John Kerry's judgment.(Scan)(Column)

Upon arriving home from service in Vietnam, John F. Kerry sniffed the political wind in Massachusetts--the only state carried by George McGovern--and decided there was hay to be made opposing the war. The hero enlisted in Vietnam Veterans Against the War, nobly serving with Vietcong--lovers such as Jane Fonda and Ramsey Clark in the so-called Winter Soldier Investigation. Kerry had no qualms about marching with scruffy Marxists carrying Vietcong flags and signs with slogans praising Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, and Fidel Castro.

And it wasn't enough merely to oppose the war. Kerry had to smear his former comrades-in-arms as a bunch of degenerate, mutilating, baby killers. The man who's now running for the highest office in the land on his war record--and beats his chest over his medals with every other breath--told a Senate hearing that Americans then bleeding and dying in the rice paddies were the moral equivalent of the Waffen-SS.

In his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (April 23, 1971), Kerry charged that American soldiers had "raped, cut off ears, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of Vietnam."

No wonder a group of Vietnam vets turned their backs on Kerry when he spoke at the Vietnam War Memorial in 2002. General George S. Patton (name-sake of the World War II general)--who led troops into combat in Vietnam--said Kerry "gave aid and comfort to the enemy." Jeremiah Denton--who was being tortured at the Hanoi Hilton while Kerry was defaming American forces in Vietnam--could barely maintain civility toward the Massachusan when they served together in the Senate.

If Americans in Vietnam were butchers and war criminals, what were the Vietcong? Agrarian reformers, one and all, according to the sage of Boston. In those halcyon days of pot and protest, Kerry insisted the conflict was a "war of the people" fought by indigenous peasant reformers. The senator-to-be apparently had never heard of North Vietnamese regulars, Soviet instigators, of the Ho Chi Minh trail.

Kerry didn't just want an American withdrawal. He demanded elimination of all aid to Saigon. If South Vietnam fell, at most 2,000 to 3,000 of its lackeys might face recrimination, Kerry assured us.

Actually, an estimated 700,000 Vietnamese went through communist re-education camps after Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City. Many never came out. More than a million boat people fled those good-hearted indigenous peasant reformers. The fall of ...