Dana Mathews's account of the "American War" did an excellent job of putting history into perspective; that is, if you prefer twisted and biased views ("Stories of 'American War' put history into perspective," April 11).

I almost laughed when Mathews recounted her excursion into a tunnel system that used to house over 16,000 Viet Cong troops. She was stunned that Americans would deforest a jungle even though, "The tunnels allowed the Viet Cong to mount surprise attacks."

Mathews's worst point is a parallel drawn between American soldiers and the Nazis of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. She claims a soldier laughing over a body, a woman with a gun to her head and some people injured by a bomb are all as horrific as the mass executions of countless innocents in Nazi gas chambers and concentration camps. To make this gross exaggeration even more ridiculous than it already is, simply look at her research.

Possibly the most one-sided source imaginable, Mathews toured the Museum of War Remnants, whose mission is to expose the, "atrocity of the U.S. soldiers and their unjust treatment of the Vietnamese." The museum and her column show very few, if any, examples of the equally brutal acts committed by the Vietnamese.