Precisely what happened is obscured by murky memories, but the central fact - that American military killed women and children - is not in dispute. In official accounts, the dead were listed as Viet Cong.

We probably would not have read about Thanh Phong last week if that unit's commander had later been killed, as he very nearly was; or if the 25-year-old Kerrey had not subsequently earned the Congressional Medal of Honor; or if he hadn't somehow managed to leave a military hospital in Philadelphia, reenter civilian life supported by the love of family and his brothers-in-arms; or if his love of country had taken him no further in his political career than the governor's mansion in Nebraska.

Thanh Phong is dominating headlines because Bob Kerrey is now a respected and accomplished political leader.

But if the fact that innocent people were killed in Vietnam is the news, it is hardly a revelation to the villagers of Thanh Phong, nor to the many Americans who listened to us speak out 30 years ago about our experience. It's certainly not news to America's Vietnam veterans, who have never stopped wrestling with the slippery truths of our nation's least understood war.

The reality is that there were many Thanh Phongs, literally thousands of cases where shots were fired, bombs dropped, and rockets launched without any sure knowledge of the targets' loyalties, capabilities, intentions, or age. People shake their heads and ask how the boys next door could have done such things.

They forget - or perhaps can never really know - what Vietnam was. Americans were outsiders in a complex war among Vietnamese. Our allies were corrupt. Our adversaries were ruthless. Enemy territory was everywhere.

Reporters have been busy researching the rules of war as though it were a board game. The truth is, there were no rules - only instinct and minute-by-minute, second-by-second judgments that we carry around inside for the rest of our lives.

It is easy today to forget that a free-fire zone was just that. Imagine a unit of seven young men venturing alone in the pitch black of a moonless night, believing because it was true that any sound could mean death, with no helicopter backup, no margin for mistakes, no time for hesitation, and no knowledge of what might happen in the next moment.

With cause - having heard shots ring out - or out of fear when you thought you heard shots, you fired your weapon. We tried to protect innocent people, but sometimes danger and confusion prevailed. As Neil Sheehan documented so pointedly, the "bright shining lie" that evolved in military doctrine was, simply, "if they're dead, they're V.C."

It has long been evident that American soldiers have truths to tell. Thirty years ago, a number of us, as self-proclaimed "winter soldiers," testified that there were terrible things happening in Vietnam. Some veterans have taken longer than others to come to terms with the war; others still have not done so. Either way, they have paid a high personal price.

"I lived with this privately for 32 years," my friend Bob Kerrey (who retired from the US Senate last year after two terms) said last week. "I can't keep it private any more. My conscience tells me some good should come from this."

It is never too late for Americans to understand the anger that many Vietnam veterans - myself among them - felt toward the body-counting, career-promoting leaders sitting safely in Washington, and of the unfairness of sending to the killing fields troops that were disproportionately poor and black.

I wonder, still, how we could ask anyone to be the last man to die in Vietnam; the last man to die for a mistake.

It seems almost cliched to talk about the death of innocence. But what else is it when the children of America are pulled from front porches and living rooms and plunged almost overnight into a world of sniper fire, land mines, ambushes, rockets, buddies going home in body bags, explosions in the night, sleeplessness, and the confusion created by an enemy who was sometimes invisible firing, and sometimes right next to you smiling?

If innocence died, it was replaced by almost nothing. The magnetic north of our moral compass had been ripped from the heavens. We had been raised to cherish human life, and then taught to exterminate, based on a differentiation among Vietnamese that our senses could not comprehend, and that we too often felt we could not apply and still stay alive.

We did not find Hitler among the enemy; we did not see Roosevelt among those we had been sent to protect.

But, despite that confusing moral backdrop, we tried to make sense of our mission, to do the job we were sent to do.

We returned home to an America that was indifferent, even hostile. There were no parades, only nightmares. Veterans were spat upon, called baby-killers, our uniforms themselves targeted us for ridicule from those who could never understand our pain. The war stories we had did not uplift, but rather repelled. For many vets, it was simply impossible to explain, so silence became the only option.

Most deadening was our realization that the anguish we felt about the Vietnamese was not shared by any part of the American political spectrum; certainly not by the White House or Pentagon; and certainly not by extremists who saw the My Lai massacre as a political opportunity and the Tet Offensive as a debating point for the vindication of views.

We veterans found, when we returned, that America thought the war was all about America - when we had thought it was about Vietnam. This seemed a betrayal, but in reality it could not have been any different. For us, the war was personal; we had lost our friends and many had watched brothers lose arms and legs; we had seen Vietnamese fight and curse, weep and die. Most Americans had not lived our experience, and could not fully understand - and we thought them lucky for that kind of ignorance.

The fissures created by Vietnam have long been stubbornly resistant to closure. Each step was its own drama as activists battled government secrecy and the willful amnesia of a society that did not want to remember.

Led by veterans and family members, advocates fought the forgetting and pushed our nation to confront the war's surplus of sad legacies - Agent Orange, Amer-Asian orphans, abandoned allies, exiled and imprisoned draft dodgers, doubts about whether all our POWs had come home, and honor at last for those who returned from Vietnam and those who did not.

Slowly, the truth was understood. The faults in Vietnam were those of the war, not the warriors.

Year by year, our nation has moved to heal what was healable, but we have still not fully recognized the wounds that only God can mend.