Five years later, I was divorced and living in New York. “I hear you’re the one who doesn’t believe in monogamy,” said one woman, out for drinks with me and a group of friends. “Tell us about it.” I was already developing a reputation as the designated maverick. “It’s not that I don’t believe in monogamy,” I explained. “It’s that I don’t think that monogamy is the only possible expression of human needs and desires.”

“Sure,” another friend replied. “That’s just a convenient way of not committing to one person. And by the way, didn’t you get divorced?”

Well, yes, I did. But not because my wife and I had affairs. I got married just out of college, when I was 21. At the time, marriage was the unconventional thing to do and that was appealing. Both of us liked to shock our friends, and telling them that we were getting married, moving to Europe and willing to have sex with others pushed all the buttons of envy and surprise.

When I first met my future ex-wife, she was dating two other men and I was involved with another woman. She didn’t tell the other men she was seeing me, and I lied as well. Of course, it was college and rules were for adults. Still, the deception was nauseating and ultimately hollow. But the sex, oh my … The excitement of sleeping with two women, the thrill of the illicit, the knowledge that she was as complicit as I was — it all combined to create an erotic charge.

I realized that I wanted both an intimate relationship and no sexual boundaries. Some people like extreme sports, the adrenal thrill of challenging limits (and cheating death) by jumping off cliffs or skiing at 70-degree angles. I enjoyed extreme emotions. I wanted to venture into the unknown and non-monogamy was a frontier that few people wanted to traverse. I got married determined to explore.

It didn’t exactly turn out that way.

For most of my marriage, non-monogamy was an idea to be probed at a later date. Then it finally happened. “I’ve been having an affair, with a doctor,” my wife told me on the phone one day while I was away on a trip.

I was bewildered and angry, and of course I had no moral leg to stand on. I didn’t mind the fact that she had had sex with someone else as much as I minded that, for her, the affair was a sign that it might be best to end the marriage. I tried to persuade her to stay, and for four years she did — in body more than in spirit — as we slowly consumed each other in anger and hurt.

Sexual experimentation remained part of the script that we shared with others in public, but like the couple who always talk about taking that trip to Fiji, we never did much to make it real. Both of us slept with a few other people in the remaining years of our marriage, but we didn’t share our experiences with each other, we didn’t delve into the feelings they brought up (“Did you enjoy it? Why?” “Does that threaten you?” “Why does sex with another man/woman make you think that I might leave?”) and we didn’t revel in our discoveries (“That turns me on … Do that with me!”). Whenever we slept with someone else, we confessed, with neither guilt nor delight, and we went on.

I hated that. Instead of living a life probing boundaries, I found myself in an unhappy marriage, having affairs. (Actually, it was only two affairs, but who’s counting?) Sex with others was supposed to plunge us into questions about love, intimacy, safety and pleasure, questions that we would explore — and answer — together. Sex with others was supposed to deepen our connection by going to the heart of what it means to be with another person. Instead, our affairs became the ultimate clichi, the familiar symptom of a relationship at its end.

But the affairs were not the cause of the relationship’s end. They were a tail-end manifestation of deep, and ultimately intractable, problems. If anything, they allowed us to cling to the increasingly painful illusion that we were a good couple. After all, I said to myself at the time, we were so strong in our love that we allowed each other to have flings. But that wasn’t really true, and neither of us took much comfort in that fantasy.

Newly divorced, I was still tormented with the old questions. Why is it OK for old Italian couples in Rimini to have wink-and-nod affairs each summer (which they purportedly do), so long as no one talks about it? Why are the French seemingly able to see extramarital dalliances as inevitable and even healthy? Why is it so important for Americans to maintain the illusion of monogamy even at the expense of emotional honesty?

It doesn’t take superhuman powers of observation to notice that many of us cannot take a vow of monogamy and keep it forever; and when we do, it is often out of fear of the consequences, not out of commitment to our partner. Far from signaling true connection, monogamy can become a substitute for emotional attachment. I wasn’t sure what was possible, but I knew that I didn’t want to be in a long-term relationship cemented by fear. Single or married, I still had the same goal: to untangle the confusing web of sex, loss and intimacy.

Monogamy is the lightning rod of modern relationships, charged and dangerous. If you want to bring a casual conversation to a grinding halt, talk about politics or monogamy; if you want to prematurely end a flirtation, suggest that you actually consider polygamy a potential path to domestic bliss. I wanted to stand in the middle of the storm and see what would happen when lightning struck.

After my divorce, I was in an open relationship with a woman named Ariel. We talked about the sex we were having with others. We didn’t have ground rules, but we understood that while we might sleep with other people, we were committed to each other. We swapped sexual details, and took delight not only in what was easy but also in what was challenging.

The trajectory of our relationship was fairly typical. I would have a one-night stand and Ariel would have one too. We tacitly competed in an effort to maintain sexual parity. By the end, she certainly won that absurd contest.

She would tell me, glowing, about the incredible sex she had with a couple. “Oh, my God, it lasted all night.” I would listen, my heart beating rapidly, flushed, excited and also unnerved. She always seemed to have the more dramatic experiences. “I placed this ad and found this couple, and the three of us …” The three of you? I thought. Where am I going to find a couple? Jesus Christ, I am so lame. And then I would find someone and Ariel and I would be even — sort of.

Whenever I met an interesting new woman, I was upfront with her about being involved in an open relationship. Sometimes that meant a replay of that coffeehouse scene years before, and though no one ever threw a glass of water in my face, I did get some pretty frosty reactions. But other times the woman was willing to play along and go to bed. Eventually, I’d kiss her goodbye, and report back to my lover.

