Knowing of my interest in these matters, Steve was kind enough to send me a copy of his exchange with you.

I certainly agree with everything he said about pursuing the truth and not wanting a food fight.

But I would expect a lot of people to be more favorably disposed to Kerry had he "dodged the draft" by joining the guard or reserve. Those were legal options, they served at least some social value, but they don't get anyone a lot of extra points from me.

I give anyone who went several points at the start. How they behaved can add or detract points.

Kerry was already a pilot, and we had a great need for Navy pilots in Vietnam -- but it was a highly dangerous mission and he elected to seek safer duty. When he volunteered for the Swift boats, they were used in a relatively safe coastal patrol role, and (according to Brinkley's biography) when he learned they had been assigned to more dangerous work he asked if he had any choice before accepting the assignment.

I honestly don't know the full story behind either his first Purple Heart or his Silver Star. We do know that his CO and the doctor who treated his first "wound" claim that it was a tiny splinter from an M-79 that went 1/8" into his arm and was treated with a band aid, and that men who were with Kerry contradicted his story that there had been a "fire fight" and asserted Kerry had been screwing around with an M-79, fired it into the water too close to his own boat, it apparently hit an offshore rock or something and detonated, hitting him with one tiny piece of shrapnel.

We do know that after 3 months in country (where he saw serious risk), without having been seriously injured in any way, he asked to be removed to a safe billet as an admiral's aide in the states. That was every much as legal an option for him (well, unless you want to quarrel about his first Purple Heart) as joining the guard or reserves was for others. But it was not a sign of great courage or patriotism in my view.

I've read various accounts of the Silver Star incident and am "troubled" by it. The kid who first shot the VC teenager later remarked that Kerry got his Silver Star for shooting a wounded unnarmed man inn the back. Kerry and some others say the VC had a loaded B-40/RPG-2 rocket. All agree he had been wounded previously by the M-60 and was moving away from Kerry down a trail when Kerry went after him with an M-16. I'm honestly not sure that anyone then or know knows what was in anyone's mind -- was the VC just a frightened kid trying to get to safety after he first his B-40 from too close a range to arm it and just broke some windows on the Fast boat, or was he instead running to increase the range so he could take cover and pop off a more effective round? I sure don't know.

We do know--as there are numerous witnesses who have talked about it--that Kerry was trying to credential himself so he could someday run for President as a "war hero" like JFK. And in that setting, it is possible that he saw a relatively safe chance to play "John Wayne" by running down and dispatching a frightened, wounded, kid whose B-40 at close range would be no match for Kerry's M-16. I've heard stories that there were VC at other points along the river, but it appears that during this engagement Kerry and the kid were basically alone (with other guys from the boat following Kerry. So I keep looking for the conspicuous gallantry that normally is required for a Silver Star--but perhaps it was there. Zumwalt justified the medal as an "impact award" trying to improve unit moral, and I've never favored giving out hero medals to boost morale--most people have to earn them.

My sense is the Bronze Star was clearly legit, and that in general Kerry "did his job" during the 3 months before he asked to be sent home.

On balance, I'd give people like Bush and Quayle a few negative points for seeking out less dangerous alternatives to risking going to Vietnam. (It was common among "conservative" college students of the era.) Bush gets a few extra good points for agreeing to be a pilot, as some of them were killed during training and the business of flying fighter aircraft has an element of danger in it even in the absence of an armed enemy. But, on balance, I'd still give him a negative score on that issue, and a BIG negative score for his DWI background. (The only reason he didn't kill people was chance.)

I'd give Kerry a positive score for his service in Vietnam--but fewer points than I would give anyone that I personally know who earned a Silver Star because his was essentially self-nominated and I think it makes a bit of a difference that his goal was not patriotic service to his country but rather punching his "hero" card so he could run for president.

I guess I treat his Silver Star about like I do most Bronze Stars with 'V' device. At best, he did his job well under serious risk to his own life. It's a big plus.

Bush v. Kerry for their "Vietnam-era military service," Kerry wins BIG.

