How many Vietnamese citizens, men, women and children, did McCain's bombs kill or maim during his twenty-three runs?
Given all the praise heaped upon McCain, the bomber of Hanoi, this is a natural question - especially for the millions of us who remember the inexpressible shamefulness of this genocidal war on the agrarian Asian population of a brutal French colony that suffered Japanese occupation and fought both the Japanese and Vichy French as a U.S. ally.
This is a poignant question that comes to mind painfully for a teacher who has known a hundred Vietnamese students in Hanoi, all of whom lost family members, "killed by the Americans" they would say unaccusingly with Buddhist equanimity. Surely the Vietnamese government, which America now happily trades with and recommended for WTO membership, has on file the answer to how many of its citizens perished during those twenty-three bombing runs. If any American was interested to know.
In his acceptance speech McCain, referring to his participation in the U.S. war on Vietnam bragged,
"I have that record and the scars to prove it, and Obama doesn't.""A lot of prisoners had it worst than me," McCain told the rapt convention audience and went on to confesses that he broke under interrogation - but did not bother to give the detail of his famous "I am a war criminal."
But hold on. Wait just a decent moment. What of the Vietnamese McCain was bombing? How good did they have it? Do not the Vietnamese victims and their grieving families deserve honorable mention at least?
Is it that the "The Greatest country on earth," as McCain cried out, has no compassion for the people bombed in their very own beautiful home city of Hanoi, so humble be it by comparison to great America?
Okay skip any body count, just give us a round number of the Vietnamese who the possible future president can be credited with assisting into the next world earlier than they expected while hoping to survived alive - as did their executioner.
And why doesn't the Republican Party thank the family of the Vietnamese man who saved McCain from drowning and then protected him from the wrath of the people he had been bombing just before being shot out of the sky? John McCain failed to even mention the guy in his speech describing only how he parachuted "into a small lake in Hanoi to an angry crowd."
Below is a relevant article from Mail On Line of the Daily Mail Company of the United Kingdom, additional reporting: William Lowther, in Washington.
'In all the tales of wartime courage peppering John McCain's presidential campaign trail; perhaps the most outstanding example of selfless heroism involves not the candidate but a humble Vietnamese peasant.
On October 26, 1967, Mai Van On ran from the safety of a bomb shelter at the height of an air raid and swam out into the lake where Lieutenant Commander McCain was drowning, tangled in his parachute cord after ejecting when his Skyhawk bomber was hit by a missile.
In an extraordinary act of compassion at a time when Vietnamese citizens were being killed by US aerial bombardments, he pulled a barely conscious McCain to the lake surface and, with the help of a neighbour, dragged him towards the shore."
Media misleads the public on McCain's participation in a merciless and illegal war that remains a blot on America's history that is pointed to by both America's enemies and friends alike. It misrepresents McCain to be able to better promote continuing today's horrific wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan (and by proxy, Somalia).
Previously, on March 22, 2008, OpEdNews published:
Years before Airman McCain began his 23 bombing runs, Ike had admitted Ho Chi Minh was a hero to his countrymen and would have won an all-Vietnam election with 80%+ had he (Ike) not blocked it. Well before McCain's first bombing mission, Rev. King Jr. had angrily condemned U.S. genocide, and Muhammad Ali had refused to go. Was McCain taken in then, and now as well, by war propaganda? McCain, an anti-hero or heartless dumbbell?
Huh? Which war did McCain know how to win? His 23 bombing runs over North Vietnam did not win anything but shame and disgust at home in streets filled with war protests. America LOST THE WAR. Surely Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper REMEMBER that America LOST THE VIETNAM WAR, but are paid to forget it. They are war facilitators pushing Obama to be competitively warlike. In reality McCain is to pitied.
Heaven only knows what Vietnamese in Vietnam watching on satellite connection were thinking as they noticed their inconsequential existence or non-existence for presidential candidate John McCain and the Republican delegates at the convention in St. Paul.
Musician and writer, who has lived and worked on all the continents and whose articles on media have been published in China, Italy, England and the US, and now resides in New York City.
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.
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