Kerry's Vietnam Service

During the recent presidential campaign it seems that every time someone asks Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry his position on any issue, he discovers a new way to steer the conversation to his Vietnam War record. Ask what is position was with respect to Iraq and you would find out he won a Silver Star in Vietnam. Ask what his position is on taxes and you would learn that Kerry also earned a Bronze Star. Question Kerry about his position on gay marriage and you would find out that he earned purple hearts "thrice." OK, he really is not that compulsive, but his war record is a reoccurring theme in his campaign. Frankly, if that is part of your biography, a candidate would be foolish not to exploit it to the point of bringing along your ``band of brothers'' on campaign stops.

To show you how much things have reverse themselves, Clinton ran twice against honest-to-goodness war heroes: George H. W. Bush and Robert Dole. Democrats had no problem asserting that draft avoider Clinton was a qualified Commander-in-Chief and Republicans where anxious to gleefully point to the war experience of their candidates.

Now a number of veterans who at least served in the proximity of Kerry have publicly called into question just how heroic Kerry was. Given the distance in time and the fog of war and barring the revelation of contemporaneous evidence, it is probably not possible to ascertain with any degree of certainty the details of those years. Since Kerry was awarded the Bronze and Silver Star officially, the only reasonable conclusion is to take those events at their face failure and cede Kerry the glory attendant those awards. Valor in service is at least peripherally related to anticipated service as Commander-in-chief.

The fact that parties and candidates have been limited in campaign spending has encouraged the formation of independent groups and some of these will continue arguing about Kerry's war record. One of the negative and very much predicted consequences of campaign finance reform is that these independent groups can take over a campaign. Depending on one's level of cynicism, an independent group can act as a proxy saying negative things about an opponent that a candidate's campaign would not want to take responsibility for, or it can muddy the themes a candidate the group is nominally in favor of wishes to use.

Much of the current animosity of some veterans groups against Kerry has less to do with his service than the exploitation of his service to suggest that there were wide spread atrocities by American soldiers in Vietnam. Indeed, to make his point in 1971, Kerry admitted

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