It was just before dawn, the slush was up to my ankles and in front of me was a billboard with the famous quote from John F. Kennedy, “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” My draft notice had arrived three weeks earlier at the start of 1966. The army gave me my first train ride and there I was at the reception center in Fort Knox, Ky., to begin basic training.

It seemed likely that I would go to a combat unit and spend time in Vietnam. Due to some quirk in the army’s personnel procedures, I was instead made a medical laboratory technician. Shortly after basic training I was at Fort Lewis, Wash., drawing blood from patients and running medical tests. It was all on-the-job training. My unit was the Main Post Dispensary where we ran sick calls for soldiers in the IV Infantry Division and basic trainees.

The United States in the 1960s was a simple black-and-white world. We had lived through the early Cold War, the Korean War, the Berlin Crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Everything was either Communist (which we opposed) or anti-Communist (which we supported.) There were neither nuances nor complications. The Vietnam War was just an extension of this long-held view of the world. We had no doubt that the war was right and it was everyone’s duty to help protect the country from this Communist threat. I beamed with pride as I stood in the slush that January morning in front of the JFK billboard.

At Fort Lewis we had weekly training sessions at the post theater. Some of these sessions explained why we were fighting in Vietnam. Typically, a young officer would show us a film and then answer questions. I recall one film that had animated dominoes falling all the way from Vietnam to California. This seemed perfectly logical to me.

The officers in these training sessions tended to be ROTC with degrees in some business major. The draftee-enlisted men tended to be social and physical science majors, except for me. I was there because of a mistake somewhere in the army bureaucracy. During the question period the other enlisted men asked questions about things like French colonial policy, Dien Bien Phu, Ho Chi Minh and the 1954 Geneva Accord. They obviously knew things that I did not know. The question periods usually ended with the flustered officer declaring the session over and ordering the troops back to their units.

My black-and-white world was starting to crumble. The post library was a remarkable place. It had a wide range of magazines and books. Prior to my army service, I probably had not read a book in five years, including my last two years of high school. I dove into that library like a starving man in an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Some of my time in the Army was spent helping with physicals for soldiers going to and coming from Vietnam. In the morning we did those going; in the afternoon we did those coming. The difference was startling. The morning group was optimistic and innocent; the afternoon group was angry and disillusioned. It was a hard, violent civil/guerrilla war that changed many of the people who went through it.

Part of my time in service was spent at an army hospital near Fort Lewis. The recovering wounded walking the hospital halls were a troubling sight. Some of these men would never fully recover. The cost of the war to our country came in many forms.

The news media in the 1960s covered the deaths, injuries and devastation to the Vietnamese. We eventually lost more than 50,000 dead, and the Vietnamese lost between one and two million, about half of them civilian. The war was a tragedy, but by any measure, it was more of a tragedy for the Vietnamese. We were, after all, in their country.

This was my state of knowledge when I was discharged from the army in 1968. I knew the war was a mistake, and I knew it was imposing tremendous costs on all concerned.

One of my life regrets is that I did not protest this cruel and disastrous policy. It would have taken great courage to take a public stance against the war at that time. Most of us disillusioned veterans just winked at each other when some lifetime civilian would talk about the glories of war. Some veterans, like John Kerry, showed the courage to protest this failed policy. Their protests helped shorten the war and save both American and Vietnamese lives. We could not build a stable democratic nation in the south of Vietnam, we could only prolong the war.

I learned some lessons from my wartime experience, and I hope our country has learned some lessons as well. As an economics professor, one of my goals is to teach my students to not be like the young me. I want them to be skeptical, inquisitive and searchers for knowledge.

Unlike my historian friends, I do not think that nations gain a lot of policy direction from history. Every situation is unique. There may be a few general rules to be learned however. The Vietnam catch-22 of “they can’t win if we do support them and they can’t survive if we don’t support them” is always lurking.

This seems to characterize our current situation in Iraq. The Iraqi government we appointed would not survive without our military support, but because of our support, they are viewed as our agents. We arrived at this situation through a series of blunders. Being resolute in the pursuit of a mistaken policy is not a virtue, it is a recipe for disaster and regret.