The suspension of Joseph Ellis from the faculty of Mount Holyoke College occurred during the summer before my final year as a Dartmouth undergraduate. I remember a roundtable discussion in my senior History seminar. The professor, who also happened at that time to be the elegant feminist chair of the History Department, remarked that it was especially silly of such a bright and circumspect scholar as Ellis to fabricate war stories about Vietnam. Was this done, my prof asked, to give Ellis a patina of macho authority or a heroic first-person credibility in the evaluation of his subject? And if so, why? Ellis surely knew by 2001 -- and had secure enough a railing on the tenure track to be able to say by then -- that the real heroes of his generation were those who had actively avoided military service from 1962 to 1972. True, the draft made such avoidance an even more heroic feat, but conscription only works as an excuse for actuating disgraceful foreign policy if you believe the phrase "conscientious objector" to be a hollow euphemism for "draft-dodger." And then there were those who went willingly into the breech, as the current Democratic candidate for president did and as he and his base of contemporaries, many of whom sat out the war themselves, never tire of reminding us.

The clarifying and semi-apologetic cliché of Sixties peace activism ran that one was "anti-war, not anti-soldier." This is a delicate moral dichotomy to navigate, as no war can be fought without soldiers and not even the most conformist, duty-bound soldier is immune to having thoughts of his own about the war he's fighting. To claim otherwise is to elevate the rational separation of command and duty to a mind-numbing, near totalitarian level, not to mention spit on the graves of men like Wilfred Owen and Ron Ridenhour and turn a deaf ear to women like Jessica Lynch. (Michael Moore will tell you these are the only people worth listening to on matters of bellicosity.)

So it followed for careful critics of the Vietnam War that American troops had been deceived-bullied and coerced into doing the bidding of an imperialist government looking to conquer Southeast Asia. The domino theory as a check on Soviet expansionism was, in updated parlance, "sold" to them as sound policymaking, just as WMD and the imminent threat of Saddam Hussein is now said to have been sold to our troops in Iraq as their chief reasons for being there.

In his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, John Kerry claimed membership to this corps of deceived Vietnam veterans, a clearly "bipartisan" organization since quite a few ex-soldiers who continued to believe the cause of fighting Communism in Indochina was a just one were nevertheless inclined to admit that, given the option to do it all over again, they would not. They were now, to borrow a phrase from a haunting Philip Larkin poem about another form of victimization, the "less deceived."

What troubles me about John Kerry and the current trumpeting of his Vietnam record is that, judging by his theatrics at the Democratic Convention and the comments he's made elsewhere on the stump, he'd gladly leap at the chance to fight this deceptive war all over again. It's his role in the one we're waging now he's not so sure about.

I don't know anyone who would claim John McCain is one to shy from brandishing his military credentials. To be sure, his tenure in Vietnam served as the ethical backdrop and much pointed-to elephant in the room of his presidential bid in 2000, a year when "character" was in desperate need of return to the White House. Yet McCain's reflections as a Navy pilot and POW never failed to register without a thank-God-that-hell-is-over-with sobriety of tone, the absence of which would be excusable for someone under the psychic strain of justifying a hell as gruesome as the one he went through. McCain never repudiated the war that kept him locked up for half a decade in a third world martial jail. Whatever you think of his politics and however curious you may be of the unspoken moral contradictions he continues battle, one thing about the Arizona senator is clear: his stoicism is non-negotiable. Yet such is not the case for McCain's across-the-aisle colleague, who came home to become the most eloquent anti-war veteran and then forgot his eloquence.

One month ago we were given to hear the following: "John Kerry, reporting for duty."

A big smile and a winsome delivery and I can't have been the only one left wondering, what does he mean, "Reporting for duty"? I thought he had reported already and come, at great agony and medal-shirking pathos, to regret it. And are not the hard lessons learned from that experience the foundations of Kerry's smarter-than-Bush policies for postwar Iraq? Whence the revisionist call to arms for an ended battle? This is either the guilty conscience escaping from an ex-protestor, or the mumblings of a time-lapsed delusional afflicted with post-traumatic stress syndrome. In any event, we have gone from the less deceived back to the deceived, and all in the convenient span of a national election cycle. History, as Joseph Ellis should have known better, often repeats itself in the worst possible way.

Consider how much credit has been paid by the sanguinary and suddenly retro-hawkish left to Kerry's willingness to sign up for service. Typically this credit has been paid in contrast to George W. Bush's reluctance to even leave the state of Texas in the sixties, much less don a National Guard uniform when doing so might have really meant something. Bill Clinton's unmistakably face-saving act of self-effacement at this year's convention gave us a new catchphrase in a season already glutted with them. "Send me!" cried John Kerry, repeatedly. Ah, but that all depends on what the definition of "me" is...

Kerry has boasted of having been convinced to enlist in 1966 by no less of a figure than William Bundy, a personal friend of the family and Lyndon Johnson's assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs (also brother to McGeorge Bundy, national security advisor under both Kennedy and Johnson). The younger, still-living JFK was evidently wonderstruck by all things redolent of Hiannisport at that time, and most likely he felt an expectation to live up to the legacy of his slain icon and monogrammatic twin. Though it's no compliment to even a naïve 22 year-old that all it took to transplant him from New Haven to the Mekong Delta was a single dorm room bull session with one of the least wise, but most escalationist, "wise men." And this was before Kerry gave a class oration at his Yale commencement in which he spoke critically of the war he was about to join:

"What was an excess of isolationism [in American foreign policy] has become an excess of interventionism... We have not really lost the desire to serve. We question the very roots of what we are serving."

Wait a minute. That sounds unambiguously like someone who sees the folly of shouldering a rocket launcher against the forces of Ho Chi Minh. The "roots" to which Kerry alluded, however, were not to be questioned for very long; he shipped out shortly after delivering this speech. (Indeed, if one wished to uncover the genesis of his now-infamous "flip-flop" on the issues, this oration and the act that followed it would be a good place to start looking.)

It'd be nice if Kerry preferred to brag that he's grown up a lot since those days of anxiety of political influence, or at least spoke more unequivocally about what kind of influence Vietnam had on him. If being harangued into fatigues by a mediocre ideologue is proudly still a suasive high-water mark, then should anyone with higher standards than those of the Anybody But Bush camp be demanding a Kerry-picked group of advisors to extricate us from the present "quagmire" in Iraq? And should the sitting president be gleefully assailed for saving his own ass when, as Kerry also indicated in his Senate testimony, many young souls still stuck in the jungle were desperate to do likewise?

This brings us to the larger point about the debate over Vietnam in this election: namely, why it's being had at all. Apart from the periodic recrudescence of an event said to have been the existential "death of American innocence," what does this historic war have to do with present one - and I don't just mean in Iraq but around the world, being prosecuted against the agents of theocratic fascism? The V-word is as non sequitur in the current discourse as the words Hohenzollern or Hapsburg or kaiser would have been in the one of 1939. Ask yourself: should a plebiscite of World War I veterans have been necessary to determine US involvement in World War II? If so, would we have appreciated its results, knowing what we now know about Hitler's ambitions, and knowing then the enervating impact the Great War had had on its participants?

If epaulets were the sine qua non of foreign policymaking, we would not have to worry about the exploitation of the Vietnam War by a candidate for the presidency of the United States. There would be no Vietnam War to discuss, just as sure as there would be no United States.

Perhaps that other popular catchphrase of the year has nailed the sentiment precisely. It's time to move on.