WASHINGTON – John Kerry’s critics have zeroed in on one week in 1971, when they charge that he threw away someone else’s combat medals to protest the war in Vietnam, then slipped away from his fellow veterans camped on the National Mall to sleep at a family friend’s house in swank Georgetown.

After 33 years, the charges may seem trivial.

But Kerry’s opponents are using them to paint him as a disloyal opportunist with credibility problems and character flaws.

Kerry has said for years that he threw his combat ribbons, but not his medals, over the Capitol fence along with the medals of two other soldiers who couldn’t make it to the protest on April 23, 1971.

Kerry won the Bronze Star, the Silver Star and three Purple Hearts in Vietnam.

Today, Kerry says he’s proud of his medals, never intended to reject them and keeps them in a protective case in his Boston home.

But in June 1971, in response to criticism that he was a phony, Kerry “bristled” and told the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin: “I did turn my medals in.”

“John Kerry returned the ribbons, which symbolized his medals, as did thousands of others in that difficult and emotional ceremony.

He is proud of that act of conviction, difficult as it was,” said Kerry campaign aide David Wade, who said that to Kerry, the ribbons and the medals were the same thing.

The tale that Kerry slept in Georgetown is tailor-made to undermine the credibility of to-the-manor-born Kerry and what some see as his faux populism.

It bubbled up in the media in 1996, during his tough Senate re-election campaign. His opponents, including current Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie, have gleefully repeated it.

It doesn’t appear to be true.

Kerry says he slept on the Mall, and news accounts and memories of several people who were there indicate that he did.

Kerry was very visible, even prominent.

He’d helped organize the protest and gained fame earlier that week when he testified against the war – wearing the ribbons he later threw away – before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“John Kerry was there day in and day out,” said Tim Butz, another organizer. “It would have been real blatant and obvious if Kerry had walked to the edge of the encampment and got in a car. I never heard any criticism from any vets that he had done something like that.”

Butz and others said many veterans went to private homes during the week to take showers.

Kerry did use the Georgetown home of the then mother-in-law of his friend George Butler to make fund-raising calls and plot legal strategies in the VVAW’s battle against the Nixon administration for the right to use the Mall.

Butler slept at the house all week.

He said that the only night Kerry might have stayed at the house was the night before he testified to the Senate.

“I remember him sitting in a straight-back chair, talking on the phone, working on his speech, up to something like midnight,” Butler said. “I went to bed and he was still on the phone.”

Historian Douglas Brinkley, in his book about Kerry, “Tour of Duty,” wrote that on the morning of his testimony, Kerry woke up “at dawn on the Mall.”

If true, that suggests he returned to camp with his fellow veterans after writing his testimony in Georgetown.

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