He was a Browning automatic rifleman, in the thick of it all the time. And he had never, ever talked about it. I have to do that all that time. It's not just unique to this current experience. You have to come home from Beirut, or the Persian Gulf War, or the earthquake in Armenia, or Tianenman Square, and get on with your life, deal with it.
Journalists are famous for being able to compartmentalize.
What this book did, when I was preparing and finishing it in the midst of the current scandal, was to remind me once again that history is long-curve. It's not short-term. You know, these people came back from the war, and we had McCarthyism. That was another chilling scandal, of a different kind, but the psychological and emotional scars still remain for a lot of people. It was a politically perilous time.