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Let Saigons be bygones: thirty-five years ago, I refused to let my government send me to Vietnam. So why did I finally go? Because my kid sister asked me to.

Article Excerpt
Why did I go to Vietnam recently when I refused to 35 years ago? The answer is that this time I was going to visit my sister, Marcie. Another answer to that good question is that Vietnam was a bad war. In the late sixties I'd been in the Peace Corps in Borneo helping people who wore conical hats and worked with water buffalo in rice paddies. When I returned to the good ol' USA, I found myself in the basement thinkin' bout the government. They wanted to send me back over to Asia to kill the same people. It was unconscionable, I told them. It wasn't even cost-effective. Neither argument, however, seemed to cut much ice with the draft board. I had to trot out a phalanx of rabbis and shrinks to confirm my insanity and thereby, perhaps quite literally, dodge the bullet. [paragraph] But that was then and this is now. People in both the East and the West long ago...

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