Four Clear Voices Rise Above the Din on Iraq

"Just think back to the dark day in history when we saw visions of American Marines airlifting Vietnamese out of the U.S. Embassy. Do you remember that? That's what happens when America makes a commitment, Congress cuts the funding and we go home with our tails between our legs," he told his colleagues.

Johnson is an unlikely standard-bearer for the war's cause, a lawmaker who has never sought the microphones or the television cameras. But for him, the Iraq debate is like a flashback. By the time Congress cut off funds for Vietnam, the war was largely over, but Johnson still languished in prison, fearing that his nation had abandoned him.

"I know what it's like to be on front lines for country when fellow countrymen don't support you," he said, vowing it will never happen again.

Johnson and Rep. Wayne Gilchrest (R-Md.) saw two different wars in Vietnam, and they see two different wars in Iraq.

While Johnson languished in a North Vietnamese prison camp, Gilchrest served in the jungles of Indochina, a Marine fighting at a time when each week about 200 Americans died. After his combat tours, he returned home, and he read the Pentagon Papers, Washington's secret history of the war in Vietnam; he read about Ho Chi Minh's contacts with the Roosevelt administration during World War II and about Dien Bien Phu, the battle that drove the French from Vietnam.

When Marines evacuated the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, Gilchrest watched on television, deeply disillusioned about a war that had taken the lives of so many friends.

Gilchrest was one of only two House Republicans to vote for the Democrats' war spending bill last month, and he is helping write the final legislation.

He says that in Iraq, as in Vietnam, infantrymen are using bullets to fight ideas, such as conflicting views of Islam that go back more than a thousand years. After Vietnam, Gilchrest said, the administration should know that bullets do not defeat ideas.

"You see the eye of the person you're fighting. You take a human life. You lose your friends. That takes a toll when you experience it on a daily basis," Gilchrest said. "So before you put someone in that situation, you want to make sure everyone in the administration . . . is competent and there's no dogma, ideology or past ghosts getting in the way."