By THEODORE L. GATCHEL, The Providence Journal

In the aftermath of President Barack Obama's speech announcing his plan for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, the media's attention has been focused on the broad political-military aspects of the plan.

On Christmas day last year, I received an unexpected present: an invitation to accompany a Brown University alumni tour of Vietnam as the tour's lecturer. I accepted and began to practice my Vietnamese, something that I had not done since attending language school in 1968 and spending a year with the Vietnamese Marines in 1969-70.

One of Shakespeare's most famous lines appears in Romeo and Juliet, where Juliet says, "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

One of the more controversial moments of Donald Rumsfeld's tenure as secretary of Defense occurred when he responded to a question by an Army sergeant about why U.S. units in Iraq were forced to improvise armored protection for their vehicles.