| McCain's status as a former POW is now his all-purpose defense against everything. Can't remember how many houses he owns? "This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years -- in prison," --McCain spokesman Brian Rogers. Maybe cheated in the Saddleback House of God debate? "The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous." [Even though he cheated on his first wife.] -- McCain spokeswoman Nicole Wallace. Farted in public? "This is a guy who never went out in public for five and a half years. He was in prison! [Fart!]" -- McCain spokesbrat Bart Simpson.
I know that this will come as a deep shock to many, but it's true: John McCain isn't the only POW in the history of world. In fact, there have been millions of them, as Wikipedia notes in this "list of nations with the highest number of POWs since the start of World War II, listed in descending order":
| Prisoner nationality |
Number |
Name of conflict |
 Soviet Union |
4 - 5.7 million taken by Germany (2.7 - 3.3 million died in German POW camps) [27] (ref. Streit) |
World War II (Total) |
 Nazi Germany |
3,127,380 taken by U.S.S.R. (474,967 died in captivity) [27]
- 3,630,000 taken by Great Britain
- 3,100,000 taken by the United States
- 937,000 taken by France
- unknown number in Yugoslavia, Poland, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark
- 1,3 million unknown [28]
|
World War II |
 France |
1,800,000 taken by Germany |
Battle of France in World War II |
 Poland |
675,000 (420,000 by Germans, 240,000 by Soviets in 1939; 15,000 Warsaw 1944) |
World War II |
 United Kingdom |
~200,000 (135,000 taken in Europe, does not include Pacific or Commonwealth figures) |
World War II |
 United States |
~130,000 (95,532 taken by Germany) |
World War II |
 Pakistan |
90,368 taken by India |
Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 |
Hmmm. Roughly 20 million in WWII alone. That's a lot of POWs. Well over 100,000 were Americans, and not one of them ran for President based on his status as a WWII POW. Some stupid general named Eisenhower--whoever he was--crowded them all out.
So, if John McCain's not unique, then why is he special? Why is he the only person around who is routinely identified as a former POW, and why is that taken to be so important? Why is he the first POW superstar in American history? These are questions that always hover in the air. Let's try bringing them down to earth, shall we? |
| POW As Hero-How'd It Happen?
Why is a POW suddenly a hero? McCain's not the only one, of course. He's merely the one who's cashed in, "big time," as America's #2 war criminal would say. Still, looking back at American history, one has to wonder. Limiting ourselves to declared wars or major conflictsm, and those who loomed large in later life (or resputations in death) due to their service we have:
| War | Heroic Commander | Battlefield Hero | Famous/Heroic POW |
| Revolutionary War | Gen. George Washington, Francis Marion, Tadeusz Ko?ciuszko, etc. | Cyprus Attucks, Nathan Hale, John Paul Jones | None |
| War of 1812 | Gen. General Winfield Scot, Gen. Andrew Jackson | Jean Laffite | None |
| Mexican-American War | Gen. Zachary Taylor, Gen. Winfield Scott | Many on the Mexican side, on our side, not so much | None |
| Civil War | Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman | Robert Gould Shaw | None |
| Spanish-American War | Cmdr. George Dewey | Teddy Roosevelt | None |
| World War I | Gen. John J. Pershing | Alvin York, Eddie Rickenbacker | None |
| World War II | Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Gen George Marshall | John F. Kennedy | None |
| Korean War | Arguably None | David Hackworth | None |
| Vietnam War | Arguably None | David Hackworth, John Kerry | John McCain |
Obviously, this is not an exhaustive list. I'm only trying to capture heroes of a certain public stature, whose war records became closely identified with them. This is why JFK is listed under WWII, while George McGovern, for example, is not. And, of course, Kurt Vonnegut was rather well known as a WWII POW, but it wasn't because he was a POW, it's because he fashioned a remarkable work work of fiction, Slaughterhouse Five, out of part of his experience. Others who had been held prisoner were well-known, such as Nathanal Hale, remembered not for his imprisonment, but for his brave words on facing his execution, "I regret that I have but one life to live for my country."
Still, the general sense of the above chart is hard to deny--in Vietnam, the POWs stepped forward to fill a void. There was nothing heroic about the collective efforts of our commanders, and thus, unlike Grant in the Civil War, even those who were able could not emerge from the collective failure of others.
But there's something more here, as well, which is best explained in historian H. Bruce Franklin's book, M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America, in which he describes Nixon's deliberate plan to alter the Vietnam War narrative, surrealistically, to make the purpose of the war the rescue of the POWs.
It was a totally nonsensical narrative, since POWs are regularly returned at the end of a war. But, of course, the Vietnamese were "gooks" as John McCain still calls them, and thus could not be "trusted" to abide by such niceties. Or at least that was the racist subtext on which Nixon's narrative depended.
This shift of focus allowed us, once again, to disavow and forget the real reasons for being in Vietnam, to forget all the blood on our hands, and instead to indulge ourselves in a rescue fantasy--a fantasy that soon spun out of control into the still-potent myth that our government intentionally abandoned live POWs--though why the Vietnamese would continue holding them is never explained. (That ole racist subtext again.)
And so it is that, bereft of any real heroic framework for the war, any real heroic narratives to explain what we were doing there, and how individual acts of valor could escape from the larger context of national disgrace, we turned to fantasy, and re-creation of the POWs as heroes. Why? Not because they were any more or less heroic than other POWs before them, but because we had nothing else to hide behind in our efforts to avoid confronting the uglt truth about how we had abandoned and betrayed our ideals. And because we continue to hide from that ugly truth, we have re-created Vietnam in Afghanistan and Iraq.
POW As MORAL Hero-Jessica Lynch vs. John McCain
Just because the image of the POW has been used to shield us from examining vital truths, this hardly means that individual POWs have to play along, however. No doubt, it's a mighty tall order to call on men who have been through such an ordeal to be leaders in seeing through how they have been used. But isn't tall orders what we expect from those who would lead us?
And besides, there's always Jessica Lynch. They wanted to use her as the POW poster girl for what we were doing in Iraq, and she refused to go along. Why? For the simple reason that it just wasn't so. Not only did her "captors" not rape her, as some overheated imaginations wildly speculated, they weren't really captors at all. They took care of her, nursed her back to health, and even tried to return her to us-only to be shot at for their troubles.
Given the hyper-jingoistic atmosphere at the time, it took as much moral courage for Jessica Lynch to speak out with the truth as it took physical courage for her to go into combat in the first place-a moral courage is considerably more rare. But one gets the distinct sense from her that it didn't take any conscious courage whatsoever on her part. She simply told the truth, because that's just what you do. It may not have felt the least bit courageous for her, but it's still courage in my book.
Now, the truths that Jessica Lynch stood up for were not complicated ones, going to national motives, and the betrayal of what America is supposed to stand for. They were simple matters of fact. But Lynch is still young, and not pretending to any sort of national leadership role. McCain is about to turn 73, and he's the GOP's presumptive presidential candidate . She is fundamentally honest, and he is not.
America needs as many Jessica Lynches as it can get its hands on. She is a true American hero. John McCain, however, not so much. |
