Many young men in the 1960s and 1970s came to reject some of the traditional ideas about manhood that many of their fathers tried to pass down - like unquestioning respect for authority even when that might mean killing and dying for questionable or unjust causes such as the Vietnam War.

During the Vietnam War, any young men -- including the current president, the vice president and me -- could have gone to Vietnam but didn't. John Kerry came from a privileged background and could have avoided it, too. Instead he said, 'Send me.'

I was not able to stop or slow down the Vietnam War.

It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.

This looks like a real war zone to me. Thirty years ago, I was in Vietnam, and I haven't seen such devastation since then,

Vietnam was as much a laboratory experiment as a war