The resulting conversations with Ariel ran the gamut from reassuring (“Yes, I still love you”) to erotic (“You did that?” — fire in her eyes; “like … this?” — fire in mine). At times, we talked about why sleeping with someone else aroused such strong reactions. What is at the heart of that gut-wrenching fear that often accompanies hearing that your lover has had sex with someone else? Why does sex trigger that fear more acutely than almost anything else? Is it fear of abandonment? Loss? Why is having a one-night stand more threatening to most of us than having a long, intimate conversation in which we bare our soul but not our bodies?

I wanted to explore these questions. I believed that only by pursuing them could I become more aware. Granted, I could have just posed them as a thought experiment and talked about them with friends. But that would have been too abstract — and too safe.

I started seeing another woman, Claudia, regularly. So I was now dating two women; but unlike in my college episode, both of them knew about each other. It was a bifurcated life. The relationship with Ariel continued, but now she was threatened by Claudia. Claudia, who also took other lovers, made it clear that she wouldn’t be content for long with what I was doing.

I tried to explain to both of them why I was doing what I was doing. I said I wanted to base my relationships not on the fact of sexual fidelity but on intimacy that was grounded in an eyes-wide-open embrace of whatever life might bring.

For each of my questions, I got answers. I wanted to know why sex aroused such contradictory and passionate emotions, and why monogamy is a cultural default setting. “Because that’s the way people are,” Claudia shot back angrily. “Because it doesn’t feel good when you have sex with other people,” Ariel said, full of hurt.

Fair enough. But monogamy is not just “the way people are.” As anthropologists such as Helen Fisher have shown, monogamy is only one of the many strategies people use to ensure stability. The key, in all instances, is to strike a balance between maintaining relationships to raise kids and providing outlets for desire, both male and female.

What I didn’t hear, from either my friends or my lovers, was that monogamy was desirable because it provided a channel to greater closeness, because it was a way of exploring the unknown. Instead, I listened to a familiar litany, full of shoulds and oughts and moral opprobrium, all of which I understood, even respected, but couldn’t support.

The longer my dual life continued, the more I wanted the two women to meet. If the point was to explore and create intimacy, keeping the two relationships utterly separate was beside it. But they were not willing, and I wasn’t willing to wait, or to push, or to continue. And so these relationships ended because I would not commit to monogamy and they would not commit to the kind of emotional exploration I craved.

Looking back over the past 15 years, I realize that it was never about sex. In fact, it was never about monogamy per se. Had I met a woman whom I loved, who said to me, “Look, I want to be monogamous because through that we can access an incredibly deep level of love and intimacy. Let me lead the way,” I would have leapt at the prospect. Had this same imaginary woman also said, “Look, I have no idea where the path will lead, and I’m not ruling out any destination,” I would have been even more eager. I didn’t meet that woman and I wasn’t looking for her. I wanted to find my own way through the confused and confusing waters of sex.

For the past year, I’ve been with a woman I love deeply and passionately. I have no desire to be with others. I share with her a deep affinity for looking into the nooks and crannies of our psyches. Nothing is beyond the pale. That doesn’t mean that all is bliss; it’s often hard work, but it’s good work.

Whether this state of affairs means lifelong sexual exclusivity, I don’t know. But I don’t really care. I was never committed to non-monogamy, no more than I am now committed to monogamy. My loyalty is to the woman I love and to exploration.

For more than a decade, I focused on monogamy and its obverse. Having learned something there, I’m now trying to learn something new, about intimacy through monogamy. Some people might say that that’s where we all ought to begin. But unless the exploration is uncoupled from fear, or at least until the fear is recognized, intimacy is null and void. For me, because sexual relationships have an incomparable edge and rawness, sex is the most direct way to confront these questions and move through them.

“So you’re settling down,” my friends say. “What about your big ideas now?” they tease, wondering if perhaps I’ve seen the light. I can see where the conversation is going, but mostly I let it be. “I’m happy,” I say, and leave it at that.

I’d fled the heat of Agra for the nearby village of Fatehpur Sikri. Agra is deservedly famous for the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort, in which the builder of that building, the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, spent the last years of his life in prison staring at a sliver of the resplendent Taj, the mausoleum constructed for his beloved wife, Mumtaz. But only a few miles away sits a village that was once the marvel of the world.

Constructed over a period of five years by the emperor Akbar in the late 16th century, Fatehpur Sikri was meant to commemorate the miraculous pregnancy of Akbar’s barren wife. In desperation, he had gone to visit the holy man Selim Chisti, who would in time become the founder of a Sufi holy order that bears his name. After being blessed by Chisti, Akbar and his empress were rewarded with a son. In thanks, Akbar built a glorious city of palaces and mosques, which flourished briefly and then fell into disuse after the emperor’s death. His grandson Shah Jahan surpassed the wonder of Fatehpur Sikri with the edifices in Agra, and today, all that remains of the former glory of the village are a palace and a magnificent mosque called Jami Masjid. It is there, in the room of the imam, that a book sits with the name of the believers, and one of those names may be mine.

The mosque is designed in the “medresa” style, with a vast courtyard flanked by colonnades and symmetrical towering arches in which students would study the Koran during the years when the mosque also served as an Arabic university. In the middle of the courtyard is a shrine to Saint Chisti, made of cool white marble, and women come from the surrounding towns to tie little pieces of clothing to the grates of the shrine. They hope that some of the saint’s posthumous holiness will give them an added edge in the fertility game.

Contrary to what some of the locals in Agra had told us, Fatehpur Sikri was no cooler. Granted, there was a dilapidated ice cream cart in front of the entrance to the mosque, and I watched in fascination as a withered old man churned a wooden handle and then proudly showed us a goop that he called ice cream. I was so thankful for the wisps of ice cold air that I bought a few servings and asked him to keep the lid off as long as possible.

After a futile attempt at sightseeing, we retreated to the shade of the colonnade and planted ourselves there. I had no intention of moving until the sun went down, and as the afternoon rays burned, I couldn’t have moved even if we had wanted to. The stone in the central, exposed courtyard had become dangerously hot. Having removed our shoes at the entrance, I could no longer cross the courtyard to exit.

