Hume was perplexed. "Senator, let me see if I have this straight," Hume said. "You're saying that we're being too aggressive in our targeting of civilians and yet, not aggressive enough in our targeting of military targets? That we need to have such exquisite precision in our targeting that we don't hit any civilian targets and yet we have to somehow, at the same time, be more aggressive in what we're doing? Senator, do you think that is possible?"
Kerry insisted it was, saying that the U.S. should attack the Taliban front lines harder and be more careful about bombing near population centers. (If, as the Pentagon contends, Taliban forces are purposely relocating among civilians, the desire to separate the two may prove hard to realize.) Kerry seemed somewhat awkwardly caught between the hawkish desire to pursue all-out war and the dovish desire to avoid civilian casualties.
But these two schools of thought -- McCain's no-holds barred military mindset and Kerry's reluctant warrior/peacenik -- frequently unite, particularly on matters that might recall the war they fought in. Both men give Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld good marks. Both see the public as supportive of this war, as opposed to the one in which they fought. "The American people were never convinced -- even when they were supporting the war, and they were in the early years -- that this was a direct threat to the United States of America," McCain says. "They never believed that and they were probably right. We didn't think about it in terms of 5,000 Americans, innocent civilians, having been killed by VC."
Likewise, both men were upset when they heard another Pentagon spokesman, Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem, say on Oct. 24 that he was "a bit surprised at how doggedly [the Taliban] are hanging on to their power." The two men, with firsthand experience of the doggedness of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, winced at Stufflebeem's comments, which seemed to underestimate the Taliban in the same way that many accused the U.S. top brass of underestimating the Viet Cong.
"I was appalled by that briefing," says Kerry. "I was shocked by it. First of all, it runs counter to what most people who look at those folks and have studied them would say about them. These are hardened, devious, courageous, tough fighters. And all you have to do is look at what they did to the Russians and the British. That was an incredibly naove and conventional view being expressed."
McCain's take is less critical but no less disappointed. "He shouldn't have been" surprised, McCain says. "And even if he was, he probably shouldn't have said it."
McCain says he's concerned about a number of statements coming from the administration in the past few weeks: "When they say that the Taliban had been 'eviscerated' and it wasn't; when they say they're looking for moderate Taliban and there aren't any; when they say they don't want chaos to ensue and therefore ... we don't want the Taliban to fall too fast," he says. "At least in certain circles of the administration there was a misperception of the capabilities and tenacity of the Taliban."
But Kerry and McCain disagree as to how much the Taliban forces resemble the Vietnamese. McCain sees little in common, and likens the Taliban more to Cambodia's Khmer Rouge than to the Viet Cong.
"The VC were nationalists with a Communist overlay," he says. Afghanistan more resembles Cambodia in 1975, where "you had economic and social chaos in the country, so you have a very extreme group in charge. The North Vietnamese might have been cruel and oppressive ... but they were not the kind to kill someone because they were wearing glasses, as in the case of Pol Pot. Or, in the case of the Taliban, to shoot a woman in the soccer stadium because she watched a Western television program."
"There's a difference between oppression and insanity," McCain says.
Kerry, conversely, sees some definite similarities. The Taliban's habit of using civilians as shields reminds Kerry of the Viet Cong: "They'll be hiding in the towns, they'll come out and fight and then go back in and meld in with the population." Echoing American soldiers' complaints in that other war, Kerry predicts that "it's gonna be hard that way to tell who's Taliban and who isn't."
For this reason, Kerry says he was "delighted" when B-52s began carpet-bombing Taliban troops last week. "That's why we want to concentrate on them while they're concentrated in one place."
McCain, too, says that he was "very encouraged" by the introduction of the B-52s. "We learned from the Vietnam war that we can't dilly-dally around. The war in those days was graduated escalation. And you can't do it with graduated escalation."
Another Vietnam lesson Kerry thinks the United States should take to heart is "know your enemy." The United States underestimated the Vietnamese, he argues. To prevent that from happening this time, Kerry says he's been sending his 99 senate colleagues stories he thinks they should be reading, including one by former New York Times executive editor Joe Lelyveld on the worlds of suicide bombers and a Washington Post piece that profiled an Islamic extremist being held prisoner by the Northern Alliance.
Kerry voices a final lesson from Vietnam that doesn't seem anywhere near the forefront of McCain's mind: Keep peppering the military with tough questions. "I'm not going to sit out there like some potted plant on TV" and just mindlessly support the war, he says. The military, he thinks, has learned the lesson of Vietnam. And then, raising a thought that surely McCain would agree with, he says, "The question is: Will the politicians learn the lessons and stay out and give the military a mission and get the job done?"
About the writer
Jake Tapper is Salon's Washington correspondent and the author of "Down and Dirty: The Plot to Steal the Presidency."
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