UI vets critical of McCain’s record on veterans’ issues

MILITARY RECORD – Johnnie McChicken

When two U.S. Army enlisted men were captured by the Viet Cong in 1963, they were plunged into an ordeal that would prove to be a relentless trial of body and spirit by torture. Once they were finally freed, however, their trials began all over again, when their statements critical of the U. S. Vietnam policy landed them in a military court facing a capital offense for violating the military Code of Conduct by “aiding the enemy.”

But, if your name is John McCain and your father and grandfather were famous admirals, violating the Code of Conduct by “aiding the enemy” translates into fodder for a political career, book deals, and adulation bordering on sainthood.

Even though news reports of McCain for collaborating with the enemy continued from the time he was captured in 1967 through 1970, the Navy never considered prosecution as an option.

Instead, Pentagon pencil pushers chose a political spin that lifted McCain, the former POW turned U.S. Senator, up to a glorified pedestal where he sprouted a halo and wings and became America's “POW-hero” and today a presidential candidate.

No such luck for the two lowly “grunts.”

http://www.usvetdsp.com/smith_mc.htm

VETS ON McSHAME

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MUY9S6iCvk

At Fort McNair, an army base located along the Potomac River in the nation's capital, a chance reunion takes place one day between two former POWs. Walking along the grounds at Fort McNair, McCain runs into John Dramesi, an Air Force lieutenant colonel who was also imprisoned and tortured in Vietnam.

There's a distance between the two men that belies their shared experience in North Vietnam — call it an honor gap. Like many American POWs, McCain broke down under torture and offered a “confession” to his North Vietnamese captors. Dramesi, in contrast, attempted two daring escapes. For the second he was brutalized for a month with daily torture sessions that nearly killed him. His partner in the escape, Lt. Col. Ed Atterberry, didn't survive the mistreatment. But Dramesi never said a disloyal word, and for his heroism was awarded two Air Force Crosses, one of the service's highest distinctions. McCain would later hail him as “one of the toughest guys I've ever met.”

On the grounds between the two brick colleges, the chitchat between the scion of four-star admirals and the son of a prizefighter turns to their academic travels; both colleges sponsor a trip abroad for young officers to network with military and political leaders in a distant corner of the globe.

“I'm going to the Middle East,” Dramesi says. “Turkey, Kuwait, Lebanon, Iran.”

“Why are you going to the Middle East?” McCain asks, dismissively. “It's a place we're probably going to have some problems,” Dramesi says.

“Why? Where are you going to, John?” “Oh, I'm going to Rio.”

“What the hell are you going to Rio for?” McCain, a married father of three, shrugs. “I got a better chance of getting laid.”

Dramesi, who went on to serve as chief war planner for U.S. Air Forces in Europe and commander of a wing of the Strategic Air Command, was not surprised. “McCain says his life changed while he was in Vietnam, and he is now a different man,” Dramesi says today. “But he's still the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in.”

“Let's face it,” says Larry Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. “John McCain made his reputation on the fact that he doesn't bend his principles for politics. That's just not true.

“John has made a pact with the devil,” says Lincoln Chafee, the former GOP senator, who has been appalled at his one-time colleague's readiness to sacrifice principle for power.

McCain,the guy who Voted No to the New GI Bill. He got his benefits and thats all he cares.