I've been following Dana Mathews during her Semester at Sea experience, and her columns have been very perceptive in general. But my jaw hit the floor when she compared acts committed by American soldiers during the Vietnam War to those carried out during the Holocaust ("Stories of 'American War' put history into perspective," April 10).

There is no doubt that there were many atrocities committed by a select few in Vietnam, but in general the soldiers were only fighting to survive. Even the war crimes I would attach to Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and other policy makers of their ilk, pale in comparison to the systematic extermination of Jews and other Nazi victims of the Holocaust. I have been to Dachau, as well as Mauthausen, Buchenwald and Auschwitz-Birkenau. The vibes I picked up in those places are much different than those I have felt from soldiers wounded in one way or another from Vietnam.

I opposed the war while I was in the military, and I'm sure my views on the Vietnam and Iraq wars are similar to Mathews's. But most of the two million dead Vietnamese, 500,000 dead Laotians and the thousands of dead Cambodians are not comparable in any way to the 12 million exterminated by Hitler or the 50 million total dead from World War II.