By Michael Uhl, Globe Correspondent

How little the John Kerry celebrated in Douglas Brinkley's "Tour of Duty" as the quintessential Vietnam veteran typifies in educational or social status the vast majority of his contemporaries who also fought in that theater of conflict.

Christian Appy has demonstrated persuasively in "Working-Class War" the blue-collar composition of the American fighting forces in Southeast Asia, including the corps of young officers, among whom, even in the military academies, only 10 percent came from the professional class or above. Yet like another senator—the good Republican played by Derek Jacobi in the film “Gladiator” — Kerry might with equal grace proclaim, "I am with, not of, the people."

Therein lies the tale that Brinkley tenders in a lengthy, highly readable, and well-researched biographical history that draws generously from the diaries that Kerry, a young naval lieutenant, kept to document his wartime experiences, and from his extensive correspondence home. We learn that Kerry, a product of St. Paul's prep school and Yale University, chose to fight in Vietnam and did so bravely. He led with distinction the five-man crew of a small craft that patrolled and provoked the Viet Cong enemy in a web of inland waterways throughout the Mekong Delta. Kerry was wounded three times and decorated for valor. And, like many GIs in Vietnam, Kerry found that his conscience began to trouble him in the execution of his duties, especially the incessant, indiscriminate fire directed at apparent noncombatants.

Kerry killed an enemy under circumstances that are not entirely clear, but probably sanctioned by war's ambiguous rules of engagement. The incident, finessed somewhat clumsily in Brinkley's account, surfaced during Kerry's reelection campaign for the Senate in 1996 when he was questioned about having shot a wounded guerrilla who had already fallen. Kerry rallied several high-profile Vietnam veterans to defend his lightning decision to shoot an adversary who, while down, remained armed and potentially deadly.

Coming home, Kerry, according to his former wife, suffered nightmares and flashbacks. In this sharing of first the dangers and now the lasting sorrows of war, Kerry could authentically personify, if never truly represent, the Vietnam veteran community. As for his politics, Kerry had already developed while in-country cogent arguments for opposing the war. His decision to join Vietnam Veterans Against the War was a gesture of solidarity with veterans he called "brothers," as well as a risky tactical move for a man who had begun to plot his career in public service while still in high school.

His personal ambitions notwithstanding, Kerry gave clear public voice to the same position taken by the veterans group. In his appearance before William Fulbright's Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971, Kerry volunteered this straightforward testimony: "I committed the same kinds of atrocities as thousands of others in that I shot in free fire zones, used harassment and interdiction fire, joined in search and destroy missions, and burned villages. All of these acts were established policies from the top down, and the men who ordered this are war criminals."

Brinkley reports that Kerry parted company with the antiwar vets in the months immediately following his moment of celebrity, and over the years he has been called a betrayer of the cause by some former comrades. But Kerry had always taken pains to emphasize that he was "never outside the system." The difference is that those Vietnam veterans who have kept faith with kerry's antiwar arguments before the Senate still continue to advocate for that historical interpretation of their war, whereas Kerry has never been able to bring that piece of his ideals to the table for serious examination within the system. And yet, the boogeyman of Vietnam still haunts the corridors of power where war policy is forged, and its lessons never seem to fall from fashion.

"Tour of Duty" is a fresh and welcome retelling of these lessons, and of how acutely Kerry once wrestled with them. Brinkley inserts many details to enhance the verisimilitude of his portrait of both the era and the man. Nonetheless, a number of gaffes and bizarre formulations underscore a suspicion that the Vietnam era is not one in which the author is deeply positioned. Jolting references to Kerry's fellow combatants as "colleagues" are one thing. But the potboiler rhetoric used to describe the National Liberation Front — the Viet Cong are "treacherous," they "infest” the Delta — and its struggles for reunification with Hanoi is amateurish.

Brinkley carries the story forward to Kerry's present drive for his party's presidential nomination in which voters, it seems, can't decipher Kerry's stance on our current war with Iraq. And indeed, if Brinkley's skillful profile of his subject is accurate, one can easily imagine the anguished content of Kerry's interior monologue as he struggles to disentangle any scruples about Iraq from his memories of Vietnam. As a young, disaffected warrior, Kerry once dissolved such ambiguities in a rush of insightful empathy, asking himself "what it would be like to be occupied by foreign troops, to have to bend to the desires of a people who could not be sensitive to the things that really count in one's own country?" To what degree Kerry sets his politics today by this internationalist benchmark, no one, not even he, seems to know.

Michael Uhl led a military intelligence team in Vietnam with the 11th Infantry Brigade in 1968-69.

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© copyright 2004 The New York Times Company