[woofie]

To this day, friends and family say, Vietnam haunts Kerry with nightmares that regularly stir him from his sleep, screaming.

In one recurring dream he is consumed by snakes in the Mekong Delta. In another, according to Heinz, he shouts: "Get down! I got the women and the children! Get down, get down!" In the throes of such a dream, Kerry often leaps out of bed and crashes into bedroom furniture, Heinz told a gathering of the senator's supporters in New York recently.

He also sees his presidential aspirations disappear before his eyes...

[Jim Robinson]

Saving the children? I heard he shot a fleeing wounded Vietnamese teenager in the back and got a medal for it.

[Jim Robinson]

(Of course no one actually saw him doing it.... hmmm wonder if he was filming the event?)

[Jim Robinson]

Kerry says he shot his war footage on a Super 8 camera he bought at the PX in Cam Ranh Bay. Asked how he filmed in the heat of battle, he demonstrated, gripping an imaginary ship's helm and thrusting his camera hand out to the side. "I'd steer, or direct, or fire my gun, and hold onto it when I could," Kerry says. "Sometimes the other guys would pick it up."

Watching the film and listening to Kerry's narration is to take a strange journey inside the war. There is Kerry in cutoff shorts, working on his suntan next to a Viet Cong prisoner bound and blindfolded. There are the splashes of incoming rocket fire. There is a mortar blowing a thatch hut into oblivion. Through the silent footage, there is a sense of a young man turning against the war as he filmed it.

"This was America's effort to win the war right here," he says as the film showed soldiers dousing gasoline on huts in a small village before setting them on fire. "There was always a kind of sick, sweet smell of burning wood."