I don't think he flew tac--close support--missions. He was Navy. So prob'ly he didn't drop much napalm, at least not over the South. He flew 23 missions off aircraft carriers over the North, bombing civilian and 'strategic' targets. Probably he bombed Haiphong Harbor a time or two.

For his valor, Bombin' John "won" (wait for it)...Right, 23 medals and awards, just about one for every two hours of air-time he logged.

Likely, Bombin' John sustained the injuries he later attributed to torture in the crash when a SAM brought down his plane into a lake near Hanoi, where he had been attacking a civilian power plant. He also like to bomb dikes, cuz they didn't move much.

He likely would have drowned in the wreckage of his fourth jet-plane crash, but for the generosity of spirit exercised by some Vietnamese who swam down and extricated the pilot from the wreck.

It would have been the first time he looked into the eyes of the people he was sworn and bound to kill, for no reason other than their nationality.

Bombin 'Johnnie is the epitome of EVERY%THING that was wrong with the USer ICORP of Vietnam, as musch as he still epitomizes everything that is wrong with the USer ICORP of Iraq.

I am really sorry that Vietnamese militia-man pulled him out.

As for the little girl, I'm sure he never scrupled about who was under his bombs. So the question's strangely moot: if he didn't he would have, without a single twinge of conscience...which makes him as guilty as if he did...

33 years and it ain't over yet.

What! No world class war photographs of Iraq or Afghanistan? Those are the wars WE ARE IN right now. The ones that need resolution, today. EVEN that little girl AND the photographer learned to forgive enough to meet the Queen of one of the nations bombing them back then. Mccain has done enough since that war to criminalize him for with THIS WAR. Moralizing over the last war where he was deemed a hero will NOT stop THIS WAR, nor will it justify anything Kerry may have done back then neither. Since BOTH were officers, I'm almost sure BOTH VOLUNTEERED for the shit they ended up with, they BOTH pulled the trigger and killed people they NEVER met before and had NO logical reason to hate. They were told to and they did. THAT IS EVERY WAR.

JOHN MCCAIN, DID YOU DROP NAPALM ON THAT GIRL?

No. That napalm picture was 1972(?).

McCain was a POW from '67 to '73. He cheered the Christmas Bombing of 1972.

Unless, like in Hogan's Heroes, he had surreptitious free run to leave, do some war efforting, then return by the following morning.

Oh yeah; from wikipedia:

After taking the photograph, Út promptly took Kim Phúc and the other children to a hospital in Saigon where it was determined that her burns were so severe that she would not survive.

Strangely, Ut took her to the hospital where she was given very minimal survival chances, and Ut won the Pulitzer Prize despite giving her a hand.

In 1996, she again met the surgeons who saved her life.

I guess he didn't need to take that breather under the tree. People everywhere react differently to death around them.

There's a new study out that re-estimated war casualties from a great many wars; the bottom line is that casualties were greatly underestimated in almost every case.

The study's figure for Vietnamese casualties in the war was 3.8 million.

So I applaud the GE-owned media property for its approximation of truth telling. The U.S. media convention has been "over a million", I think. Sometimes the daring ones say "as many as two million."

I'll look up the link tomorrow.

The McCain campaign continues its good work:

Asked for a response, the McCain campaign referred The Associated Press to Orson Swindle, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel who was imprisoned with McCain. Swindle said Duyet "has no credibility on every utterance he makes."

(snip)

"He says John McCain would make a great president. How the hell does he know? He has absolutely no credibility," Swindle added.

There is a certain irony in a guy named "Swindle" calling some other source uncredible...

What a world!

BC,

I think you're right on the merits, but do we really want this election to be about the Vietnam War? Is that the discredited foreign policy we want to focus on between now and November?

Not that the Dems are doing all they can - even yesterday Obama described McCain as a great war hero. Why? Why suck up to him even a little? Everyone knows his biography, no need to reinforce it. He was a POW almost four decades ago, that's not his identity any more. Now he's the confused, conservative Republican with the faux-maverick image. That's our winning meme.

Orson Swindle? Great name, though. He should be in a cartoon.

Thanks for the link, Nell. Scary.

The Vietnamese have always amazed me by their capacity to forgive. I find it almost incomprehensibly admirable.

Think of us, arguably the most vindictive nation on earth!

Iran kidnapped 52 US diplomats for 400 days a quarter-century ago. All of them were released.
We've never forgiven.

The Vietnam war was followed by a 25-year embargo against that country.

And what about Agent Orange? Thousands of deformed babies. Who's taken responsibility for it?

DCS: I believe that the single greatest step this country could take toward a better future would be to acknowledge the sins of its past. Of all those sins, three of them tower above all others: slavery; the Vietnam war; and contempt for the poor.

