My Journey in Vietnam, the Middle East, and Japan: A Message to the Youth of the Future

2018/10/08

I would like to thank the students, faculty, and everyone else at Keio University. What I find wonderful about this university is that students learn more here than just the founder's intent to bring modernity and social development to Japan in 1858.

You can learn about history, constitutional law, government, and much more. There are students studying in almost every field. There are graduates who have become prime ministers, high-ranking officials, astronauts, and Olympians. However, you study here as students not because you can, but because you should. It is not something that can be bought with money. You are being taught in a very practical way how to live your life, how to become someone greater than yourself, and how to become part of something that transcends yourself.

Today's topic is about myself, but it is not one I chose. If I had chosen it myself, it would be quite conceited. This is a topic chosen by the university. If I were asked to talk about Japan-U.S. relations or foreign policy, I could talk for hours. I would keep talking even if you all fell asleep. However, it is difficult to talk about oneself. Having to tell anecdotes and stories about myself to draw lessons for those of you just starting your careers is particularly difficult for someone like me who is thinking about stepping down soon.

I am the son of a Boston police officer. I was born in Boston, but my father soon moved to a town called Decatur, Georgia. You probably haven't heard of such a town. It's not so much now, but back then it was a rural town. I had what could be called an almost ideal childhood. I didn't wear shoes from June to September. Since it was the South, I didn't need them. It was a very warm, wonderful place, and I played every sport a boy could play. All my friends did too. Most of our parents had served in World War II, returned home, and were busy trying to improve their own lives.

One day when I was 16 years old, my father called the three of us—I have a younger brother and sister—and said, "This is the rule of our house. All three of you will go to college." That sounded perfectly natural. Until my father said the next words: "And the three of you have to find a way to do it yourselves."

Our family had enough money to live on, but we didn't have the extra money to send three children to college. I ended up going to the U.S. Naval Academy to play American football. My brother went to college on a military scholarship, and my sister, believe it or not, went to college on a baton-twirling scholarship. The three of us accomplished what our father said. We found our own way to go to college.

I knew nothing about the Navy. I lived in Decatur, Georgia. There was nowhere further from the sea than that. I knew nothing about the ocean. I originally planned to go to a university called the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga because I received a scholarship to play American football for four years.

American universities have many types of sports scholarships. Some are for four years, and some are for two years with an extension for another two years. However, it is very risky. If you get injured or fail to succeed in the first two years, you will be expelled. But how did I, who didn't have a natural affinity for the Navy and didn't grow up with seawater in my nose, end up going to the Naval Academy? I can only call it luck.

My father went to Annapolis, where the Naval Academy is located, on a business trip and went into a bar for a drink. He asked the person next to him, "What kind of work do you do?" The person replied, "I am a freshman football coach and basketball coach at the Naval Academy." My father said, "Is that so? My son plays football, basketball, and baseball, and he also does the shot put. He's the captain of the football team." The coach said, "Is that so? He must be good. Tell your high school coach to send a film of your son playing football." When the coach sent it, I received a letter from the Naval Academy asking if I was interested in being nominated. I hadn't thought about it at all. My father hadn't told me about his interaction with the Naval Academy coach.

Why is this so important? It's because, unlike the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, at the Naval Academy, once you entered, you didn't have to continue playing football. It's the Navy, so if you stayed out of trouble, you could stay for four years, have a job when you graduated, and receive a salary while in school. What could be wrong with this situation? I knew nothing about the Navy, but I had enough sense to realize that when an opportunity comes, you grab it. However, I would be lying if I said, "One day I woke up with a deep love for the Navy."

All the young men of my generation were supposed to enter the military. There was a draft, and if you were going to college, you were supposed to enlist either before entering or after graduating. I intended to go into the military after graduation, but entering the Naval Academy moved that plan forward a bit.

And I also became engaged to a young woman. She is the woman with whom I recently (less than a month ago) celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary. We fell deeply in love, and I carefully considered what to do with my career.

Initially, I was thinking of going into the Marine Corps. Looking at my graduation yearbook, I can see that others were convinced I would make a very good Marine officer. However, it was in the middle of the Vietnam War. I thought privately and spoke with my fiancée. If I went to the Marine Corps, there would be six months of training, followed by 13 months in Vietnam, totaling 19 months before we could get married. If I went to the Navy and served on a ship off the coast of Vietnam, after four months of training, I would spend seven months off the coast of Vietnam, totaling 11 months. We decided on this because we could get married sooner.

