For me, as a combat veteran of the Vietnam War, the most odious thing about the 25th anniversary of its end has been the endless media parade of leftover anti-Vietnam War protestors. They are all over television and in print, recounting the story of their brave, noble and ultimately successful struggle for peace and justice against an oppressive establishment.

There is only one thing wrong with this picture. It is a crock.

Former anti-Vietnam War protestors are using their positions of power and influence in the media, academe and the Clinton administration to try to revise history and hide the truth about their movement. Here are the biggest of their myths and the truths behind them:

Myth: They were protesting for peace. Fact: the anti-Vietnam War movement was not a pro-peace movement it was an anti-USA movement. Remember the Viet Cong flags? The posters of Ho Chi Minh? Jane Fonda posing on an anti-aircraft gun in Hanoi? Former anti-Vietnam War protestors want you to forget these images, because they show clearly that the movement was calling not for peace by for a Vietnamese Communists victory and a US defeat. Wanting the US to lose also means that they wanted American servicemen to die - there is no escaping that conclusion.

Myth: The anti-Vietnam War protestors were free thinkers, bravely challenging the conventional wisdom and entrenched authority. Fact: When interviewed, they all drop the same telling comment: "Everybody I knew was against the Vietnam War." The truth is that support for the Vietnamese Communists and hatred of the US was the conventional wisdom on college campuses during the Vietnam War, and it required absolutely zero personal courage and moral fiber to take that stance. Strangely enough, that is still the case today.

Myth: They were noble and pure, occupying the moral high ground. Fact: Torched ROTC buildings. Trashed university administrative offices. Rocks and bottles thrown at police by rioting mobs. All more images that the anti-Vietnam War protestors would like you to forget. In America, everyone has a right to protest. The anti-Vietnam War protestors went beyond protest into rioting, arson and vandalism.

Myth: The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were not so much Communists as they were nationalists, certainly preferable to the evil, corrupt South Vietnamese government. Fact: After the Vietnamese Communists won they executed thousands of their people, sent hundreds of thousand of them to "re-education' camps, and installed a totalitarian police state and socialist economic system that would have made Stalin proud. Two million Vietnamese fled the new regime, most hoping to come to the USA. It was not nationalism and "agrarian reform" they were fleeing, it was torture, political repression, economic hardship and death.

The war has been over for a quarter of a century, the U.S. trade embargo ended nine years ago, and relations between Hanoi and Washington have been "normalized." Yet, even with all of their excuses gone, the Vietnamese government remains a brutal and oppressive police state, and the Vietnamese people continue to suffer economic hardship and political repression as a result. Not the happy Vietnam free of foreign devils that the anti-Vietnam War protestors predicted but rather exactly the human rights disaster that the supporters of the Vietnam War warned would result from an American pullout.

Myth: We lost the war, which proves that in the end the anti-Vietnam War protestors were right. Fact: We lost the war because of incompetent and uncommitted political and military leadership. Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, McNamara, Kissinger, and Westmoreland were not FDR, Truman, Eisenhower and MacArthur. It also did not help that the anti-Vietnam War protestors and their allies in the media clouded the issues surrounding the war (as they continue to do today) and that America's so-called leadership had neither the will nor the smarts to counter these deceptions.

Well, so what? Why not bury the past and let bygones be bygones. Why not just let the healing begin? Because letting the former anti-Vietnam War protestors succeed in their campaign to be remembered as Quakers with love beads and tie-dyes rather than as the America-hating, radical left-wing fifth columnists that they were gives them a moral authority and influence over public opinion and policy that is undeserved and dangerous. This is not just some musty historical debate waged between aging and irrelevant antagonists. The history that the former anti-Vietnam War protestors hope to revise has practical lessons that are still relevant to America today. If we let them succeed, they will obscure the truth about the Vietnam War, whose real mistakes we will then be doomed to repeat.