Ivy Leaguers and John "Wayne" McCain, Hero

On an episode of M*A*S*H, the television comedy about a mobile hospital near the front lines of the Korean war, a pilot was brought into the hospital. The pilot had forgotten his real name and was confused after an apparent head wound. He was telling the medical staff he was Jesus Christ.
Despite attempts to reorient the pilot he continued to insist he was Christ. One of the doctors disliked by others accused the pilot of trying to get out of his military duties by faking he was Christ. He reported the pilot to an insane military intelligence officer who was a gung ho stickler for rules.
The intelligence officer demanded the doctors release the pilot to return to his “duties” as an elite weapon of the USA. The other doctors resisted and called for a psychiatric evaluation.
A sympathetic military psychiatrist saw the pilot and determined the pilot sincerely believed he was Christ. Despite protests by the intelligence officer, the psychiatrist stated the pilot had lost himself after participation in numerous bombing raids. He believed the pilot could no longer accept the death and destruction he participated in leading him to take on the personality of Christ. The psychiatrist is asked if the pilot would ever fly in combat again. He says the pilot may reclaim his identity but would likely never be a pilot again.
During the show the pilot was told he was actually a pilot with duties of bombing the enemy. He looked at the psychiatrist with saddened face and tells him “Christ could never do such a thing”.
I keep thinking of that episode of M*A*S*H and find it ironic the fake Christ objects to the war. Since 9-11 and the beginning of the war in Iraq in 2003, there are many followers of Christ that seem to have no problem with pilots dropping bombs on areas with civilian populations. Some seem to think it is the duty of American men and women in the military to take on the “new Crusade” against god-less Muslims. In Vietnam, many clergy felt the war was justifiable because of godless communists.
The likely successor to George W. Bush is John McCain, alleged “hero” of the Vietnam War. With Obama and Clinton skewering each other in their lust for power ,the Democrats seem to have once again found a way to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. In their attacks on one another they have given Republicans all the ammo they need to defeat either one of them.
Of course the differences between the three, besides the obvious anatomical, racial and age, are really minimal. All three belong to the elitist power structure despite all their attempts to portray themselves as candidates of the blue collar worker, the non-white community and the young and old. Recent attempts to attack Obama for telling a relative truthful fact about Americans being “bitter” and falling back on their religion and guns for relief are the theater of the absurd when Clinton and McCain call a black man elitist because he is a Harvard grad.
Clinton wants to have us to believe she hasn’t been part of the American “royalty” despite being a grad of Wellesley and Yale, a former first lady and current New York Senator. Clinton has run a campaign full of distortions, outright lies and a sense of entitlement to be the next President based on the experience she claims.
John McCain wants to play the humble ex-POW of Vietnam, whose son has been deployed to Iraq as a Marine. He plays down the role of “hero” but not enough to keep it from being a factor in his candidacy. He also plays the grandfather figure that Ronald Reagan made famous in his role of President of the U.S. And like Reagan, McCain may well have the onset of senility but keeps it well disguised with the help of campaign staff. And in the continued revisionist history of John McCain’s life, the American people are supposed to forget he was one of the “Keating Five” in Congress that were in bed with the robber barons of the 1980’s stock scandals. The five were joined by Neil Bush in ripping off the savings of the “common people” McCain, Obama and Clinton now try desperately to woo with lies about their own common people roots.
McCain, son of a higher ranking Admiral in the Navy, was appointed to the Naval Academy. To have us believe his father’s influence had nothing to do with the appointment is a bit much to expect. Just as the elite get their kids into Ivy League schools, military brass get their kids into the academy of the various services.
Is John McCain a war hero? No doubt in the eyes of Americans a man who enjoyed shooting rockets, dropping bombs and shooting off guns in war is the real deal. And after 22 bombing raids over North Vietnam in which he released bombs onto civilian areas as well as reported military targets, the hero was shot down and spent 5 ½ years as a POW.
Because his father was an Admiral, McCain spent a number of years being treated better than most POW’s. After some years of this preferential treatment, McCain did a heroic thing. He refused an early release so others held longer than him would be released. After that time McCain was no longer treated differently and endured violent interrogations.
McCain has been most vocal in his opposition to water-boarding and other “torture” techniques endorsed by the Bush people since 9-11. He uses the Geneva accords as his reason to oppose such actions. Like cafeteria Catholics or Baptists with only an Old Testament view, McCain fails in his Geneva accords test. He forgets the use of bombing raids on civilian populations is considered a violation of these accords. John McCain took part in such actions 23 times before being shot down.
