John Kerry and George Bush treat their pasts in very different ways. Kerry tries to wish inconvenient parts away, like having his first marriage of 18 years annulled. If he emphasizes the medals he won on the Mekong, he thinks we'll forget how he either threw away, or pretended to throw away, those very medals.
He was young when he testified to Congress that the men he left behind were war criminals, raping and pillaging and cutting off ears of peasants. He was so caught up in the fervor of '60s protest that he couldn't make inconvenient distinctions. Why not accept responsibility now for some of his most irresponsible statements? Why can't he just say that the man wised up when he was no longer a boy?
He doesn't because there's a methodical calculation behind the flip-flops. Ron Rosenbaum, who was two years behind Kerry at Yale, describes in the New York Observer the draft culture on campus in those days. "When Mr. Kerry was there, local draft boards still had the option (but not the requirement) to extend undergraduate deferments from the draft to those who pursued graduate study. The clued-in people, many of them well-connected preppies, knew that if your draft board wasn't going to give you a deferment the savvy thing was to try to get an officer's commission in the Reserves or the Guard."
George W. did that. So did John Kerry. Each knew that an officer's duty would be smoother than a grunt's. We're fighting a different kind of war today. A different worldview requires different strategies, different tactics. All our soldiers and Marines in Iraq are volunteers. The enemy makes himself into a human bomb and hides in "holy" places. The brotherhood of man promised by the Age of Aquarius never arrived.
The Vietnam War, like the Civil War, the Spanish American War and the two world wars, is over. (Grenada, too.) We've got problems, so let's face them. Any survivor of the '60s could tell you that you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.