COLUMN LEFT / BARBARA GARSON : The New Hero Fought War From Inside : Protest veterans will have political weight as the anti-war generation comes into its own.

Old soldiers may never die, but at a moment during the last election campaign, World War II veterans began their inevitable fade away. For the next twenty-five years, then, we’ll be faced with candidates who came of age during the Vietnam War. Judging by the claims and evasions of the 1992 campaign that means we’ll be choosing between gung-ho volunteers in a bad cause and half-hearted draft dodgers now suffering amnesia. That’s hardly the pick of the Vietnam crop.

After all, the spirit of the age was resistance. Millions of Americans demonstrated to stop the war; hundreds of thousands took bolder action. Bravest of all were the tens of thousands of resisters in uniform. They’re the ones who should be able to run for office standing proudly on their wartime records.

Peter Hagerty, for instance, signed up for Naval ROTC at Harvard. Two days before graduation he indicated that he was thinking of refusing his officer’s commission. “I was given a visitor pass to Kittery Naval Brig and told to take a look because if I didn’t accept this commission, that was where I would be spending a lot of time.”

So he went off to Vietnam.

On a destroyer ordered to the Gulf of Tonkin, Hagerty, the officer in charge of the forward guns, noticed hairline cracks in the barrels. When he reported the defects he was ordered to OK the guns and shut up. At this point he refused all further orders and was dismissed from the Navy.

Had he simply gone home, Hagerty would now have the kind of military record that candidates have trouble explaining in 30-second sound bites. But Peter Hagerty was a 1960s radical, not a ‘90s politician. But he volunteered for an even more dangerous civilian assignment, returning to Vietnam for the Lawyers Military Defense Committee.

“I hitched rides every where I could--on convoys and in C-130s--up Highway 1, Da Nang, Hue, the DMZ, up The Perfume River, Saigon and the Delta . . . There I was, a pony-tailed civilian in jungle fatigues, running around Vietnam looking for servicemen in trouble.”

Now that’s a military record that ought to qualify a man for office. But why am I limiting my nominations to men? What about Lt. Susan Schnall, the Air Force nurse who was court-martialed for dropping anti-war leaflets from an airplane onto her own base?

From 1969 to 1971 I worked in an anti-war coffee house near Fort Lewis Army Base. It was packed nightly with enlisted men who took courageous actions, large and small, to end the war. A typical GI--which means a working class high school grad--mentioned that he and a few others had been discussing the war in the supply room when their commanding office walked in.

“Suddenly it got dead still. So I said, ‘What were we talking about? Oh yeah, how the war sucks.’ Then the man next to me put in his bit, then the other guy and the other guy until every one of them saw that we could talk against the war. It felt great.”

Anti-war activities in Vietnam itself were more dangerous and emotionally complex. Still, one GI simply stood on a street in downtown Saigon with a homemade anti-war petition and collected more than 2,000 signatures before the army noticed him. The number of men who took part in clear-cut protests at the front may have been small but it was far larger, I’ll warrant, than the number who participated in atrocities like My Lai. From pray-in to mutiny, ordinary soldiers made the sort of “hard choices” our politicians like to claim that they can handle.

History, they say, is written by the winners--which in this case really means the losers. The people who planned that war stayed in power, even though the majority of Americans fought courageously against it and won.

OK, not everyone did something positive. As one GI said while waiting at the coffee house for his discharge, “I stayed stoned the whole war.” His civilian equivalent would be Bill Clinton, trying not to be drafted without actually refusing--understandable if not heroic.

It’s not easy to decide in the middle of a war that your country is wrong and then do something about it. People shouldn’t have to make such decisions. But a surprising number did. It’s time we recognized the resisters as our Vietnam heroes.

Once we do, my generation’s politicians can begin exaggerating their military records along with the others. We listened to the 75-year-olds tell us how many Kamikaze bombers they shot down from a lone PT boat, so I guess we’ll have to listen to the 50-year-olds brag how they single-handedly stopped the war in Vietnam.