The military records of Kerry and Bush have been the focus of a lot of attention. However, there has been little serious analysis on how the differing wartime experiences of these two men have effected their styles of leadership. Clearly the GOP has tried to frame this issue in the most simplistic terms imaginable: equivocating (Kerry) or standing firm (Bush). The issue of Kerry's protest activities notwithstanding, it is uncontested that he led his men in battle not only with valor and bravery, but also with honesty, integrity, and the earned trust of his men. Although how Bush would have behaved in similar circumstances is unknowable, his style of executive leadership would suggest that were he faced with the difficult task of uniting rough men in a common cause among jungle rot, threat of death, and the thousands of subhuman hallmarks of war, he would have done rather poorly. Men like him always do. Historical examples abound of guerrilla leaders who are intellectually dim, religiously pious, and determinedly myopic. The Hutus of the National Liberation Front (NLF), for example, were exceedingly pious:

...the 'genocidal attackers,' - ...that priest whom they forced to eat his own penis before they crucified him... those babies buried alive... those children impaled, sprinkled with gas and burned, in their school, by the principal himself... – are also excellent Christians, generally of the Adventist persuasion, who don't smoke, don't drink, arrive in the villages singing hymns at the top of their voices, and they consider Saturday a sacred day, devoted to prayer on which one must above all not shed blood. [Source]

Children of war usually are soldiers themselves, unable to comprehend political concepts beyond hazy notions of 'freedom'; but from what? War is the bailiwick of ignorance. And how deeply must one be committed to their cause, how driven to 'stay the course' must a person be, to train (or to be) a woman like this in Sri Lanka:

They taught the women who, like me, were not virgins to spend a day with a grenade in our vagina. They put replicas of the suicide-vest on our backs – those big heavy vests, stuffed with dynamite, with a detonator, a cable, and steel balls, which the Leader himself had conceived of after seeing them at the cinema in a Rambo movie. We had to live like that. We had to prepare ourselves for the day when we would throw ourselves on a target, pin them to the ground, and then we would activate the detonator and explode it.

The issue of war is an important one in the current campaign because it lets us see how our candidates act under enormous pressure in a terrain stripped of meaning; pressure that more often than not brings out the worst in people. In many ways, America's experience in Vietnam is quite similar to what's been happening in Burundi, Angola, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Columbia – all infernos of perpetual carnage. John Kerry, like few other exceptional men in the Senate (John McCain, Bob Kerry), has survived the kiln of war and been changed by it. He has learned from it. Bush, conversely, avoided war and relied on his connections and a collegiate conviviality to "lead". As a result, Bush is much more willing to not only settle geopolitical grievances via interposed populations, but to use such populations (mostly the helpless and the poor) to further abstract political ambitions. I agree completely that Bush is a leader. I agree with his Christian principles and quest for universal freedom and human rights. I disagree that his style of leadership is in any fundamental way different from that of a drug-wracked Mafioso in a banana republic: egotistical, unreflective, dogmatic, deeply religious, single-minded, simple, and entirely dependent on the institutions which protect him to assert a moral authority he himself does not possess. The accusation that John Kerry is a man who constantly changes is mind, and is therefore not fit to lead, reminded me of this passage I read recently about what a young Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., wrote while he was recovering from being shot in the chest at Balls Bluff during the Civil War:

He had found that he did not require a religious faith. Uncertainty – "I am able to take a leap in the dark" – turned out to be all the certainty he needed. The assurance that he had done his duty was a wholly adequate consolation.

At the end of these reflections, he adds a note. "It is curious how rapidly the mind adjust itself under some circumstances to entirely new relations -," he writes. "I thought for awhile that I was dying, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world – The moment the hope of life returned it seemed abhorrent to nature as ever that I should die -." "How rapidly the mind adjusts itself": the test of a belief is not immutability, but adaptability. Our reason for needing reasons is always changing.

Perhaps being shot at can open your eyes in ways that owning a professional baseball franchise can't. Perhaps it depends on what kind of man you are to begin with.