Growing up in the sixties there seemed to be two worlds. One world was provided by Hollyweird with their never ending parade of war movies starring all kinds of handsome and manly devil-may-care heroes fighting the good fight in various wars, mostly World War II. There was plenty of drama and action, tales of sacrifice and courage and strangely bloodless deaths unlike the movies of today.

Then there was the reporting done by magazines like Look, Life and the rest. There were some pictures of people in a strange land I had never heard of, it was called Vietnam. Three of these pictures were seared forever in my mind. One was a grinning Vietnamese soldier carrying two human heads by the hair, why he had two heads and where he was going with them was something that escaped me at the time as I was transfixed by the hellish nightmare of the picture itself. I just was not used to that sort of thing. The second picture was of a grinning young Vietnamese lad who looked to be around eight or ten years old sitting on the ground and next to him laid several dismembered human limbs as in legs, hands, arms, and feet who was apparently selling them and to this day I shudder as to what reason people were buying such things for. The third was the now famous picture of a naked young Vietnamese girl running down the road towards the photographer, her face a mask of pain and fear, a victim of napalm.

There was one thing I knew for certain, I never, ever wanted to be in the military so that I could be sent into what seemed a very real version of Dante's Hell.