As a young pilot for the Navy McCain would go on missions, drop his payload of bombs on areas without knowing the number of innocent civilians killed and return to his carrier. He could be drinking beers in the Officers’ Club after dinner. After a couple of weeks of flying he’d spend every third week carousing by his own report.
While John McCain may be seen as a hero to Americans, there are many in Vietnam who would say he is a criminal responsible for the deaths of their family members who were innocent civilians. Dropping bombs on North Vietnam wasn’t anything other than terrorism against the North Vietnamese in an attempt to get them to capitulate to American force. There weren’t tactical targets that presented as imminent or immediate danger to American troops in these bombing runs.
The bombing of North Vietnam was the same tactic Americans first started in World War II during the incineration of Dresden. In that campaign, engineers were assigned to develop bombing patterns that would create the terrorizing and deadly firestorms that killed hundreds of thousands of the civilians in Dresden. Firestorms were a familiar scene to residents of Hanoi and other North Vietnamese cities.
As a common grunt on the ground I loved hearing the bombs of American bombers thudding in the distance because I knew it would reduce the possibility of me and my fellow grunts getting killed.
As I look back, I can’t help but wonder how pilots knowingly dropped payloads on areas without thinking who would be killed by their actions. Unlike grunts that had to see the result of their destructive actions, pilots flew high above their victims and returned “home” after releasing their bombs. It was just a job. They never got to see the “crispy critters” grunts got to see after a napalm run. They never got to see kids after large pieces of shrapnel decapitated them.
Looking back, I remember grunts being called baby-killers as a result of My Lai and other actions with innocents being killed either intentionally or by accident. As I hear about similar events happening in Iraq and Afghanistan I now understand it’s always innocent that suffer most in wars. On John McCain’s missions, just one of the many bombs dropped could be capable of killing more than were ever killed in My Lai. Only one of the bombs dropped on Baghdad or Fallujah could kill more than ever were killed by Marines on the ground in Fallujah in one week.
The grunts are called baby killers. John McCain is a hero. Even if McCain had not been taken prisoner, he’d never have been held as responsible for the deaths of civilians as Privates, Corporals and Sergeants in an infantry unit killing them out of rage or fear or by accident. And McCain was responsible for more death of innocents than any of the grunts. This is the nature of heroism in America.
Walking the jungles or riding the streets in dangerous combat zones is tedious, exhausting and boring right before it becomes deadly. There are seldom times when the grunts can leave the war zone and carouse for a week before having to go back out. They certainly don’t have the thousands of feet between them and the deadly ground of the war zone the pilots have. And yet those who have to go face to face, gun to gun and sometimes bayonet to bayonet against their declared enemy also become villains much easier than the true dealers of death from the skies.
John Wayne and John McCain are heroes people associate with wars. One was a fictional war hero of the screen and the other fictitiously declared a hero after he failed his 23rd mission to drop bombs on a nation’s people whether they were combatants or not.
Here are a few excerpts of an interview with McCain from John McCain: Biography and Much More from Answers.Com
“As a young navy pilot, McCain was in his element. "I enjoyed shooting rockets and dropping bombs and shooting off guns," he recalled to Esquire's Charles P. Pierce. "Nobody in their right mind wouldn't enjoy that. . . . You're a young, single guy, and you go out and you fly for a couple of weeks, then you come in for a week and carouse . . . Nobody deserves to get paid for that." He gave up the single part of the equation in 1965, when he married Carol Shepp and adopted her two children (the couple later had a child of their own, too), but the lure of adventure was more difficult to abandon. So McCain volunteered for service in Vietnam.
Vietnam
In June of 1967, McCain (by then a lieutenant commander) set out for Vietnam from Norfolk, Virginia aboard the USS Forrestal. The carrier was in the Gulf of Tonkin on July 29, its crew preparing for the second launch of the fifth day of striking enemy targets in North Vietnam, when one of its own bombs detonated on deck. McCain narrowly escaped the resulting conflagration that killed 132 crewmen, with two others missing and presumed dead, and injured 62 more. It was one of the worst military accidents of the war.
A little less than three months later, on October 26, McCain was making his 23rd bombing mission over North Vietnam when his plane was hit by antiaircraft missile. Forced to eject, breaking both arms and a leg in the process, he landed in a lake near Hanoi and was captured. He spent the next five and a half years as a prisoner of war (POW) at the sarcastically nicknamed "Hanoi Hilton."”
http://www.answers.com/topic/john-mccain
William T. Leichner, RN
USMC combat veteran
Vietnam 1967-69