I must have dozed off, because the next thing I remember I was surrounded by a group of about a dozen young men seated in a circle. Bearded, studious, they had clearly taken to heart the Persian inscription on the side of the gate overlooking the town: “He that standeth up to pray and his heart is not his duty, does not draw nigh to God but remains far from Him. Your best possession is what you give in alms; your best trade is selling this world for the next. Said Jesus — on whom be peace — the world be a bridge, pass over it but build no houses on it. He who hopes for an hour may hope for an eternity. The world is but for an hour; spend it in devotion. The rest is unseen.”

Though the men in the circle were speaking Urdu, I could make out the occasional word in Arabic, and noticed that they each carried a copy of the Koran. A slightly older man seemed to be leading the discussion, and given his demeanor and the white skull cap, I assumed that he was their imam. As their teacher cum prayer leader, he asked questions, elicited responses, posed challenges. I had spent a portion of my first years in college studying Arabic and Islam, and I found the scenario fascinating. Here I was, half a world away, in the middle of something I had only read about. It was Islam in practice, and I was hooked.

They must have noticed my attentiveness, because one of them came over and asked me my name. Pleasantries were exchanged in simple English, and he invited me to join the circle, which I did like a wide-eyed little kid asked to sit with the grown-ups. One of the advantages of traveling in India is the prevalence of English-speakers, thanks to the several hundred years of British rule. Politely adapting themselves to the stranger that they had invited into their study group, they did their best to continue the discussion in English, though not everyone was able to communicate. For the next hour or so, I listened and occasionally asked a question. I can no longer remember what verse of the Koran they were discussing, only that the conversation flowed quietly in the heat, punctured by digressions in Urdu and Arabic.

At some point, I realized that all attention was on me. They wanted to know about me, about why I was there, what I was looking for. They wanted to know my faith, and I answered honestly that I wasn’t sure. They pointed to the shrine of the Sufi saint and asked me if it was like the shrines of Catholic saints. I answered yes, in Europe and Latin America there were such places of pilgrimage. They gestured around the courtyard and asked if there were places like it in the West. I looked at them, and I said no.

I’ve come to realize in the years since that I was wearing rose-tinted glasses that afternoon, that in every culture, there are men and women engaged in a tradition and committed to the search. But for me at that moment, it was a window into a reality that I had only dreamed of. It looked perfect, and it felt pure. Their eyes were open to life, and they seemed to want to see. They seemed to revel in the devotion to he who created us all, to Allah, and his prophet Muhammad, and to the revelation of the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Koran. Trimmed beards, gleaming white teeth, the melodious sounds of chants and questions, it all was as it should have been.

And what more could anyone want? In college, I was used to discussions about how much 150-proof vodka an average male could drink before going into shock, yet here were men slightly older than me asking about God’s will. I was accustomed to the bored looks of other students when philosophers and thinkers were debated in class, yet in front of me were a dozen faces utterly focused on the imam and the text and the real questions: Why are we here, what does it all mean? That was immensely appealing, and seductive. Just to my right lay the body of a mystic who had passed a life dedicated to drawing near to God, to touching the ineffable. Just in front of me sat a group of men trying to walk the same path. And there I was, and they were inviting me to walk with them.

“Why do you not believe?” one of them asked.

“But I do,” I replied. “I’m just not clear about what tradition feels most right to me.”

“Why not the way of Islam?” another suggested. “You could start now. It’s easy. You simply state your belief, and we will go and write your name down in the book.”

I was stunned. It hadn’t even occurred to me. Convert? There and then? On the spot, impulsively? But then again, was Paul impulsive when he was struck on the road to Damascus? Was Muhammad impulsive when he heard the thunderous voice of God and was told to recite? Was Buddha? Was anyone who had an intense, unexpected, wrenching experience of conversion and belief? Who was I to say what was impulsive and what was the moment beckoning me? What if I missed the opportunity to respond? What if that moment, that singular once-in-a-lifetime moment were presenting itself to me and I refused to embrace it? Maybe it was all as simple as it seemed.

Islam followed on the heels of Judaism and Christianity, and took liberally from each faith. In the century after Muhammad’s death in the year 632, Islam slowly changed from a religion intended solely for the Arabs into a proselytizing faith meant for the world. When Muslim armies invaded India beginning in the 11th century, they also attempted to convert the Hindus who fell under their rule. That is why today there are more Muslims living in India and Pakistan than anywhere else in the world (Indonesia is a close second).

As the realm of Islam expanded, the process of conversion was simplified. All a prospective convert needed to do was state the basic tenets of the faith, and in doing so, accept them. That remains true today. To convert, an individual must simply stand in front of witnesses and declare, in Arabic: “La Illah Allah, wa Muhammad rasul Illah.” Or rather, “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.” Known as the shahada, this statement is the basis of Islam. All else flows from that creed: the acceptance of the Koran as the literal word of God, the submission to his authority and the respect for the tradition (hadith) of the prophet.

I knew all of that. I had read books. I had studied. But not for the last time, I was brought face to face with the insurmountable gap between books and reality. Nothing I had read had prepared me for that moment, and nothing could have. In that heat, everything was calm and still. Everything seemed so simple. I was being offered a choice. I was being asked to join. This wasn’t a college fraternity or a volunteer organization or the glee club. This was a religion, and a dozen smiling, curious, excited faces stared at me and waited for my decision.

I said yes.

“So all I do is recite the shahada?” I asked.

The imam nodded. “That is all, and then we write your name in our book.”

“So I all I do is say, ‘La Illah Allah, was Muhammad rasul Illah’?”

“Yes, that is all.”

