Sep 1, 2018 3 min read

Then-candidate Donald Trump once said of John McCain’s service in the Vietnam War, “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

Trump was never captured because he never served. He obtained five deferments, four for college and grad school, and a medical one for “bone spurs” on his feet that he later said were “minor” and “temporary” and that his doctor said were not “significant medical problems.” So, while McCain was being tortured in North Vietnam’s famous Hoa Lo Prison (sarcastically nicknamed the “Hanoi Hilton”), draft-dodger Trump was partying back in the States, once joking that avoiding sexually transmitted diseases was his “personal Vietnam.”

Naval bomber pilot John McCain, as meticulously detailed in Robert Timberg’s book “The Nightingale’s Song,” was shot down over North Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi, in 1967. Upon crashing he broke both arms and a knee, whereupon he was captured by North Vietnamese soldiers, brought to Hoa Lo Prison, and incessantly beaten and tortured for refusing to admit to war crimes or to provide information to his captors. Before his arms could fully heal they were re-broken, and, because of his “bad attitude,” when surgery was finally performed on his knee, the doctors merely cut all the ligaments and cartilage, meaning he could only flex his knee about 10 percent during his entire captivity.

And then his captors learned that his father, Admiral Jack McCain, was named commander-in-chief of military forces in the Pacific (CINCPAC) and, seeing the propaganda possibilities, offered to release him. McCain refused because the U.S. military Code of Conduct stipulated that men are to be released in the order in which they were captured. And – typical McCain – in refusing the offer, he began shouting obscenities at his captors.

“They would have let him go,” a fellow inmate recalled, “and here’s a guy that’s all crippled up, all busted up, and he doesn’t know if he’s going to live the next day, and he literally blew them out of there with a verbal assault. You can’t imagine the example John set for the rest of the camp by doing that.”

For his refusal, McCain was, as Timberg writes, “slammed from one guard to another, bounced from wall to wall, knocked down, kicked, dragged to his feet, knocked back down, punched again and again in the face.”

John McCain was beaten and tortured for most of the more than five years he was a POW, before being released in 1973. While Donald Trump’s so-called bone spurs no longer bother him, if they ever did, McCain could never again raise his arms above his head.

May this true American war hero finally rest in peace.

Bruce G. Kauffmann’s email address is bruce@historylessons.net.