Vietnam still resonates In America because so many of us were altered by it -- often in ways we never perceived at the time. As a reporter in Southeast Asia, I spent most of my time not in Vietnam on operations with G.I.'s, but in Cambodia, the weak, neighboring country that had been sucked into the war's vortex with little say of its own and virtually no control over its fate.

So when I returned to the United States at war's end, my head was reeling with images of Cambodians being driven like cattle into the countryside by the murderous Khmer Rouge. Many of my friends were in those helpless throngs. Foreigners with passports, people like me, were spared. I still feel guilty, though it no longer suspends and cripples me.

But I still had much to learn about the changes in me. A few years later, I was in a little New England town where my younger daughter was going to summer camp. Walking on the village green, we came upon the war memorial. My gaze went to the bottom where the names of the handful of Vietnam dead were engraved. My eyes began to took and I could not speak when my daughter asked me what was wrong. This happened again and again over the years to follow -- every time I came within view of a war marker with names of the Vietnam fallen. I groped for an inner explanation. I had not walked with many of these men, had not felt their pain, their hopes, their fear, had not shared their letters from home. For only one extended period, Hanoi's offensive in 1972, had I seen them in Vietnam; the rest of the time I was in Cambodia, watching the Khmers being turned into a nation of victims and refugees. So why was I weeping every time I saw a list of GI names?

The answer that finally emerged was that I did know them -- or at least felt kin with them. The GIs and the Cambodians were in a primal sense the same. They had been sent to their fates on behalf of a policy that turned out to be folly -- by men in temples of power who were not large enough to adult their misjudgment and end the carnage. Though unlike the Cambodians and the American soldiers, I was neither dead nor physically maimed, I felt part of the wreckage, too.

How has it changed me? I am very careful about making promises. All those Cambodians and Laotians and Vietnamese thought we had made them a promise. They also thought America could perform miracles. The age of those miracles is over. Whatever pledges I make now as an individual are those that I am definitely going to keep. I look after those close to me, I have learned that life is one-on-one. You don't save the world, or even a large chunk of it. What you can do is try to help people, one at a time.

As a person I'm still an optimist, believing in the possibilities of individuals. As a journalist, I'm warier, much more skeptical. Vietnam isn't the only factor in this skepticism, but it's a large one. In some ways, that war was one long skein of illusions and lies. Lying at the top is what eroded trust in the government; and it's still doing so. Witness the Pentagon's woeful dissembling about the soldiers exposed to toxic gas in the Iraq war. If there's a character issue in American public life, perhaps the avoidance of truth-telling is it.