By TOM KNOTT

WASHINGTON, D.C., August 22 – John Kerry is having another “Apocalypse Now” moment, this time along the presidential campaign trail.

He is back in Cambodia again, involved in another top-secret fantasy, looking as out of place as ever, as he endeavors to overcome the stories of atrocities and heroism behind a jaw that stretches forever.

He seemingly has a million war tales, some taller than others, according to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

“On more than one occasion, I, like Martin Sheen in “Apocalypse Now,” took my patrol boat into Cambodia,” Kerry wrote in the Boston Herald in 1979. “In fact, I remember spending Christmas Eve 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real. But nowhere in “Apocalypse Now” did I sense that kind of absurdity.”

His is a fanciful recollection that his campaign has re-shaped into one without dates. He was in Cambodia, his campaign now reports, although he is just not sure when he was there during his highly interpretive four-month tour in Vietnam.

The newly massaged spin probably is just as well, if only because Lyndon Johnson was the president on Christmas Eve 1968. The dropping of President Nixon’s name is the reflexive response of the nut wing of the far left.

Kerry’s abbreviated stint in Vietnam has the feel of a well-orchestrated attempt to chart his political path: from his home movies in the jungle, to his record-setting scratches that led to Purple Hearts, to his highly public protest following his return to the U.S.

He was a political soldier of fortune, all too willing to exploit both his service and the notion of U.S. soldiers as monsters.

That, too, is the fuel fanning the Swift boat indictment. Kerry turned on his “band of brothers” in the politically fashionable climate of the day and earned his first measure of celebrity.

Testifying before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1971, Kerry confirmed the worst charges made against the U.S. military by Jane Fonda and her band of treacherous, communist sympathizers.

Regarding his “brothers,” Kerry said, “They had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam, in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing of this country.”

Kerry confessed to taking part in war crimes as well, sailing with the virulent protest winds of 1971. Now he is sailing in the opposite direction, touting his military record as the essential weapon in the war against the Islamic terrorists.

“I’m John Kerry, and I’m reporting for duty,” he said last month at the Democratic Convention in Boston.

Spare us from that unsettling prospect.