When, we wonder, will America’s veterans next make themselves felt in presidential politics? That is the question about which we find ourselves wondering this Memorial Day. It was nursed in a column issued in Haaretz newspaper by the editor of the Sun, who was reacting to a dispatch in the Associated Press reporting that ex-GIs who fought in Iraq “have been watching in frustration” as “Republican presidential contenders distance themselves from the decision their party enthusiastically supported to invade that country.”

It’s not just Iraq, the column in Haaretz pointed out. “It’s also Afghanistan. And it’s not just the Republicans with whom frustration is growing. Democrats, too, helped take us into this war (they controlled the Senate, where a majority of the Democrats voted to authorize the Iraq war). If veterans seem more frustrated with the GOP now, it’s only because the betrayal by the Democrats happened earlier.” It went on to say that the thing to remember about veterans is that they have long memories.

This is natural enough. War will always be indelible for anyone who experienced it, even, the Haaretz column noted, for those who had but a small part in a war. It would be folly to take them for granted, or underestimate how suddenly — and to what devasting effect — veterans can make themselves felt. This is what we learned in 2004, the Haaretz column noted, when the Democrats put up for president John Kerry. More than 30 years had passed since Mr. Kerry had made his testimony before the Senate.

Yet, the column in Haaretz recalled, “it took but a single phone call from one retired admiral, Roy E. Hoffman, and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth sprang up.” There will always be controversy about the Swift Vets attacks on Mr. Kerry. But the American people had made short work of it; they rebuffed Mr. Kerry’s offer to report for duty and handily re-elected, in George W. Bush, a president who made one of his signal causes an appreciation of our GIs and winning the war in which he’d ordered them to appear. The Swift Vets won.

They knew we’d won in Vietnam, and among their beefs with Mr. Kerry was frustration not only their sense that he was unfit for command but the role that he’d played in throwing away our victory. That is what a new administration has been doing in the Middle East (and Afghanistan). It threw away our victory in an Iraq that was, in Mr. Obama’s own assessment when he pulled out or GIs, “sovereign, stable, and self reliant,” a point of which we were reminded on the eve of Memorial Day by Fox News’s Sean Hannity.

His guest was an extraordinary woman, Debbie Lee, whose son, Marc, a Navy Seal, was killed at Ramadi in 2006. He was the first Seal to die in Iraqi Freedom. When the chairman of President Obama’s joint chiefs of staff, General Dempsey, suggested that Ramadi wasn’t important, it was Mrs. Lee who forced an apology. Yet when Ramadi fell, Mr. Obama’s spokesman asked a press conference whether we should “light our hair on fire.” Retorted Mrs. Lee: “My son’s blood is on that soil.”

When our veterans are going to make their move in a presidential election, this is beyond our ken. Could it be as soon as 2016? Maybe. Or will it take another generation? We don’t seek to answer that question here. Who, after all, could have guessed that more than thirty years after Mr. Kerry had testified against them they would rise up to stop his quest for the presidency in its tracks? What we do seek is to mark the point that the veterans of our current war are likely to have the same kind of memory as earlier veterans — and to suggest that when they’re ready, they’ll be heard in our politics.