Thus, I ended up on a destroyer off the coast of Vietnam. My destroyer had served in World War II. It had six guns and was much needed off the coast of Vietnam to support the Army and Marines who were in trouble. I sat on the ship, kept watch, steered the ship, led the ship, and gave orders. Occasionally, we would get radio calls from Marines or the Army who were in trouble and fighting the North Vietnamese, asking us for cover fire.

I would sit with a coffee cup, give orders, and provide cover fire, and the Marines would tell us if it was good or bad, and we would fire again. I felt a bit strange. This was because while other Americans were in the thick of the fight, I felt I was not. That became a lesson for me. What it means is that, whether politically, militarily, socially, or culturally, I want to be as close to the real action as possible at all times.

It's not that I was ignorant about the Vietnam War. However, it didn't seem to make sense that American Marines and Army personnel were in Vietnam. There were many young Vietnamese who could have carried rifles if they wanted to. I came to the idea that instead of Americans fighting in their place, we should go to support Vietnam and the Vietnamese people. In that case, whether as an advisor, air support, helicopter support, or fire support, it made a lot of sense. So I wrote a letter to my wife, telling her I desperately wanted to volunteer for the Vietnam War, and I actually volunteered to be an advisor to Vietnamese units in the Vietnamese countryside. And when I returned from that deployment, we got married. In addition to the 50 years of marriage I mentioned earlier, what went well was that we had two biological children and six adopted children.

But do you remember what I said before? The story about being concerned about having to spend 19 months in the military before marriage. I ended up spending six years in Vietnam. During that time, I got married and returned occasionally on what is called R&R. It is truly an irony of life that I ended up spending six years to avoid 19 months of service.

My first tour in Vietnam was in the Mekong Delta, which was hot, muddy rice paddies. As a newcomer, I went to a Vietnamese base and was trying to become an advisor to an ambush team. This meant going on ambushes with the Vietnamese, and if there was a problem, requesting helicopters, asking for air support, and having them fire. They decided to have some fun with me and asked, "Do you want to take a walk around to get used to this area?" I replied, "Of course. Good idea. That's useful." I slung my rifle, put on my grenades, took my canteen, and went out in line with the Vietnamese.

We passed through a small village and came to a rice paddy. Walking in a rice paddy was a struggle. I weighed 106 kilograms. When Vietnamese people walk in a rice paddy, they sink just a little. When I walked, I sank up to the middle of my thighs. And when you put your legs into a rice paddy up to the middle of your thighs, it's easy to sink, but really hard to get out.

I asked the Vietnamese person with me, "Why don't we walk on the paths?" They said, "No, you can't. There might be traps set." I replied, "I see." It made sense, so I continued walking through these rice paddies all day long. They were walking cheerfully and happily, but I was miserable. I have never tried so hard to move in my life. So, when I returned to the base, I put down my rifle, put down my grenades and canteen, immediately went into the river behind the living quarters, and sat down in the water. I was exhausted. However, the story about traps being set was a complete joke. They were teasing me. they wanted to see if the newcomer could take a joke. In other words, as they told me a few days later, you have to have a sense of humor.

In reality, however, there was not a shred of humor. This was during my second tour in Vietnam. Have you ever seen the movie "Apocalypse Now"? Do you remember the patrol boats in it? There was a unit consisting of 140 Vietnamese and 20 such boats, and I was the senior advisor. I stayed in the border area with Cambodia on a river in Tay Ninh Province for several months, and from time to time I would go out on different patrol boats to see if the Vietnamese sailors were using their equipment properly and if they needed more training.

That day, we went out early in the afternoon. It was a hot day, and the boat captain asked me if he could pull the boat up to the trees on the bank. It was because we could get into the shade. I didn't think much of it and didn't object. One sailor was at the bow. He was a Vietnamese sailor, and he was trying to bring us closer to the tree. It seemed that patrol boats had often been tied to this tree before. And the enemy had set a booby trap on that very tree. He touched it. It blew off his ears, blew out his eyes, blew off his nose, blew off one hand and half of the other arm, and his head and chest were burned and torn open.

