Honorable Men

On Rob's bus, Tom Early sits near his old friend Dick Camp. Both were officers in Richard's battalion, both saw heavy combat. Like many on the trip, they'd been career professionals.

Now, still lean and fit in middle age, both with finely honed and somewhat sardonic senses of humor, they sit gazing out the windows at the lush countryside as a Vietnamese government tour guide talks over the speaker system.

The guide mentions the Viet Cong "hero" Nguyen Van Troi, who'd tried to assassinate Robert McNamara, "the American minister of defense."

Early, 56, who retired as a colonel and later became a graveyard administrator in Indiana, snaps his fingers.

"Too bad he missed!"

Alan McLean, an Episcopal priest from Pine Bluff, Ark., visits the Hanoi War Museum on a trip with other veterans. On his third week as a young lieutenant in Vietnam, McLean stepped on a land mine and lost both his legs. (By Frank Johnston – The Washington Post)

"Boy, I'll tell you," says Camp, 57, who also retired as a colonel and who is now a school system administrator in suburban Cincinnati, "we got hosed. I was trying to sort through my feelings: It's not anger, exactly, but it just makes you sick to realize they were lying to us."

"Maybe rage, Dick?" interjects Ken Sandall, a San Jose attorney who was a radioman in the battalion.

It is an arresting moment. The fierce bitterness of these men – archetypal American warriors for whom "Duty, Honor, Country" will never be mere words – springs from a deep sense of betrayal. They've been discussing H.R. McMaster's book "Dereliction of Duty." The misplaced ideals and outright lies that fueled Vietnam – not just McNamara's, who'd realized the war couldn't be won but kept on sending boys to die anyway, but also the misrepresentations of LBJ and his advisers, to say nothing of the weakness of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – afflicted men like Camp and Early directly, personally.

Now, decades later, they seem far removed from the military stereotypes into which they were once fitted by anti-war protesters. It's not that they've suddenly embraced left-wing causes, or wouldn't return to battle in a moment if their country called: Camp and Early simply think, now, that what happened was appalling – that they, too, were somehow wrong – and they're honest enough to say so.

From Our Audio Gallery The Vietnamese "are highly independent people. They're very, very poor . . ."   – Richard Sutter in 1967

"I detested guys like George McGovern because they didn't support the party line," Camp says. "But they were right."

"We denigrated them," Early agrees. "I hate to admit that the People's Republic of Massachusetts was right."

"Who else?" Camp asks.

"The Berrigan brothers," says Early, who once – as a Marine recruiter – had protesters dump chicken blood on his paperwork.

"They were right as rain," Camp laments. He shakes his head.

"It hurts," Early says. "Why were we here? What the hell was accomplished? ... And the lies! – starting with the Gulf of Tonkin. It was like a little kid telling a lie, and he has to just keep lying.

"And at the time, you're just here worried about living for the next five minutes, and saving Marines.

"I mean, we were just put out there to die, without a plan."

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