Roy Exum: McCain Is A Real Hero

  • Monday, July 20, 2015
  • Roy Exum
Roy Exum
Roy Exum

That sound you may have heard in the background Sunday afternoon was a bunch of carpenters hammering on Donald Trump’s political coffin. For whatever reason the one some call “The Donald” has lashed out at Arizona Senator John McCain, saying the Vietnam veteran was hardly a hero. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured,” said the dumbest presidential candidate in decades.

On Sunday’s talk shows he could hardly contain himself.

He correctly said, "I will say what I want to say," but he didn’t credit his freedom of speech to men like John McCain who have fought for the very freedoms that Trump, long considered a draft dodger, takes so much for granted.

Let me tell you why John McCain is one of our country’s greatest heroes. After his plane was shot down over Vietnam in 1967, he was taken to the infamous Hanoi Hilton and was systemically beaten and tortured for five years. Actually Senator McCain is John III – both his grandfather and his father were four-star Admirals in the Navy before John III went to the U.S. Naval Academy and earned his commission. He was remembered in Annapolis for his penchant of standing up to bullies, much to the delight of his classmates. And, as I write this, McCain has the class not to respond nor stoop to Trump’s level.

At flight school, a fun McCain partied hard and “pushed the envelope” but was a good “driver” in an A-4 Skyhawk and would complete many successful missions. On July 29, his plane was on fire when he landed on the USS Forrestal. Instead of running from the flames as a draft dodger might, McCain was frantically trying to help another pilot out of the plane when a bomb exploded. It killed 24 sailors that day and McCain was hit hard by fragments with injuries to his chest and legs.

Such wounds get a pilot a trip home, but McCain, despite the fact he and his wife had just adopted two little boys, talked his way onto the deck of the USS Oriskany, another aircraft carrier, and was soon back in a Skyhawk, his skills earning both the Navy Commendation Medal and the Bronze Star as he created havoc in the skies over North Vietnam.

In late October a missile found him over Hanoi and, when he ejected from his plane, both arms and a leg were fractured. His parachute landed in a lake and he would have drowned if some Vietnamese soldiers hadn’t pulled him from the water so they could crush his shoulder and gig him with a bayonet.

He was first refused medical treatment, but when his captors learned his bloodline, marginal care was given, and the daily beatings increased. Finally he was sent to a hospital (his captors were scared of reprisals if he died in prison) where he lost 50 pounds and his hair turned white. When he returned to prison his cellmate thought he would die within a week.

Once he seemed to recover, he was placed in solitary confinement for two years. The only people he saw were the torturers who beat him every day, taking pleasure on focusing where his injuries were most tender. It was at this time, his lowest point, when he became a bona fide hero.

In mid-1969 Admiral John McCain Jr. -- the POW’s dad – was named commander over all U.S. forces in Vietnam and the enemy thought it would be a propaganda gem if they released his son. The younger McCain turned down the offer, saying he would only accept repatriation if every man that had been put in prison before he got there was released as well.

Are you getting this? The sadists were beating him every two hours every day of the week. He had dysentery. They would tie him painfully to the jail bars and leave him hanging for hours. And John McCain turned down a free ticket home unless the guys who got there before he did could go home, too. That, dear reader, is a hero beyond compare.

Eventually he tried to commit suicide (the guards stopped him) and he signed a phony “confession.” As he wrote in his book, "I had learned what we all learned over there: Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine."

He was beaten several times a week until he was released in March of 1973 and – to this day – cannot lift his arms over his head because of what was done to him in prison.

So here comes Donald Trump, with his trademark hair wave, talking on ABC’s ‘This Week,’ where he said, “I will do far more for veterans than John McCain has done for many, many years, with all talk no action. He's on television all the time, talking, talking. Nothing gets done."

What an ironic word for Trump to use because after what he said about John McCain, “The Donald” is most assuredly ‘done.’

Good riddance.

royexum@aol.com

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