The problem comes with what he did next. Both Brinkley and the Globe series say that Kerry's friends at the time say he did not appear expecially 'anti-war" until AFTER he lost the Democratic primary in 1970 to Bob Drinan, the radical anti-war priest. He realized that being a Vietnam war hero didn't impress the voters of Massachusetts in 1970. This friends said Kerry was then looking around to find "an issue" to further his political ambitions, when he found the VVAW.

As you may know, at one point the VVAW did a 3- or 4-day "march" to Valley Forge, PA, during which they acted a bit weird and passed out leaflets to people in the towns they went through saying, in essence: "A US Infantry Company Has Just Come Through Here. If you had been Vietnamese, we would likely have shot you, burned your home, killed your dog, and raped your wife and daughter. If you don't want your son to become a monster, oppose the war."

That was not the first time they characterized us as "monsters" and "war criminals" and "drug addicts." Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that 60-80% of us were "stoned" 24-hours a day. He said we were routinely committing "war crimes" with the knowledge and approval of every level of the chain of command, and compared our behavior to Ghengis Khan.

You have no reason to know me, but, FYI, I was no hero in Vietnam or anywhere else. I did volunteer, and even covered up some medical problems to get in. But I had done my undergrad honors thesis on the war, knew a fair amount about our enemy, and when I got to Vietnam I was detailed to an Embassy job working on North Vietnamese/Viet Cong affairs. In one capacity or another I was in Vietnam 5 times between 1968 and coming out during the final evacuation in 1975, and I visited 42 of 44 provinces in the south plus Laos and Cambodia. (Never got so much as a scratch, although on occasion people within 50 feet of me were killed.)

After the war I became the senior resident scholar at Stanford's Hoover Institution on War, Revoltuion and Peace working on Vietnam, serving as Associate Editor for Asia & the Pacific of the Yearbook on International Communist Affairs and writing a 500+ page book on the history of Vietnamese Communism. A decade after earning my BA I returned to school and earned first a JD and later an SJD (academic doctorate) from the Univ. of Virginia Law School, where I have worked and taught for nearly 17 years. I've taught Vietnam seminars both at the law school and for undergrads at Virginia, and I spent 1994-95 as the Stockton Prof. of International Law at the Naval War College, where I also taught a seminar on "Lessons of the Vietnam War."

All of this is to suggest that I probably know more about the war than the average Vietnam veteran. But I certainly don't pretend to have all of the answers.

You are absolutely right that honorable people can and have drawn opposite conclusions about the war. But I would submit that OFTEN the differences are in reality based upon conflicting understandings of the facts. I took part in a number of early "teach ins" and Vietnam debates starting in '65, and I debated a number of the leaders of the so-called "New Left" during that period.

There was a lot of confusion about what was going on in Vietnam in 1966, but today I think that a lot of the factual debates of that era are no longer possible among serious people. I recall hearing speaker after speaker assert that the National Liberation Front was "independent" of Hanoi and that the State Department "lied" when it alleged we were getting involved because of (to mention the title of one major white paper): "Aggression from the North."

During those debates I would carry around copies of a number of North Vietnamese publications (they used to send me large packages a few times a year of all of their new publications in English, because I had sent in a form I picked up at an early teach-in and mailed it to Hanoi). I had all 4 volumes of Ho's Selected Works, the proceedings of the Third Party Congress in 1960 (where the Dang Lao Dong Viet Nam passed a resolution calling for "our people in the South" to establish a "united front" under the leadership of a Marxist-Leninist Party), and I used to point out that entire paragraphs of the NLF program were VERBATIM copies of the 1955 Fatherland Front program in Hanoi. In essence, the American peace movement was being "conned" by Hanoi's brilliant political warfare campaign.

In February 1983, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap and Gen. Vo Bam were featured in a French TV documentary in which they admitted that in May 1959 the Party had made a decision to liberate South Vietnam. Gen. Bam was ordered to open the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and five years later the United States decided we had to "contain" Communism in Indochina just as we had agreed to do in Korea, Europe, and elsewhere. I submit that at this point it is not credible for anyone to allege that Vo Nguyen Giap--Hanoi's Minister of Defense throughout the war--was a liar and the NLF was really an independent South Vietnamese resistance group. (And, by the way, I interviewed hundreds of defectors and POWs during the war and they often laughed at how successful they had been in deceiving the west on the Party's role in the NLF.)

