Disband of Brothers

A Split in Ranks of Veterans Over Kerry Has Its Roots in the Concept of Honor

Vietnam veterans opposed to John Kerry demonstrate outside the Fleet Center in Boston during last month's Democratic National Convention. (Rick Bowmer -- AP)

Honor: so intangible, yet so powerful. The glue, some soldiers say, of any fighting force; the raison d'etre of many a soldier.

The Honor Code. The Honor Guard. "Honor-bound to defend freedom." That's from a placard at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay. And that catchphrase from the Vietnam War, about an oh-so-elusive "peace with honor."

If it's military, it's about honor. Without it, a soldier is a rogue. A scoundrel. Perhaps a war criminal? A politically opportunistic veteran? A John E. O'Neill, he of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth? Or a Sen. John Kerry, the very decorated but embattled soldier who wants to be commander in chief?

So valued is this sense of honor that the allegation of dishonor hits like heavy ordnance. And for weeks, the Swift boat veterans have been firing away -- just as they feel they were fired on, by Kerry, some 33 years ago when the decorated young vet likened the U.S. military in Vietnam to war criminals.

For decades, some veterans have massaged their anger, have polished their grudge. Then they exploded on the scene with a vengeance, propelled by the presidential campaign, to do to Kerry what they believe he did to them: attach dishonor to his name. Why now after all these years? Some say it's politics. Some say it's the lasting sting of being called a war criminal.

Whatever it is now, it started as a battle over honor.

"In the old days, people fought duels over honor," says Mackubin "Mac" Owens, a retired Marine Corps colonel and a professor at the Naval War College. He's not one of the angry Swifties, as they are called, though he agrees that Kerry dishonored the troops by pointing up war crimes during his 1971 congressional testimony.

"In certain respects, what you have here is a latter-day example of a duel," Owens says. "In the old days, if I had been there and John Kerry had walked out of the Senate in 1971, I would have taken a glove and slapped him in his face and told him to choose his arms."

As if in combat, obscure veterans are popping up from the foxholes of their lives to support one side or the other.

Perhaps one of the best-known Vietnam veterans, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), is serving as a kind of arbiter of honor, pronouncing the Navy combat service of Kerry and the noncombat National Guard service of President Bush equally honorable.

This is about more than service, though. It's about the cultural wars that have rumbled along the country's ideological fault lines for decades since Vietnam.

It would be simple to paint the debate with stereotypes: between those who loved the smell of napalm in the morning and those who made love, not war. Really this is a debate about the morality of the Vietnam War itself -- between those who supported it and those who didn't; those who fought in it with no complaints and those who fought but then protested.

It parallels the fissures in society that have calcified over the past 30 years.

"Opposition to the war was conjoining with the civil rights movement, conjoining with the women's rights movement," says Roger Wilkins, a George Mason University historian.