I suppose there must be some way in which I'm compelled to show some side of myself - or of people - that's paranoid and fraught and beleaguered and downtrodden, just as Tom Cruise wants to show that he's terrifyingly upbeat and terrifyingly heroic all the time.
My solution to the problem would be to tell the North Vietnamese Communists frankly that they've got to drawn in their horns and stop their aggression or we're going to bomb them into the stone age.