I had several good friend who were very active in the anti-war movement, and while I disagreed with them I actually respected them more than I did the "silent majority" and the fraternity boys who just wanted to show them down and call them names for protesting. Most of them were sincere, and they were trying to keep their government from doing what they thought were evil things.

But VVAW was in an entire different category. It was a mixture of hard-core Communists, Black Panthers, misfit screw-ups, and a number of "wanna-bes" who got to pretend they were "warriors" by hanging around with the radicals.

The Executive Director claimed to have been seriously wounded as an Air Force Captain while landing at Da Nang on his second Vietnam tour. (He was also a Black Panther.) He and Kerry appeared on various TV shows and spoke together about the evils of the war at rallies. When a journalist finally bothered to check the "Captain" out, it turned out he had never passed E-5 in the Air Force, had never been assigned to Vietnam (and probably had never even landed there as a stopover since his jacket did not include authorization to wear the Vietnam Service Ribbon, which he would have qualified for with even a 1 minute stopover anywhere in country). His "wound" was from a 1961 soccer injury. He was, in short, a total fraud. And he was not the only one. There were guys who had never worn a uniform, a clerk from South Carolina, a mechanic who served in Germany, and several deserters who tried to pass themselves off as SEALS, green berets, and the like. They told stories of routinely using POWs for "target practice," of taking babies from their mothers to use for "bait" for booby traps, and one spoke having had "advanced genocide training" in the Army. But they wore ragged uniform parts, and lots of people believed them. I was just starting my second tour when I read about the "Winter Soldiers Investigation" and then Kerry's SFRC testimony, and I felt that he had betrayed us to further his political ambitions.

There were drug problems in Vietnam -- especially after '68. But the idea that 80% of us stayed "stoned" 24-hours a day is a lie. There were war crimes in Vietnam. But from what I saw and heard, most of our troops did a very good job and remain proud of their service. Because the VC intentionally refused to comply with the requirements of the Third Geneva Convention to wear a uniform or identifiable insignia, more civilians were killed than would likely otherwise have been the case. But we went to great lengths to try to avoid war crimes and injury to innocent civilians. At least that was my experience, and I've spoken to hundreds of vets over the years and don't recall a single one who though we were routinely committing war crimes.

I read DRV and PRG/VC propaganda almost daily, and when substantive political documents were captured anywhere in country and set up through intelligence channels they usually made their way at least in photocopy form to my desk. I spent nearly 10 years studying and reading their stuff, and when I read Kerry's Senate testimony red lights started going off. He covered at least half of the official "PRG" program, demanding that we withdraw immediately, impose a "coalition government" (a classic Leninist trick to dupe nationalists into "sharing" power, where the Leninists insist on controlling the internal security, military, and treasury and give the other members of the government responsibility for the ministries of agriculture, forestry, and tourism). Kerry said we should allow the Vietnamese to "settle their own problems" (another mainstay of Hanoi's propaganda line). Imagine someone arguing in 1942 that we should "allow the Europeans to solve their own problems" and not get involved in helping the French or British. He even demanded that we pay reparations to Vietnam after we left -- another of Hanoi's demands.

John Kerry clearly did not want the United States to fight the Cold War. He said that Communism was no threat to us, and made the audience laugh when he said they weren't going to attack our McDonalds hamburger stands. Pretending to speak for a broad cross-section of Vietnam vets, he said there was no reason for us to be involved in Vietnam.

