Soldier on.

• Position: UPFRONT

Thirty minutes, they said. "Get your combat gear and be on the airplane at Pope"--the Air Force base next door to Fort Bragg. Where are we going? "Top secret." How long will we be gone? "We don't know." What can I tell my wife? "Nothing." In the mid-'60s, I was an Army enlisted man, armed with a notebook, camera and a .45 pistol that I couldn't have hit my foot with, on a C-130 full of paratroopers bound for somewhere I knew nothing about.

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The Dominican Republic incursion was war lite, but it was the first in a new generation of conflicts, less defined even than Korea, on a C-130 full of paratroopers, a mere prelude to Vietnam and absent the clear, unifying enemies of World War II. I didn't know why I was there, only that people were shooting at me. I was too terrified to realize it, but the implications for North Carolina of my ambivalence--and that of thousands of others--were profound.

In the years to come, as we plunged deeper into Vietnam, many, civilians and politicians alike, couldn't separate their scorn for the war from those who fought in it. I had no trouble. I remember the sobs of Mattie, my landlady's daughter, the night the chaplain came. Her husband, a helicopter door gunner, was among the first to die. Gradually, across North Carolina, the Cold War's grudging out-of-sight, out-of-mind attitude toward the military turned into open resentment. They drafted sons and sent back bodies.

Conscription ended in the '70s, but for the next decade and a half, the bitter taste lingered. Politicians opposed expansions at Fort Bragg, Camp Lejeune and other bases. Complaints soared about noisy jet fighters at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base. GIs were ordered not to wear combat fatigues off base because it offended civilians.

The resentment was shortsighted, and the state was shooting itself in the foot with better aim than I had with my .45. When war in the Persian Gulf broke out in 1991, tens of thousands of North Carolina-based service men and women were shipped out...