Seeing that, we decided to turn back and rush to the base. I carried him to my jeep, removed the back seat, put him in, and had another sailor drive the jeep to the military hospital. I was in the back seat with the sailor who was suffering in intense agony. Can you imagine that pain? Like all military officers at the time, I had morphine injections. They were given to military officers and NCOs. Morphine injections were not supposed to be used for head injuries, but this man was suffering terribly, and I dared to use it. And according to military rules, if you injected someone, you were to pin it to their uniform shirt so that a doctor seeing them later would know the patient had been given morphine. However, he wasn't wearing a shirt. It had been blown off. I pinned it to his pants.

Five minutes, then eight minutes passed, but the morphine didn't help him; he was writhing, screaming, and in a terrible state. So I did something you must never do. I gave him a second injection. After injecting him, I took the used needle, pinned it to my uniform, so the doctor would know two morphine injections had been given.

We went further, but he didn't get any better at all, and I did something truly terrible. I actually gave him a third morphine injection. I pinned it to his pants. What was I trying to do? Obviously, I was trying to euthanize him. Who would want to live in such an injured state? When we arrived at the military hospital in Tay Ninh, to my surprise, he was still alive. A large military operation was underway near the hospital, and there were many injured Vietnamese.

When I carried the terribly injured man in, the doctor took one look and said, "Put him over there. His turn will be handled by triage." That means prioritizing the treatment of patients with a chance of survival over paying attention to patients who are expected to die. And I hurried back to the base. This was because the roads were dangerous after dark.

After four or five months had passed, while I was at the base, a woman appeared with a man. I knew who that man was. He was the man I had injected with morphine three times. But I didn't know what he wanted. Do you know why he came? They traveled 90 minutes from Saigon to come back and thank me for saving his life. Tears welled up in my eyes. Because I hadn't been trying to save his life. I had been trying to euthanize him.

What lesson did I learn? First, and very obviously, you must not play God. In this world, there is only room for one God. Whatever religion you believe in, there is only room for one supreme being. But I also learned another lesson. A man who lost one whole arm, half of the other arm, was blind, could barely hear in one ear, had no teeth, and was severely burned, came to me to thank me for saving his life. How indomitable is the human spirit? It was truly amazing. Two lessons for you students are not to play God, and to realize that the human spirit is indomitable.

I got out of Vietnam in March 1975, and the following April, Vietnam fell into the hands of the communists. I got out because I wanted to warn the people in Washington about what was happening. It seemed like no one was paying any attention at all, even though this country was about to fall. I finally found someone who would listen. He told me to come to Washington immediately and asked if I would take on a mission in Vietnam. "Of course. What is it?" I asked. "I want you to go back to Vietnam with a few others and make sure that equipment we can't take out doesn't fall into enemy hands," he said. In other words, the people in Washington already understood in their hearts that Vietnam would fall, and they wanted to prevent a large amount of equipment from falling into North Vietnamese hands.

So I went back to Vietnam, and after doing my job for three or four days until April 28, I was told to go to Bien Hoa Air Base. At one point during the Vietnam War, it was the busiest air base in the world. I landed there in the morning with two American soldiers. I was already a civilian, but the base had become completely quiet. It was a completely abandoned air base. It was very eerie. I can't explain it to you all. We accepted the situation and headed toward a corner. There was special equipment there that had to be either taken back to Saigon or destroyed, and we began collecting it.

During that morning, we encountered one or two South Vietnamese soldiers—our allies. They were stragglers who had been left behind and were hiding in the buildings of Bien Hoa Air Base. They saw Americans and came out, seeing that there must be a way to get out of here. By early afternoon, 30 South Vietnamese had come out. At the same time, the North Vietnamese began shelling and approaching. I don't want to say they were attacking. In military terms, they were probing. They were trying to see how much force we had.

I told the 30 Vietnamese to get into the drainage ditches. All buildings in Vietnam have drainage ditches around them because of the high rainfall. They serve as hiding places. The soldiers got in there and were shooting at the North Vietnamese. Meanwhile, we proceeded with our work. I received a call on the military radio from my boss in Saigon. He said, "Rich, I'm sending a helicopter for you." I said, "Sorry, boss. A helicopter won't work. I have 30 soldiers with me. We are fighting together to push back the North Vietnamese." He said, "Rich, I can't tell you why, but you have to get out of there immediately," so I replied, "I can't. If I try to escape by helicopter, they will shoot me. I would do the same if I were in their position."

