It came out as sort of a joke actually, and it kind of stuck. In Vietnam, where I lived for about eight years, they used to say that there were people...

I suppose the feeling that I'm probably nearing the end of my journalistic career and possibly my life, and while I still remember so much of the contemporary...

I'm 62.

I have no idea. Actually, my genes aren't all that great, so I think if I make it to 70, I'll probably be doing pretty well.

I live in Manhattan in the shadow of the Empire State Building. I was born and raised in New York City. I think I'd be quite happy to move away from...

I'm technically called a senior writer, and I have been covering science for the last decade, but I have interpreted this to mean that since science...

It stands for Wilde with an E at the end of it, and I know what you're getting at. My grandfather's first cousin was Oscar Wilde, who was famous for...

Oh, yes, absolutely.

Yes, very much. His plays are marvelous. He had a tremendous wit. I wish that I could emulate him in some ways. So now I'm proud to have him on the...

Yes, a very dedicated Quaker who opposed war and killing in every way, shape or form. She was one of the few people during the late 1930s, when war...

Let's take a close look at this cover. You see a typewriter there and you see some cigarettes and passports and I think a dog tag there and a camera.

Is all that stuff yours?

I want to show those pictures in just a moment. Was this cover your idea?

You thank Peter Osnos in the opening acknowledgments, and then buried in your book you and Peter Osnos, when he used to be at the Washington Post, were...

Years later what's that friendship like?

Did he have anything to do with your doing this book with Times Books?

You mention your mother was a Quaker. What was your father?

How many brothers and sisters?

How long have you lived in New York City, and where did you go to school?

And then after school?

Where?

How did you find yourself in Korea?

How long were you in the service?

When did you go to work for the AP?

Go back to Cuba just for a moment, and I'm looking for the gentleman's name that you write up so much -- La Cabaa.

There was the case a of young boy who asked before being shot that the executioner spare his face because he wanted his body returned to his family....

Yes, he did. He and a girl who was working as a stringer for UPI and had become enamored of this guy -- and I'm ashamed to admit that I introduced the...

So in the end they simply gave up, and he came to a bad end, I believe. He took to beating up this girl. By this point I was in Vietnam, and she sought...

Let's see. I joined them in 1960, and I left them in 1965. In the interim I had won a Pulitzer and I had lots of job offers and I accepted the one from...

About a year.

I guess I became a little bit disenchanted. It seemed to me that there were a lot of things that I wanted to say about the Vietnam War, and it was very...

I was doing free lancing for a while. Because of my ABC contract, I had to do a couple of documentaries for them, and I did some radio work for the...

That was one of the rare times when we were actually on the same operation together. I don't even remember what the operation was. But of course we...

Yes, it happens quite regularly. In fact, just a few weeks ago the New Yorker magazine asked us to assemble, along with Peter Arnett and Horst Faas,...

Yes, I guess so. The interesting aspect, I think, of our work at the time was that despite the fact that we weren't really cooperating with each other...

I guess it would depend on what type of conservatives they were. If they were simply idealogues without any knowledge of either Vietnam or other world...

In your book you say very positive things about Chester Bowles.

Let me quote you quoting him: "The Cuban fiasco demonstrates how far astray a man as brilliant and well-intentioned as Kennedy can go who lacks a basic...

It happened that my AP colleague Peter Arnett and I were covering a Buddhist demonstration at that time at which the secret police beat up Peter pretty...

I figure about seven. It was five years continuously for the first stint, from ‘61 to ‘66, and then I was back a few times. I spent quite a long...

I met my wife in 1961. Actually the second or third day I was in Vietnam I visited her because she was the deputy minister of information and chief...

Her name was Huynh thi Le Lieu.

Oh, yes, very happily so.

1965 we were married, so whatever that is -- really a quarter of a century, most of our adult lives.

No. I do by a previous marriage.

We were adversaries at first. Of course, it was her job. The government was furious at me most of the time, the Saigon government in the early 60s,...

When did she become an American citizen?

You tell a story in the book where the two of you are in, I believe, North Vietnam and there's a passport problem. You come back in through Vientiane,...

At any rate, my wife, Le Lieu, and I at that point were sort of commuting. We had no place to live, but we had hotel rooms simultaneously in Vientiane...

The Pulitzer committee doesn't ever say, but I think basically it was for coverage of the political events and war as they unfolded in 1963. It was...

The Buddhist monks had been conducting anti-government demonstrations for about a month and a half prior to this incident, demanding certain changes...

What was the impact of that, and who published it?

Never published it?

In your opinion when you were in Vietnam what people whom we would know played it straight with you and who didn't?

Who was he?

Who was the most dishonest?

Did you ever confront him?

Was he editor of a Newark paper?

Let me read something you say in this book: "The real problem of aging is one's loss of humility and a corresponding gain in one's intolerance of errant...

You've thought about that.

Let me read it again: "The real problem of aging is one's loss of humility and a corresponding gain in one's intolerance of errant foolishness." What...

You were talking about people who appeared on the platform with you during the war period. Did you have a lot of unhappy experiences?

Ernest Gruening.

You talk about Herman Kahn, who's deceased but used to be with the Hudson Institute says -- or one of the other Vietnam crusaders, "Hearing my colleagues...

You talk about how people would say negative things about you. On the next page you talk about your friends being Martin Luther King, Pat Brown, Robert...

"I took years to come to terms with the trauma those last days of the war left me, and even now I try not to think about that cruel April 1975." On...

At the same time there was nobility in some cases too, people who made tremendous personal sacrifices to see their families survive. Vietnam has been...

I certainly have not seen any grounds for hope, particularly in Bangladesh or in some African nations or in some other south Asian nations simply because...

No question about it, with some very bad memories. During the Husk regime some of the worst human rights abuses happened in Prague. I can't help forgetting...

I'm not a spiritual person, and I guess it's the sort of release from the heavy-handed politics of the outer world. I think that a region has to be...

In Antarctica?

Yes, I guess I missed the stability of having raised a family, I suppose, in the conventional way. I've missed . . .

Yes. I've certainly missed the kind of career that I suppose I could have made if I had opted to be an editor or go up the journalistic ranks rather...

Probably where I'm trying to draw some conclusions about where the world ought to be going right now. I think, at the risk of sounding a crank, I worry...

Not for now. Maybe at some point. If so, it will probably be on some scientific matter rather than politics, I would guess.

Parts of it were very hard to write because there are things in there that I've never really told anyone. It's like going to a father confessor or to...

Some of my feelings about leaving Vietnam. For one thing, after the fall of Saigon I hadn't written about Vietnam at all. This is the first time I've...

The reviewers have been very kind. It's only been out in the stores, I guess, for about a week now, so I'm waiting for the verdict to come in, but my...

I hope to leave something of value for my otherwise worthless life to those who come after me, not just my own family but other journalists. I found,...

Thank you very much for having me.