“We call this investigation the Winter Soldier Investigation. The term ‘winter soldier’ is a play on words of Thomas Paine’s in 1776 when he spoke of the Sunshine Patriot and summer soldiers who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough. “We who have come here to Washington have come because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country, we could be quiet, we could hold our silence, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, the fact that the crimes threaten it, not reds, and not redcoats, but the crimes which we are committing threaten it, that we have to speak out. “I would like to talk to you a little bit about the result of the feelings these men carry with them after coming back from Vietnam. The country doesn’t know it yet but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history; men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped. “As a veteran and one who feels this anger, I would like to talk about it. We are angry because we feel we have been used in the worst fashion by the administration of this country.”

John Forbes Kerry is, to judge by the way the current campaign is going, still conjuring the monster, 33 years after he spoke the above words in his now-infamous testimony before the Senate. At the time, early 1971, he had come from the anti-war propaganda fest called the Winter Soldier Investigation. Funded by Jane Fonda, it was, like many a left-wing piece of agitprop, shrewdly named, though only in the Orwellian sense. Miss Fonda and the soldiers who joined her were actually the summer soldiers who, though they served in Vietnam, did not want to stay with the fight. The winter soldiers were the ones who stood with the fight, even as the going got ever more rough. Some languished in the prison camps of North Vietnam, like Admiral Stockdale, a real winter soldier if there ever was one. While a prisoner, he actually beat himself with a footstool to disfigure his own face so that the communists would not be able to use his face in a propaganda film.* There were hundreds of thousands serving honorably in Vietnam at the time Senator Kerry vented his anger by deriding them to the Senate as war criminals. The vast majority of American GIs returned home after Vietnam and lived quiet, productive lives.

Nor are most of the GIs who served in Vietnam ashamed of their service. Our sense of the veterans of Vietnam is that for the most part they recognize that many GIs and American civilians held differing — and honorable — positions, whether hawk or dove, on the war. Even so, one commander for the American side, General Westmoreland, is quoted on the World Wide Web as saying that 91% of Vietnam veterans say they are glad they served, while 74% said they would serve again, even knowing the outcome.

It is getting clearer by the day that in the coming campaign Mr. Kerry is going to try to do to the GIs serving in Iraq what he did to the GIs serving in Vietnam. He is going to try to strip the value from their service, as he did the service of GIs who went to Vietnam, when he spoke of the “chance to die for the biggest nothing in history.”

He will seek to delegitimize the Congress and president who sent them. We doubt it will work in respect of Iraq, and this could be the moment for the generation of which he is a part — and perhaps other generations — to confront the monster he conjured so long ago.

* The story is told in Senator McCain’s memoir,”Faith of My Fathers,” as follows: “As a resistance leader, Jim Stockdale had few peers. He was a constant inspiration to the men under his command. Many of his captors hated him for his fierce and unyielding spirit. The Rabbit hated him the most. One day, the Rabbit ordered Jim cleaned up so that he could be filmed for a propaganda movie in which he would play a visiting American businessman. He was given a razor to shave. Jim used it to hack off his hair, severely cutting his scalp in the process and spoiling his appearance, in the hope that this would render him unsuitable for his enemies’ purpose. But the Rabbit was not so easily dissuaded. He left to find a hat to place on Jim’s bleeding head. In the intervening moments, Jim picked up a wooden stool and repeatedly bashed his face with it. Disfigured, Jim succeeded in frustrating the Rabbit’s plans for him that evening.”