Reporting on Robert McNamara's death Monday and his role in the Vietnam conflict, ABC News anchor Charles Gibson said: "By 1964, it became known as McNamara's war."

The rest of the news was lost to me as I recalled where I was in 1964.

In January I was standing in dress whites on the tarmac at Saufley Field, near Pensacola, Fla., where I was learning to fly for the Navy. The occasion was an awards ceremony and, after, I wondered with the rest of my training class why some of our instructors had just received combat medals if there was no war going on.

I was that naive. We all were.

Two years later I was in Saigon flying my first missions in Vietnam, and I was no longer as naive. My squadron's mission was coastal reconnaissance. When we weren't flying we hung out at the Rex Hotel and traded experiences with fellow officers, including Australians, New Zealanders and South Koreans.

It took me roughly two weeks to collect enough of those stories to know our situation was hopeless -- that whatever we were trying to do, it wasn't going to work, that Vietnam was distinctly not the place to die gloriously for our country.

The summer of 1966, in McNamara's War, was lousy. But I wouldn't call it my worst.

Maybe I'd call the summer of 1991 my worst. That summer I was waiting in line to look up friends in the directory for the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. It was my first visit to The Wall, and in front of me was an older couple, also waiting. I remember the woman quite distinctly. She had on a gray cloth coat, odd, I thought, in the summer heat.

When they got to the directory she began scanning the pages, searching alphabetically. And then she said, without looking up from the page, "Here he is. Here's Johnny right here."

With that, his right arm reached out and drew her to him. They stayed that way for a while, and then they were off to find Johnny in one of the lines on one of the panels containing the more than 58,000 hapless victims of McNamara's War.

I like to think that they were proud of their Johnny. And, I'm proud of their Johnny, whoever he was. He did what he was told to do in Vietnam until he died there.

But back then he probably received a short paragraph in a local newspaper. He didn't get a sound bite on CNN or a magnetic yellow ribbon urging us all to "Support Our Troops." He was not called a hero back then, when the word had some weight.

I survived Vietnam. That's all I can claim from the experience. And because of Robert McNamara's War, no matter what I accomplish, I will always also be a loser.

Unlike Johnny, who was spared it, I, like all Vietnam veterans, live loss, see every day the wasted promise of our friends frozen in their photos, just as we see ours in everyday mirrors.

Garson is a poet and writer in Soldiers Grove who is working on a book about his experiences as an aviator in Vietnam.