Now, as a matter of historical fact, whether we wanted it or not, Vietnam had become a "test case" and was identified as such by all of the major players. Khrushchev had been deterred by Dulles and Ike's threats of massive retaliation after Korea, but Mao had come along (supported by Castro) and argued that while the Imperialists looked very fierce, in reality they were but "paper tigers" because we could not use our nukes against guerrillas who lived among the people. And people like Lin Piao and Che Guevara were saying that once the Americans were defeated in Vietnam, that would show the world we could not resist peoples warfare and they would quickly start a dozen or more "Vietnams." And had we walked away in 1965, I am in my own mind certain that we would have very quickly have faced a dozen or more "Vietnams" throughout the Third World--and in fact we COULD NOT have prevailed without resorting to nukes. Had we shown that we could not defend victims of "national liberation wars" we might easily have lost the Cold War or had to try to resolve the struggle in a nuclear war with Moscow. We simply lacked the men and money to win a dozen major guerrilla wars. (FYI, I was a lawyer working for the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy in 1981 when we decided on what became the Reagan Doctrine of supporting guerrillas in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, and Nicaragua--which almost bankrupted Moscow in trying to stop them.)

In 1971, Kerry pretended there was no real difference between our democratic system and other forms of government. Whether democracy, benevolent dictatorship, or communist system, what really mattered was whether a government could "meet the needs" of the people. So the communization of Indochina and other areas was basically none of our business and something we should stay out of.

Interestingly, he recognized that when we withdrew perhaps "millions" of people who had relied upon our promises (if you recall, JFK's promise to "defend any friend") to help them. But he said that would be our fault, because we convinced them to fight a war they could not win. But their deaths would of course be on our conscience for having the gall to intervene in someone else's business.

Two of the strongest arguments for getting out of Vietnam were the need to "stop the killing" and to promote "human rights." After leaving the Army in '71 I became very active in both of those debates, and indeed I was asked to write a piece for the NY Times on whether there would be a "bloodbath" if we withdrew and in Jan '73 I appeard on the PBS Sunday night show, "The Advocates," on the same issue. (A first-term congressman named Les Aspin was also on that show, which was moderated by a law professor named Michael Dukakis). I warned there would be major killing.

After the war, I got to know former Director of Central Intelligence Bill Colby, who would drive down each year to lecture to my Vietnam seminar (wouldn't even take money for his gas) until his death. He had been in and out of Vietnam for near 15 years starting as CIA Saigon station chief in the late '50s, and he knew the country better than any American I knew. We had incredibly similar "takes" on the war, both noting how much more secure things were after 1970. At one point in the early '70s Bill and John Paul Vann took off on a couple of motorcycles and drove unarmed across South Vietnam--just to show it could be done in safety. I had similar experiences driving around the delta during that period.

Another man who used to come down and guest lecture for me was Adm. Thomas Moorer, who had been Chairman of the JCS under Nixon at the end of the war. He told my students about Nixon calling him and and saying, in essence, that the JCS had been bitching for years that it was not being permitted to fight the war to win, and asked for a strategy. Moorer brought it back, they implemented it in 1972, and by the end of that year we essentially had the situation stabilized and in a meaningful sense the war was "won." Saigon controlled almost every population center (save for I think Quang Tri province), Hanoi's best had been stopped in their Easter Offensive assault by ARVN with just U.S. air support, and the first serious bombing of the entire war had left Hanoi totally vulnerable and without a single SAM left. Moscow and Beijing had told Hanoi to 'cool it' for a decade or so, and had cut supplies. Hanoi was forced back to the Paris talks and we got an agreement. We had B-52s in Guam to enforce the accord if Hanoi violated it.

Then the "Kerry effect" kicked in. Under pressure from Kerry and the anti-Vietnam movement, Senators like Church, Fulbright, Gore, Aiken--the same crew that showed up to hear Kerry--pushed through a statute (of very dubious constitutionality) making it unlawful for the President to spend Treasury funds on "combat operations" anywhere in Indochina. At that point, Pham Van Dong said "the Americans won't come back now even if we offer them candy," Moscow and Beijing dramatically stepped up their aid, and the PAVN launched conventional invasions to conquer their neighbors. I was in South Vietnam in April 1975 and watched their conquest up close.

In the next two years, the Communists slaughtered an estimated 2 million people in Cambodia and perhaps half-a-million in South Vietnam (not counting another half-million who died in the next few years trying to flee as boat people). More people died in the first two years after "liberation" than were killed in 14 years of war, and tens of millions of others were consigned to a Communist goulag that still ranks among the worst human rights violators in the world.