Over the centuries, there has been heated debate among Muslim scholars and theologians about how the shahada must be expressed. The point is for the believer to believe these words, but not everyone who says them believes them. Sometimes, they may be said under duress or pressure, or uttered hypocritically. Some theologians had declared that it was preferable for someone to say these words “in their heart,” silently, than to utter them falsely out loud.

As I sat there, I repeated the shahada to myself over and over, as if trying to hear how it sounded inside my soul. I had always wanted to go to Mecca, and now, if I became a Muslim, I would be able to. But the promise of an exotic pilgrimage wasn’t sufficient. Did the words sit right? Did I believe? Islam respects the tradition of Judaism and Christianity and stresses that Allah is the same God that Abraham heard in the wilderness and that Christ beseeched on the cross. That makes the first part of the creed unobjectionable to someone raised in the monotheistic traditions of Europe and the Americas.

The trouble is with Muhammad. The idea is not simply that Muhammad is a prophet of God, but that he is the last of the prophets and that he and only he got God’s message right. Because the Koran was revealed in Arabic, and not written down by subsequent generations (or so say Muslim theologians), nothing was lost or distorted in the process of recording God’s message. Islam, for Muslims, is the same message given to the Jews and Christians, but where earlier people had misunderstood God’s teachings, the Arabs got it right.

I didn’t really believe that, but then again, I wasn’t sure I really believed much of what I had learned about the Bible. The question wasn’t whether I should relinquish one tradition for another but whether I was prepared to make such a major step so casually. Before I could fully consider, my mouth started moving, and I leapt.

It took all of 10 seconds, and I immediately regretted what I had done. The actually act of stating something so sacred was far different from running the words through my head, and the moment they rolled off my tongue, I knew that I couldn’t in good faith honor what I had just said. But there it was, out of my mouth, hovering in the air and heading into their ears. Slowly, their eyes lit up. They had expected a day of prayer and study, away from the sun at its midday height, and now they had the added bonus of gaining a convert. I knew I had only a few moments to try to reverse what I had done.

“So that’s all there is to it?” I asked cheerfully.

“Yes, and now we go and note it officially,” the imam said, beaming.

“Well,” I said nervously, “I’m not sure I’m ready for that.”

They looked perplexed.

I began to improvise. “In my country, it takes more than that to convert. I’m interested in Islam, but I still have doubts.”

They continued to look confused.

“You’ve shown me a lot, and given me a lot to think about,” I said, hoping that the finality in my voice would offset my rash pronouncement of the shahada.

There must have been something in my voice, or in my eyes, or perhaps just in my body. Whatever it was, the faces around me began to register disappointment. They realized that though I had spoken the words, I hadn’t absorbed them. I may have converted in form but not in spirit. A few of them nodded; others shrugged, and they began to drift away from the circle. The moment had passed, for them and for me.

“Well, perhaps we will write your name down, or perhaps you will return,” the imam said, his tone suggesting a chastising parent who is at once resigned and bemused.

“Yes, perhaps,” I replied sheepishly. “Thank you.”

He smiled. “Salaam alechem,” he said as he departed.

“Wa alechem salaam,” I answered in kind.

Peace unto you.

It was still a few hours before the sun began to set and I mustered up the energy to leave. I had approached the door of Islam, but I hadn’t been able to walk through. I had done the right thing by not allowing the romance of the moment to override doubts that were still there and questions that the shahada could not answer. But to this day, I wonder how life would have been different if I had taken the other fork in the road, if I had gone with the imam to inscribe my name in that book, if I had joined those smiling men and embarked on a journey whose end I will never know.

That confession sparked intense debate and soul-searching. The wounds of Vietnam, many observed, were reopened with a vengeance, and though George Bush had proudly proclaimed at the end of the Gulf War that the United States had, once and for all, kicked the Vietnam syndrome, the publication of McNamara’s book showed that this particular dog wasn’t going to die so easily. Dozens of editorials denounced McNamara’s confessional as too little, too late. Appearing at events publicizing the book, McNamara was subjected to verbal assaults. Speaking in front of nearly 1,000 people at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government (an event I attended), McNamara was confronted by a veteran who demanded an apology, and when McNamara dodged the request, the questioner persisted by listing the names of his friends who had been killed in Vietnam and shouting at McNamara that he owed the nation an apology. McNamara quickly lost his cool and shouted back, “Shut up! You just shut up! You’ve had your chance to speak.”

The publication of “In Retrospect” inaugurated the most recent round of Vietnam books. With some exceptions — the most notable being Michael Lind’s upcoming book, “Vietnam: A Necessary War” — contemporary writers on Vietnam are united in their analysis that this was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. Most of the current wave of books amounts to a stunning indictment of the men who made policy for the United States and a persuasive demonstration of what many people suspected in the late 1960s but could not prove: that the war was utterly misguided, unnecessary and unwinnable. Given that the legacy of Vietnam continues to influence every military decision that the United States makes, and given that the entire leadership of today’s armed forces adhere to what might be called the “Vietnam avoidance doctrine of military engagement,” how Americans understand Vietnam shapes not just public consciousness about history, but the political and military decisions we make in places ranging from Kosovo to North Korea.

The new orthodoxy on Vietnam is aggressively countered by Michael Lind, the gadfly of the intelligentsia who works for both the New America Foundation and Harper’s magazine. His implied rejoinder to McNamara is “We were right, mostly right.” He rejects the view that the war shouldn’t have been fought, and he asserts that the underlying reasons for the conflict were sound. Vietnam was a battle in the Cold War, which was a global struggle that used proxy conflicts in lieu of nuclear weapons to decide the outcome. Though Lind faults the way the United States military prosecuted the Vietnam War, he maintains that in every respect, U.S. officials were right to think of Vietnam as vital and right to try to defend South Vietnam against a Marxism-Leninist incursion led by Ho Chi Minh in alliance with the Soviet Union and China.

