Want one more example of John Kerry the phony? Remember that speech he made to Congress as a returned Vietnam War hero in 1971, when he slammed his fellow vets as sadistic killers, and became the hero of the antiwar movement? Well, he delivered it all right, but the speech was written by a professional speechwriter who tutored him in how to give it.

Ever hear of B.G.Burkett? He wrote the book, “Stolen Valor,” a history of pretenders to military glory in the Vietnam War. It won the William Colby award for the outstanding military book in 2000. Burkett is considered an expert witness on unmasking Vietnam fabricators who have included a congressman and a Pulitzer Prize-winning professor.

No, John Kerry was not the congressman, but he’s in the book, pages 135-136 and 165, and Burkett discussed him from Dallas on one of the talk radio programs just the other day. In the book, Burkett described a march by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War in April, 1971, after which soldiers threw their war medals over the wire fence at the Capitol Building.

“Some broke down and cried,” said Burkett. “One of them was John Kerry, Vietnam Navy veteran and aspiring politician who had been among those who organized the protest.

“Kerry flung a handful of medals he had received the Silver Star, a Bronze Star Medal and three Purple Hearts over the fence. Kerry spoke later that week before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee putting a face on the antiwar movement far different from the one seen before the scruffy hippie or wild-eyed activist. Kerry represented the All-American boy, mentally twisted by being asked to do terrible things, then abandoned by his government.”

The public took what they saw and heard at face value, said Burkett, “not understanding that they were watching brilliant political theater. Kerry, a Kennedy protégé with white-hot political aspirations, ascended center stage as both a war hero and as an antiwar hero throwing away his combat decorations. His speech, apparently off the cuff, was eloquent, impassioned.

“But years later, after his election to the Senate, Kerry’s medals turned up on the wall of his Capitol Hill office. When a reporter noticed them, Kerry admitted the medals he had thrown that day were not his. And Kerry’s emotional, from-the-heart speech had been carefully crafted by a speech writer for Robert Kennedy named Adam Walinsky, who tutored him on how to present it.”

“Kerry did not return from Vietnam a radical antiwar activist,” wrote Burkett. “Friends said that when Kerry first began talking about running for office, he was not visibly agitated about the Vietnam War. ‘ I thought of him as a rather normal vet,’ a friend said to a reporter, ‘glad to be out but not terribly uptight about the war.’ Another acquaintance who talked to Kerry about his political ambitions called him, ‘a very charismatic fellow looking for a good issue.’”

Kerry had found one and wrapped himself in his Vietnam veteran status, said Burkett. He also had no compunction against using in his 2004 biography, “Tour of Duty,” a picture taken on that April, 1971, day of his then-wife, Julia, consoling him as he is curled up on the front lawn of the Capitol, weeping over the emotion of having just tossed away combat medals. What Kerry said and did that week, said Burkett on the radio, gave aid and comfort to the enemy, prolonging the war by encouraging the enemy to fight on. And his testimony before Congress helped establish and perpetuate the image of Vietnam veterans as sadistic killers.

Kerry admitted that he had seen no atrocities but learned of them from veterans whose stories he believed. My Lai notwithstanding, most atrocity stories were deliberate lies spread by antiwar activists calculated to turn public opinion against our intervention in the war, said Burkett.

So tell me this. Why is President Bush called a liar over why he went to war in Iraq when he was told by our own and British intelligence that there were weapons of mass destruction there? How come Bush is a liar and Kerry is not, if both men believed and repeated what they were told?

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, WA, 98340.).