The reason Vietnam is so important in this election is that one cannot begin to understand why McCain would sing "bomb Iran" to a Beach Boys tune without understanding the picture I posted, what brought it about, and why McCain approves.

McCain is a war lover, not a warmonger (Cheney is a warmonger), McCain loves war. The man's entire life has been the glorification of war. All his role models and heroes are military men. He's justified every atrocity his beloved military has ever committed.

So he will not hesitate to obliterate Iran if that's where glory lies.

Usually people wait until they're president to kill innocent people. But McCain is already ahead of the pack.

I'll let Josh Marshall and Matt Stoller obsess about energy tax policy and school vouchers. As an American, I think I owe that little girl an explanation and that's what I intend to focus on.

That little girl and her sisters in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Chile, Nicaragua, ....

Bernard: But what about those childern WE bombed this afternoon? Mccain sings that song because he wants to bomb Iran, which is 40 years and several thousand miles away from Viet Nam. That little girl forgave so that the woman she became COULD forget.

What about those childern WE WILL bomb tonight, tomorrow and next year and the year after, and the next few years after that. THOSE CHILDERN WE can help save, that's who needs OUR help now. Why wait 40 years to reminscence over pictures of their burned bodies, have THEM forgive and forget, while WE rage on in some other battlefield.

Given that girl is now living in Canada (it's on previous posts at ATR), why don't we just get her to come down and ask him?

This sounds incredible, but when you talk to modern Vietnamese about it, they have come to view the war as an intra-national tragedy (brother against brother) rather than an international tragedy. They hate wars, not Americans.

Duyet's response is not surprising, he seems to embody some of my favorite Vietnamese traits: brutally honest and able to tell bullshit on immediate sight. But if they like you, they tend to like you genuinely, politics aside.

I'm with you, Mike. The dead are dead. The only reason to focus on them is so that the living may go on living and not join the legions of dead on America's newest, glorious battlefields.

EMH: Indeed. I, as a Frenchman and an American, give the Vietnamese two reasons for them to hate me. But I grew up with Vietnamese kids in school. There were a whole bunch of them in every grade: they and their families were simply the most lovely people (and, yum, that food was good!)

Mike Meyer- there are iconic images of the Iraq war already, such as the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner standing on a box, the pictures of Samantha Harman and Charles Graner giving a thumbs up wearing rubber gloves next to Manadel al-Jamadi's iced corpse. The little girl crying with her brother looking on after her family was gunned down at a checkpoint, in January 2005. Undoubtedly many others.

I will admit, like you I have difficulty understanding McCain's enthusiasm for war subsequent to his imprisonment.

Jonathan Versen: Mccain is a bomber pilot, other than shoveling horseshit in congress, its ALL he ever knowed. (and I guess he wasn't too great at countermeasure jagging) His personal habits and social skills would have tanked a lifetime military career but lend themselves nicely to a life of politics(shoveling horseshit). Alas, it seems, he dreams of the "good ole dayz" of stick in hand, thumb on the pickle button, and target(maybe) in the sights. This time he doesn't have to worry about being too slow on the rudder pedal and end up spending a few years under his enemy's thumb, singing like a canary or worse. Just another case of "WE're going to do it right this time around".
Face facts, NO ONE learned a thing from Viet Nam. Nothing was learned 33 years ago, nothing will be learned from Viet Nam today. NOTHING. If WE had learned even the most simplist lesson, WE WOULD NOT BE WHERE WE ARE TODAY.

Mark from D/ Linda/ David/ Elle/ Mark/Leighton/Justin, etc.

Whoever you are, you're all the same person. (Same IP address.) Go play somewhere else. Thanks.

If Obama works for peace, i work for Magnum photography...

Mark from deutchland: I think Einstein said it best, "If my theories prove correct, the Germans will say I am German and the French will say I am a citizen of the world. If they do not, then the French will say I am German and the Germans will say I am a Jew."

or a mistake is typing "buy" when you meant to write "buying"

Obama and McCain are both disgraces. Vote Nader.

The Vietnamese have always amazed me by their capacity to forgive. I find it almost incomprehensibly admirable. Think of us, arguably the most vindictive nation on earth! Iran kidnapped 52 US diplomats for 400 days a quarter-century ago. All of them were released.
We've never forgiven.

It's the nature of sin, Bernard. Once you're wrong, you have to prove that someone else is wrong, else you face your own filthy nature. And the best way to "prove" the wrongness of another is passionate hate for that other.

Cognitive Dissonance is a hungry bitch, and she never has her fill.

En Ming Hee said:

This sounds incredible, but when you talk to modern Vietnamese about it, they have come to view the war as an intra-national tragedy (brother against brother) rather than an international tragedy. They hate wars, not Americans.

