In Washington, D.C., the day is cold, the air is still, and the sun is warm. On afternoons like this, in late winter in the East, you can stand for hours in the light without freezing. I have stood a long time now, at this black wall. I don’t know what I expected to find at the Vietnam MemoriaL But after a Gulf War in which men who died behind the lines in traffic accidents were given heroes’ burials, in which soldiers who met token resistance for a hundred hours are called “greater” than those who spent months and years facing the fiercest guerrilla fighters of our century; and with President Bush pushing the notion that in Vietnam it was our loss, rather than our policy, that stained us, and that the Gulf War redeems that loss — it seems time to stand here.

I arrived in Delhi at 3:00 A.M. and found a driver, sent by my friend A.J., waiting for me at the Indira Gandhi Airport. He spoke no English, so I had no idea where he was taking me. All I knew was that A.J. had arranged to get me a room somewhere in the city.

My problems began after months and months of struggling with bills and banks and a mortgage payment, when one of my more prosperous clients called and casually asked, “Did I invest thirty thousand or forty thousand dollars in the last bond issue you sold me?”