McCain's Vietnam (Page 2)

McCain expanded on this theme in a speech to the American Bar Association on the thirtieth anniversary of the 1968 Tet Offensive by North Vietnam and the Viet Cong. "Like a lot of Vietnam veterans, I believed and still believe that the war was winnable," he said. "I do not believe that it was winnable at an acceptable cost in the short or probably even the long term using the strategy of attrition which we employed there to such tragic results. I do believe that had we taken the war to the North and made full, consistent use of air power in the North, we ultimately would have prevailed."

Appearing before a packed audience at a town-hall meeting at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire in early December, McCain resoundingly called on his listeners to recall "the lessons of Vietnam," which--rolled up into an applause-gathering soundbite--means, he said, "never again do we send our men and women to fight and die in foreign conflicts unless our goal is victory!" Practically speaking, McCain considers the lessons of Vietnam to be as follows: America's armed forces should be utilized when "US vital interests are threatened," which interests McCain liberally defines as including "ensuring the survival and prosperity of the American people, defending our allies and combating such global threats as terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction or narcotics." Though McCain consistently opposes the use of US forces in nonstrategic or humanitarian missions like Somalia and Haiti, when US interests are at stake, he believes, Washington must make a full-scale commitment to win, even if it means total war--an approach that he applies to crises around the world.

At the height of the crisis in Kosovo, McCain clamored for an invasion, bitterly criticizing the Clinton Administration for its "excessively restricted air campaign" and its decision to "refrain from using ground troops," adding: "These two mistakes were made in what almost seemed willful ignorance of every lesson we learned in Vietnam." Similarly, during the flare-up in 1994 over North Korea's nuclear program, McCain recklessly accused President Clinton of "appeasement" of Pyongyang, warning, "The time for more forceful, coercive action is long overdue." McCain demanded that the United States increase its alert status; mobilize US troops; deploy aircraft carriers, more fighters and Apache helicopters; pre-position bombers and tankers; and announce the immediate application of economic sanctions--even while recognizing the strong possibility that such actions could lead to war on the Korean peninsula. And on Iraq, he says that "the only way to prevail is to strike disproportionate to the provocation," criticizing the White House for "the extremely limited scale" of bombing raids there.

In a speech in New York on the anniversary of the December 7 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, McCain singled out maverick nations like North Korea and Iraq for special attention under a policy he calls "rogue-state rollback." If pressure against these states doesn't work, he said, "We must be prepared to back up these measures with American military force if the existence of such rogue states threatens America's interests and values."

"It seems to me that he finds it uncomfortably normal that we should be blowing somebody up," says John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists. "I think McCain has not been able to come home from the war."

If today McCain is obtuse about Vietnam, a telling incident from the summer of 1967 indicates that for a fleeting moment, at least, he came face to face with his conscience over Vietnam--and blinked.

Like many potentially life-altering experiences, McCain's came as the result of a brush with death. On July 29, 1967, while preparing for his sixth bombing run over North Vietnam in his A-4 Skyhawk aboard the deck of the USS Forrestal, an accidentally fired Zuni missile ripped into his plane's fuel tank. Within moments, a chain reaction swept the deck of the carrier, triggering fires and explosions, setting off 1,000-pound bombs and engulfing planes, killing 134 men. McCain, slightly wounded, saw body parts fly and watched blistered comrades die before his eyes.

A few months later, sipping Scotch in a Saigon villa with Johnny Apple of the New York Times, McCain reflected on the trauma. "It's a difficult thing to say," he said, "but now that I've seen what the bombs and the napalm did to the people on our ship, I'm not so sure that I want to drop any more of that stuff on North Vietnam." (In 1972, a significant number of B-52 pilots and crew engaged in exactly that kind of heroic insubordination, refusing orders to fly missions in the midst of President Nixon's carpet-bombing of North Vietnam.)

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