Reconciling Kerry with the swift vets is pretty simple.
In Vietnam war movies, there's always the gung-ho 2nd lieutenant who goes around shooting everything that moves, and who's always trying to get medals. In the Army, that guy probably would have gotten fragged, or his sergeants would have just ignored him.
In Kerry's case, he was in the Navy, so after putting up with his crazy antics for 4 months, they figured out a way to ship him home. People aren't perfect, and every service has ways to deal with an officer who's a bit whacked.
At some point after being sent home, he must of realized what he had been doing in Vietnam, and Kerry decided that the atrocities he committed weren't his fault, but rather the fault of his commanding officers, and the government who sent him there. Pretty typical behavior for a very young man: "its not my fault".
So he joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and started testifying about the "atrocities our soldiers were committing in Vietnam". Never mind that he was really testifying about atrocities he'd committed...
This angered his ex-compatriots no end. Here they have some nut who's committing atrocities, so they get rid of him, and he proceeds to go home and tell the world, and tar them with the same brush. From their point of view the "soldiers committing atrocities" was Kerry himself, and they got rid of him, so they were the good guys, and he the bad guy. So having Kerry portraying himself as the "bad guy who learned to be a good guy and warn about all the other bad guys" was especially galling. Especially later on as he got deeper into VVAW and started to fudge the truth. Nixon sent me to Cambodia in 1968 using his magic time travel powers!
So now its 33 years later, and Kerry runs for president, pretty much on the platform: I was granted mystical powers in Vietnam. It doesn't surprise me that these swift vets have come forward, and that they are so vehement. It doesn't surprise me either that the Kerry campaign hasn't responded directly. Kerry has admitted to committing atrocities in Vietnam, but I'm a crazed killer doesn't seem like much of a political platform.
Whether its important what Kerry was like 33 years ago is a different question. Personally, while all this is interesting, I find it much more telling that Kerry criticized Bush for finishing reading to the schoolchildren for 7 minutes on 9/11. Given that on the same day Kerry sat dumbstruck for 40 minutes, one has to wonder at his abilities today: clearly he had less presence of mind then Bush on that day, and he has less memory today.
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