At every turn, Lind rebuts the view that the United States shouldn’t have committed itself to Vietnam. Instead, he contends that the Johnson and Nixon administrations should have learned the lessons of the Korean War and kept American casualties to a minimum while still making a maximal effort to rebuff the Viet Cong insurgency. If the United States had backed down in Vietnam, the effects of its global position might well have been devastating, as events after the fall of Saigon in 1975 suggested.

Lind is especially dismissive of McNamara’s Hamlet-like guilt, and he has little but scorn for the former defense secretary’s historical revisionism. McNamara himself felt that “In Retrospect” left much unexamined and unfinished, and he organized a series of meetings between 1995 and 1998 that brought together American academics, military men and former policy-makers with their Vietnamese counterparts. The result of these half a dozen meetings is the book “Argument Without End.” It’s an odd combination of narrative, transcripts of the conferences and descriptions of the discussions between American and Vietnamese participants. Though the structure is unorthodox, it’s actually a breezy, easy to follow read. McNamara was known for his methodical, scientific approach, and this book is full of six-point summaries and concluding paragraphs that restate central questions and posit new ones. He leaves no ambiguity about his conclusions, and therein lies both the book’s strength and its weakness.

After many hours of debate between American and Vietnamese participants, McNamara and his co-authors conclude that throughout the 1960s, the United States constantly missed opportunities to negotiate with the North Vietnamese and consistently made choices that led to further involvement. The greatest failure, McNamara now believes, was “a failure of empathy.” American policy-makers and military officials never understood what motivated the North Vietnamese and therefore misjudged how the enemy would react.

McNamara believes that he and other officials in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were guilty of mirror-imaging. He recognizes that U.S. leaders often assumed that the North Vietnamese would act the way Americans would act, that the heavy loss of life and property caused by the bombing campaign after the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964 would bring the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table or that the deployment of more U.S. ground forces would signal to Ho Chi Minh that a communist takeover of South Vietnam was not a possibility the United States would accept. Yet, judging from the testimony of North Vietnamese officials in “Argument Without End,” the bombing campaign had the opposite effect and in fact stiffened the resolve of the North, while the deployment of U.S. ground troops was not seen as particularly threatening given the initial American and South Vietnamese ineptitude in dealing with Viet Cong guerrilla activity.

What is most striking about McNamara’s recent book is the degree to which he and other Americans remain unable to listen to what the Vietnamese were saying. Twenty years after the fall of Saigon, an exasperated McNamara still can’t quite grasp “how the North don’t owe you an apology when you devastated our country in a war designed to deny the Vietnamese people their right of self-determination. We tried to negotiate with you, but you wouldn’t even agree to a neutral solution, so convinced were you that communism in Vietnam would mean communist domination throughout Southeast Asia. So we fought, we paid the price, and we won.”

McNamara wants a quid pro quo, an “I’m sorry/no, I’m sorry” dialogue. The Vietnamese will have none of it. McNamara and his co-authors conclude with a devastating indictment of the American war effort, including a painful look at the missed opportunities for negotiation and an effective point-by-point deconstruction of the canard that, had the military been unfettered by the timidity of civilian commanders, it could have won the war.

Lind agrees that the conventional war envisioned by General Westmoreland wasn’t suited to the realities of the Vietnam conflict, and he harshly rebukes conservative critics who believe that it was liberal policy-makers alone who prevented the army from winning. But Lind vehemently denies that the so-called windows for negotiation were anything more than clever mirages projected by devious North Vietnamese leaders. That analysis stands in direct opposition to the argument made by Fredrik Logevall of the University of California at Santa Barbara, who asks in “Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam” whether the war was inevitable — and answers that it wasn’t.

Logevall argues that at numerous points during the crucial two years before Lyndon Johnson ordered a massive deployment of ground troops in the summer of 1965, the United States government could have pulled back with only a minimal loss of international prestige and domestic support. The role of the South Vietnamese government was pivotal. The ultimate success of the American war effort depended on a Saigon leadership that could cobble together a government that enjoyed the active support of the Vietnamese. That never happened, and it left the Americans in the position of fighting on behalf of a South Vietnam that functionally ceased to exist after 1965.

As Logevall shows, not only is that fact clear in hindsight, it was clear at the time to U.S. officials. Even more astounding, Americans policymakers prevented the South Vietnamese leadership from negotiating with the North in 1963 and 1964. So adamant were the Americans that South Vietnam remain non-communist that they allowed and even facilitated coup after coup in Saigon rather than permit leaders in Saigon to broker a political settlement with Ho Chi Minh.

Logevall punctures the myth that Johnson’s hands were bound by the actions of the Kennedy administration. Marshaling an impressive amount of evidence, he underscores that at numerous points between November 1963 and the summer of 1965, the Johnson administration chose escalation and war over less bellicose options. Logevall’s book amounts to one of the most effective indictments of the Americanization of the Vietnam War that has yet been written.

The recent publication by the Library of America of two volumes that bring together the best journalism of the war supports Lind’s contention that the reporting of the time simplistically presented the American war effort as an unambiguous strategic and moral failure. The Vietnam War exists in the American imagination largely through the pivotal reporting done by the likes of David Halberstam, Malcolm Browne, Neil Sheehan, Ward Just, Peter Arnett and Frances Fitzgerald. The evolution of Browne and Halberstam from early supporters of the war to disillusioned chroniclers of the conflict parallels the ill-considered Americanization that Logevall charts. It’s hard not to be struck by the “gosh, gee-willickers” quality of the early stories, especially when juxtaposed with the hard-bitten perspective that creeps in after 1966. The change in attitude that the press corps underwent is easier to appreciate if one reads the Library of America volumes alongside William Prochnau’s “Once Upon a Distant War,” which shows just how anguished journalists such as Browne and Halberstam were about this war gone wrong. Even in their raw, unannotated form, however, the reporting underscores the disconnect between policy-makers in Washington and realities on the ground in Vietnam.