I may be bullshitting here -- been known to -- but perhaps it's because it was, ultimately, their civil war (though one that was egged on, if not created by, other countries). We in the U.S. know that this was adventurism -- even the right wing admits this. Thus, we need a better reason to justify all that death. We don't have it, hence our obsession over it.

Face facts, NO ONE learned a thing from Viet Nam. Nothing was learned 33 years ago, nothing will be learned from Viet Nam today. NOTHING. If WE had learned even the most simplist lesson, WE WOULD NOT BE WHERE WE ARE TODAY.

This is one of those rare times where I have to agree wholeheartedly and without reservation with Mike. I was actually shocked -- I can't believe I had any innocence left -- utterly shocked by how ridiculously fucking easy it was for Bush to attack Iraq. Nothing held him back, nothing undermined the plan, abso-fucking-lutely nothing. "Surely," I thought, "our past relationship with Iraq -- especially our buddy-buddy relations with Saddam -- will be a stumblingblock." But no one on television ever brought it up, EVER! The first time I saw a reference to that past relationship on TV after the invasion of Iraq was, no bullshit, on the Simpsons. (It was an old magazine cover featuring Saddam and Uncle Sam sharing a milkshake and gazing lovingly into each others' eyes. The title: Iraq and U.S.: Friends Forever, or something similar.)

That should have taught our so-called liberal allies that "liberal" aristocracies cannot be trusted. But, no. Not even a little. Fanatics lined up behind two of some of the worst candidates (as the media demanded). And now the well-heeled liberals are confused, shocked, mouths open and gaping like fish, while Obama cuts the bullshit and starts talking like he was always walking.

Fool me twice. Fine. I fucking get it this time. No more invasions, please, no more lessons, I get it. We will commit the sins committed in Vietnam over, and over, and over again until we get what we lacked in the sixties, and what we lack now: a true opposition party. And it doesn't matter how many precious fucking blue dogs it costs us, or how much "incivility" it requires: look at those pictures of children slaughtered in our names and you'll decide, tout d'suite, that that cost is a goddamn bargain.

The article I just linked gives an estimate of 180,000 violent deaths for the Iraq war. What they write is confusing--they compare Iraq Body Count's figure for April 2008 with the Lancet2 and IFHS estimates for the war as of June 2006, which makes no sense at all.
It's not clear to me how they got their own number.

@Donald: Look at you link; you go, guy! ;>

It's wrong of me, but I can't help but wonder if the authors of the study chose to be extremely conservative with their Iraq war casualty estimates and unclear about how they arrived at them, in an effort not to draw on themselves the kind of reaction that the Lancet studies got (and that would bury the basic conclusion of their estimates for past wars).

Mike Meyer: Face facts, NO ONE learned a thing from Viet Nam. Nothing was learned 33 years ago, nothing will be learned from Viet Nam today. NOTHING. If WE had learned even the most simplist lesson, WE WOULD NOT BE WHERE WE ARE TODAY.

Once again the 'we' problem raises its head.

It is not true that no one learned a thing from Viet Nam. I did, for one. What I learned turned me into the anti-imperialist I am today. This happened with a substantial number of U.S. citizens at the time (nothing close to a majority, of course). The incidence of lesson-learning was highest in my generation, which had been raised believing in the myths of American exceptionalism and which had the largest proportion of those deployed in Viet Nam.

It is certainly true that very few members of the political class learned anything, or if they did quickly suppressed the understanding.

From 1972 on into the early 1980s, an enormous amount of effort was put into making sure that as many members of the public as possible would fail to draw unwanted conclusions, or forgot the lessons that were briefly visible in 1974-5 or so.

The participation of "liberal" members of the political class in this active rewriting of the immediate, lived past was among the most instructive aspects of the period for me, and for the diehard lesson-learners.

Of all those sins, three of them tower above all others: slavery; the Vietnam war; and contempt for the poor.

Um, not to play "rank the atrocities" but you're missing that whole "ethnic cleansing of the native population" thing that sometimes crossed over into actual genocide and that went on in this country for almost the first 200 years of our existence (and was, in fact, one of the primary motives behind our Revolution, as the Brits didn't want us to be as "aggressive" with our land swipes as our forefathers wanted to be). In any list of sins that the US needs to atone for, that should be up near the top.

Hell slavery and ethnic cleansing were two of the foundations that our nation of "liberty and justice for all" were founded on. No wonder that on the whole Americans are somewhat schizophrenic members of the international community...

Nell: I have PROOF WE learned nothing: Nixon resigned under JUST the threat of IMPEACHMENT. Unless one can prove Mike Meyer never existed one CANNOT say IMPEACHMENT was not brought up in the conversation concerning THIS administration, and yet---????

NonyNony: you're right.