Then he cursed and slammed down the radio receiver, but he managed to find a plane to pick us up from the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) in Thailand. It was a C-130 transport plane, which I think is very familiar to those in the Self-Defense Forces. It was a fixed-wing aircraft for carrying cargo, and it was something that could certainly carry 33 people. The plane landed and approached where we were. However, it never stopped; it spun around, so we all ran toward it, and when the rear ramp went down, we ran even more. The plane took off and climbed sharply over the airfield. When we looked down from the window, the North Vietnamese were rushing in.

Twelve minutes later, we landed in Saigon without any problems. My boss said, "Okay, I'll show you this. It's something I couldn't tell you," and pushed a piece of paper into my hand. It was an intercept of North Vietnamese secret intelligence that said, "There is an enemy in Bien Hoa, so kill him." In other words, they narrowly missed the chance to kill me. However, at 6:00 p.m., my boss said we would leave here tomorrow. The whole country was beginning an emergency evacuation (as the tide of the Vietnam War turned unfavorable).

However, I had not yet completed the plan to evacuate the Vietnamese Navy. This was because, at that point, it was still treason. Even if it wasn't a good government, the South Vietnamese government was still functioning. If Vietnamese naval officers actually working with us were seen retreating and fleeing, it would be treason. A trusted Vietnamese naval officer said to me, "I intend to carry this out, but you know my men won't leave their families behind." Having been in Vietnam for six years already, I knew that. However, I hadn't told my own government about it. This was because I feared they would not agree.

On the night of the 29th, I secured one of the last helicopters flying out of Saigon. And I flew to the Blue Ridge, which is still the flagship of the 7th Fleet today. I had no identification, no passport, and no wallet, but I had a gun. You may have seen it in old newsreels, but when a helicopter drops off refugees, the previous helicopter is pushed into the sea so that other helicopters can land. It was a terrible story.

Looking around in the dark, I saw a Navy lieutenant wearing the aiguillettes indicating he was an aide to an admiral, so I said, "Lieutenant, you won't believe this, but I am a graduate of the Naval Academy and I am on a special mission for the Secretary of Defense. I believe the admiral of this ship is Admiral Whitmire, so please tell the admiral that for three years, every day during football practice, I changed my clothes under the admiral's photo posted in the Navy locker." The admiral was a very famous Naval Academy football player.

The admiral's aide looked at me as if I were a bit crazy, but he seemed to feel there was something that sounded like truth in my story. Especially since I was using the language of a naval officer. He went up to the admiral and came back down and said, "Please come with me." I went up to the admiral. Admiral Whitmire was a man of much larger build than me, and when I explained who I was, the admiral understood. However, even though I was on a special mission for the Secretary of Defense, I had no identification or anything. So, I asked the admiral to send a message to Washington to ask the Secretary of Defense who I was and what I should do.

He said, "I can't send a message. I'm down here, and he's way up there." I said, "Admiral, you must." Then he sent a message to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Chairman went to the Secretary of Defense, and an answer came back in 20 minutes. The answer was, "He is exactly who he says he is. Do as he says."

The admiral was perplexed. He put me on a small boat and took me to another U.S. Navy ship, and I climbed the ladder to board and went to the wardroom. There were the captain (a commodore), the executive officer, and others, but they looked very dissatisfied. The captain called out, "Young man." I was young back in 1975. "I'm not used to an armed, unknown civilian coming to my ship in the middle of the night," he said. I said, "Captain, I'm not used to boarding a ship armed in the middle of the night, but we have things we must do." And he did what I asked. We went to a place called Con Son Island, met up with 31,000 soldiers and their families on just over 30 Vietnamese Navy vessels, and sailed for eight days to the Philippines.

When we arrived in the Philippines, the Philippine government at the time was the Marcos administration, and they would not let us into the port. They were afraid that North Vietnam would be angry and retaliate. So we had to change the nationality of the ships. In other words, we lowered the flag of the Republic of Vietnam, raised the U.S. Navy flag, disembarked the refugees, and sent them to Guam. Then we sailed into the port and safely moored the ships.

