When you walked through the wards of an evacuation hospital in the Republic of Vietnam, as I did on occasion as an Army photographer, you saw people whose right to wear the Purple Heart would never be challenged.

The halls of Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, where a friend of mine worked as an orderly one summer during the late '60s, were full of young men cruelly blasted on Vietnam's battlefields. Purple Hearts? No argument.

A black granite wall near the Lincoln Memorial bears the names of thousands for whom the award of a Purple Heart was the nation's expression of gratitude for all they lost in its behalf. And of course, they lost everything.

The same goes for Army Specialist Justin Onwordi, the Nigerian immigrant who was buried Thursday in Raleigh after being killed in Iraq as an American serviceman. His widow, Ebony, can treasure his posthumous Purple Heart as a symbol of his patriotism and devotion to duty.

Yet for all the suffering and sacrifice, the Purple Heart is an imperfect gauge of gallantry. If the Viet Cong had managed to land one of the rockets they sometimes lobbed in our direction smack in the middle of our nightly poker game, it would have been Purple Hearts all around. Big deal. But if one of today's GIs were to defuse a truck bomb big enough to demolish half of Baghdad, all the while dodging machine gun fire, and to do it without sustaining so much as a scratch, there'd be no Purple Heart to go along with his medal for bravery. Would that bother him? Not likely.

The Purple Heart, as we can see, does not signify bravery so much as a degree of honor. It simply testifies to the fact that one was willing to stand in harm's way, to the extent that duty required it, and to accept the consequences.

Those consequences could be extreme -- annihilation. Or they could be minimal, as was the case with the three superficial wounds that brought Purple Hearts to John Kerry.

Still, I can't help wondering: If I'd been maimed for life by an exploding rocket while drawing to a dangerous inside straight, what would give me the right to hold my head higher than Kerry -- wounded in actual combat even if just slightly -- holds his?

Kerry of course has been taking immense grief from critics who say he lied and otherwise manipulated the system to construct a record of bogus combat exploits that led to the undeserved award of his three Purple Hearts and two medals for valor in action.

He can hardly complain about his Vietnam service being carefully scrutinized, since he has made it a linchpin of his argument that he's more qualified than President Bush to lead the nation during a time of war. He can, and does, complain about the inaccuracy and unfairness of the accusations.

Most Americans no doubt are finding it difficult to sort through the competing claims. That surely pleases the Bush camp, since a focus on Kerry's war record diverts attention from subjects the president no doubt finds unpalatable -- casualties in Iraq, terror threats, job losses and so forth.

Men who served with Kerry testify that he was a model of coolness, courage and initiative under fire. Others who also took part in the Navy's hazardous Mekong Delta missions -- including some who once sang Kerry's praises -- now say he was conniver and manipulator whose decorations were undeserved.

The closest we're likely to come to the facts would seem to be through after-action reports, records of treated injuries and medal-related paperwork from the period, rather than from people's fallible memories. Kerry would be smart to get all that documentation out in the open, pronto.

It would hardly be surprising, in any case, for there to be gaps or discrepancies that couldn't be resolved. But what would it take for Kerry's candidacy to be seriously damaged?

People couldn't be expected to just brush it off if, for example, he were found to have engineered the award of medals on the basis of his own, embellished accounts of combat incidents.

Nor would it look good if it were established that the Purple Hearts he accepted were for injuries that ordinarily wouldn't have qualified, or that he had pulled strings to get them. If the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" want to make serious hay in their Republican-funded attack ads, this is the sort of thing they'll have to be able to show.

Integrity and character are the issues here, and they matter. Bush has his own conduct in uniform to answer for in that regard, but Kerry has chosen to go down the Vietnam road, so it's reasonable to expect him to account for himself.

He might even give some thought to whether he still feels comfortable with those Purple Hearts -- even if they permitted him an early exit from the combat zone. He could say, "Out of respect for my fellow servicemen who suffered so terribly during that misbegotten war, here are some medals I earned but that I've decided I can live without." The point would remain that Purple Hearts or no, he went, and he fought -- honorably.

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