LAST WEEKEND, at the invitation of a good friend, I found myself in Eminence, Missouri, a place that is, geographically speaking, just about the aortic valve of the heart of middle America: a town of 548 souls, the signs say, about 200 miles southwest of St Louis, the very paradigm of rural American simplicity, the kind of place where, as one of my hosts put it, “all the houses have wheels and none of the cars does”.

I was there not to take advantage of the hiking possibilities in the magnificent northern reaches of the Ozark Mountains, but to gatecrash a very private reunion and in the process to learn a little about the sharp end of American foreign policy.

Every June, under steamy hot skies, fuelled by gallons of beer, tons of meat and enough nicotine to keep a thousand personal-injury lawyers in business for life, a band of brothers from the now defunct 1st Battalion of the 52nd Infantry come from all over the country to relive the time they spent almost four decades ago in the jungles of Vietnam.

They only started doing this a few years back, when e-mail suddenly narrowed oceans of space and time. Some of the veterans wouldn’t come. Some have been once and never come back, evidently overwhelmed by the sight of comrades they thought they’d never see again and the poignant absence of men no one will ever see again. But a hard core show up every year, bearing scars mental and physical, but proud still; men like Sgt Philip Verlee, shot through the stomach by a Vietcong sniper and, 27 surgeries later, fighting again for his country during Desert Storm.

Inevitably in this rolling weekend of mirthful banter punctuated by reflective silences, the talk turns from time to time to Iraq. For many of the veterans the images of war have brought vividly back into focus memories of their own battles 35 or so years ago.

They’re all quick to acknowledge that Iraq is not Vietnam — they can check off the differences themselves: the scale of US losses is still barely a fraction of the 58,000 who died in Vietnam. The draft back then made the war a much more direct experience for millions of American families. Although reservists have served in Iraq, the war has not touched lives everywhere in the way Vietnam did.

Above all, the US was a much different place politically in the late 1960s and early 1970s — the antiwar Left was part of a broader counter-cultural movement that helped to tear the country apart. That has no parallel in today’s more conservative America.

But nearly all the veterans believed, whether they agreed with the current war or not, that the US is steadily digging itself into a hole of its own making. They see on their TV screens a military that is ill-equipped for the counter-insurgency fight.

For them the sights and stories of frightened young men sent to pacify hostile lands, fearful that the next step could blow their legs off, is all too familiar. And most of all, what these battle-hardened men worry about is that, just as they did in Vietnam, Americans have already lost sight of what it is fighting for in Iraq, that they no longer have any real confidence that this is a winnable war with a plausible strategy for victory.

The country is in the midst of a fierce debate on whether to pull US troops out of Iraq quickly. On the day these veterans gathered last week, the Senate defeated a resolution that would have cut the level of US forces sharply, leading to a total pullout in a year or two. Though the resolution was lost, the issue looks likely to dominate this year’s congressional elections. Troublingly, the tone of the debate is now so rancid that it is required practice not to confront the arguments and facts but to impugn the motives of your opponents.

On the Left it is axiomatic that the war was predicated on a deliberate falsehood and prosecuted for nefarious reasons related to oil and money.On the Right Republicans — who, unlike some of the Democrats they attack, avoided serving in Vietnam — accuse those who are calling for an early withdrawal from Iraq of cowardice in the face of the enemy. The spectacle of men who spent the Vietnam war drinking their way through college in the US now waving the white feather at men like John Kerry and John Murtha, the Vietnam vet who is an antiwar Democratic congressman, would be laughable if it did not seem to be so politically effective.

The veterans I met were no cowards, nor were they antiwar liberals with an anti-American agenda. Many of them were good ol’ boys from the Deep South, with accents as thick as the creamy white gravy they served on their biscuits for breakfast, or libertarians from California who believe the best government is no government.

Their concerns about the war resonate and their own experience is instructive. Most US casualties in Vietnam occurred in 1968 and after, by when Americans were weary of war and increasingly unconvinced that their Government had a strategy to win it. But it was another seven years and another 30,000 deaths before the US extricated itself: in ignominy.

The Democrats’ critics are right. It would be ruinous for the US to leave now. But it would be much worse to stay and dither. Americans need to decide if they believe in this fight or if they should indeed get out of it.

Their leaders need to stop using the military to score political points over their opponents at home, and instead do what is necessary to win the war. That may mean not a drawdown of troops, but more troops, a demonstration of heightened US resolve to create and protect a functioning Government in Iraq, whatever the cost.

But if it can’t do that, if the political will at home to see the war through is lacking, then the US should get out and cut its steadily mounting losses. Because the very worst thing would be if, in 40 years’ time, other men from other battalions came to places like Eminence, Missouri, to swap stories of another shared nightmare, and to mourn beloved friends whom the rest of the world thinks died in vain.

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