What is the lesson here? What did I learn from that? It may not be very familiar in Japan, but as you go through life, it is often much easier to ask for forgiveness afterward than to get permission beforehand. If I had sought permission from the U.S. government beforehand, I don't think they would have given it. If you do it before asking for permission and create a fait accompli, and then say "I'm sorry," they have no choice. In other words, it's easier to ask for forgiveness afterward than to get permission beforehand, and since then, I have made that the guiding principle of my life.

I moved to the Department of Defense. After that, I went to Iran for a year and fulfilled my duties there. There are no people in the world more ethnocentric, nationalistic, and self-confident than the Persians. I have lived in many places, but Iran was the only foreign place I did not enjoy at all. The Iranians themselves are cultured, highly educated, lovely, and have a good sense of humor, but as a group, they are extremely nationalistic, and I think that continues to this day.

The time I started working at the Department of Defense was the same period when the United States began to be targeted by terrorism. In April 1983, diplomats were killed in the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. In October of the same year, I had to face the bombing of the Marine barracks in the same Beirut. Planes began to be hijacked, and cruise ships were also hijacked. In 1982 and '83, although we didn't fully realize it at the time, we were embarking on the long road of facing terrorism that continues to this day.

The Middle East is a very interesting place. It combines very fascinating people, a very interesting culture, and very intractable problems, and you get drawn in.

I very much enjoyed building personal relationships with the Middle East. If you are going to say something to a leader in the Middle East, you should make sure to say the exact same thing to another person. They talk to each other, and you will build a reputation, for better or worse, based on how you behave.

I was able to become very close to King Hussein of Jordan. I thought he was an outstanding individual. However, during the first Gulf War, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, the only person who stood by Saddam Hussein's side, while behaving somewhat aloofly, was King Hussein of Jordan. There were complex circumstances related to the history of the Hashemite tribe, but anyway, the only person who could talk to Saddam Hussein was King Hussein.

All the other Arabs were talking to Saddam Hussein about my relationship with King Hussein, and about me working on counter-terrorism and being involved in Middle East issues. Even if we hadn't met directly, he knew me, so the 41st President George H.W. Bush asked me if I would take on a special mission to deliver a message addressed to Saddam Hussein to King Hussein. I replied, "I'll do it. But there's one problem." When the President asked, "What is it?" I replied, "I promised to take my two sons to an event, so I can't go to Jordan until late tonight." President Bush is also a father, so he said okay. I took my sons to the event, then went home, packed my bags, and left.

After obtaining permission from King Hussein, I arrived in Jordan and went straight to his palace. He and I sat in his office and had lunch together, and I told him I had a message from President George H.W. Bush addressed to Saddam Hussein and wanted it delivered to someone Saddam Hussein trusted.

King Hussein asked what kind of message it was, so I didn't go into detail but told him the content very briefly. Then he said he had just the right person. He called his Prime Minister, told him to join the lunch, and ordered him to drive from Amman to Baghdad to meet Saddam Hussein to deliver the message from the American President. The Prime Minister looked at me. He didn't seem happy to receive the King's order, but he set out with the message.

However, he didn't use an ordinary motorcade from Amman to Baghdad. As soon as he entered Iraq, American planes periodically strafed both sides of the road to Baghdad. I wanted the Prime Minister to reach Baghdad safely and to take the delivery of this message seriously. He reached Baghdad and, according to his explanation, was taken to several underground facilities, and finally was able to meet Saddam Hussein and deliver the message. It was a message about the use of weapons of mass destruction, stating what would happen to himself and his hometown of Tikrit if Saddam Hussein deployed weapons of mass destruction. It was a very strong message.

Saddam Hussein sent a reply. It was that he would not use weapons of mass destruction. Prime Minister Badran returned from Iraq the next day and again had lunch with King Hussein. As soon as the King entered the room, he looked at me with hostile eyes and was very angry that I had made him mediate such a harsh message. The King said, "Do you want to sit and eat?" When I replied, "No, Your Majesty," he left. However, since I had received Saddam Hussein's answer, I returned to the United States and met with President Bush. Of course, Saddam Hussein did not use weapons of mass destruction in 1991.

