Noam Chomsky's writings played a role in that transformation. I stopped at his chilling 1970 essay "After Pinkville," which I remember reading when it came out. ("Pinkville," connoting communist influence, was the military slang for the village where the infamous My Lai massacre took place.) It was not the first Chomsky essay I had read. That honor may go to "The Responsibility of Intellectuals," which he wrote in 1966. ("It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies. This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to pass without comment. Not so, however. For the modern intellectual, it is not at all obvious.")

"After Pinkville" still remains vividly in my consciousness from that long-gone moment when a growing sense of horror about a distant American war that came to feel ever closer and more brutal swept me into antiwar activism. Its first sentences still cut to the heart of things: "It is important to understand that the massacre of the rural population of Vietnam and their forced evacuation is not an accidental by-product of the war.