Latimer quickly turned the charge sheet around and pushed it closer to him. I have very little memory of what happened next in our chat, because I spent that time—twenty minutes or so—pretending to take notes as we talked. What I really was doing was reading the document upside down, albeit very slowly, and copying the charge sheet word for word. At some point Latimer broke off the interview and refused to say where Calley was or in any way help me get to him. I was pretty sure the judge sensed he’d gone too far with me, and I did not dare ask him for a copy of the charge sheet, for fear that he would instruct me that I could not use what I had seen.

My hatred of the Vietnam War stemmed not from an ideology but from what I had learned in reading and reporting on it—on-the-job training, in a sense.

One of my quirks as a reporter, however, has been to keep track of the retirement of senior generals and admirals; those who did not get to the top invariably had a story to tell in explaining why. I also watched death notices, which proved surprisingly full of detail on the foreign postings of CIA operatives who passed away.