What makes a War Hero?

By Robert Thompson - Oct 21, 2008, 06:28

The tame media in the USA have been teaching us new titles for the principal candidates in the USA presidential election, and we are told that Senator McCain is a 'War Hero' and Governor Palin (using her own words) is a 'pit-bull with lipstick’. To go off at a tangent, it is interesting to note that in the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, pit-bulls are classified as dangerous dogs under the Dangerous Dogs Act of 1991. Unless they are kept extremely tightly under control, they have to be destroyed.

Coming back to the question in the heading, we are informed that Senator McCain was only able to get through to the end of his training through what we call piston (i.e. powerful lobbying by close relatives or friends), and he had to rely on this again to be assigned as a US Navy aircraft pilot. His heroism, according to the same sources, was to fly over Viet Nam in order there to bomb defenseless civilians, incidentally in a poor country which posed no threat whatsoever to the USA. When his aircraft came down in that country (whether from defensive action or through his own incompetence), despite initial threats to his life as a criminal murderer, he was treated mainly as a prisoner of war.

However, it also appears that he was later tortured, just as Vietnamese prisoners of the US forces were tortured, and we must all condemn equally all such ill-treatment. Such resistance as he was able to muster might indeed have been a sign of heroism, but doubts have been expressed by his fellow-prisoners as to the extent to which he collaborated with his torturers. In all these particular circumstances, my sympathies are with him as a victim of exactly the sort of treatment as we have come to associate with the behaviour of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

To sum up, I still fail to understand why Senator McCain has become a 'War Hero' when he should be classified as a victim of brutal torture. I see no heroism in bombing innocent defenseless civilians, since such behaviour should lead to his being classified as a 'War Criminal' rather than as a 'War Hero'. Can any citizen of the USA please explain to an elderly European, who remembers only too well the Nuremberg Trials, how the Senator has managed to acquire the latter title in the media across the USA?