Over the years some have asked why Kerry chose to dispose of his ribbons, not his medals. Critics saw him as trying to have it both ways. It gave credence, they believed, to what A.J. Liebling of the New Yorker once claimed of Rough Rider Theodore Roosevelt: He was a "dilettante soldier but a first-class politician." Further confusing the issue was the fact that Kerry did lob the medals of two no-show veterans toward the Marshall statue at their request. "The point of the exercise was to symbolically give something up," Kerry recalled in his defense. "I chose my ribbons, which is what many of the veterans did." The medals he tossed had been given to him by two angry veterans who wouldn't make it to Washington; he was merely serving as their surrogate. Before Kerry discarded his ribbons, he declared: "I'm not doing this for any violent reason, but for peace and justice, and to try to make this country wake up once and for all."

Kerry spent much of his time that afternoon with two Gold Star moms, Ann Pine of Trenton, N.J., and Evelyn Carrasquillo of Miami. He stood by them as they hurled medals back at the government. As a World War II veteran played taps and about 500 people gathered around, the names of men who died in Vietnam were called out. Watching TV that evening was Rich McCann, who had traveled the Mekong Delta rivers with Kerry and was now a graduate student at George Washington University. "When he threw those medals over the fence, I was pretty upset," McCann recalled. "I was grappling with a lot of issues myself. It was hard to accept that I had given a year of my life for a lost cause. In retrospect, however, what he did was right."

Not all the men gave up medals or ribbons. Many chose to turn in hats, jackets and military documents. A photograph taken by George Butler of VVAW shows that the offerings included recruitment letters, induction papers and discharge forms. Historian Andrew E. Hunt, in his superb "The Turning: A History of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War," explains the rationale of several veterans for returning personal possessions. Ron Ferrizzi, for example, a Philadelphia native, disowned his Silver Star and Purple Heart against the pleas of his family. "My parents told me that if I really did come down here and turn in my medals, they never wanted anything more to do with me. That's not an easy thing to take. I still love my parents. My wife doesn't understand what happened to me when I came home from Nam. She said she would divorce me if I came down here because she wanted my medals for our son to see when he grew up."

For a World War II veteran, the tossing away of medals must have been a painful sight. They didn't know whether these long-haired hippies were on drugs, or whether something had happened in Vietnam that they couldn't fully understand. As the memorabilia piled up and the media took it all in, it was clear that the antiwar movement had just turned a sharp corner. First Kerry's testimony before the Fulbright committee, now this.

Butler captured the emotions of the afternoon with his camera. Collectively, his photographs speak of personal liberation. For many of the veterans, the discarding of military paraphernalia set them psychologically free. It was as if the U.S. government had corrupted them, seized their moral compass with shiny pin-on honor. "You have no idea how healing the whole experience was," Bill Crandell recalled. "It was our hour of claiming ourselves back."

Julia Kerry, John's former wife, who was with her husband the entire week, came to the conclusion that the veterans had been in deep depression and denial. "There was so much buried pain," she recalled. "It was numbing to witness." On the last day the veterans also planted a tree, as a symbolic gesture for the preservation of life over death. "The truly impressive thing was that no acts of violence had been committed that entire week," Sen. Kerry recalled. "We had just promised to be nonviolent and we were."

Recent critics of Kerry assert that his Dewey County III ceremony is a metaphor for a lifetime of political flip-flopping. For Kerry, giving up his ribbons -- the objects he had with him in Washington that week -- made perfect sense. To his way of thinking, he was symbolically returning his medals to the U.S. government by tossing his ribbons. Even Sen. Stuart Symington, D-Mo., when preparing to cross-examine Kerry at the Fulbright committee meeting, asked him what the "medals" on his chest represented. They weren't medals, they were ribbons; it was -- and is -- a common mistake. From Kerry's vantage point, there is nothing contradictory about his statement to "Viewpoints" that he had given back "six, seven, eight, nine medals." To have said that he had given back ribbons but that his medals were at home would have simply confused the TV audience.

Still, the persistent resurrection of this issue means Kerry should have been more exact in his language back in 1971. Clarity is usually a virtue in politics. But we should also remember that he earned those medals/ribbons. The shrapnel in his thigh should remind us of that sacrifice. It is a tangible souvenir from Vietnam that is still with him every day.

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