As recounted in my book "Useful Idiots," (out in paperback this month, I shamelessly note), or in Mackubin Thomas Owens's piece in the Feb. 23 issue of National Review, John Kerry returned from Vietnam and leant his prestige to the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Though innocuous-sounding, VVAW was one of the more radical antiwar groups. Through several well-publicized stunts, including one in which Kerry participated by throwing his medals over the White House fence (he later acknowledged that the medals belonged to someone else), VVAW legitimized the libel that American soldiers in Vietnam routinely committed war crimes.
Kerry testified before Congress in 1971 to the effect that American soldiers had "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam ..."
So spoke the man who now claims to be the "veterans' candidate." There were atrocities committed in Vietnam, as in every war. But Kerry's claim was grotesque. South Vietnam was full of American and international reporters who would have been only too happy to report such events if they had happened. My Lai was prosecuted. And, as Jug Burkett proved in his invaluable book "Stolen Valor," those atrocity stories had been made up by impostors, many of whom had never even been in Vietnam. But Kerry was there. Surely he knows that the vast majority of his fellow Americans conducted themselves as well as they could.
As a young man, Kerry embraced a view of his country as an outlaw nation. His close colleague at VVAW Al Hubbard spelled America with a "k." Kerry has never repudiated that stance, but has played it this way and that depending upon how the political wind is blowing. If antiwar fervor is the order of the day in Massachusetts, then he is the war protester who described Vietnam as an "obscene memory." If the tide turns and war service begins to seem politically useful, he is the hero of the Mekong Delta, proudly displaying his framed medals on the wall.
But his voting record tells the real story. Kerry took pride in trying to thwart Reagan's muscular anticommunism in Central America during the '80s. He supported the nuclear freeze. He opposed the first Gulf War.
He made a huge contribution to defaming the Vietnam War and creating the myth of the American soldier as monster. From his subsequent history, it seems that he came to believe in it.