Washington

IT was a Frank Capra story with a Vietnam War twist. In 1968, a 21-year-old squad leader was riding shotgun on an armored personnel carrier when the Vietcong detonated a land mine. The soldier was on fire, his face a bubbling mass, his eardrums shattered and bleeding. Yet he instinctively reached for the unconscious 19-year-old turret gunner caught in the burning steel cage.

Frantically, he pulled out his comrade, who lay comatose, blood pouring out of his ears. The squad leader tugged at the dead weight and managed to throw him off, jumping down to shield him before the vehicle blew up. Later, at the field hospital, the squad leader asked about the soldier he had brought in, who only months before had saved him when he was felled by flying shrapnel.

“Your brother is alive,” the medic said, “on the bunk next to you.” In an amazing fluke, Chuck Hagel and his brother Tom fought side by side in a unit of 12. At times, because of casualties, the squad was reduced to just the two brothers and four other men. Now Mr. Hagel, a Republican former senator from Nebraska whom President Obama has nominated to be secretary of defense, faces another battle — as a maverick who was once a foot soldier in the conservative Congressional ranks. Attacks have come from hawkish former colleagues, pro-Israel advocates angered that Mr. Hagel once referred to them as “the Jewish lobby,” and gays offended by a 1998 reference to an ambassadorial nominee as “openly, aggressively gay,” a comment for which Mr. Hagel recently apologized.

When the brothers returned from Vietnam, Chuck with two purple hearts and Tom with three purple hearts and a bronze star, they came to blows over the war. Their arguments dramatized the divisions that tore America apart. Tom, who became a liberal Democrat and law professor, called it a rotten, immoral war, while Chuck countered that it was a noble cause gone wrong. Tom once told me, “Till the day I die I will be ashamed I fought in that war.” Chuck said that as he lay near death, remembering the squad mates who had been ripped in half by land mines, he vowed “in my whole life, if there is anything I do, it’s going to be to try to stop wars.” At Memorial Day and Veterans Day ceremonies, Chuck was often the lone man who dared to say, “there is no glory in war.”