graduated from the US Naval Academy in June 1964. At the time, the war in Vietnam seemed far away, a brush fire smoldering on the horizon. In August, two months later, the Tonkin Gulf incidents triggered an American military response. By then, I was going through Marine Officers Basic School in Quantico, Va. The war suddenly seemed a lot closer.
My battalion mounted out from Long Beach, Calif., in February 1966, beginning a journey that would deposit us in the coastal lowlands of South Vietnam a few weeks later. Did I think about not boarding that ship? No. Not once. I was a child of World War II. I came of age in the 1950s. In 1961, a plebe at Annapolis, I marched in John Kennedy's inaugural parade. On that day the new president proclaimed that Americans were willing to pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship to advance the cause of freedom in the world. I believed him. We were both wrong.
In February 1967, two weeks before I was to rotate home, I was wounded in a way that resulted in severe facial scarring. I spent the better part of the next year and a half in the hospital, a dark time.
The country had changed dramatically while I was gone. The antiwar movement, little more than a curiosity when I left, had taken root. Its members had become the heroes of the mass media. Beneath their bluster and self-absorption, they raised troubling questions about the war that our leaders seemed at a loss to answer.
With survivor's instinct, I dropped out of the debate and made a decision. I told myself that whatever life had in store for me, good or bad, I was going to fulfill it, Vietnam or no Vietnam. I sought to neutralize the war's impact on my life by ignoring it, moving it off to the side, letting it scab over.
My game plan, such as it was, worked. I became a newspaperman, a profession I found pretty much by throwing a dart. In those days, it didn't really matter what I did, as long as I did something.
The years passed. By the early 1980s, I was the White House correspondent for the Baltimore Sun. Few of my colleagues had been to Vietnam. One who had, Walter Robinson of the Boston Globe, mentioned to me one day, as if he had surprised himself by noticing, that there were only a handful of Vietnam veterans among the scores of journalists in Washington. We exchanged a look that said - though the phrase had not yet come into vogue - ''don't go there.''
In November 1986, the Iran-Contra scandal erupted. At its heart were three Annapolis men: Oliver North, Robert McFarlane, and John Poindexter. I smelled Vietnam right from the start, wondered if the burgeoning scandal might be in part the bill for the war finally coming due. I thought about writing a book on Iran-Contra, but quickly realized that I was less interested in the scandal itself than in what it might say about my generation of well-meaning, if ill-starred, warriors. On that score, the Iran-Contra crew only took me so far. I expanded the book to include two other Annapolis graduates: John McCain, senator and POW, and James Webb, decorated Marine, secretary of the Navy, and critically acclaimed novelist.
The result was a 1995 book, ''The Nightingale's Song,'' in which I chronicled the lives of all five men in order to illuminate the generational divide that I discerned between those who served in Vietnam and those who used money, wit, and connections to avoid serving. I don't think of the book as cathartic, but I now realize that it allowed me to say things I had long submerged.
For me, the crucial issue in the Vietnam era is how you answered the summons, how you responded to the call to arms.
If you believed the war made sense, you had an obligation, I think, to serve. That means you didn't play the deferment game, or get married, or have a baby so you didn't have to go.
If you felt the war was a mistake, and I think that was a legitimate political position, I think you had to keep faith with your generation by opposing the war in a manner in which you put yourself in peril, peril that in some way mirrored what others were experiencing in Southeast Asia. That means walking into your draft board, saying ''I'm 1-A and I'm not going to go.''
If enough young men had done that, especially the white middle class kids that were the center of gravity for the antiwar movement, I believe the machinery of the Selective Service System would have ground to a halt, the war would have ended, and a lot of blood would never have been spilled. As it was, most men used a vast smorgasbord of deferments to beat the system and avoid or evade the draft.
Looking back, it wasn't the war that was the problem. Vietnam was hell, but so are all wars. The problem was the homecoming. I think this generational fault line emerged when men and women came home from Vietnam. Many had seen friends and comrades die. Others came home maimed themselves. And yet, when they got back to the States, they were condemned by some as baby-killers. Others were spit on. It was as if they had barely dragged themselves out of the primordial sludge.
Across this generational divide, meanwhile, they saw their unbloodied contemporaries flourishing. Not only was there no stigma attached to what used to be called draft-dodging, the other half of this generation wore its antiwar credentials like combat decorations.
That was what turned Vietnam into what has been called an indigestible lump. It was as if a social contract had been broken, as if we had gone to bed one night and awakened to find the world had changed.
Milt Copulos, a Vietnam veteran, put it this way: ''There's a wall 10 miles high and 50 miles thick between those of us who went and those who didn't, and that wall is never going to come down.
That seems too strong to me, but who knows? Since the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1982 there has been a lot of talk about reconciliation, an amorphous phrase that means, I suppose, that both sides say everything's forgiven. I'm not angry at anyone, but on this point I'm with Jim Webb. He says he doesn't want to be reconciled, and neither do I.
Robert Timberg is deputy chief of the Baltimore Sun's Washington Bureau.
Robert Timberg during his days at the Naval Academy, top, and today.
