But by 2004, after two White House terms, Clinton had grown candid about his own non-service (as well as that of other prominent American politicians):  "In the Vietnam era," Clinton said on the stump,  "most young men -- including the president, the vice president and me -- most of us could have gone to Vietnam and didn't go. And John Kerry said, 'Send me.'"

Of course, Bill Clinton is right. But the fact that as a young man John Kerry, already then the graduate of an exclusive New England boarding school and prestigious Yale University, broke ranks with those from similarly privileged backgrounds, enlisted and volunteered for combat service in Vietnam, which counted for next to nothing among U.S. voters last November.

In fact, the evidence is mounting that for aspiring presidential candidates, service -- even heroic service in Vietnam -- is not a political asset, but rather a political liability that non-veteran opponents effectively exploit.

In 1992, former Nebraska Governor and now Senator Bob Kerrey, who had earned his nation's highest honor -- the Medal of Honor -- while losing his leg in Vietnam, was seen as a formidable contender for the Democratic nomination. The Kerrey campaign, which was not nearly as good as Bill Clinton's, was damaged by hit men from other campaigns -- including Clinton's -- who slandered the former Navy Seal as a  "baby killer." Democratic primary voters in 1992 were less swayed by Kerrey's awesome heroism than by ugly rumors planted by his opponents about the Vietnam vet's instability.

In 2000, Republican John McCain paid a heavy political price for his own Vietnam heroism, including five-and-a-half years as a POW in North Vietnam. Opponent supporters used smears to raise doubts about McCain's mental health, and even his patriotism and devotion to his fellow POWs. The most hateful branded the Arizona senator  "the Manchurian Candidate."

The 2004 presidential election was the fourth in a row won by the candidate who had avoided serving in his generation's war when the loser, as a young man, had actually gone to serve in the theater of combat where Americans were dying.

In 1992, Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush, who had left Yale after Pearl Harbor to become the youngest naval pilot of World War II. In 1996, Clinton defeated Bob Dole, severely wounded and much decorated World War II veteran. In 2000, George W. Bush, who had formally declined the option of serving in Vietnam and fought the battles of Amarillo and Lubbock in the Texas Air National Guard, defeated Al Gore, a Harvard graduate and son of a U.S. senator who had enlisted in the Army and served in Vietnam. The 2004 candidates' military records are well-known.

Contrast this recent history with the national experience after the Civil War, when every Republican president into the 20th century -- from Ulysses S. Grant to William McKinley -- campaigned trumpeting his devoted service in uniform to the Union.

Patriotism today has very little to do with what most of us learned in American history class. The patriot is no longer the admirable citizen who places the common good before his own individual comfort, who sacrifices herself for the safety and survival of her country. That definition is now quaint and obsolete. Patriotism, as redefined by tough-minded, tough-talking hawks, is not action, patriotism is ideology. This new, debased patriotism requires no personal risk, no sacrifice, no inconvenience.

America's premier military sociologist, Charles Moskos of Northwestern University, a former Army draftee, suggests that the total absence of American collective sacrifice today for the common defense makes the U.S. war in Iraq unique.

Moskos understands that this is the first U.S. war to be fought without a draft, to be financed by three tax cuts. Could it possibly be, Moskos muses,  "now that we pay soldiers to die for us, that Americans don't want to be reminded of sacrifice?"

Let us pray that that is not true. But it is now 30 years since the end of Vietnam, and no veteran of that war has ever sat in the White House.