That’s just the problem, Lind counters. The realities on the ground were ugly because war is ugly. American and South Vietnamese troops committed atrocities in no lesser or greater numbers than any troops in any war, and the naivet&#233 of the reporters was breathtaking. Lind says that the Cold War demanded not just strength but the appearance of strength and that had the United States forfeited Southeast Asia, the bandwagon effect could have been lethal. The nations of Western Europe, seeing that the United States would not fight, might have shifted allegiance to the Soviets, not out of warm feelings but out of strategic common sense. And the loss of Vietnam, Lind continues, would have led to a global copy-catting, where revolutionaries in countries such as Angola, Mozambique, Syria and the nations of Latin America would have taken the cue, allied with the Soviet Union, and overthrown governments allied with the United States.

The problem with Lind’s argument is that he chooses his evidence too selectively. Lind believes that the fact that Laos and Cambodia went communist after 1975 and the fact that the Third World became intensely anti-American and pro-Soviet in the late 1970s proves that the fears that the loss of Vietnam would have a deleterious effect on U.S. influence worldwide were correct. Yet he fails to take into account that the deleterious effect might not have been the loss of Vietnam per se, but the loss of Vietnam after nearly 15 years of direct and indirect war during which the United States explicitly tethered its prestige to the outcome of the conflict. And Lind’s argument that the disasters of the 1970s would have been even worse had it not been for the preventative policies of the 1960s doesn’t truly rebut Logevall’s arguments about what actually did happen and what feasibly might have.

Lind maintains that the example of Vietnam can teach much to leaders dealing with conflicts in Kosovo and beyond. He thinks that the orthodoxy about Vietnam has dangerously colored contemporary approaches to foreign policy. What he calls the “liberal-isolationist consensus” has created an absurdly high bar to the commitment of U.S. troops, and the military’s continued reliance on conventional warfare demonstrates just how blind the Pentagon has been to the actual lessons of Vietnam.

A quarter century after the fall of Saigon, the link between Vietnam and U.S. foreign policy is stronger than ever. Though Lind seems to feel that learning from history is simple and that only stupidity or ignorance can prevent us from understanding the legacy of Vietnam and applying that wisdom, most people find that learning from the past is easy to preach but hard to do.

For instance, take McNamara’s injunction that each side in a potential conflict listen carefully and try to understand the goals and attitudes of the other before escalating. In the case of Kosovo, that necessity was clearly grasped and conflict was still not prevented. Years of dialogue and negotiation between Slobodon Milosevic and Richard Holbrooke ensured that each side had a good reading of the other. That didn’t stop the Serbs from cracking down on the KLA, nor did it halt U.S. intervention. Luck, as much as anything else, allowed the Clinton administration to avoid sending in U.S. ground troops. Had Serbia been less industrialized, as North Vietnam was, or had Milosevic been slightly less tractable, the United States would have eventually done so.

In addition, as Lind is at pains to remind us, some of the supposed lessons of Vietnam are wrongly learned. The utter unwillingness of the military to countenance putting American troops in harm’s way in Kosovo is a direct result of the Vietnam syndrome in action. However, the problem with the Vietnam War wasn’t that Americans died; it was what they died for. Thirty years later, we seem to have forgotten that.

Perhaps the greatest weakness of Lind’s book is that he fails to recognize that his is merely one interpretation of what happened. Like McNamara, he is an absolutist who believes in Truth, and he thinks, just as McNamara thinks, that he knows it. Logevall, for all his prodigious research, understands that his is only one reading. Unlike Lind and McNamara, he wouldn’t say that he has found the Truth where others have somehow missed the path. If history were simple, then everyone would understand it, no one would repeat it and lessons would be learned as easily as we learn not to put our hands on a hot stove.

Like it or not, Vietnam has become a touchstone for contemporary questions about the United States, about military force and about global power. It is a giant screen onto which we project our fear that we might make the wrong decision and squander our strength. If only we could figure out Vietnam, we could assure our place of preeminence in the world for generations to come. That is a comforting thought. It says that our fate is controllable and that our future can be manipulated. Less comforting but probably more true is that the only thing that we can control is how we write about the past.

“Yeah, of course,” he replies, as if to say,
“You want me to spell it out for you?”

So here we go, into some image of the Alaskan wilderness, a consultant having
a premature mid-life crisis and a recently divorced New Yorker. No itinerary,
Anchorage and the Kenai peninsula, looking for something.

Alaska, the last wilderness, they say. Alaska, bigger than the United States
east of the Mississippi, they say. Alaska, virgin land, hardy people,
glaciers, mountains, eagles, Eskimos and Dr. Fleischman, Maurice the
astronaut and the rest of the “Northern Exposure” crowd. Alaska, pipelines and
oil spills and strange young men wandering off into the wilderness of Denali,
Jon Krakauer tells us. Alaska, fishermen and endless night and nightless day,
and frozen wastes. Alaska, what we once were but aren’t anymore.

Alaska has become a giant projection screen for the angst of the lower 48.
Against the backdrop of the Alaskan wilderness, the conundrums of late 20th
century urban/suburban life suddenly become less perplexing. They also appear
in sharper relief. Juxtaposed to pristine mountains, angry weather and vast
open spaces, the foibles and worries and fears that beset us in cities and
subdivisions seem absurd. They also become more troubling.

The day of departure came. I woke up in New York; 10 hours later, I stepped
off the plane in Anchorage. It was 9 p.m. It was twilight. The sky was
filled with luminous gray clouds, and the snow glowed on the mountains
surrounding the city.

