Author Tim O'Brien will speak today and Thursday at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Vietnam and Iraq are entirely different worlds, but the conflicts there are similar, according to award-winning author Tim O'Brien, an infantryman during the Vietnam War whose novels "Going After Cacciato" and "The Things They Carried" dealt directly with that conflict.

"It looks similar, there are enough similarities to make it worth talking about," O'Brien said in a recent phone interview from his home in Austin, Texas.

O'Brien will join fellow novelist Robert Stone ("Dog Soldiers," "A Flag For Sunrise"), whose work also has dealt with the Vietnam War, on a panel, "The Vietnam War in Light of Iraq," at 7 p.m. today in the Doc Rando Recital Hall of the Beam Music Center at UNLV, 4505 S. Maryland Parkway.

They'll be joined by historian Charles Herring, Iraq war veteran and conscientious objector Jimmy Castellanos and writer Vu Tran. The panel will be moderated by J. Andy Fry, professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

And on Thursday, O'Brien and Stone will read from their works at 7 p.m. in the Barrick Museum Auditorium at UNLV.

Admission to both events is free. For more information, call 895-5542.

O'Brien and Stone saw different stages of the Vietnam War, though. O'Brien graduated from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., in 1968 with a degree in political science, but also received a draft notice. Although against the war, he served anyway and was assigned to the 3rd Platoon, A Company, 5th Battalion, 46th Infantry as a foot soldier from 1969-70. He served in the same platoon as the one involved in the My Lai massacre, in which United States soldiers wiped out a village of Vietnamese civilians.

During his tour, while fighting in My Lai and surrounding areas, American troops were met with intense hostility, O'Brien said, and "we didn't know why we were so despised and feared. You had the feeling you had stepped into a house where Ted Bundy had done his work."

Like everyone else, O'Brien didn't find out about the massacre until halfway through his tour when Seymour Hersh of the New York Times broke the story.

O'Brien said he understands how a My Lai or killings of civilians in Iraq could occur, because of the similar nature of the two guerrilla wars. "There are uncertainties. Who do you kill? Whom do you trust, if anybody. There are no battle lines, no front, no rear. There's frustration. Your friends are dying and there's frustration and anger because you can't find anyone to shoot back at."

Stone went to Vietnam as a journalist in 1972, when the U.S. involvement was beginning to wind down and the war was being turned over to the South Vietnamese military. His novel, "Dog Soldiers," uses Vietnam as the background for a story about heroin trafficking. It won the 1975 National Book Award, and O'Brien's "Going After Cacciato," a hallucinatory vision of the war and a soldier who has opted out of the conflict, won the award in 1979.

O'Brien said he's still haunted by the Vietnam War. "It occurs throughout your life in petty ways. You feel wary all the time. (You think) what's going to go wrong? There's no safe place you can go to."

For O'Brien, writing about Vietnam has helped in some ways. "When it's on the page it's kind of out of me. It's a validation, I did go through that. My own life was real."

O'Brien and Stone have been friends for about 20 years now, O'Brien said. At least he thinks it's been that long. Long enough not to remember how they met. O'Brien, who takes yearly golf vacations to Las Vegas, said he's looking forward to joining Stone for the panel and reading.

Stone is "out of the Bible," O'Brien said. "There's something prophetic about him. He's quiet, thoughtful and wise."