The occasion was a clash between the Army of [South] Vietnam’s first division in the north of the country with a unit of regulars coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail from the Democratic Republic of [North] Vietnam. It was the first time whole units of the northern Communist regulars had been encountered. Until then, the Vietcong [southern] guerrillas had been encadred with southerners who had been withdrawn to the North after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and the division of the country, retrained, rearmed and then infiltrated back into the south to provide the backbone for the insurgency against the Saigon [Diem] regime.

I was one of only two members of the Saigon press corps to fly north to investigate the episode. [My companion, when I got there, was Pham Xuan Anh, then working as a stringer for Beverly Deepe, the correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor. I had long suspected Ahn’s sympathies for the other side, but was as shaken as others when he was revealed as a secret colonel in the North Vietnamese army, and for his brief 15 minutes of history, became the chief press officer for the Communists when they took Saigon in 1975. Ahn, who like other southerners soon found he had “no respect” in the new regime, was shortly thereafter sending messages to Vietnamese refugee friends and acquaintances in the U.S. suggesting he would like to join them. He never was able to and became something of a phantom in the long years of Communist repression which followed.]

Through an interpreter, I interviewed a prisoner, asking impromptu questions, in part based on my knowledge of the north gained during a year I had spent as a correspondent during the French war. [The division intelligence officer was an ethnic Chinese and we had mutual friends in his hometown of Haiphong, the major port in the north.] When I wrote my version of the events for US News & World Report, an old friend, then U.S. chief of staff in Saigon, called a press conference to deny Khanh’s assertion and refute my reporting which essentially said the local Vietnamese commanders and Khanh were correct. When a British colleague asked the general about my reporting, noting I was a respected veteran correspondent in the region, the general charged “Sanders is a victim of Vietnamese counterintelligence.” My response: if the Vietnamese command had been that clever, we Americans wouldn’t have had to be there!

For months, another old friend Ted Serong, the counterinsurgency specialist advising the U,S. command, had been sarcastically pointing out in his broad Melbourne accent, since the American navy assured us there was no infiltration down the coast, the air force assuring us traffic on the Trail had been minimized, and the Army guaranteeing there was no logistical support across the Cambodian border, those seemingly unlimited stocks of Communist bullets whizzing around our heads were only a figment of our imagination. [A young foreign service officer about this time said to me: “I am against invading Cambodia, but these guys are falsifying the reporting to the extent if we ever do have to go in, we won’t have a legal and propaganda basis for it.”]

The midterm elections took place in the U.S., and shortly after in the new year, the State Department released, strangely enough, its huge stocks of a white paper it had on hand, “Invasion from the North”, documenting the growing numbers of northern soldiers and logistics support for the insurgency in the south. I was flown to fishing vessel which had been caught and bombed off central Vietnam carrying weapons for the southerners, with, conveniently enough, a copy of a Haiphong newspaper in the crew’s quarters dating the ship’s recent departure from that port..

A few years later, the same officer, an old and dear personal friend, now a U.S. field commander, and a newly arrived general and I were having dinner in the field in northern South Vietnam. The American withdrawal had begun, and I had just been told some details in Saigon before flying north to see him. When my host contradicted me on some aspect, I said, rather innocently, “It wouldn’t be the first time an American general had lied to me” He stared at me with those clear blue eyes Asians say one can see through to the soul, and then said, to our dinner partner: “Back in 1964, this guy was trying to tell me we had been invaded, and the White House was saying we hadn’t. What would you have done?”

Iraq is not Vietnam. But those memories came flooding back as I listened to Senator Edward Kennedy calling for an American withdrawal from Iraq. Even more intense memories were awakened listening to Senator Arlene Spector [R., Pa.], pontificating on his recent trip to Iraq. In Saigon, such visitors were said to have been “parachuted” in, often to make what is now called “a photo opportunity” for home consumption. [It happened with newsmen too: when one highly touted news magazine editor made his periodic trips to Vietnam, the local military PR groaned, as he got suited up in camouflage for a patrol, necessitating the assignment of a regiment to insure his safety.]

As during the Vietnam conflict, there are no dearth of critics of strategy and tactics. But few in the Congress or the media have an alternative to denying the possibility of a new international terrorist sanctuary coming into being in Iraq if the U.S. loses the war or simply gives up the fight.

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.