Here's why a lot of Vietnam veterans don't support Sen. John Kerry's presidential ambitions: They believe Kerry is a political opportunist who betrayed them.

It has nothing to do with what Kerry did or didn't do when he served in Vietnam as a young naval officer in charge of a Swift boat.

It has everything to do with what he did when he returned from the war and aligned himself with such radical members of the anti-war movement as ardent North Vietnam supporter Jane Fonda.

Kerry entered the public spotlight when, as a representative of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971. He was handsome, intelligent, articulate, even at times eloquent. Clearly he was a young man with political aspirations, a Massachusetts JFK wannabe if ever there was one.

Kerry's testimony spanned two hours. In a nutshell, he told the committee that the United States should get out of Vietnam, that the war was wrong.

Well, just about everybody by that time knew that the war was wrong, none more than those who had been there to fight it.

The worst wrong of the Vietnam War was that the civilian government of this nation sent its young men in uniform off to bleed and die but refused to allow them to end the bleeding and dying by defeating the enemy as rapidly as possible.

To their immense credit, America's fighting men continued to perform their duties, fully aware that their sacrifices were unlikely to achieve any overall victory.

But that wasn't the focus of Kerry's Senate testimony about the conduct of the U.S. military in Vietnam.

Instead he focused on veterans' statements obtained a few months earlier during what the VVAW called its Winter Soldier Investigation.

He told the senators that these veterans "testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents, but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command ...

"They told the stories at times they 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 ..."

Well, you get the picture.

Of course, Kerry's portrayal of the American military's actions in Vietnam was identical to that of Jane Fonda and her ilk, that U.S. boys in Vietnam were "baby killers" on a genocidal rampage against a gentle, peace loving people.

The trouble with Kerry's characterization as obtained from the testimony of the so-called "winter soldiers" is that the veracity of their testimony was highly questionable.

In some cases, the horror tales of atrocities were embellishments of actual events or the products of overactive imaginations. In other cases, they were out and out fabrications.

In their book "Stolen Valor," authors B.G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley, as well as others, have looked at the Winter Soldier testimony.

Some of the "veterans" who claimed to have witnessed atrocities had never been to Vietnam. Others had been there but served in rear area jobs far from the fighting in the countryside. At least one wasn't even in the service, and a few who testified weren't anywhere near Detroit at the time the investigation convened there, meaning that their "testimony" was delivered by men pretending to be them.

Undoubtedly, some American soldiers committed crimes in Vietnam, as soldiers of all nations have done in all wars since the beginning of time. When such crimes and atrocities occur, the military investigates and the perpetrators are held accountable.

For Kerry, whether it was deliberate or a case of naivete, to perpetrate such a dishonest image of those who served in Vietnam is to slander and besmirch the characters of all who served in that difficult war with honor and bravery.

So if you wondered why decorated Vietnam War "hero" John Kerry is not universally embraced by his former comrades in arms, that's why.

This article was published by The Philadelphia Intelligencer.