Neil Sheehan on what the Swift Boat Vets have missed:

The nation has yet to come to grips with what really happened in Vietnam, and Mr. Kerry’s accusers are among those who simply cannot and never will. They are driven by more than a political desire to further the fortunes of George Bush. Their remarks make clear that what they really hold against Mr. Kerry are his antiwar activities after his return and his testimony then that atrocities were being committed in Vietnam. They regard these as undermining the war effort and casting aspersions on their service. “We won the battle,” one of Mr. Kerry’s accusers, former Navy commander Adrian Lonsdale, said. “Kerry went home and lost the war for us.” The group’s second television commercial focuses on this issue, running bits of old news film of Mr. Kerry’s testimony in a 1971 Senate hearing, excerpting his remarks to twist their meaning.

By 1968, civilian deaths, the great majority from air strikes and artillery, were estimated at about 40,000 a year and seriously wounded at 85,000. The wholesale killing cheapened the value of Vietnamese life in American eyes. It created an atmosphere that fostered the massacre at My Lai hamlet on March 16, 1968, when 347 Vietnamese old men, women, boys, girls and babies were butchered. That same morning another 90 unarmed Vietnamese were slaughtered at a nearby hamlet by a second army unit…Mr. Kerry undoubtedly said some intemperate things in 1971. That is the way of youth. But he also showed the moral courage to try to persuade his fellow citizens to halt actions that were disgracing their nation.