Some were almost comic, were they not to have had cumulatively enormous repercussions for the Vietnamese, the U.S., and the world.

On the comic side: The director of the Saigon radio network’s child had been abducted by opponents of the regime. The incident was relatively insignificant, even politically, but mostly a matter of distraught parents in a chaotic environment. But a group of protestors had gathered with signboards and were marching back and forth in front of the station’s principal studio. One of the “stand up” American national network commentators, usually preferring the safety of the sidewalk in front of Saigon’s premier hostel, the Caravelle, was there with camera crew at the ready to take film for his nightly newscast. But the “demo” was rather lackluster. Suddenly, as I watched, he began to fling his arms about and shouted, translated by his loyal Vietnamese assistants, “Yell! Louder! You sons__ of b____! Yell!” And the tumult did increase, at least momentarily.

Or more morbid: I remember a strange conversation with a young American journalist friend working as a “stringer” [a local hire] for one of the American television networks. He explained he came from an archly typical Irish American Catholic family; there were several priests and nuns in his extended family. He said he did not go to mass, but was a believer. And he said he was having a problem of conscience; I was a little older although hardly capable of the role of father confessor and I suppose he came to me for lack of someone better, for at least I was in the same trade. His perplexity was brought on by the fact he, unlike his bosses who came and went after they made their reputations for “war correspondent” or “political analyst”, had many local contacts. [Earlier he had worked for a local English-language newspaper in Bangkok and then in Saigon.].

He was getting calls, he said, from the Buddhist political activists, a part of the opposition waging a campaign against the regime of Pres. Ngo Dinh Diem and the Americans. They telephoned to alert him were he and his camera crew to be at a certain street corner in Saigon at a certain hour, they would capture a strikingly newsworthy event. It was as dramatic as they had told him it would be: a Buddhist monk, one suspected to have been drugged but it was never proved, was brought quickly to the spot in an automobile and dumped in the intersection, and before police and others could intervene, doused himself with the help of his comrades with gasoline and set himself ablaze.

My young friend’s dilemma, he said, was he was still enough of a believing Catholic to oppose suicide as a sin. And he felt he might be collaborating and thus equally guilty with the perpetrators of these continuing acts of political defiance, but, ultimately suicide. Were he to refuse to follow up on the telephone calls, he would be shirking his duty as a newsman — and missing one of the great opportunities to be in on an important moment in history. But to continue …I, for once modestly, told him I had no advice. I said it had to be between him and his conscience and his sense of values and his God. He left, rather sheepishly.

The telephone calls and the suicide emulations became a repeated ritual and one of the most effective instruments in a campaign to discredit Catholic Pres. Ngo Dinh Diem, his regime, and its American backers . The Buddhist campaign, whatever its origins and real intent, was to be an important element in the American debate leading later to Diem’s usurpation and assassination on orders from President John F. Kennedy.

Years later, when we met and I reminded my colleague of the conversation — now positioned with one of the major U.S. newspapers, married to a young Catholic woman whom he had met working in Saigon, and with a family of his own — he said he had no memory of the talk with me. I doubt my memory created the story wholecloth. On the other hand, “denial” — for as far as I know he continued to take the Buddhists’ calls — does sometimes wipe out memory.

Distinguishing between reality and perception has always been a principal problem of human consciousness, probably from the beginnings of human society. For so many technical and societal and political reasons — perhaps best summed up in what has been called the digital revolution — the world of communication in the early part of 21st century is a long way from those scenes in Saigon so many years ago. But the problem of distinguishing reality and perception has been further aggravated by the very progress of that technology.

It was always relatively easy to use photography to lie which, after all, came on the scene only about 150 years ago. If nothing more, it can isolate a portion of a complicated subject — a city or a battleground — to give a totally false perception of the general atmosphere or of events. I learned my quite good photographs told a “lie”: what appeared to be an idyllic isolated village in Laos belied the filth, disease and poverty, to which a rapidly encroaching war would only add more misery, [A Sense of Asia, Charles Scribners Sons, 1969]. So one is not surprised when a French cineaste uses a poignant photograph of a tormented Palestinian child as victim to build a false charge against Israeli military. Or that CNN always seems to find individuals saying life under Sadam was better than before the American invasion [especially if they are rich Baathists who profited from the earlier regime and had the money and facility to flee to Jordan or Syria]. Or that photographs or the more than sufficient almost daily bloody carnage presents a picture of total and unlimited chaos in Baghdad.

“Iraq” for more reasons than time or space could possibly accommodate here is not “Vietnam”. And I am not a reporter in Baghdad; I do not now nor never knew the place. But reading the blogs of young sincere American military in Iraq tells me the problem of perception versus reality is a conundrum no easier solved today than it was those 35 years ago, nor one we will untangle soon.