The Vietnam War scarred me more severely than any of the eight Purple Hearts I'd received during almost eight years of combat.

Up to Vietnam, I'd always been a Don Quixote-like idealist who believed that those who served our country as professional military officers did so only from the point of view of DUTY, HONOR, AND COUNTRY. But during Vietnam I finally got a look inside the inner circle of the Army's top brass -- and witnessed corruption and evil so great it broke my heart and arclighted my belief system.

For me, it became the launching pad of the journey I'm still on today -- to do everything in my power not to let that sort of bloodbath happen again. Vietnam gave me a new mission: To speak the truth and not let my children or your children or our country be doomed to repeat the horror, the waste and the futility of Vietnam. Thus began my crusade to wake up the American people.

Col. David Hackworth (retired) is the author of Hazardous Duty and is now Military Affairs Editor of Newsweek.

For twenty years now, I have kept these notebooks sealed shut, and it is clear why: their contents are unbearable, and no testimony will ever help those victims.

An elderly intellectual once told me that the war was the Vietnamese punishment for their destruction of the Khmer and Champa kingdoms centuries before. But for me, after Tet, no philosophy or ideology - least of all crusading American democracy - could justify or even remotely explain the slaughter of those civilians. From that day on, I had no facts or beliefs except for what had been done to those people.

At evening when I had a break, I recorded these events in my notebook as if it were a duty, as if having an account of the horrors could somehow mitigate them, keep them from consuming me, and bear them witness.

Now, forty-five years old, as maple leaves spiral past my attic window, I weep as I write this. Weep for Mr. Long, whose young wife went blind and crazy before she died a slow death with a head full of slivers, weep for the deafened boy who suffered alone without his parents, weep for the beautiful little girl who would lose her burned arm, weep for her napalmed mother, who would probably die or survive as a monster.

Twenty years ago, during Tet Mau Than, such tears would have seemed to me a an obscene personal luxury in the presence of those wretched people. Tears would have rendered me useless: if I had begun to weep then, I could not have stopped.

John Balaban is the author of Remembering Heaven's Face. ©1996