To put it another way, I lied. Most of us did; and the folks above us wanted us to lie. I stripped myself of integrity. We lied about what we were doing in North Vietnam. We lied about what targets we hit: Say my Fragged target was a ford across a river. If I saw a better target—say, boxcars on a rail siding—I would miss my Fragged target and somehow my bombs would hit the boxcars. We lied about where we flew. For instance, I always tried to fly in the no-fly buffer zones on the Chinese border, because the North Vietnamese didn’t have any guns on the ground there. They also knew about our buffer zones and figured we would follow orders.

When I went into North Vietnam, there was nobody from Washington up there, so I did what I felt was in the best interests of winning the war. If our leaders had no interest in winning, whatever that was, well, I did; and I was going to try to win, even if they didn’t want to or were unwilling to really try. I loved the fighting. If they didn’t care about the truth, then I would lie. If they didn’t care about the killing and dying, then neither would I.

In war, of course, shit happens more often than at most other times. You are faced with the ever-present reality that you are out there killing other people, and that is very bothersome, especially if you really believe the stuff they taught you in church. You are stuck with a contradiction: “Thou shall not kill.” But you are killing. The only way to resolve the contradiction is to try to do it as humanely as possible. That comes from knowing why you are at war, and then to fight it in such a way that it is over as quickly as possible and everyone can go home and live in peace . . . or at least until the next war.

So you do your best to hit the enemy where it hurts. For example, the North Vietnamese airfields were off-limits. Now, you tell me—you are a pilot over North Vietnam near Hanoi with your head on a swivel, with Red Crown screaming out MiG warnings and beepers going off as Air Force pilots are bailing out of their jets, and there is an enemy airfield sitting there off to the right of Thud Ridge waiting for you to drop some bombs on it, and the Big Bosses send your bosses messages saying, “Do not bomb that airfield”—and you think, You’ve got to be shitting me, and you wonder how to get close enough to miss your Fragged target in order to lay some ordnance on the airfield with a slightly long bomb.

What good did any of that do? I learned something. I learned that you cannot trust America. And I tell my Arab friends that as I point out to them that the once-upon-a-time capital of the last nation to put complete faith in American military might is now called Ho Chi Minh City.