Today, Carl Miller’s words sound like prophecy.

But back in 1966 — when he was the first young man back from the wars in Vietnam and talking to a Salisbury Post reporter — he was disillusioned.

“We’ve got enough men there now,” he said, “to stand hand to hand, elbow to elbow, at the widest part of the country and run everyone of (the Viet Cong) out. We could start at the tip end and just walk north and end this thing ...

“But we won’t. We’ll spend $10 billion, and we’re not going to win.”

In the light of history, 25 years after the fall of Saigon, his words bore the wisdom of age, though he still looked like a boy. Today, he’s older and still bitter about how America lost that war. He sees its effects every day, as a top administrator at the Hefner VA Medical Center on Brenner Avenue.

But in 1966, he was a boy burning with the fire of a 17-year-old volunteer who’d persuaded his reluctant father to sign papers so he could join the Marines and then volunteered again to have his overseas duty extended so he could go to Vietnam “where the action was.”

Instead, he was frustrated, bitter — and 39 pounds lighter than he was when he decided during mid-term exams in his senior year at Boyden High School that he had to go — at that moment, even though he was a senior and would have graduated in June.

“I finished the day out and went up town and joined the Marines.” The recruiter tried to talk him out of it. So did his parents. And his sisters. Even his brother-in-law, who had just been discharged.

But he wouldn’t listen and he was at Parris Island in two weeks and in no time he’d finished electronics school and gone to Japan — and life was good.

Vietnam was building, however, and he wanted to see what was happening there. So he asked the Marines to extend his tour six months so he could go — and in days he landed at Da Nang in South Vietnam. The temperature was 135 degrees.

The base at Da Nang was the largest in South Vietnam — but soldiers were still in tents. He and his buddies had to pitch a tent to have a place to sleep that first night.

The food was canned or powdered, and his weight dropped from 181 the day he arrived to 143 when he left. Flies, mosquitoes, rats, roaches were everywhere. So was disease. Carl got a case of jungle rot in July and had it until January.

But the biggest problem was frustration.

War in Vietnam was not like the war in the old World War II movies. The sides didn’t draw battle lines. No one wore uniforms. South Vietnamese and North Vietnamese who had infiltrated into South Vietnam looked alike to American eyes. No one knew who the enemy was and he was everywhere. On the base. Inside their tents. He had to be inside their tents. Allies wouldn’t plant punji stakes — sharpened bamboo sticks — inside their tents so that when they got up in the morning, they stepped on them and sprained an ankle. Or broke a foot.

By the time Carl got there, so many Americans soldiers had been injured stepping on punji stakes that the government issued special jungle boots for Vietnam. They had a steel plate inside the sole and webbed sides instead of leather so they’d give. A man who couldn’t walk couldn’t do anything.

And it wasn’t unusual to buy a Coke from a South Vietnamese ally — and find crushed glass or acid in the bottle.

A battle meant hunting for the enemy like hunting for rabbits and squirrels.

“If it’s a war and people are getting killed,” he said, “let’s do it and get through with it.”

But the country didn’t do it and and didn’t get through with it for years.

And Carl Miller, who finished high school with correspondence courses while he was over there, isn’t through with it yet — even if American troops came home 27 years ago, even if Saigon fell to the communists a quarter of a century ago.

But he isn’t thinking about Vietnam now because it’s the Memorial Day weekend.

“I think about Vietnam every day,” he says, and he’ll keep on thinking about it every day because he’s the administrative officer in charge of the night shift at VA Medical Center. He answers directly to the director, William May, also a Vietnam veteran.

His duties deal with virtually everything that has to do with veterans except medical decisions.

“And some of the veterans have lingering problems that started in Vietnam, and they’ve never gone away.”

Some are sad, he says. Some are bitter.

“When I’m working, I talk to all of them that come in. I see it every day.

“I don’t know if I would be any different if I hadn’t gone to Vietnam, but when you see it every day, you can’t not think about it.”

“I spent 10 years,” he says, after he came home in ’66, “not knowing what I wanted to do. Vietnam had a part in that.

“There was no way to adjust. We weren’t welcomed with open arms. A lot of us didn’t even want to tell anybody we were veterans.”

The soldiers coming home got no time to readjust.

“You were in Vietnam one day,” he says, and back in this country the next night, “and there was no time to get over anything.”

In World War II most of the soldiers came back by ship and had some some wind-down time. They all came home to a hero’s welcome, kissing the girls and hearing the cheers.

But the soldiers who were in Vietnam came home one by one — and alone.

“You hit the ground running and kept it all to yourself. I think that’s what causes the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in a lot of people. A lot of it has to do with the way they were treated. We came home to jeers where they came home to cheers.”

Carl got a job at Fiber Industries, planning to start college in September, and met Sallie. Just the thought of her demands a digression. He figures if he hadn’t gone into the Marines, his timing at Fiber would have been all wrong and he might never have met Sally.

“We’ve been married 32 years and have two sons. Carl III is writing his dissertation at the University of Georgia for a Ph.D. in philosophy, and Joseph is a dispatcher for the Salisbury Police Department and is starting rookie school this fall. If I hadn’t met Sallie, everything would have been different.”

And he picks his story up again — with her.

He started East Carolina but left for another job. And then another job.

“I had lots of jobs back then.” They were married in ’67 and moved to Las Vegas because he still felt unsettled and had friends there.

But they came home in ’78. He bought some convenience stores, but sold them in ’82 and went to work at the VA Medical Center and has been there ever since — and feels lucky.

“I don’t think Vietnam haunted me as much,” he says, as the way the soldiers who were there were treated when they got back here, “the attitude of the country after Vietnam. I hear Vietnam stories every day, and I can’t tell why some people get over it and some don’t.

“My bitterness is directed at individuals more than the nation,” he says. People like Jane Fonda, who were treated like heroes. “She definitely gave aid and comfort to the enemy. That’s the definition of a traitor. I doubt that there’s a veteran in the world who could stand her.”

But he thinks the nation needs to learn from the experience, too.

“If you don’t learn from your mistakes, you’re bound to make them again.”

Vietnam was like Korea.

“We were afraid of China. Same mistakes. Same ending. Harry Truman did it in Korea; Johnson, in Vietnam.”

He’d rather not think about Vietnam.

“It didn’t turn out like it started to be. When it first started, everybody in service wanted to go. I guess, kindly like World War II. Everybody’s patriotic, and Uncle wants you to go and that’s what you do. But years later, you don’t feel the same way about Vietnam.

“It was wrong. Politics don’t have a place in a war. It wasn’t like Desert Storm. They went over there and they won. That’s the only reason they went. But they wouldn’t let us do that. Everybody knew. There was no question of that.”

“There wasn’t a politician who didn’t know,” he says.

And that’s what makes you wonder.