My friend had rented a car, and he picked me up at the airport. We had a
quick meal at a place called The Humped Whale or The Frolicking Seal or
something to that effect. Salmon, halibut, steak, hamburgers, salmon steaks,
halibut steaks, halibut burgers, halibut tacos and of course, salmon tacos.
For the next week, halibut and salmon would haunt my waking hours. Salmon
from the Kenai Peninsula, the Copper River, the Kenai River, the Prince William estuary, salmon from streams and oceans, salmon
spawning. And halibut from trawlers, halibut from the fishing ships docked at
Homer, docked at Seward. Halibut that signs informed us we could catch, for
$100 here or $150 there.

Lesson No. 1: Alaska isn’t cheap, at least not for the average tourist. Improved roads and
communications around Prince William Sound and on the coast south of Juneau
have made Alaska less expensive in recent years, but it still costs more than
most parts of the United States outside of New York and San Francisco. The
high cost of this wilderness is one of those unmentioned ironies of modern
life. To spend a meaningful week in a motel on the edge of nowhere, or to sleep
under the stars in order to be kept awake at night by the cacophony of nature
costs more than most people make in a month. Getting away from it all is a
luxury that not many can afford.

After a night in the Captain Cook hotel, we drove off to the Kenai Peninsula,
heading for Homer. Alaska is vast, but the Kenai Peninsula is compact. It’s
less than 300 miles from Anchorage to Homer, which lies at the tip of the
peninsula. What Kenai lacks in scale it more than makes up for in scope. It’s
often said that Kenai is Alaska in microcosm, containing rivers, forests,
mountains, glaciers and fjords, and surrounded by ocean. Because it has one of
the only real highway networks in Alaska, Kenai in summer gets clogged with
RVs, hotel rooms are scarce and dear, and everywhere you go, sightseeing
companies try to entice you into day-long “wilderness” adventures.

In June, with more than 20 hours of daylight, the ethereal beauty of the
night sun cast our journey in a peculiar light. Surrounded by glaciers and
volcanic mountains, our conversations about urban ills had a pure simplicity.
“I have everything,” my friend told me one evening, “a perfect job, a
wonderful wife, money, and this glorious little daughter. So why the hell am
I so miserable?” In the background, the mountains fringed with snow rose
starkly from Homer Bay. “I didn’t realize how numb my life had become until I
felt the joy of being around my daughter.”

Lesson No. 2: Ever since modern man invented the wilderness, we’ve tried to find ourselves
there. There’s something so very American in seeking truth in the land, in
going west to find answers to the ennui of our lives. It’s been said that
before civilization, humans looked at the grandeur of the mountains, at the
wide expanses of space, at the majesty of nature and saw — nothing. Today, we
see what we want to see, and in Alaska, we see the antithesis of America, the land
of malls, interstates, high-rises and suburban sprawl.

When my friend and I spoke, the words had an echo. Like a man speaking
ancient Greek at an Amish picnic, they were out of place, and the feelings
behind them were detached from their source. I talked of my recent divorce,
he mused on the gap between how his life looked from the outside and how he
experienced it, and we both felt oddly — OK.

Lesson No. 3: The people we encountered in Alaska fall into distinct categories. There were
the fishermen, not much different from the hard-drinking, hard-working souls
who cling to the shores of New England. There were the oil workers and
executives, who live in Anchorage or Fairbanks. There were the people who
work in various service industries that cater to tourists. And then there
were the refugees from the states, the ones who moved to Alaska in the past
two decades in order to remain in the ’60s and commune with the land.

Our kayak guides had never met each other before, but they even looked alike,
bedecked with clothing instantly traceable to Haight-Ashbury circa 1975.
“We’ve been living here for two years,” the woman told me. “My boyfriend and
me, we got this place, and we’re almost done with the room. It’s cool, you
know, because we’re off the grid.” The other guide, who was in his late
20s, made an approving face. “Off the grid,” he nodded. “Cool.” Noticing
our incomprehending looks, he explained to us. “Off the grid means off the
power grid in Homer. So we don’t use electricity and contribute to the oil-producing economy.”

I asked how they heated their homes and what they used for
light. “Kerosene.”

It occurred to me that the environmental difference between kerosene and oil
was about as great as the difference between renting at Avis and renting from
Rent-a-Wreck. One cost less and had a certain hipster cachet, but no matter
which, you’re still renting a car. “Off the griders” in Alaska may buy their
own kerosene tanks from the local store and they may avoid paying a monthly
stipend to Alaska Gas & Electric, but they aren’t exactly roughing it or
saving the earth.

Many people have come to Alaska in the past three decades in order to
escape post-industrial America and its corporateness, yet without the
Alaskan pipeline, without Exxon and Mobil and various oil consortiums,
without the supertankers trolling Prince William Sound, and without the
fishing ships that load up on that oil in order to catch salmon and crabs and
halibut, and the canneries that package the fish, and the
ships that then take those cans to the lower 48 for sale, those people
couldn’t live off the grid with their kerosene tanks and macrame.

Lesson No. 4: In Alaska, you learn that, unless you subscribe to the Outward Bound philosophy of pushing your body to the brink, you need civilization to enjoy the wilderness.
Unless your taste in travel runs to privation, freezing and suffering,
Alaska is enjoyable to visit because it’s so easy. Nowhere in the world,
except perhaps Switzerland, can you so effortlessly transit from the creature
comforts of modernity to vast expanses of land, ice and forests. An entire
economy has developed to help people experience the wilderness.

We could wake up one morning, take a trawler out into the bay to a tiny
island, get in a sea kayak, start to paddle around the island, and spend the
day surrounded by sea otters and their babies, plus the occasional seal, with
more than a dozen bald eagles flying over our heads. Then we could head back to the town
for beers and an NBA playoff game on ESPN in the bar.

