John McCain war hero?

[Professor]

[Professor]

[Professor]

[Ameriman]

[Bill_in_Bethlehem]

john mccain is unfit to serve as a united states senator

[Sandman]

A few things confusing/frustrating things in this thread.

When you guys talk about McCain trying to save a man from a burning aircraft, are you talking about the USS Forrestal fire? Because I've never heard any account, including his own, that claims that he did anything other than run off the flight deck as fast as he could. He's claimed that there was a quick moment where he tried to double back when he saw the other pilot burning to death, then heard an explosion and ran away. That may or may not have happened, but it's a far cry from "attempting to save" anyone. In practical terms, it just means he witnessed someone burning to death. But regardless, even if his own story is true and there was a split second before an explosion when he thought about maybe saving someone...................THE EXPLOSION WAS FROM A BOMB HE HIMSELF DROPPED. This cannot be disputed. When the rocket hit the plane next to him, he panicked in his cockpit and inexplicably dropped a bomb from his own aircraft, which later exploded in the fire, making the fire a million times worse than it would have been. This is not speculation. It's what happened. Then, he runs away and doesn't do the one thing that all sailors, officer or enlisted, are SPECIFICALLY TRAINED to do........................stay and help with the firefighting. All hands. ALL. HANDS. But he ran away. Not saying him staying and holding the middle of a hose would have changed anything, but it certainly adds insult to injury that he broke an ancient shipboard taboo.

The Forrestal fire fundamentally changed so many things in the Navy, that to this day 45 years later we still receive regular training on it. Non-military people talk about it with this reverence like it was some uncontrollable terrorist attack. In reality, it was a perfect storm clusterf*ck of incompetence and bumbling mistakes that killed over a hundred people, and McCain played a starring role. He dropped a bomb, then lied about it saying that the rocket hit his plane as well as the one next to him, knocking the bomb off. Every other report of the incident, including the official one, contradicts this claim. His plane was not hit. I don't know how to explain the disconnect between the fact that almost every single sailor in the Navy today knows McCain acted incompetently and cowardly on that day, and the general public who seems to be completely unaware. All I can chalk it up to is successful politics. McCain has managed to change his own story over the years. The Navy hasn't forgotten. We have entire qualification pin programs built around not having another Forrestal situation.

Now, the POW situation...................I think McCain is a hero in the same sense I think anyone is a hero who endures a POW camp for that long, especially in a leadership capacity. It's an amazing, terrible thing. Does he deserve any extra recognition for the actions noted? I'd just point out that he was binded by the official military code of conduct to refuse special treatment or release. He could have easily broken it, it's just a set of rules, but he surely knew that by doing so, he wouldn't have had any military career or much of a public life to go back home to. He would have been punished under the UCMJ for literally relinquishing his place in an official POW chain of command, and treated like a coward in the public sphere. So while I think he definitely deserves all the credit in the world for standing strong under extreme pressure..............it's kinda what he was supposed to do anyway, and there would have been pretty long-lasting consequences had he not. I won't belabor this point though, like the Forrestal incident which I think definitely discounts any claims of heroism. I have a huge respect for McCain for his POW experience, and I think he displayed a lot of courage and fortitude by not just looking for a short-term easy way out when it was offered to him. Just pointing out a little nuance that I think people miss. Read the 4th article of the Code of Conduct.