Consider the setting at the time of the Winter Soldier event and Kerry's summary of it. The country was still reeling from the evidence presented at the trial of Army Lt. William Calley for murdering 22 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai on March 16, 1968. The country had read Seymour Hersh's epoch-making report on the massacre of more than 300 unarmed Vietnamese and had seen the photos in Life magazine. "We intend," said William F. Crandell, a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, in opening the event, "to demonstrate that My Lai was no unusual occurrence."

Indeed. Decades later, reports of the horrors are still trickling out. The Toledo Blade won a Pulitzer Prize for its October 2003 series about killings committed by an elite U.S. Army "Tiger Force" unit in the course of a seven-month period in 1967. "Elderly farmers were shot as they toiled in the fields. Prisoners were tortured and executed -- their ears and scalps severed for souvenirs. One soldier kicked out the teeth of executed civilians for their gold fillings," the Blade reported. "Investigators concluded that 18 soldiers committed war crimes ranging from murder and assault to dereliction of duty. But no one was charged."

"The object of Winter Soldier," Crandell wrote in 1994, "was to take the all-too-available atrocity stories coming out of Vietnam and show their direct relationship to American policies ... In VVAW we knew as veterans that everyone who participates in war crimes suffers, and we needed to tell our country that these horrible acts were not simply aberrations or psychotic episodes, but the inevitable outcomes of the direction soldiers in Vietnam had been given." In other words, the war itself, defending against guerrillas, was "a formula for war crime."

And in a passage that reads like an anticipatory rebuttal to the accusations by the SBVFT, Crandell added: "What relief we found as misled warriors came from confession rather than blaming. We never denied our individual responsibility for the acts we took part in. We were an army that was profoundly troubled by guilt for indefensible acts, and we admitted as much. Then we went further ... We invited America to come clean."

I spoke to Crandell this week. A former infantry patrol leader, he had returned to the United States in October 1967 with a Purple Heart and had joined VVAW after the Tet offensive of January-February 1968. Crandell told me that, in 1971, after an attorney named Mark Lane had included unreliable evidence in an earlier compilation of war-crimes charges, he had been concerned about keeping the evidence to the straight and narrow. "We vetted the witnesses," he said. "People had to produce identification. They cross-checked each other. That's why we organized the testimony by military unit."

And as for the charge that Kerry "betrayed" his comrades, Crandell insists: "The whole point we made was that the war crimes came from above." Kerry said the same in Washington in 1971. He repeated it on "Meet the Press."

And yet on Aug. 23, as if nothing at all had been learned from decades of scholarship and journalism, CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked former presidential advisor David Gergen whether Kerry should apologize for what he said about the war. He didn't ask whether Robert S. McNamara should apologize. He didn't ask whether Henry Kissinger should apologize. He didn't ask whether Dick Cheney and George W. Bush should apologize for their support of a wrong war. (As recently as his interview with Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" on April 18, Bush repeated the right-wing stab-in-the-back demagogy that what had been wrong with the Vietnam War was that the civilians had run it.) Responsibility has never been George W. Bush's game. He represents the America that refuses to be sorry, and the unscrupulous John O'Neill does his dirty work as he did for that spiritual guide, Richard Nixon.

Some thought Kerry was overdoing his Vietnam credentials with his theatrics of "reporting for duty." But Kerry was on to an essential truth about the America that emerged from Vietnam: That duty begins when you open your eyes in the dark face of reality. It is the same truth with which he closed his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee 33 years ago:

"We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away their memories of us. But all that they have done, and all that they can do by this denial, is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission: To search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war; to pacify our own hearts; to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country these last 10 years and more. And more. And so, when, 30 years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say 'Vietnam' and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead where America finally turned, and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning. "

"One last mission": The turning is still in progress.

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