This odd melding of virgin wilderness and modern amenities somehow added to
the appeal of the Kenai Peninsula. One minute we were sitting by a
glacier lake with no sound but the breeze and the ripples; the next, we were
eating hot cinnamon buns at a roadside bakery. Two miles of ugly stores, gas
stations and McDonald’s would give way to 50 miles of unadulterated beauty. One
night we were getting drunk in a honky-tonk bar while a dead ringer for Frank
Zappa sang John Mellencamp songs and some nurse on leave from
Anchorage draped herself over some guy just out of the merchant marine
dripping with tattoos. The next morning we were heading out into Seward Bay,
waves high, rain in the air and volcanic cliffs jutting angrily out of the
ocean.

Day by day, I noticed a peculiar cadence to our conversations. As we
meandered through the peninsula, we talked, sometimes elliptically, sometimes
in long, intense bursts. Yet these conversations, about life, about finding
some meaning, about purpose and vision, about what to do, all took place in
hotel rooms, in the car or in restaurants. When we were hiking, or kayaking, or
walking, or boating, thoughts of that world — of work, family, children,
aging — evaporated, as if such concerns were of another life, felt by other
people in other realities. Divorce has no meaning next to a cobalt blue lake
carved millennia ago and hardly touched by man since. Financial consulting has
no substance in the midst of an electrical storm.

Lesson No. 5: You cannot escape your demons. Once enveloped — cushioned — by the familiar accoutrements of modern life, our baggage
reappeared in the wilderness with a vengeance. Our questions and conversations seemed so starkly
middle-class, so very post-Freudian, with a twist of New Age and a dollop of
therapeutic jargon. But the struggles were very real, and the pain of life,
of mortality, unmet expectations, and the unknown demanded — and rightfully so — our attention. That’s
why those who flee to Alaska find their demons chasing them there. Two guys
can go hiking for a day or traveling for a few weeks, but if my friend and I
had moved to Alaska in the hopes of avoiding ourselves, we would have been
quickly disillusioned. Living off the electrical grid doesn’t take you off
the emotional grid.

Still, as a contrast with the streets of San Francisco or the bars of New York,
Alaska underscored just how insidious modern American angst can be. In our
daily lives, not only do we feel that vague disquieting ennui, but we are
constantly reminded of how trite those feelings are. My friend is not
supposed to feel depressed when he possesses the external trappings of success,
and if he does, then he is reduced to a caricature of modern man. In his
quotidian existence, he hears in a thousand indirect ways that he doesn’t
have the right to have the questions he does, that having them is pathetic
because he has so much materially.

No wonder, then, that he felt the need to leave his life and go to Alaska,
even if it was only for two weeks. No wonder so many disoriented souls seek
in Alaska that which they have no room to find in the lower 48. For a few
weeks, the distance makes the pathos bearable. The vastness and power of the
land puts it in perspective. And in the quiet of the glacier lakes, no one
can hear you cry.

At the end of our trip, we splurged at a Westin ski resort 30 miles from
Anchorage. At the top of a ski lift, there was a four-star nouvelle cuisine
restaurant, with 360-degree views of the steep peaks. And there we sat, and
talked late into the night, sipping scotch, filled with the warmth of that
endless sun and the sureness of a friendship. I grew sentimental about my
ended marriage, and he spoke of depression. And we sat, in that strange
juxtaposition of worlds, and it grew quiet. And for a moment — final lesson — everything was
still.

Maybe it was something about the Vatican. About that fey art history teacher in high school who lovingly lulled us with slides of Michelangelo and his Sistine Chapel, of Bernini and his St. Theresa of Avila and her not at all subtle sexual delight at finding God. About Bernini’s 1660s redesign of St. Peter’s Cathedral and of the surrounding square in the highest style of the High Baroque. About the pomp of the Catholic Church and the seductive power of bishops, cardinals and popes. The vestments, the gold, the ceremony and the solemnity. And of course the mystery of the sacrifice and the sacrament. All of which I could idealize without the slightest bit of reality encroaching.

My knowledge of the church was blissfully free of any experience of the church. I had studied the papacy and read the history of the early church fathers. I had lingered over the Gospel and the words of Christ, just as I had read the Bhagavad Gita and the Torah and the Dhammapada and the Analects. They were all paths to the holy, and on Christmas Eve, 1986, my path led me to St. Peter’s Square and to a group of Carmelite French nuns who took pity on me and got me a precious ticket to midnight Mass.

Even at the time, it seemed surreal. The nuns milled around St. Peter’s Square in the late afternoon with the intensity of Yankees fans pouring off the subway in the Bronx. Told by the Vatican guards that there were absolutely no tickets for midnight Mass, I must have been drifting despondently, because one of the nuns, all alert eyes and a piet`’s compassion, tugged my sleeve and whispered, in French, “I can help.” It took me a moment to realize that she was holding a ticket in her hand. “One of the other nuns fell ill,” she explained. “Would you like her ticket?”

Five hours later, I sat surrounded by a pack of wimples under the gilt dome of St. Peter’s. They spoke excitedly among themselves, and the one who had given me the ticket offered a running commentary of the proceedings. The nuns gasped, hands over their mouths, eyes wide, when the pope appeared. It was as if I were at a rock concert, starring John Paul and the Cardinals. The pageant lasted for hours. The cardinals processed. The pope blessed. Children from around the world brought offerings to the papal seat. Music was played. Frankincense was dispersed. Then the pope spoke, solemn, humorless. He spoke in many languages, and I understood none of them.

The ceremony seduced, but it did not move me. This was the church, and I was looking for God. And I didn’t find Him there. Perhaps He would come, soon. Perhaps during the holiest of holies. It was time for communion, and I hesitated, and stayed in my seat. I couldn’t bring myself to approach the priests in their ornate vestments, surrounded by nuns, and take the body and the blood.

The next morning, I resolved to go all the way.

I would eat the wafers, sip the wine, experience the Eucharist miracle of transubstantiation. After all, it was Christmas Day. It was Rome. And all the restaurants were closed.