Some say that there was no "domino effect" and thus the war was for nothing. This ignores the fact that in 1965 both Thailand and Indonesia were economic basket cases ripe for revolution, and China was supplying arms and training to guerrillas not only there but as far away as Mozambique. By delaying their victory a decade, we bought time for Thailand and Indonesia to become stronger and for China to purge Lin Biao and turn inward after the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. An earlier defeat could have shown Moscow that Mao was correct about armed struggle and helped to reunify the Communist movements.

I didn't mean to turn this into a book, but was impressed by your note and wanted to engage you a bit on the issues. In my view, Kerry made statements that were so far from the truth that he should have known they were lies that had the effect of portraying those of us who were still in Vietnam as evil "monsters" and "war criminals." I think Jane Fonda was clearly a Communist at that point, but John Kerry was also pushing the "party line" and did a heck of a lot more harm to us than anything Fonda ever did. He had the credibility of being "one of us."

I do NOT think he was flirting with Communist at the time. I think it was a marriage of convenience for him. He needed a cause, the VVAW was in desperate need of a credible "voice" who had actually been to Vietnam, and he spouted their line in order to get to speak to the angry crowds.

Fonda clearly committed treason. (Because my legal work touches on this area, last year I was invited to address that issue at a conference sponsored by the Univ. of North Carolina Law Review and I made the full case -- and no one in the argument questioned it after I finished. I pointed out that she went to Hanoi and made radio broadcasts addressed to U.S. forces and urging them to refuse to obey orders, telling sailors that the bombs they were being asked to load really contained illegal poison gas and they could be tried as war criminals if they carried out their orders.) I honestly don't know if John Kerry did, or not, but we now do know that he made two visits to Paris where he met with DRV/PRG leaders--admitting to the Foreign Relations Committee that he know the visits probably were illegal. (In fact, they were felonies.) And if he said anything that gave them "aid and comfort," it probably was treason.

We know that Hanoi was using American communists to pressure families of POWs to denounce the war in return for promises they would get letters from their husbands and fathers. We also know that on at least one occasion John Kerry played "host" to such a press conference, and other POW wifes showed up and screamed at him "What are you going to run for next!" If he coordinated that effort with Hanoi, it would likely come within the realm of treason.

When Nixon complained that Hanoi was torturing our POWs, Jane Fonda screamed that was a "lie" and John Kerry expressed outrage that we would even mention the Geneva Conventions given our own blatant violations. (In reality, the International Committee of the Red Cross wrote Westmoreland that never before in history had an army gone to greater lengths to ensure respect for the rule of law, noting that we had made a policy decision to give the VC protections of the Third Convention despite the fact that they clearly did not qualify under the terms of the accord. But I would add that we made one exception--VC engaged in terrorist acts.)

As a Senator, Kerry's record has been anti-national security. He has opposed military weapons systems that are critical to us, and voted to weaken the Intelligence Community. He now claims that he would try to strengthen the UN, but it is noteworthy that when the UN Security Council in November 1990 called upon nations to go to the aid of Kuwait and enect Iraqi forces who were continuing to rape and torture the people of Kuwait, John Kerry voted to deny the President legal authority to assist the Security Council. Anyone who would turn to him for leadership in the war against terrorism would in my view deserve what they got. Sadly, the rest of us will also pay the price.

Well, Mr. Hart, I don't ask you to agree with any of this. But I think a lot of the dispute was not about values (I think all Americans prefer peace to war and favor justice and human rights) but rather about facts and about the likelihood that one particular policy option will produce the desired result (peace with freedom) that most of us want. In 1972 I published a short monograph showing how the documents in the Pentagon Papers refuted most of the major arguments being used by the anti-war crowd. (I think Steve has that on his web site as a link.)

My hope is that people who disagree with my views will show up in Boston and we can have a serious discussion of what really happened in Vietnam (and Cambodia and Laos) and whether what we tried to do was a good or a bad thing. If you come, let me know and perhaps we can sit down for a few minutes and have a good chat.