Vietnam was and is the defining period of my life. I had joined the U.S. Navy to get out of Montana where I was born and raised. The Gulf of Tonkin incident happened while I was in boot camp - August 1964. By April 1965 I was sitting off the coast of Vietnam watching the first big contingent of Marines go ashore.

I was stationed on an oiler - the USS Hassayampa. Over the course of the next two years and two cruises to the area I spent about 15-16 months in the official war zone. We refueled all kinds of ships, from aircraft carriers to minesweepers. While we were never in any real danger, evidence of the war was all around us ranging from the Soviet "fishing trawlers" that shadowed us to just sitting back with a can of Coke and watching the action ashore with high powered field glasses we'd buy at the base exchange.

While I was in the Navy I hadn't thought much about whether the war was right or wrong or even whether we were winning or losing. I was in from age 17 until I turned 21. My needs were pretty basic: beer, women, and work. The Navy supplied all three.

When I came home in August of 1967 things began to change. I couldn't understand what the protests were about. At the same time I began to have vague feelings of unease about why so many people were dying, so far away, and for what?

By the summer of 1968 I was working for a major airline at the San Francisco Airport. United Airlines had the MAC contract to bring back the coffins from Vietnam. Over the course of the summer I counted the coffins and tried to match them to the news reports about casualties. The numbers never did line up. There were always more coffins than were being reported in the news media. I came to distrust the government and the military that had sent me and so many others to Vietnam.

I also came to feel guilty about the fact that I had gone through the fringes of the war but was never really in harm's way even though so many others were. I felt - and still feel - that in some way I let others fight for me.

I was married in June of 1968 and began going to a local community college that same fall. Ronald Reagan was right about one thing - the California college system helped turn me into a radical. Within two years I was an organizer for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW).

The San Francisco Bay Area was a focus of the anti-war movement. One of your commentators hit the nail on the head though - VVAW was really an organization apart from much of the rest of the anti-war movement. I mean I was married, had two kids, was a veteran and worked full time. I came to be very politically left in my thinking, but would go to many meetings and stare in amazement and amusement at what others were saying and doing.

This is not to say that my life wasn't changed forever. I truly believed that there could be substantive political change and that it could come out of the "movement." I believed this so deeply that by 1976 - after we had pulled out of Vietnam - I enrolled in night law school. The reason? To be a movement lawyer. By the time I graduated in 1980 and passed the California bar exam in 1981 the movement was dead. In the meantime I had burned out my marriage and by 1983 was divorced. ...

As I said in the beginning, Vietnam changed my life. It was my primary focus for ten years and shaped my political and moral values. I could have been anything - a Montana farmer, a blue collar worker, an advertising executive, or even a manger.

Instead, my life's work continues. It's not that different from that 1968 summer I spent counting coffins.