My first trip to Europe, 1964: My traveling partner and I are going to summer school in Nice, France. We pack little drip-dry pastel cotton suits, pumps, stockings, white gloves, to dress up to visit her professors from her junior year abroad in Paris. Skirts and blouses. No jeans, that marks you as an American.

Bathing suits which we hardly use. In fact they are so terrible that we buy French ones while we are there. White tennis clothes, racquets and balls. Our suitcases are the size and weight of small elephants.

In Nice, we join a tennis club for a month, since there are no public courts and we are determined to play. Every afternoon after our final conversation class, we take the bus to the club.

We play doubles with a retired French army colonel and his partner.

"You Americans ..." (whack) "you are going to lose ..." (whack).

Does he mean tennis? No. He means Vietnam.

"Dien Bien Phu, 1954," he says. "I was there. Only 10 years ago."

Gradually over the weeks we play doubles, he tells us more of his story.

Independence movement. Commu-nists. Guerrillas. Corrupt officials. An army not prepared. Government lies. Jungle. Tunnels. Ambushes. Folks who are your allies during the day and your enemies at night. All that money, wasted. All those French soldiers, all those Vietnamese, all dead.

What was it all for? What did we think that the Americans could do, that the French had not already tried?

We don't know how to answer him, but we listen hard. And he and his partner beat us in tennis, too.

Back home and in Cambridge to begin graduate school, I start paying attention to news of Vietnam. I read I.F. Stone's Weekly, The Nation, and other similar publications. I read the Globe and the Times. It does not take me long to conclude that the French colonel was right. We are heading for a mess.

The first anti-war march I went on was probably in 1965 or 1966. We walked down Mass Ave from Harvard Square to Central Square.

It was very small. There were probably more drunks and hecklers on the sidewalks than there were marchers. I don't remember who organized it.

We all went home peacefully when it was over.

The rest of the story, you know. How the national mood gradually changed from support for the president and the war. How the protests escalated from small neighborhood demonstrations to riots and marches on Washington. How it all finally ended after almost 10 more years of wasted lives, treasure and national reputation.

Do you remember those Roadrunner cartoons where Wile E. Coyote runs over the cliff but at first he doesn't realize it? He's running in the air, and then he looks down.

Amazement. Splat.

When the current history of our Republic is written, one of the things that I predict will astonish the commentators, wherever they come from, is that we got another chance and we blew it again.

The post-colonial dream didn't die as it should have after Vietnam; instead, we went and did it again in Iraq!

Folks thought that good intentions and the ideology of democracy would produce an easy win, without the necessity for planning or understanding or even picking the right goals.

They forgot that the armed forces' morale and command structure were wrecked after Vietnam, and it took a whole generation to bring them back.

They forgot the lives lost, the economies wrecked, the money we do not have for addressing domestic issues -- everything from infrastructure to higher education to economic development to energy independence. And too many others of us believed the rhetoric and let them do it again.

Amazement. Splat.

America is a strong country. I trust that, like the coyote, we can rebound from the canyon floor and chase that roadrunner once again.

But life is not a cartoon and our national destiny has to be based on more than wishful thinking.

We will not get endless chances to recover from such foolishness. It's the political season.

Let's listen to what the candidates are really saying. Let's study their policy proposals, not just how well they insult each other. Let's think hard about the future we want, and choose wisely. Maybe the next time we can chase a different roadrunner.

Why do we need to pay attention today? Here's a scenario for you:

It's 2064 and two Chinese girls are visiting the USA for a cheap vacation to improve their English, which is still a useful international language.

They go to a gym to play pickleball (nobody plays outdoors anymore because of global warming) and they are teamed up with a retired American army colonel.

"You Chinese are going to lose," he says....

Theodora J. Kalikow is president of the University of Maine at Farmington. She can be reached at kalikow@maine.edu