John Kerry's views were formed in Vietnam - now they are in tunewith the times again, writes Conor O'Clery, North America Editor.
On March 17th, 1969, John Kerry hoisted an Irish flag on an oar and led his crew to the An Thoi Officers' Club at a US coastguard HQ in South Vietnam to celebrate St Patrick's Day. He and his band of brothers in Vietnam got very drunk. Kerry, commander of a PCF-94 patrol boat on the Mekong Delta, recalled later that "we fought imagined Viet Cong and charged a few people and sang and shouted". The US naval lieutenant had good reason to celebrate. As a thrice-wounded officer, he was being sent home from the combat zone. He had already earned three purple hearts and been awarded the Bronze Star for rescuing a Green Beret under fire and a Silver Star for jumping off his boat and shooting dead a Viet Cong soldier armed with a rocket-launcher.
During his tour, Kerry had often cruised along the Co Chien River deep in the Delta. I went there in 2000 on the 25th anniversary of the end of the war to talk to people about their experiences at the hands of the Americans. After a quarter of a century there were many with bitter memories of what US forces had one.
In the town of Vinh Long I came across a former Viet Cong nurse called Dung, who runs a little provision shop. Over tea among boxes of soap and electric fans, she recalled that "my older brother's seven children were killed, all but one, and my mother was beaten by American soldiers who broke her ribs". She added that "I have a lot of hatred for Americans, I will hate them till I die. I cannot forget the sight of people dying, and being raped by American soldiers".
John Kerry himself detailed the atrocities of American troops in his diaries, and the casual slaughter of peasants, which made him more and more disenchanted with the war as time went by.
After he returned home in 1969, Kerry joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). According to the just- published Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, by Douglas Brinkley (where the St Patrick's Day celebration is described), Kerry gathered evidence from other returned soldiers of how they tortured and raped Vietnamese women, burned homes and machine-gunned villagers.
Kerry, a native of Massachusetts, was one of 1,000 veterans who travelled to Washington for a VVAW protest in 1971. The demonstration was called Dewey Canyon 111, in mockery of the name given to a military operation by the Nixon administration. Kerry had made anti-war speeches and was invited to address a Senate committee investigating the war, chaired by Senator William Fulbright.
It was a turning-point in public opinion about the war. Kerry's voice, said Senator George McGovern, added a new dimension to the criticism of the Nixon administration. Kerry argued to the hearing that South Vietnamese and American servicemen were equally victims of the war. He accused the US government of war crimes through policies such as free fire zones, carpet bombings and the torture and execution of prisoners. He told how he had been instructed to shoot anything that moved on the Mekong Delta during US-imposed curfew hours and how other veterans had testified to mutilation and random killings.
That testimony climaxed with a question that electrified the audience of officials and veterans: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam. How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
On that day, Kerry, according to Brinkley, became the face of the anti-war protest. Even Nixon was impressed by his performance. He was different from the "bearded weirdos", he told his aides, Henry Kissinger and H.R. Haldeman.
"He did a superb job," conceded Haldeman, who called him "a Kennedy-type guy - he looks like a Kennedy, and he talks exactly like a Kennedy".
Later, Kerry, along with hundreds of other veterans, threw medals and ribbons over a fence towards a statue of John Marshall, the first US chief justice, to show their disgust about the war. Kerry threw only his ribbons and a couple of medals belonging to absent comrades. Brinkley discloses that he still has his medals in a drawer in his Boston study.
The medal incident confirmed a belief among colleagues that Kerry had political ambitions and was trying to have it both ways. Morley Safer of CBS asked him in a 60 Minutes interview: "Do you want to be president of the United States?" Kerry replied that it was a "crazy question". However, shortly afterwards, he made an unsuccessful run for the US Congress, and in 1984 he secured a Senate seat in Massachusetts.
At the conclusion of his testimony to the Fulbright hearing, Kerry said: "Thirty years from now, when a man is walking down the street without an arm or a face or a leg, and a little boy asks him why, he will have to say 'Vietnam'."
Thirty-three years have passed, the idea of running for president is no longer crazy, and many of the veterans who demonstrated with Kerry are turning up at his campaign rallies in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, some in wheelchairs, some missing an arm or a leg.
Two days before the Iowa caucus, a man whom Kerry rescued in the Mekong Delta, Jim Rassman, turned up at a rally in Des Moines for the first reunion since that day, and told his tale to the crowd.
He was an army lieutenant at the time, he said, and travelling on another patrol boat when they were ambushed. He was blown overboard by an explosion and swam underwater to avoid being cut down by other patrol vessels fleeing the scene. Every time he surfaced for air he was shot at. Kerry saw him, turned his boat around and raced back. Rassman clung on to scramble nets thrown over the side, but couldn't climb aboard. Kerry, wounded in one arm, pulled him to safety, despite the fire from the bank. Rassman, now a retired police officer, said Kerry undoubtedly saved his life.
Rassman is just one of dozens of Vietnam veterans who have joined the Kerry campaign for the Democratic nomination for president. It isn't the first time they have backed him. In 1984, after his opponent in the Massachusetts Democratic primary, Congressman James Shannon, attacked him for protesting against a war in which he had chosen to fight, Kerry asked for an apology.
Shannon's reply, "That dog won't hunt", infuriated many veterans, and a group calling themselves the "doghunters" rallied to help Kerry win the Massachusetts race against the odds.
Kerry is not the only Vietnam war hero fighting for the Democratic nomination. The retired general, Wesley Clark, was also wounded in the fighting. He chose to continue his career in the military. The Massachusetts senator has a clear edge over the general, however, in the crucial battle for the support of veterans, who numbered about 65,000 of the 463,000 registered Democratic and independent voters in New Hampshire, and are well-represented in southern states.
Clark has been supported at events by classmates from West Point, but their presence doesn't have the same emotional impact as the scarred and wounded Vietnam veterans.
The key test will come on Tuesday in South Carolina, which has an exceptionally large veteran population. It also has many wounded soldiers who fought in the Iraq war. In a signal that he will take the fight for the veterans' support to the president, Kerry now regularly accuses Bush of cutting veterans' benefits and under-funding military hospitals.
The president doesn't understand that "the first obligation of patriotism is to keep faith with those who fought for their country", he says.
To have been a protester against the Vietnam War was, not so long ago, a political liability, especially for someone such as Bill Clinton, who dodged the draft. But in the current atmosphere of growing criticism of the war in Iraq, and mounting casualties, it will be difficult for President Bush, who avoided Vietnam service, to turn the issue against Kerry, especially with veterans at his side such as Jim Rassman - who, as he tells Kerry supporters, is a Republican.