I'm heartbroken.

When I was a little boy in the early 70s, my family attended a small Presbyterian church in a suburb of Milwaukee. I remember at church they gave us children little UNICEF boxes in which we could save up our small change to help starving children -- other little boys and girls, we were told -- in other countries around the world.

I don't remember how much, but I remember putting some of my precious small change -- pennies at least -- into the box. We weren't poor by any means, and I didn't want for anything, but back then a penny was worth quite a lot more than today, and, when you considered finding a couple of them in the couch a major find -- that was big stuff.

I'm heartbroken to find out I was working, in my own small way, to finance the brutal socialist North Vietnamese dictatorship. Here's where the pennies that little boy gave away for his church, and the starving children, went:

Even the United Nations Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF), financed in large part by U.S. purchasers of UNICEF's Christmas Cards, had sent millions of dollars in aid to North Vietnam during the last year of its war against South Vietnam. UNICEF's spokesman said, "UNICEF has no way to make sure the supplies got to the children. They were dropped off at the airports and docks and we assume they were used as we intended." But what UNICEF had dropped off at the airports and docks were not crayolas, dolls, and lollipops. They dropped off trucks, bulldozers, and heavy construction material.

As a little boy I saved pennies to give to a dictator.

I feel ill.

And very, very sad.