Charles Krauthammer dissects The Vietnamization of John Kerry.

Kerry in turn has been one of the most important shapers of the meaning of Vietnam for the rest of the country. Over the course of his three decades in public life, he has presented Vietnam in three different ways.

First, the one that electrified the nation and made him famous was Vietnam as moral outrage, a crime, a place where U.S. soldiers “with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command” acted like “the armies of Genghis Khan.” That was Kerry in his antiwar phase, testifying before Congress in 1971.

Second, Vietnam as a strategic error, a quagmire stumbled into by a well-meaning nation. That was Kerry for the next 30 years. In a now-famous Senate speech denouncing U.S. support for the Nicaraguan contras, Kerry cited his own searing experiences in Vietnam (and Cambodia, he claimed) as an object lesson in not intervening abroad.

Third, presented to the nation at this year’s Democratic convention: Vietnam as field of glory. Hence the flourish and fanfare for the Swift boat vets, the biopic featuring riverboat exploits, culminating in “I’m John Kerry, and I’m reporting for duty.”

Unfortunately for Kerry, field of glory does not work in a place he himself once proclaimed the scene of a crime. There is simply no escaping the dissonance of glorying in a military service of which Kerry said, as he concluded his 1971 statement to Congress, “We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service.”