Vietnam & After

Did pacification breed heroes?

"Pacification also took a brutal face in unreceptive regions.  Viet Cong villages often were simply obliterated as Doug Hostetter describes.  Usually, this meant bombing and then bulldozing, a technique the Vietnamese called "ironing" a village.  The idea was that if hearts and minds could not be won, better to drive the people off their lands then have them growing food for the guerrillas.  Such territory was often sprayed with Agent Orange and declared a free-fire zone, where anything that moved was assumed to be an enemy." - Harry Maurer, Strange Ground

By the summer of 1967, "pacification" was well underway in Vietnam.  The "war hero," Lieutenant Commander John Sidney McCain III had flown five bombing runs over North Vietnam by July 1967 dropping Napalm, and annihilating "targets", merely "following orders".

On July 29, 1967, catastrophe erupted aboard the USS Forrestal, the Navy Carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin, upon which McCain's aircraft was stationed.  A rocket was accidentally propelled through McCain's plane while he was in the cockpit preparing for his 6th bombing raid.  Fuel was dumped across the ships deck and two canisters of napalm were dropped from McCain's plane.  McCain escaped the plane without any injury and ran past his comrades who tried to extinguish the flames.  He sought refuge below deck where he watched from a distance as his comrades fought the flames trying to save the ship and each other.  134 men died.

Soon after, McCain admitted to a New York Times reporter that he had learned from the ordeal, and gained empathy for the Vietnamese that the U.S. had been dropping napalm on, after watching his comrades burn to death.  McCain would then go on to complete 17 more bombing missions, dropping tons napalm, and destroying villages before he was shot down over Hanoi on October 26th, 1967.

As a prisoner of war in Hanoi, McCain undoubtedly suffered torment that no one should ever be subjected to under any circumstances.  Later, as a United States Senator from Arizona, he would become known as a "maverick" for opposing torture.  However, he reneged on that position when voted against a bill that would have banned waterboarding as an interrogation technique.

hero -

1.	a man of distinguished courage or ability, admired for his brave deeds and noble qualities.

2.	a person who, in the opinion of others, has heroic qualities or has performed a heroic act and is regarded as a model or ideal: He was a local hero when he saved the drowning child.

McCain beats Obama . . . In Vietnam

An NBC News correspondent reports from Hanoi that John McCain will carry Vietnam in the upcoming American presidential election.  Unfortunately for Senator McCain, the Vietnamese can't vote in our elections.

Ian Williams interviewed Hanoi residents and found the younger generation too busy with their own affairs to care about the American elections, but that the older "Vietnam War generation" remembered John McCain for his efforts to normalize relations between the U.S. and Vietnam after the war.   Here is an excerpt from the article:

"During our visit we sought out Vietnamese who’d met McCain. We found 81-year-old former nurse, Nguyen Thi Thanh. In his memoir, McCain says she saved his life, fending off a baying mob at the edge of Hanoi’s West Lake, and treating his wounds, putting splints on his arms and leg, and giving him antibiotics.

"Some people were very angry," she recalled, "but I was a nurse, it was my responsibility."

She doesn’t move so fast these days, but has been closely watching the progress of the man she treated.

"Sometimes I watch him on television, and he’s got really big. He used to be so young, thin and handsome," she told me. "He used to be part of the war, but now he’s running for president, which is a good thing. I hope he is elected."

We also met one the men who had dragged a badly injured McCain out of the West Lake. He too recalls the anger, and the chants of "beat him, beat him," but forty-one years have mellowed Le Van Lua.

"I feel that he could be the winner," he now says of McCain. "If he wins, it’s good. Already through his dealings with the Vietnamese government, John McCain has really helped Vietnam.""

The article included two short video reports from Vietnam:

An Interview with McCain's Wartime Captors: