My uncle Harold was not a war hero, at least when judged against the bar set by Donald Trump.
The current Republican frontrunner, as you are likely aware, dismissed the military service of Senator John McCain during a recent campaign stop in Iowa. McCain spent more than five years as a North Vietnamese POW, enduring many rounds of torture after a surface to air missile knocked his A-4 Skyhawk out of the sky.
On a bombing run through fierce anti-aircraft fire in October of 1967, McCain was faced with a terrible choice. He could elude the missile or hit the target, not both. He continued on to the target.
Trump just scoffed at the daring act. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump told an audience. “He’s a war hero because he was captured? I like people who weren’t captured.”
“The Donald” avoided service in Vietnam, by the way — which is fine. My first professor of American military history used student deferments to keep his name off the draft lists so many times he ended up with a Ph.D. And despite his reluctance to join the military during wartime, he developed a sophisticated understanding of both campaign strategy and combat tactics.
Anyway, like McCain, Uncle Harold’s time in uniform would not have impressed Trump — not in the least.
Harold joined the Marine Corps in 1939 and was posted to the legation guard in Peking (now Beijing), China the next year. In one letter to his folks, he eagerly explained that China was considered “the best duty” in the Corps — not for the exotic adventure, mind you, but for the fact that the men could afford maids, laundry service, transportation, women and many rounds of booze, even on a private’s pay.
Only after he arrived did he include another, less palatable, fact in his notes home. The Japanese, at war with China since 1936, held Peking and the surrounding lands.
So you can probably guess what followed. On the same day Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, the 200 or so “North China Marines” woke up to find themselves surrounded by thousands of enemy troops backed by armored cars. Although some of the Marines hastily broke out weapons and toted them to the showers (as they were packed in cosmoline), the commanding officer ordered a surrender.
That’s right, Donald, they never fired a shot. Instead Harold and the others suffered through three and a half years in Japanese POW camps — three and a half years of beatings, starvation, disease, diarrhea, heavy labor, vermin, threats, taunting, abuse and many deaths. When located by American forces in Niigata, Japan in August of 1945 after Japan’s capitulation, Harold was jaundiced, brittle and bowed over by a number of illnesses. He weighed just over 110 pounds. The other’s were in similar shape.
It’s hard to imagine what Trump might have said about these Marines.
On the other hand, I can imagine Harold supporting The Donald — at least until Trump uttered his infamous condemnation of men captured in war. My uncle was a staunch conservative who backed the war in Vietnam.
But that’s supposition. Harold died in 1973.
What I do know is this: The North China Marines and the others they encountered — men captured on Bataan, Wake Island, Guam other outposts — maintained military discipline throughout their long ordeal. They obeyed their officers, they performed their duties and they provided aid to comrades. Although individuals occasionally lapsed, the men never allowed the enemy to break them as a unit. They remained American service men, and did so under circumstances Trump could never imagine.
So Uncle Harold, John McCain, all the rest acted heroically, at least by my standards. If Trump disagrees, that’s entirely his right. And if a segment of the voting population continues to back the candidate even after such statements, they must be able to see some substance beyond the apparent stubborn lack of perception, something missed by the rest.
And that’s fine — with a caveat. From the ranks of those supporting Trump, I’ve heard little condemnation of the candidate’s take on captivity. Do they not realize that to back a person, a voter need not surrender his or her entire conscience? In some cases it’s justified for the ranks to rise up and rebuke their candidate.
Such a stand may just make them all better in the long run.
