Permit me, if you will, to give you a suggestion. Get "No Peace, No Honor" by Larry Berman. Read it with the broad open mind of a scholar seeking truth; not with the narrow focused mind of an advocate pleading a case.

If you do that you will discover two "myths of Vietnam" which far transcend in importance any of those which you have on your current list:

     Myth No. 1: That Henry Kissinger was a brilliant diplomat. In negotiating the Paris Accords of 1973 Kissinger betrayed everyone who came within his orbit, conspicuously including Nixon and Thieu. The results were disastrous for all concerned, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee notwithstanding.

    Myth No. 2: That the Christmas bombing of Hanoi in 1972 was necessary in order to force the North Vietnamese (GNVN) to accede to the treaty terms that the US was demanding of them. Kissinger had already surrendered to the GNVN on the only real sticking point (whether the US and the GNVN would both leave South Vietnam simultaneously or whether the forces of the GNVN would "stay in place" where they were in SVN at the time the cease-fire began) in order to get the GVN to agree to a peace treaty before the 1972 elections. On October 26, 1972, Kissinger proclaimed to the world, “Peace is at hand.” He called it a "peace with honor". But President Thieu upset the apple cart. He was passionately outraged at Kissinger's flagrant and perfidious double-cross of the South Vietnamese. He refused to sign the treaty and threatened to torpedo the whole deal, as he had done to a similar treaty negotiation in 1968. The only reason for the Christmas bombing was to get Thieu to accept the unacceptable concessions which Kissinger had made to the GNVN in October without telling Thieu what he was doing. John Negroponte said, "We had to bomb them (the GNVN) to get them to accept our concessions".

Finally, Bob, you and Steve will not be completely successful in Boston unless you give due consideration to the Mother of All Vietnam Myths: the myth that Americans are superior to Asians in all aspects of modern warfare. In one crucial area Asians have a clear advantage over us: they are much more willing to die for lost causes than we are. That is not because they are braver than we are; nor because they are dumber than we are. It is because they are locked by their history and their culture into autocratic societies which require them to march into the valley of death whenever and for as long as their leaders tell them they must do so.

We, on the other hand, have several ways of getting rid of leaders who mislead us into wars that are unnecessary and, ipso facto, immoral. In the ‘60s and 70s the American people let Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon send nearly 60,000 of their kids to their deaths in Indo-China before they reined in their government. Today they are losing patience with Bush even though only 1,000 have died in his war. When Larry King recently asked John McCain whether Bush could win the election this year, McCain’s answer was, “It depends on how many Americans die in Iraq between now and November.”

Is it any wonder that people in the administration are reported to be looking for a way to cancel the elections “for the duration” of the war?