Soldier and slander.

IN his cover story last issue on John Kerry's other Vietnam war record--his record, that is, of slandering American troops--Mackubin Thomas Owens may have made a mistake. Owens wrote that Kerry "will have to explain to his fellow veterans why he chose a path that dishonors their service." This may not be the case. The Owens article has been widely picked up, cited in the New York Times and on NBC's Nightly News among other places, but the press has shown no appetite for pressing Kerry about his 1971 testimony before the Senate. A brief recap: Kerry described the findings of something called the Winter Soldier Investigation, a project of anti-war activists such as Jane Fonda and Mark Lane, which trumped up stories of rape, torture, and other atrocities by American soldiers in Vietnam. As Owens wrote, the stories should have been unbelievable on their face (especially for veterans), were debunked even by anti-war liberals at the time, and have been further discredited since.

The media have brushed off the issue as irrelevant or a pointless "re-fighting" of the Vietnam War. But Kerry, who now surrounds himself with Vietnam veterans, has an obligation to explain whether he still believes his allegations, and if not, to apologize for them. Instead, his campaign seems determined to misrepresent his testimony, precisely because it is so indefensible.

According to a spokesman, Kerry "praised the noble service of his fellow servicemen and women." If so, this was the oddest "praise" soldiers ever received. The closest Kerry has come to having to account for his remarks was in an interview by a reporter for the Knight Ridder news service. Asked why he relied on the Winter Soldier Investigation, Kerry replied, "Because some of it was highly documented and very disturbing. I did in my heart what I thought was correct to help people understand what was going on. I've always honored the service of people over there. I never insinuated that everybody fell into one pot."

This is a statement shot through with mendacity. The Winter Soldier charges were not "highly documented," but totally unsubstantiated. Kerry didn't "help people understand what was going on," but rather helped publicize lies--and, as a decorated veteran, gave them more credibility than Jane Fonda ever could. He didn't "honor" the service of vets, but said "we are ashamed of ... what we were called on to do in Southeast Asia," and maintained that America "has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men [Vietnam veterans] who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence." Kerry peddled the Winter Soldier claim that atrocities were widespread, "not isolated incidents, but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command." These crimes tainted the nation--"the crimes threaten it," Kerry declared, "not Reds."

A limp defense of Kerry has been mounted by The New Republic, which has attacked NR for "deliberately misconstru[ing]" Kerry's testimony. According to the magazine, NR obscured the fact that "far from making the allegations himself, Kerry was simply repeating what other veterans themselves had admitted." As The New Republic itself admits, we explained this context accurately in our cover story. (Its quarrel is with the precise text on our cover.) In any case, Kerry did make the allegations himself when he chose to repeat them, and endorse them, in his testimony. It is also important whether the allegations are true. The New Republic accepts their accuracy without saying why. Other Kerry defenders have explained that Kerry's allegations of atrocities were only one paragraph in his testimony. But his testimony was predicated on the idea that the Vietnam War was an ongoing atrocity, which is why he opened it with his tales of war crimes.

Kerry thundered, "We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai." He allowed, under questioning, that the massacre was a "horrible aberration." And yet the main thrust of his comments was to present the massacre as the inevitable result of a sick American culture and its criminal war. Kerry said: "I think clearly the responsibility for what happened there ... lies in large part with this country, which allows a young child before he reaches the age of 14 to see 12,500 deaths on television, which glorifies the John Wayne syndrome, which puts out fighting man comic books on the stands ..." Kerry thought the U.S. was the problem in Vietnam, the criminal element, not the Communist North. He estimated that 3,000 people--a mere 3,000!--might have to leave South Vietnam in the event of a Communist victory. "Yes," he added, "there will be some recrimination but far, far less than the 200,000 a year who are murdered by the United States of America." Murdered. (In truth, the first three years of a Communist "peace" saw more deaths than the previous thirteen years of war.)

Kerry makes much of his "band of brothers," and he should indeed be proud of the company of such men. All the more reason to disavow his slander of them, and their cause.