Vietnam and Iraq
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

One of the convictions that animates these columns is that the American people, in their assembled glory, are far smarter than any of us individually. So when they do something like mount a review of Senator Kerry’s service in and after Vietnam – as so many Americans are doing now – they are no doubt doing it for a reason. And we can’t shake the feeling that the reason they are questioning Mr. Kerry with such a vengeance is that they are concerned that he will do in Iraq what he did in the war in Indochina little more than a generation ago.
As this debate shakes out, we have little doubt that it will focus less on what the young John Kerry did in combat in Vietnam itself. Life has taught us to be extremely wary of questioning a man’s conduct in combat. His actions there, like those of nearly all soldiers in combat, were shrouded by the fog of war. We tend to the view that his service in Vietnam was honorable. The Bronze Star with V for Valor is no small thing, the Silver Star is an even more important medal, and even one Purple Heart, and even for a minor wound, attests that a man was willing to put himself in harm’s way for his country. President Bush has shown admirable judgment in praising the senator’s wartime service.
The big questions facing Mr. Kerry have to do with his actions as part of the anti-war movement, where, in harness with Jane Fonda, he did things that in the cold light of history we believe will appall most Americans. When Mr. Kerry began attacking his fellow GIs, and the American leadership, and asserting that Americans were committing war crimes in Vietnam, and that he himself had committed war crimes, he was doing so at a time when America was still at war. He suggested that the communists were not a threat to America when, in fact, they were. He met with enemy agents on foreign soil while America still had troops in the field and prisoners in enemy dungeons. And he did this in pursuit of an American retreat that eventually consigned tens of millions of Vietnamese to live for decades under communist oppression.
Americans might have been prepared to leave all this to the historians had Mr. Kerry sought the presidency at a different time. But America has once again sent its soldiers into a war to secure democracy in a dangerous part of the globe. A bitter peace movement, much like the one in which Mr. Kerry once played a role, is again seeking to win through protests at home what the enemy has been unable to win in combat. Suddenly, what Mr. Kerry did after Vietnam looks highly relevant to the kinds of judgments the American president is going to have to make in the coming months and years.
This is why the questions about Mr. Kerry’s war record – and his record after the war – have suddenly enveloped his campaign. Years ago he and his anti-war pals called one of their protests the Winter Soldier Investigation, after Thomas Paine’s famous phrase about the winter soldier and the sunshine patriot.
It was an ironical boast, we noted back in January, because Mr. Kerry’s protesters were not the winter soldiers Paine referred to, they were not 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.
The reason all this controversy has erupted is that Americans know that the war against Islamic terror is no place for a summer soldier. It will involve setbacks as well as advances, and it is going to be impossible for Mr. Kerry to make these questions go away before they are answered.