What is this lesson? It is that the relationships you build in the future are important and will continue to be important. Even after you leave any job, because of the relationships you have built over a long time, you will have influence and the ability to affect events. I think that is what the anecdote with Saddam Hussein shows.

The same applies to Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 1991, I had to go see the Mayor of Leningrad, who was Putin's boss, and I also met Putin. After the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001, I went to Moscow at the request of the 43rd President George W. Bush. I visited to obtain permission from Russia to fly over Russian airspace, use the railways, and use old maps of Afghanistan. In the Russian Republic, I first met with military personnel and then with intelligence people, but they said a flat no. However, Putin said he would help the United States.

I can't prove it to you, but here too, I think human relationships played a role. Ten years earlier, Putin didn't have a bad experience with me. I think that had continued. Now, the relationship between the United States and Russia is not continuing, but that can't be helped.

On the day of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001, I was in my office. Secretary of State Powell was away in Peru, and Randall Schriver, who is the current Assistant Secretary of Defense, was my aide at the time; he pulled me out of a meeting and said, "There's something you have to see." He pulled me back into the office, and we watched television. There, of course, the World Trade Center was burning. As we watched, a second plane crashed into it. I knew immediately that this was not an accident, but terrorism. And I immediately started running.

Fortunately, however, the next day, the head of Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), a man named General Mahmoud, visited my office. Imagine. The day after losing 3,000 citizens, he sits down, I serve coffee and tea, and he wants to talk about "history." I said to him, "General, I'm sorry, but history started today." He said, "No, no, you have to understand why the Taliban are in Afghanistan." I replied, "No. I can understand that. I worked with those guys during the war with the Soviets. I'm fighting those exact same guys now. If Pakistan says it supports doing the right thing, you have to do what we ask."

ISI Director Mahmoud seemed very dissatisfied, but I handed him a list of requirements. I deliberately used the word "requirements." Not requests. Because there was no time to waste. I asked him to hand the requirements to the then-President, General Musharraf. The Director returned to my office the next day and said President Musharraf agreed to all seven requirements. I said, "I'm sorry, but there's one more. When you return to Pakistan, go to Kandahar, meet with the Taliban leader Mullah Omar (who is harboring Al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks), and tell him we have no reason to fight him; what we want is Al-Qaeda. What we are seeking are the (Al-Qaeda) Arabs, and he must break with the Arabs. If he does, we will not intervene in the Taliban issue." The Director was very angry but did as he was asked. And after returning to Pakistan, he called me. He said Mullah Omar was refusing for reasons such as tribal customs and respect for visitors.

However, thinking about Mullah Omar forced me to think about President Musharraf as well, which led me to another lesson for all of you. We were having great difficulty between Pakistan and India. This was mainly due to the fact that a terrorist group in Kashmir was trying to eliminate the leadership of the Indian government by attacking the parliament building, and the Indian government responded by placing one million troops on the Pakistani border, and Pakistan responded by placing one million troops in exactly the same way, and they began threatening each other with the use of nuclear weapons. And the language in their respective parliaments was unlike language anywhere else in the world, making most people tremble. Many of the embassies in New Delhi, India, and Islamabad, Pakistan, were withdrawing personnel. This was to ensure they wouldn't be hit directly by nuclear weapons or devastated by a nuclear cloud. We in the United States did everything we could to vent the frustrations of both sides.

Then there was a small terrorist incident. The Indians asked me to come to Delhi. They were hot-headed and said, "Look, you know. Your intelligence agency knows. We know too. We have photos here. There are 13 terrorist camps in Kashmir, and they are operated by Pakistan. We need to change that. It must change. We need to reduce the terrorist camps." Even the Indians knew. That it was not reasonable to ask the Pakistanis to remove everything.

So I said I would handle it, and I met with Pakistan's President Musharraf to argue about these camps. I showed him photos taken by the United States and disclosed American secret intelligence about the camps. The quality of the secret intelligence was so good that we could see signs of Kashmiris and Pashtuns, and we even knew the rank structure of the Pakistani officers training the terrorists, so there was no room for dispute about what was happening. After an appropriate exchange, the President said, "Okay, I see. What do you want?" I said, "By tomorrow, you need to show that this particular camp is gone. You must demolish it." He said, "Okay."

