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As part of the VVAW protest staged on the steps of the Capitol the day following the hearings, Kerry publicly discarded the combat ribbons representing the medals he’d won. The incident would come back to haunt him. In 1984, Kerry acknowledged that on that day he threw away other people’s medals as well as his ribbons. The issue came up in the 1985 Washington Post profile when Kerry was asked about the demonstration and why he hadn’t thrown away his own medals — as he certainly appeared to have done. “They’re my medals. I’ll do what I want with them,” he said. “And there shouldn’t be any expectations about them.... It’s my business. I did not want to throw my medals away.” Sennott reported in 1996 that Kerry discarded the ribbons of his Silver Star, along with medals given to him by other veterans in New York and Massachusetts. Kerry gave the same account to the Phoenix.

“I threw back my ribbons,” Kerry says today. “Somebody tried to make a deal out of that and it’s not a deal.” The most important thing about a military award, after all, is not the physical medal or ribbon but the fact that it was awarded in the first place. People are rightly outraged if a veteran wears an unearned medal, but any Silver or Bronze Star or Purple Heart can be acquired and pinned to a uniform if a person actually won it.

What is a big deal, yet relatively little known, is that only months after being in the national spotlight for the VVAW, Kerry left the group. Although he kept the move relatively quiet at the time, he now says that he’d begun to have second thoughts about the group’s polemical tilt. He had earlier raised concerns about others in the antiwar movement who, he thought, failed to serve the interests of veterans. (The best example of this is actress Jane Fonda, who appeared in a North Vietnamese photo inside an anti-aircraft gun turret.) “We were trying to talk to the heart of America, and some of those folks had overstayed their welcome in my judgment or been so abusive in their rhetoric that they lost the ability to communicate,” says Kerry. “I resigned and left [the VVAW] because the agenda of some of the folks within the veterans’ movement ultimately became confused and went way beyond just trying to end the war. There was a lot of rhetoric about every social ill and evil there was.”

Not everyone in Kerry’s shoes protested the war in the first place. Former Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey didn’t join the VVAW or participate with any other organized protest group, even though he came back from Vietnam opposed to the war. “I became very uncomfortable with the people protesting the war,” says Kerrey. “I did not feel as close to them as the people I served with.” (As a student at Berkeley, however, Kerrey worked with antiwar activist Allard Lowenstein to register new voters.)

In fact, Kerry says, some of his wartime friends “were not supportive of what I did.” Not all of them thought pride as a veteran could be reconciled with opposition to the war. Still, he believes that time has brought most of the these people to the view that he and the other protesters were right: “Nowadays most of the people who had second thoughts about it have come around to realize — most of them, not all, but most — that it was a mistake.”

EVEN THOUGH Kerry personally turned against the war, he still saw — and sees — value in military service. “The duty was extraordinarily exciting and rewarding and challenging. I learned an enormous amount from it,” he says, though he acknowledges that “being shot at” is not fun. Kerry praises military service for management and character training: “I think a lot of people who don’t get the discipline or [the chance to serve] miss something.”

Yet he’s not willing to criticize members of his generation in leadership positions — men like Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, and former president Clinton — for failing to serve. “I have infinite respect and love for the guys who served and the bond that we all have, which is unlike anything anyone else will have, but I’m not going to hold it against the other person because they made a different choice,” he says. The most he’ll say about such people, particularly those who are now hawkish on foreign policy, it that their failure to serve “affects my view of the depth of their understanding.” He adds: “It certainly clouds my sense of that person, but I’m not going to personalize it.”

Kerry also emphasizes that age differences radically altered the way people approached the war. The war as fought in 1965 — heavy on advisers — was different from the war of Tet and Khe Sahn in 1968. And Kerry, who was in college during the Kennedy presidency, experienced the war differently from those who faced the draft under an increasingly discredited Johnson in 1968. By the early 1970s, things had changed yet again. The South Vietnamese faced a largely conventional threat from North Vietnam. Besides, throughout the prosecution of the war, the military gave personnel only one-year tours, which meant that the soldiers and sailors who confronted the enemy came in with none of the institutional knowledge of their predecessors.

An increasingly influential school of thought now sees Vietnam as one battle in the Cold War, along with Korea and other conflicts. In 1999, Michael Lind pressed that point in Vietnam: The Necessary War (Free Press). What does Kerry think of this thesis? “I think in the end you can make an argument that there were some salutary consequences notwithstanding the outcome,” he says. “The energy expended in it probably had a long-term outcome for the Cold War.” But does this mean that the onetime war protester thinks the war was really worth it? No. “You could make the argument,” Kerry says. “I personally think the outcome [of the Cold War] would have been the same.... I think you could have avoided a lot of grief by avoiding it in the first place, and I still believe that.”

One fact about Vietnam cannot be erased or spun: more than 58,000 Americans lost their lives there. More Marines died in the Vietnam War than in World War II. Kerry still believes that price was far too high. But now, unlike 30 years ago, he’s willing to raise the possibility that the hawks may have had at least half a point — and to talk publicly about Viet Cong wrongdoing. His willingness to discuss the Vietnam era in new terms suggests that America may be willing to think about that period in a new way as well. But we won’t know that for sure until 2004.

Seth Gitell can be reached at sgitell[a]phx.com.