Three decades later, a campaign that's still about Vietnam

When the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington was dedicated 22 years ago, it was said that the country at last could "separate the warrior from the war." With this presidential election, it's obvious that this has not happened.

In profound and highly personal ways, this campaign is forcing a generation of Americans to examine the decisions they made and the path they took back then, whether they were warriors or civilians. For many, it's as if the black granite wall with the 58,235 names of those lost in Vietnam, the photos of student protesters shot at Kent State, the revelations in the Pentagon Papers had all come hauntingly alive. And that's not pleasant for anybody, no matter what their politics.

In fact, in a recent report, Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia (likening Vietnam to the Civil War) wrote, "For only the second time in our nation's history, the bitterness of a bloody, lost war will shadow national politics until generational replacement has removed all the brave soldiers who experienced the event first-hand."

Over the next two months, that bitterness is likely to grow, not diminish.

Attacks on John Kerry's combat record (whether he deserved his medals) are just the opening act for an even deeper controversy over his antiwar activities, which many opponents back then - and even today - consider to have been treasonous.

For baby boomers, this revives the surreal picture of former Vietnam POWs claiming that Mr. Kerry's charges about US atrocities lengthened their incarceration while war historians relate the details of "free-fire zones" and US bombing of Southeast Asia they allege violated the Hague Convention prohibition against attacking civilians. All that's missing is Country Joe and the Fish singing "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" at Woodstock in 1969.

In April 1971, Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by J. William Fulbright, that US forces had committed "war crimes ... on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command." He was repeating the confessional revelations of atrocities made earlier that year by GIs at the "Winter Soldier Investigation" in Detroit sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

Richard Nixon had said he didn't want to be "the first President to lose a war," but by then the goal was not to win the war but to disengage "with honor."

"We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam?" Kerry asked in a riveting moment of his Senate presentation. "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

Many of Kerry's critics today still burn with resentment over his testimony, which they took to have been an indictment of all Americans who fought in Vietnam.

"Kerry's remarks to Fulbright's committee were devastating to everybody who served in Vietnam," says former POW Paul Galanti, who was forced to listen to "Hanoi Hannah" broadcast North Vietnamese propaganda about antiwar vets back home. "They were as demoralizing to me as solitary [confinement]. I consider Kerry's remarks to be deliberate lies and a prime reason the war dragged on."

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