Vietnam. Will it never go away? It is a thorn that lies embedded deep within the soul of each man and woman who served there, a thorn that works its way inexorably to the surface at unexpected and awkward moments. Senator Bob Kerrey had such a thorn buried deep, but it finally wormed its way to the surface and the world heard of an ill-fated patrol that ended with women, children, and old men dead in a heap in the center of a remote village.

Now historian Joseph Ellis, fresh on the heels of a tremendously successful new book on the Founding Fathers, has found himself caught up in the tangle of his own lies about Vietnam. Last week the Boston Globe broke the story that Ellis, a Pulitzer Prize winning historian on the faculty of Mount Holyoke College, had fabricated stories about service in Vietnam. He claimed to have been in the 101st Airborne and to have served on General William Westmoreland's staff. In fact, Ellis spent his whole time in the military teaching history at West Point.

The irony in this is that for many years there wasn't a whole lot of cachet to be found in having served in Vietnam. On the contrary, it was hard to find anyone willing to talk about it, especially the vets themselves, who felt the big chill of public disapproval upon their return.

You can't understand it unless you have been walking down a street in uniform and had someone spit at your feet or you have been confronted by a grieving mother who asks you why you came back and her boy didn't. The old soldiers from the greatest generation were slow to accept the newest crop of veterans as brothers in arms. Small wonder vets were reluctant to talk to anyone about their experiences, including other vets.

Somewhere in the late '70s and early '80s that began to change. The Vietnam Memorial helped close the wounds and open a floodgate of memories. Vietnam showed up in such movies as Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, and Platoon. Vietnam also had a second run as a television war, starting with a supporting role in Magnum PI and moving to the lead role in shows like China Beach and Tour of Duty.

All of a sudden it was cool to have been in Vietnam. Vets were still reluctant to share stories with outsiders, but at least they were talking to each other. Hardest hit by this new Vietnam chic were those men who had stretched out their student deferments to avoid service and who now found themselves to be on the fringe of the war stories. Where once it was great to have been a peace marcher, now a stint in Nam looked pretty good on the resume.

Maybe that's why Ellis started embellishing his military record with his own fictional tour of duty. Certainly it helped in his role as the teacher of a very popular course called ''Vietnam and American Culture.'' Students were especially impressed with his anecdotes. One student is quoted a saying that Ellis's Vietnam stories ''changed the dimension of the course. His having that personal experience gave the course more gravity.''

The idea that Ellis was making it up was shocking to both students and colleagues. Given his impressive academic credentials, most are wondering why he felt he needed to say anything, never mind outright lies. ''It's sort of like President Bill [Clinton],'' one fellow academic is quoted a saying. ''How could someone that smart do something that dumb?''

Professor Ellis's response was brief and contrite: ''Even in the best of lives, mistakes are made. I deeply regret having let stand and later confirming the assumption that I went to Vietnam. For this and any other distortions about my personal life, I want to apologize to my family, friends, colleagues and students. Beyond that circle, however, I shall have no further comment.''

Life is indeed a bitch. You spend years building a career and a family, you are within reach of all your goals, when all of a sudden something stupid you did jumps up and threatens your entire universe. What is it about my generation of middle aged men that has left us so vulnerable to these late blooming catastrophes? Is it all just a coincidence that Vietnam figures either directly or indirectly in many of these scandals? For the men of my generation, was our internal compass knocked askew by the choices we made to either serve or not serve, to either fight or take flight?

I can't speak for others but as for myself I know that I have lived a life that is spilt down the middle. There is me before I went in to the war, the kid from a small town who went to college and was drafted. There is me during the war, emotions compressed into a diamond hard soul that learned to feel little and care less. Then there was me after the war, for many years an uneasy amalgam of both of those other me's, an unstable chemistry of dreams and people and places all ended too early, trapped in a pressure cooker of slowly decompressing feelings.

What we did during the war, even if we never even went to the war, is something that my generation of men carries on our back, a weight that sometimes leads us to stumble and fall. For those who get caught up in the collateral damage of our occasional lapses -- friends, family, students, colleagues -- the fall from grace can often be their initial glimpse into a private world they scarcely knew existed.

But not everything that war teaches is bad. Those of us who did serve learned some important lessons: how to take our losses and move on, how to keep putting one foot in front of the other no matter how tired or discouraged we were. The poet Robert Graves summed it up pretty well in this quote about leaving the service after World War I:

''I still had the Army habit of commandeering anything of uncertain ownership that I found lying about; also a difficulty in telling the truth--it was always easier for me now, when charged with any fault, to lie my way out in Army style ... Also, I retained the technique of endurance: a brutal persistence in seeing things through, somehow, anyhow, without finesse, satisfied with the main points of any situation. But at least I modified my unrestrainedly foul language.

Something to think about.

June 23, 2001

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