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Hero's Robes Cloak McCain, But Not All Believe It

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By BILLY HOUSE

The Tampa Tribune

Published: September 3, 2008

ST. PAUL, Minn. - From his first TV ad of the general election, John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign played up the Arizona senator's image as an American hero.

"The American president Americans have been waiting for," the ad said, flickering images of McCain with others of him as a prisoner of war in Vietnam three decades ago.

Republicans continue to press that hero image at their national convention.

Tuesday night at the convention, President Bush, Laura Bush, and former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson all described McCain's courage as a POW, with the first lady calling him "a real American hero."

And earlier Tuesday, some of McCain's fellow POWs were dispatched to the hotels of various state delegations to tell their tales of his bravery. One of them was a delegate from Florida who sometimes shared the same Hanoi prison cell as McCain.

That American hero theme will build through McCain's scheduled presidential nomination acceptance speech Thursday night.

As for Democrats, it is difficult for Barack Obama and his supporters to touch the idea of McCain as a war hero. Instead, they go only as far as to ask whether that status makes him any more qualified to be president.

However, others question whether it is accurate to envelop McCain in the cloak of a "war hero" or seek to politicize his ordeal as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Among them is Robert McComb, a retired Navy commander and Vietnam veteran who is following the convention from his home in Port Ludlow, Wash.

Defining The Word 'Hero'

"John McCain just does not fit my definition of 'hero'," said McComb, who like McCain is a Naval Academy graduate.

"We call everyone heroes nowadays - football players, basketball players and people who've been a prisoner of war. The word 'hero' has become sort of like 'gourmet' - we've so ruined it that it's lost its meaning," said McComb. "This is one example."

McComb acknowledges he is an independent voter who has contributed about $150 to Obama. But he is not affiliated with any organized group of anti-McCain veterans, of which there are a few.

Instead, the 24-year Navy veteran says he personally knew McCain's father. And he was there at Pearl Harbor to see the young aviator step off a plane after five years of Vietnamese captivity. McCain had endured a lot personally, but that does not mean he was a hero, McComb said.

Five-and-half years earlier, in October 1967, McCain's jet had been shot down during a bombing raid on Hanoi. Realizing his father was an admiral and commander in chief of Pacific forces, the Vietnamese sought to score propaganda points by giving McCain an early offer of release.

But McCain, whose severe injuries were evident in TV images sent to the United States, refused to take the release before other Americans at the same Hanoi prison who were captured before him.

McComb said he doesn't dispute how broken the young Naval aviator's body had become at the hands of his Vietnamese captors.

"But did that make him a hero?" McComb asks. "A guy who falls on a grenade who saves his buddies - in my mind, that's a hero."

McComb says he finds it ironic that many of the same people who challenged John Kerry's Vietnam War service when he was the Democratic presidential candidate in 2004 are now extolling McCain as a war hero. As he sees it, Kerry did risk his life as the leader of a Swift Boat during the war.

But a Florida delegate - retired Col. George "Bud" Day of Okaloosa County - said, "John McCain is a hero in every sense of the word."

Day was at the Hanoi Hilton as McCain's commander and sometime cellmate.

"He showed an incredible amount of courage," said Day. "The Vietnamese were torturing us and trying to get us to do bad things against our country. They offered him early release, ahead of the other guys, and he said 'I'm not leaving here until the guys shot down before me go home, or the guys sicker than me.' That was really a defining moment for John and he did absolutely the right thing."

Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, said the term "war hero" had become less valued after Vietnam.

But in McCain's case, he said, the American public does view what he endured as "pretty remarkable." The use of the term "hero" to describe McCain has become synonymous with "character" - and someone who will be able to do the right thing as commander in chief, Luntz said.

Some Question Relevancy

For their part, Obama, who has no military service, and his supporters have stayed clear of diminishing McCain's military service and years as a prisoner of war. But they haven't stayed silent.

In June, former Army Gen. Wesley Clark, himself a former Vietnam veteran, made waves when he said McCain had been a "hero" to him as a prisoner of war during the war years, but his service is not something that means he should be president.

And that tightrope walk has continued. Last week, Democratic New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson raised McCain's military service in an address to the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

"John McCain served his county in war. We honor his service, but that doesn't mean we have to make him president at a time when America needs change, not more of the same," said Richardson.

And Obama, in his nomination acceptance speech, repeated what has become a common line in his campaign stump speech.

"The Republican nominee, John McCain, has worn the uniform of our country with bravery and distinction, and for that we owe him our gratitude and respect," he said.

"But the record's clear," Obama went on. "John McCain has voted with George Bush 90 percent of the time. Sen. McCain likes to talk about judgment. But really, what does it say about your judgment when you think George Bush has been right more than 90 percent of the time?"

On Tuesday, former Rhode Island Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee - an Obama backer - said, "It seems that everybody that serves gets called a war hero."

But Chafee, who often was an ally of McCain's on controversial issues before the Senate on which they both bucked the GOP, also said that what's "more important than that being a war hero is his McCain's approach to the world, in which our adversaries and allies both have nuclear weapons."

And in that regard, said Chafee, he disagrees with McCain's alignment with the Bush-Cheney foreign policy.

Reporter William March contributed to this report. Reporter Billy House can be reached at (202) 662-7673 or bhouse@tampatrib

.com.

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