I was feeling proud of an easy victory. I went back to the Indian side and told the Indians, "Look. It was easy. Now there are 12 camps." Then he said, "No. The Pakistanis demolished that camp, but they rebuilt it four kilometers away." I wasn't angry at Musharraf. I was angry at myself. I went back to Islamabad to see President Musharraf and said, "Okay, you won last time. Now it's my turn to ask again. You must demolish this 13th camp. From tomorrow, there will be only 12. Whether it's one month, two months, or five months, no matter how long it takes, it will never exceed 12." He agreed, and that helped calm the situation.

What is the lesson I am trying to present here? In other words, I made a mistake. I assumed that everyone sees things the same way I do. That everyone understands words the same way I do. But they didn't. What I want to say to you is that as you go through life, you must not assume that people see things exactly the same way you do.

Finally, I have been asked to talk a little about Japan. Why am I so interested in Japan? I should say there are historical reasons and personal reasons. The historical reason is that since the time Commodore Perry arrived and the Treaty of Peace and Amity between the United States and Japan was signed in 1854, the United States has always seen Japan as being at the center of its relations in the Pacific. Except for the four years of the Pacific War, it has been that way since 1854. Historically that is true, and it was also true through the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which ended the First Sino-Japanese War, and the Treaty of Portsmouth, which ended the Russo-Japanese War. Historically, America's national interests have been with Japan, and Japan has also determined that, more or less, the majority of its national interests are with the United States.

There are also personal reasons. The first time I came to Japan was in 1967. I arrived in Yokosuka on a destroyer. Everything was going well. I went back to sea toward Vietnam and returned to Sasebo in January 1968. Across the pier, I found a very strange vessel. I had never seen anything like it. Since I was an officer, I walked over to that vessel, and there was a petty officer. He was the petty officer of the watch on deck. As per naval protocol, I saluted and asked for permission to board. After all, I was an officer. He replied, "I cannot grant permission." Thinking it was strange, I returned to my own ship and pondered it. The next day, when I looked across the pier, the vessel was gone. It was the USS Pueblo, a U.S. Navy intelligence gathering ship, and it was captured by North Korea shortly thereafter.

However, even when my ship was off the coast of Vietnam, it was going in and out of Japan with surprising frequency. And I also noticed that during the six years I was going back and forth to Vietnam, I always stopped in Japan. I could understand that there was something central about Japan's location.

People say, "Armitage, why do you love Japan so much?" or "You really like Japan, don't you?" I like the people of Japan for many reasons. I always like the people who become my Japanese counterparts. I have never had a counterpart in Japan, either in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the Ministry of Defense, who treated me poorly or told me something that wasn't true. I hope they would say the same about me.

But even setting aside many personal reasons, there is much to be said about Japan. The real reason I like Japan so much is because I love my own country. Any American who loves their own country should try to build as close and rational a relationship with Japan as possible. From my perspective, this is the key to Asia.

Now, I must summarize the lessons I have drawn from my life and spoken about in this hour. The first lesson is very obvious. When you come to a fork in the road, you must make a decision which way to take. There is no right choice or wrong choice. It is just a decision. And you must walk through life. Whether you go into academia, business, or politics, you will occasionally reach a fork in the road. It happens often, it's not strange, and you have to accept it. There is no right path to take, nor a wrong one.

Second, I have reached the conclusion that in my life, things were never as good or as bad as they seemed at the time. You don't need to feel extremely happy or extremely sad about anything. Over time, nothing is as good or as bad as you first think.

Next, things always start to look "better" in the morning. There is something about the dawn that restores vitality. No matter how terrible a problem remains in your mind when you go to bed, usually, you fall asleep, and after sleeping, you wake up in the morning and things look just a little bit better.

Finally, I will say what I want to leave you with. What is important in going through life is to be just a little bit kinder to others than you think they deserve. When I walk up to someone, if that person is grumpy and mean to me, should I be mean back to him? No, I shouldn't do that. What I should do is treat him a little bit kinder than he treated me. Because I don't know what is happening in his life. If you ask me, that is the greatest lesson in life.

(This article is a translation by Professor Taiyo Tsuchiya of the Keio University Graduate School of Media and Governance, with some modifications, of the commemorative lecture given by Mr. Richard L. Armitage on the occasion of his honorary doctorate conferral, held at the Mita Campus South School Building Hall on June 8, 2018.)