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Senator John Kerry has used his Vietnam war service skillfully to win his party's nomination. Yet Senator Kerry's stump-speech war hero boasts hide an ugly reality: Kerry has often used his 4 months of service in Vietnam as a prop in his 35 years in politics not to build up our military and our national security, but to tear it down.

Soon after leaving the military, John Kerry became a leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War protest group. This group was one of the more radical of anti-war protest organizations. The group, including Kerry, advocated the "People's Peace Treaty" that proposed peace on the terms of the VietCong and the Communist Hanoi regime and supported Hanoi's position to use American POWs as a bargaining chip in negotiations. Group members in protests wore tattered fatigues marked with pro-communist graffiti and marched under the flag of the Communist VietCong.

In April 1971, Kerry testified to Congress that American soldiers in Vietnam had "personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam." Kerry testified, "We all did it." He said these claims were "not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command." As B.G. Burkett points out in his book "Stolen Valor", these allegations were based almost entirely on trumped-up stories from phony veterans who alleged atrocities they could not possibly have committed or witnessed.

Kerry had defamed the military to further the anti-war cause.

Kerry used his war service as a prop to garner attention to his activism and as a shield to deflect criticism of how his actions harmed the military. Kerry even used his own medals for political theater when he threw what appeared to be his medals over a fence in front of the Capitol building. (His medals ended up on display in his Senate office later when they became something to be proud of again.)

Over the years, the politician John Kerry has followed the path laid out by his anti-war activism.

Senator Kerry helped the Communist Vietnamese regime in the 1990s, advocating normalization with Vietnam and voting to end the trade embargo against Vietnam. He prevented the Vietnam Human Rights Act from coming to a vote in the Senate, deflecting concerns about human rights abuses in Vietnam. His favors to Vietnam were rewarded. In 1992, Vietnam granted Colliers International, a company headed by Kerry's cousin C. Stewart Forbes, a contract worth $1 billion as the exclusive real estate agent representing Vietnam.

Senator Kerry consistently sought to downsize military and intelligence budgets and stop key military procurements. In 1995, Senator Kerry voted to freeze defense spending for seven years. In the 1980s, Kerry opposed the strategic modernization effort proposed by President Reagan, instead supporting the nuclear freeze. Yet Reagan's aggressive approach forced the Soviet Union to reform internally in ways that ultimately led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and Cold War victory.

When asked in the South Carolina debate if President Bush overstated the terrorist threat, Kerry said, "I think there has been an exaggeration." This comment echoed his 1971 Congressional testimony: "I think we are reacting under cold-war precepts which are no longer applicable. ... I think it [the Communist threat] is bogus, totally artificial. There is no threat. " Yet when the Communists invaded and took over South Vietnam in 1975, over a million Vietnamese 'boat people' were forced to flee.

In 1991, Kerry voted against the first Gulf War resolution to force Saddam out of Kuwait. After Kerry voted for the Iraq War resolution in October 2002, he voted against funding for the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq in September 2003. One could say that Kerry voted against finishing in 2003 what he voted to start in 2002, but Kerry insists his vote for military action in Iraq was only to support diplomatic efforts. Has he not noticed that hollow threat diplomacy always fails?

For both Kerry and Bush, it's not the service of their youth but their actions as public leaders that indicate their Presidential mettle.
Given Senator Kerry's questionable national security views and record, it is fair to ask: Who really has gone AWOL on our national security?