Okay, I admit it: My generation – women and men now climbing through their 50s and early 60s – is not the Greatest Generation Jr. I have grown to accept as fact the charge that we would not, in fact did not, rise to the great challenges of our time. Still, it remains true that men and women of this generation are now governing America; one of them will be our next president.

As a nation, we never resolved the debate over the Vietnam War, and never fixed that tumultuous event in our national consciousness. This is why the generational flaws of the candidates have never glowed as brightly as in this election of 2004. The election centers on the silent agreement not to agree about Vietnam and the years of protest and politics it spawned.

President Clinton was the first leader elected on the basis of this consensus, but in avoiding service during Vietnam, Mr. Clinton, his eyes always set on his future, “preserved his integrity within the system.” Mr. Clinton’s election extended the silent consensus not to speak of Vietnam to those artful dodgers who had courageously or not, legally avoided service. I was a charter member of that club.

Senator Kerry is our first presidential candidate to run as a war hero turned radical anti-war activist. Mr. Bush is cast as the ne’er do well son of a wealthy established family who pulled strings to avoid the service that Mr. Kerry chose not to skip. Neither story fills one with wonder. But by emphasizing this aspect of Mr. Kerry’s life at every turn, the Democrats reaped a whirlwind. Mr. Kerry cannot wear his medals without reliving the moment he threw them away. Democrats would have done better to blunt the GOP attack on them as too soft to be trusted with our security by convincingly addressing the current crisis. This would be a more formidable approach than the Kerry campaign’s decision to fall back on the two sides of Vietnam coin. But tongue-tied on the subject as are the Democrats, Mr. Kerry could not speak about the crisis without significant hemming and hawing, the source of now-famous flip-flops.

This election shows that Vietnam retains a sharp potency for a substantial portion of the electorate. I blame this on our collective incoherence on the war in Indochina. Like medium-term amnesiacs, we shuttle between a fading but instructive memory of World War II and a national assessment of the Cold War that is closest to the now vanished tradition of “liberal anti-communism.” But on Vietnam, we remain divided in ways that prefigure our contemporary divisions over America’s role after September 11.

In my own case, the world turned the day the national draft lottery numbers were first announced. My birth date drew No. 25. Translation: If I lost or otherwise consumed my 2-S student deferment, I would be caught up in the war. A year later, for unrelated reasons, I wanted to take off a semester. In short order, I was told that my 2-S depended on my being enrolled and attending classes. Rather than stay in school, I signed up for what turned out to be a phony rabbinical school. Along with some friends who similarly found religion, I called the con artist the “Vietnamer Rebbe.”

To a portion of his own supporters, Mr. Kerry’s war record was embraced in order to provide a shield against the Republican sneer that in these extraordinarily complex and dangerous times, the Democrats were unworthy custodians of the national security. But this is a fight with no finish.

But though Mr. Kerry fought, he never embraced that war- nor articulated overarching lessons drawn from its aftermath. Mr. Bush did not fight, but embraced the war, and drew appropriate lessons about the perception of American weakness and the importance of American resolve.

Messrs. Bush and Kerry are both flawed men, and their flaws were particularly apparent during those disorienting years. We are being asked to apportion honor to one or the other; thus far the campaign has tipped on attempts to deny as mere pretension the aspiration of the other for that honor.

At one point in his life, Mr. Kerry evinced a greater show of courage, but the key characteristic we should be looking for in a commander in chief is judgment. The next president will not lead a charge up the hill, like Teddy Roosevelt. We are being asked to trade the fog of this war for the fog of one 30 years old. Neither side will prevail in the continued fight over Vietnam. As long as we stalemate on Vietnam, we will not agree on the current crisis, on the post-September 11 situation. That’s why it is dangerous, and not merely folly, to continue this civil war over the 1960s generation. We were not the greatest; we were unusually selfish; we were as given over to intellectual and spiritual fads as the unloved masses were addicted to the established culture; we found some courage amid many mistakes, we are who we are. We were the lost boys. It has nevertheless fallen to us, flawed though we may be, to provide a president in these dark hours.

Mr. Twersky is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.