HOW HE SEES IT Kerry's gaffes remind voters of fickle nature of Dem's nominee

By E. THOMAS McCLANAHAN
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
Time has played a strange trick on John Kerry, who has based much of his candidacy on his service in Vietnam. The controversy over what Kerry did or did not do to earn his medals may never be resolved, given the defects of human memory.
But what Kerry said in 1971 about American atrocities is of a different order, because it was so galling to those who were still fighting at the time -- or those who were held by the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese, and learned of Kerry's remarks from their exultant captors.
The dominant message of Kerry's campaign isn't about taxes or health care or Social Security or Iraq or any other of the major issues of the day. All that's drowned out in favor of: Elect me. I'm a war hero. I've experienced combat. I won't send our young men and women to war without a good reason.
Anyone who dons such a mask in such a high-stakes election practically invites others to tug at the edges, and the controversy of the past few weeks has produced a few telling loose ends -- problems that might not be damaging to another candidate, but present difficulties for Kerry because he has relied so much on his hero's image.
Although Kerry has said his anti-war activities were a "little bit excessive," and admits that he could have "phrased things more artfully at times," he has never repudiated the statement that he and "thousands of other soldiers" committed atrocities on a routine basis with the full knowledge of their commanders.
Pride or shame?
Thirty years ago he told Congress he was ashamed of what he did in Vietnam, but now he refers to his service with pride. ("I defended this country as a young man, and I will defend it as president.") Into this contradiction flows all the doubts about Kerry's capacity to see through a given course of action.
In many ways it's the smaller controversies that seem the most revealing. He quibbled, for example, about whether he threw his ribbons or medals, or somebody else's medals or ribbons, over that fence in 1971.
You wonder why it doesn't occur to him that most people understand it makes no difference. Ribbons or medals, Kerry publicly repudiated everything those military decorations stood for.
But he has played this game too long and he has become sloppy and self-dramatizing, as when he drew a parallel between his personal experience and the plot of the movie "Apocalypse Now."
"On more than one occasion," he told the Boston Herald in 1979, "I, like Martin Sheen in 'Apocalypse Now,' took my patrol boat into Cambodia. In fact, I remember spending Christmas Day of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas."
Years later, in a 1986 Senate speech, Kerry said the memory of that Christmas in Cambodia -- and hearing President Richard Nixon deny a U.S. presence in that country -- had been "seared, seared" into his memory.
Except that Nixon was not yet president, and as Kerry's campaign now admits, Kerry wasn't in Cambodia at that time.
He tripped up again last year in a Martin Luther King Day speech. "I remember well, April 1968," Kerry intoned. "I was serving in Vietnam -- a place of violence -- when the news reports brought home to me and my crew mates the violence back home ..."
Except that he wasn't "in" Vietnam at the time, he was offshore on a Navy ship in relative safety.
Easy conclusion
Given Kerry's yearning for the spotlight at any cost and his history of contradictory positions, every one of these gaffes reminds people of his fickleness, just as putting an extraneous "e" on the end of "potato" recalled all the suspicions about Dan Quayle's lack of intellectual heft.
On the question of whether Kerry deserved the medals he won, the burden of proof remains on those who say he didn't. But given his over-the-top 1971 testimony about atrocities, the unexpected controversy over his Vietnam service is a kind of poetic justice.
XE. Thomas McClanahan is a member of the Kansas City Star editorial board. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.