John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, is a POW. For the uninitiated, POW is an acronym for Prisoner of War. But it’s not really true that John McCain is a POW. After all, he’s walking around free right now in the good ole United States of America. But he once was a POW. In other words, John McCain is a former POW. If you don’t believe me, here is proof:
That’s a monument to the shooting down of John McCain that still exists near Truc Bach Lake in Vietnam (formerly North Vietnam). The inscription reads “On October 26, 1967, Lt. John McCain in his A4 B1 was shot down in this lake.” The picture shows Lt. John McCain surrendering. It does not show the plane that was destroyed during this incident. Nor does it show any of the three other Navy planes that John McCain destroyed during his lackluster career as a pilot.
McCain III lost jet number one in 1958 when he plunged into Corpus Christi Bay while practicing landings. He was knocked unconscious by the impact coming to as the plane settled to the bottom.
McCain’s second crash occurred while he was deployed in the Mediterranean. “Flying too low over the Iberian Peninsula,” Timberg wrote, “he took out some power lines [reminiscent of the 1998 incident in which a Marine Corps jet sliced through the cables of a gondola at an Italian ski resort, killing 20] which led to a spate of newspaper stories in which he was predictably identified as the son of an admiral.”
McCain’s third crash three occurred when he was returning from flying a Navy trainer solo to Philadelphia for an Army-Navy football game.
In fact, if the Navy believed in bad mojo, they might have grounded McCain after he was involved (not his fault) in the disaster in the USS Forrestal.
McCain’s fourth aircraft loss occurred July 29, 1967, soon after he was assigned to the USS Forrestal as an A-4 Skyhawk pilot. While seated in the cockpit of his aircraft waiting his turn for takeoff, an accidentally fired rocket slammed into McCain’s plane. He escaped from the burning aircraft, but the explosions that followed killed 134 sailors, destroyed at least 20 aircraft, and threatened to sink the ship.
I wouldn’t count this fourth loss of an airplane against John McCain, but I might have concluded that letting him fly just wasn’t a good idea. And that turned out to be the case because less than three months later the North Vietnamese shot him down (destroying a fourth airplane) and took him captive.
In retrospect, the Navy probably never should have graduated McCain from the Academy. He finished fifth from the bottom of his class and led the world in receiving demerits. In fact, he would have been kicked out if he had not allowed a fellow cadet to take the fall for a hidden television he kept hidden in the duct work of his dorm. (He liked to watch the TV western, Maverick.
McCain didn’t take his Naval career seriously and he went on to wreck three planes, proving he was a terrible pilot. But at least he showed up for work, unlike the present occupant of the White House who didn’t crash any of the few planes he flew before going AWOL. In short, McCain dishonored the institution he served and never should have been trusted to fly. But he did fly…right into a North Vietnamese surface-to-air missile. And that’s when he became a POW.
He didn’t stay a POW forever though. Eventually he was released and became a former POW. That’s what he remains today.
Now, it may have been (let’s hope so) that the Navy gave John McCain a fourth plane because he was the son of an admiral. Ordinarily, I would not think it common practice to give a plane to man that has wrecked three multi-million dollar airplanes.
