...it is important to remember, to spell the names correctly, to know the provinces, before we are persuaded that none of it happened, that none of us were in such places."
                                                                         Gloria Emerson, Winners and Loosers, p.4

This is Saigon, 1969 to 1971. It is not Vietnam from the footsoldier's point of view, but from the perspective of a civilian working and dying in the mortal chaos of Saigon.
     On 16 January 1969 I got on the big silver bird for Vietnam. It was raining. Noah would have been impressed. I was younger than anyone I have ever known. In a sense, I was not even me. In fact I died in Vietnam. Another Michael was born; smarter, tougher, sadder, different.
     No one is born at some particular moment. We die and are born each particular moment by moment. But some moments are bigger, last longer and bite deeper. I was born in Saigon, my life became a new thing. It changed fast and hard and, sometimes, I didn't know it was happening. It took me ten years to look back.
     When I did, I cried.

We had another system called HES. That stood for Hamlet Evaluation System. It totalled up all the Friendly Hamlets, all the Unfriendly Hamlets, and all the Unknown Hamlets and did a lot fancy arithmetic. In the end it spit out a piece of paper that would say something like "89% Pacified." One day, the evil emperor Nguyen Van Thieu needed a new Cadillac and a larger Swiss Bank account. Since such wealth was only garnered by convincing the electorate that we were winning a righteous war, and since the only way we could ever win such a war was in the computer, he called the great chief, Tricky Dick, who called his generals, who called MACV, who called a Colonel, who called the CDC Project Manager, who called the chief of programmers, who called my boss, who called me. It seems that Nguyen thought that 89% Pacified wasn't good enough to win hearts and minds. So we threw a switch in a program and counted all the Unknown hamlets as Friendly.
     Overnight, Vietnam was 99% pacified.