Vietnam. It was the war America lost. The war in which more than 3 million Americans fought; 303,704 were wounded and 58,022 died. It also was a war that killed 3.6 million Vietnamese.

Last week in Hanoi, former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and a delegation of American generals, diplomats, historians and spies sat down for four days of closed-door talks with their counterparts from Vietnam.

President Clinton called the conference, which was organized by Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies, "a rare opportunity to study past events in order to learn valuable lessons for the future."

Journal-Bulletin staff writer Randall Richard was one of only two journalists permitted to observe the talks and record the discussions about the causes and conduct of the longest war in American history.

HANOI, Vietnam -- If his soul was tortured, Robert S. McNamara didn't show it.

At 81, the former U.S. secretary of defense moved about the room like a man who still needed to be in control -- answering important phone calls, shuffling papers and agendas, and consulting with ambassadors and generals and spies.

But this wasn't the 1960s and this wasn't the Oval Office in either the Kennedy or the Johnson White House.

This was last week, more than 20 years after the end of the war and McNamara was in a city he once bombed, among enemies he tried to vanquish.

He had already concluded that: "Our attrition strategy could not succeed. . . . Our bombing strategy could neither break Hanoi's will nor reduce the flow of supplies . . . "

Yet the man who helped direct the only war this country ever lost still wanted to learn where he went wrong and why. He came to Hanoi to search for the missed opportunities to end the war.

The world, he seemed to be saying, is a rational place. If men of good will are prepared to clearly and honestly address their interests, then a future war like Vietnam can be avoided.

"My thesis is that we must not permit the 21st century to repeat the slaughter of the 20th . . . the time to initiate action to prevent that tragedy is now."

THE TWO SIDES met in an air-conditioned hotel with high ceilings and gold-colored walls.

Delegates sat around a big square table covered with microphones and water bottles. The interpreters worked in two glass cubicles.

McNamara was the first American to speak. He acknowledged America's mistakes, he reviewed America's belief that "threat of Communist aggression to be real," and he argued that:

". . . Had we appraised the objectives of China and North Vietnam more accurately, we could have avoided or greatly shortened the war."

He got little reaction from the other side.

McNamara got a reaction later, however, when he declared: "In view of Hanoi's total commitment to achieving independence by military means, regardless of the cost, there never was a chance for a South Vietnamese and U.S. military victory."

That last concession seemed to anger the 13 Vietnamese generals and diplomats and scholars who sat across the table from him.

If McNamara meant to imply that Hanoi did not care about its own people, bristled one former Vietnamese ambassador, or that it didn't feel the pain of every lost life, then the Americans still didn't understand the Vietnamese people.

As to what, if anything, the Vietnamese discovered about their former enemy, it's hard to say.

This is a society, one of their top generals explained, that has learned, after a thousand years of domination by its neighbor to the north, to keep its secrets.

The Vietnamese would give no ground, share no intelligence, reveal no flaws. Some of its military secrets are still so secret, the general said, that even he couldn't answer many of the Americans' political questions.

And, the general said, even if he did know the answers, he probably wouldn't tell.

NONE OF the Americans were willing to take all the blame for the war.

Chester Cooper, the CIA's special adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, said: "Not only did we not understand each other, we did not want to understand one another. You never read between our lines and we never read between yours."

Cooper acknowledged that Washington was so ignorant about Vietnam back then that "we did not even know, what we did not know."

Nicholas Katzenbach, former U.S. attorney general, made a similar point to the Vietnamese generals and diplomats about the domino theory.

It was wrong, he said, "but I don't think it was an irrational theory. You should have perceived that that influenced us. If that was our mindset . . . what steps did you take to say we will be independent, totally neutral, totally nonaligned?"

Cooper also said that he knew the Vietnamese generals used the pauses in the bombing -- not to pursue peace -- but to resupply the Viet Cong in the south and introduce fresh troops from the north.

"I'm just not willing to admit that everything we did was wrong and immoral and everything you did was right," Cooper said.

BY DAY FOUR, the stubborn refusal of the Vietnamese to shoulder any blame for the carnage was clearly wearing thin on the Americans.

Frustration and exhaustion started to show in their faces. Only the military men, and only in private, seemed to be able to relax when they traded war stories.

Meanwhile, McNamara and other U.S. politicans and diplomats struggled with their demons.

A generation ago, they were supposed to have been their country's best and brightest. Instead, by their own admission, they were ignorant, arrogant and hopelessly overmatched.

But they meant well, they insisted, and perhaps their old enemies would at least give them that.

The Vietnamese, who lost 3.6 million of their own, refused to admit the war was all an unfortunate and perhaps inevitable mistake.

No, they insisted, they would keep faith with their own dead, even if their former adversaries who sat across from them at the table couldn't even manage that.

The Vietnamese weren't about to risk telling their people that they shared any of the blame for a war that wiped out so much of their population.

No, if the Americans were searching for some kind of historical absolution, for some kind of healing of the soul, or perhaps for just some rare chance to learn from their mistakes of the past, that was their business.

In Vietnam, the war to worry about is always the next war.

BUT THERE were times at the conference when the applause from the delegates was more than polite, when both the Vietnamese and the Americans seemed to enthusiastically endorse what was being said.

That voice came from one of the scholars from Brown who tried to put the most important lessons of the four-day session in perspective.

"Each side," said Thomas Biersteker, director of Brown's Watson Institute for International Studies, "projected on to the other motivations and intentions that proved to be tragically wrong . . . "

The U.S., he said "constructed Vietnam as a pawn of the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. . . . How we thought about Vietnam was more important than the reality of Vietnam . . .

Vietnam, he said, assumed that the U.S. operated according to the same colonial logic as the French.

The Vietnamese missed the important differences between the French and the Americans -- "particularly the deep American ambivalence about its global role that could have been pursued to advantage by Vietnam, if it had attempted a more empathetic understanding of U.S. motivations."

"We both paid dearly for our misunderstandings," he said.

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