Disband of Brothers

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

"Why are they there? Well they're there for the dignity of serving the country, and they're doing the right thing," he says.

That's the "honor of service," he says. It makes it possible for people to accept the sacrifices involved.

But the moment of dishonor occurred in 1971. So why now?

"We're talking about commander in chief of the United States," he says of Kerry's presidential ambition.

The Swifties want him stopped.

Separate it from the presidential campaign, though, and the dispute over honor in the military is nothing new.

"Catfights over military service are as old as the republic," says G. Kurt Piehler, director of the Center for the Study of War and Society.

Take Longstreet and Lee, for instance. Gen. James Longstreet lost his honor, in the eyes of fellow Confederates, for criticizing the war strategy of Confederate commander Robert E. Lee during the Civil War.

"Virtually every war will create these controversies," says Piehler.

Already, the first drafts of history on the war in Iraq are laying the groundwork for future debates. Think Abu Ghraib. Think WMD or lack thereof.

The Iraq conflict -- another war full of controversy. The similarities haven't escaped Diane Acosta. She's a state prosecutor from Arizona who was visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial the other day when she said of Vietnam, "I think people always will debate it."

They will continue to question the morality of the war, whether there was honor in it.

They will ask: "Should we even be there? And once we're there, what do we do?"

Acosta's change of tense seems to conflate Iraq and Vietnam. The questions, she says, are "for both."

She and her husband, Don Acosta, retired from an arms manufacturer, aren't too taken with the whole debate about honor and who's got more of it. Don Acosta, 56, sees it simply.

"I have friends on that wall," he says solemnly. He's remembering one friend in particular, a Michigan kid named Mike Elmy.

"I'm flashing back right now to that afternoon," Acosta says of his youth in Pontiac. "The neighborhood was on the porch when the Army officials pulled up to tell them they'd found Mike's remains."

To Acosta, who did not fight in the war, the honor of service is in just being there. And Kerry was there.

"He could be on this wall, too. Very easily," Acosta says. "Did he cut and run? I just don't believe that. . . . Not that I'm a big Kerry man, 'cause I'm not."

He's a Bush man. Was in 2000, will be again. Still, he jabs a finger toward that granite wall and says emphatically of Kerry, "I think he stepped up [to the plate] with these folks."