When I first walked across the tarmac of Saigon’s Tansonnhut Airport on a warm evening in April, 1962, nervous that the customs officers might not accept the journalist’s visa I had hurriedly obtained from the South Vietnamese consulate in Hong Kong, I believed in what my country was doing in Vietnam. With military and economic aid and a few thousand pilots and Army advisers, the United States was attempting to help the non-Communist Vietnamese build a viable and independent nation-state and defeat a Communist guerilla insurgency that would subject them to a dour tyranny.
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Question

When I first walked across the tarmac of Saigon’s Tansonnhut Airport on a warm evening in April, 1962, nervous that the customs officers might not accept the journalist’s visa I had hurriedly obtained from the South Vietnamese consulate in Hong Kong, I believed in what my country was doing in Vietnam. With military and economic aid and a few thousand pilots and Army advisers, the United States was attempting to help the non-Communist Vietnamese build a viable and independent nation-state and defeat a Communist guerilla insurgency that would subject them to a dour tyranny.
What is the author’s