Lt. Cmdr. Ray Voden, shot down over Hanoi on April 3, 1965, listened to her for eight years. “Hannah often stirred up arguments among the P.O.W.s. There were nearly fist fights over the programs. Some guys wanted to hear them, while others tried to ignore them. Personally, I listened because I usually gleaned information, reading between the lines.”

For almost five years after I became a correspondent for ABC News, I would tape-record her programs almost daily, in case she said something newsworthy or presented a captured American pilot on her program. To me, she was just another source of information or disinformation to be checked out and sorted in the communications pudding of the Vietnam War.

In May 1978, I returned to Vietnam and asked the Foreign Ministry to arrange an interview for me with Trinh Thi Ngo. By then Hanoi Hannah had left her beloved Hanoi and moved to Ho Chi Minh City, the renamed city of Saigon, with her husband, who was a southerner and a Vietnamese Army officer. The appointment was set up for the rooftop bar of the Rex Hotel, where I waited along with Ken Watkins, who had been a Marine corpsman and a regular listener to Hannah.

While we waited, Ken recalled his memories of Hannah. “The signal was pretty good around Danang and we would tune in once or twice a week to hear her talk about the war,” he said. “Hannah didn’t necessarily make sense; she used American English, but really didn’t speak our language in spite of hip expressions and hit tunes, even tunes banned on U.S. Army radio. The best thing going for her was that she was female and had a nice soft voice.”

I asked if he was still angry at her. “Sure,” he said, “some antagonism, add it to the Vietnam list. But this trip back is about coming full circle on a lot of things, and she is another voice from the past I want to confront in person.”

So an ex-Marine and an old war correspondent waited that sunny morning for the real Hanoi Hannah to appear, waiting for reality to sweep away the years of bitter images in the windmills of our minds. Dragon Lady? Psy-warrior? Prophet? Or what?

Like so many phantoms of the war, she was not what we imagined. She didn’t look like the “Dragon Lady” from “Terry and the Pirates” comics. Elegant and attractive in a striking yellow ao dai, the Vietnamese traditional dress, she appeared happy to answer our questions.