One of the questions about Senator Kerry is whether in the current war against Islamist terrorism he is going to prove to be the senatorial equivalent of a summer soldier. The phrase is from the American Revolution, when Thos. Paine wrote, “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it NOW deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

Back during Vietnam, where Senator Kerry fought as a young lieutenant in the American Navy, GIs who grew disaffected from the war came together in 1971 in a famous protest called the Winter Soldier Investigation. The title was ironical, for they were not the hawks who wanted to stick with the fight. They wanted an American withdrawal from the war. They may have appeared in arms, and often courageously, but in Paine’s sense they were summer soldiers.

Mr. Kerry’s take on Vietnam will bear examining. Few, if any, suggest he served dishonorably or without courage. He drew some of the most dangerous duty in the war, riverine patrols in the Mekong Delta. But when he came home, he testified before the Senate in which he now serves, saying the most horrible things about what American GIs were doing in Vietnam. It was not all a lie; there were some atrocities. But the young ex-lieutenant failed to illuminate the many more acts of heroism and idealism that were central to the story of America’s expedition in Vietnam.

Moreover, Mr. Kerry mocked the struggle against communism and allied himself with the likes of Jane Fonda. “In our opinion and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America,” he told the Senate. “And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom,” he added, was “the height of criminal hypocrisy.” That breast-beating took place four years before the Cambodian communists, in the wake of the American retreat, drove their countrymen into the killing fields that claimed as many as a million or two million of a population of but seven million.

We’d like to think this will all be debated in due course, but our concern has more to do with the current war. It is not going to be possible in the debate over Iraq for Mr. Kerry to testify against the comportment of American GIs, as he did after he returned from Vietnam. Our GIs in Iraq have been performing their duties in an exemplary fashion that may be unmatched in the history of warfare. In the case of Iraq, Mr. Kerry cast his vote with the majority that declared the war. At the time it gave some of us hope.

But then, when the going got rough, or at least controversial — that is, when the winter soldiering was under way — the senator went AWOL, voting against the $87 billion that President Bush requested for our troops and that Congress finally authorized by a comfortable margin. Mr. Kerry may or may not have been a summer soldier and sunshine patriot, but what is the equivalent in the upper chamber — sunshine senator?