We got into the war in Vietnam one step at a time. Our first real involvement began back when President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent some military "advisers" to help the leaders of South Vietnam fight some rebels in North Vietnam. It was the issue of Communism that sucked us in. There was a civil war between the northern and southern parts of Vietnam. The North was getting money and supplies from Communist China and from the Soviet Union, too. Many Americans feared that the Chinese Communists would control a united Vietnam. But we hadn't done our homework, and we didn't know much about the country where we were fighting. We backed corrupt leaders in South Vietnam who robbed the treasury and had limited popular support. And we didn't realize that the Chinese and the Vietnamese didn't actually get along very well. Most of the advisers to Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson believed we should fight in Vietnam. They believed it was America's role to stand up to communism anywhere. If Vietnam was allowed to become communist, everyone seemed sure that all of southeast Asia would follow. Publicly Johnson said, "I do not find it easy to send the flower of our youth—our finest young men into battle." But the President sent them anyway.

Soon after he was elected, something happened that gave Johnson an excuse to enter the war—which his advisers had been pushing him to do. An American ship was on a secret mission to the Gulf of Tonkin, near Vietnam. It wasn't supposed to be there. A torpedo was fired at the ship, or so it was said. Two days later there was a second report of torpedoes. Johnson said an American ship had been attacked. That was untrue, but that's what the Navy told him. So he got Congress to pass a resolution that let him go to war. We began bombing North Vietnam. Before we finished we dropped more bombs on that small country than we had on both Germany and Japan during all of World War II. And we sent soldiers. Lots of them. Most of our soldiers were decent and some were heroic. Many helped the people of Vietnam. But some didn't. They had killing weapons and they used them on innocent villagers as well as on enemy soldiers. The war became a national nightmare. It went on and on and on, becoming the longest war in U.S. history.

The Pentagon, our military control center, couldn't understand how guerrilla fighters who had their ammunition carried over jungle trails on the backs of old men and women could beat a modern army supplied by helicopters. The military chiefs kept telling the President that if we just sent a few thousand more soldiers and dropped a few more bombs it would all be over. But the old men and women and the guerrilla fighters, who seemed to know how to vanish into the jungle, finally made the great and mighty United States give up and go home. We thought we were doing the right thing when we began. We thought we were fighting for freedom. And we never intended to make Vietnam a colony. So why did we make such a terrible mistake? At one point a worried President Johnson said: "I feel like a hitchhiker caught in a hailstorm on a Texas highway. I can't run. I can't hide. And I can't make it stop."

We didn't understand what the war was all about. It was indeed about freedom, but not the kind of freedom we envisioned. The Vietnamese wanted to be free of foreign rule. They wanted to choose their own leaders. They wanted freedom even to make the wrong decisions. This was a nasty civil war. We made it worse—we made it a high-tech war. We brought in grenades, rocket launchers, jellied-gasoline explosives (called napalm), and chemicals (called defoliants) that took the leaves off the jungle trees. And we still couldn't beat the Vietnamese. We should have known that could happen. After all, we started out as a small nation that defeated the great and mighty British empire. Didn't we remember that people fighting for their freedom are apt to be unbeatable? What had happened to us?