Michael Olesker, The Examiner
2008-04-07 07:00:00.0
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BALTIMORE -

When John McCain arrived in Annapolis the other day, he brought with him his presidential campaign and memories of his personal torment. If you listened carefully, you could also hear echoes of Bob Dole’s presidential run a dozen years ago. Dole was a war hero, and so was McCain. But their wars were fought in the distant past, and no one knows precisely how this translates to the politics of the present.

McCain spent his youth at the U.S. Naval Academy, then headed off for Vietnam. The horror of his captivity there was described, by Robert Timberg, in a remarkable book called “The Nightingale’s Song,” which recounted McCain’s plane getting shot down over Hanoi and crashing in a small lake.

There, Timberg wrote, McCain “sank to the muddy bottom, then kicked back up gasping for air. As he sank again, he tried to manipulate the toggles of his life vest to inflate it, but discovered that his [broken] arms were useless. ...

“An angry crowd had gathered, all seemingly armed. Stripped down to his skivvies, he was kicked and spat upon, then bayoneted in the left ankle and left groin. Suddenly the pain from the injuries he incurred on ejection, muted until then, flared through his body. He raised his head, was stunned to see that his right calf was nearly perpendicular to his right knee, [when] an onlooker slammed a rifle butt down on his shoulder, smashing it.”

Days later, McCain awoke in a medical facility. The room was infested with mosquitoes and roaches. Rats scuttled across the floor. And McCain’s years of torture and deprivation were only beginning.

Now McCain returns to Annapolis, partly to remind us of his military history, while his presidential campaign runs TV commercials showing video of his Vietnam captivity and trumpeting his astonishing courage during his long season in hell.

And we know we’ve been here before and wonder what we should make of it when we go to the ballot box.

When Dole ran for president in 1996, there was a TV spot showing his sister. She was weeping 50 years after the fact. She remembered when her brother returned from the war with his body ruined and the pain excruciating. If you watched, you wanted to reach through the TV screen and comfort this poor woman.

And then there was Dole himself, talking one night during the campaign about his father visiting him in the hospital. There was no money, Dole said on PBS, so his middle-aged father had to walk the whole way. As he told the story, Dole’s face contorted, and he sobbed wrenchingly, and you wanted to embrace him.

And you wondered: If we vote for this man and send him to the White House, will we finally have paid our debt to him and to his whole generation of selfless warriors?

It’s the same question some of us ask now about McCain. But it comes with a twist.

The country finds itself five years into a war that ruins untold numbers of lives and takes uncountable amounts of money. McCain’s war, in Vietnam, divided the country in terrible ways, but the war in Iraq doesn’t so much divide us as offer national consensus: We hate it, all of the polls declare, and want it to go away.

And this, as much as Vietnam, will ultimately define the candidacy of McCain — no matter how many TV commercials he runs, and no matter how our hearts go out to him for his uncommon military service.

His is the voice insisting that the war can still be won militarily, that the so-called surge is working, that America is served well even if we have to remain in Iraq across generations to come. McCain wishes to remind us, he says, of something called honor.

But McCain, like Dole, leaves out something honorable in the telling of his own story. It is the truth of the suffering, which only certain survivors can tell: what this pain does to the soldiers and to their loved ones, and how it lingers across the years. Dole’s pain goes back more than 60 years; McCain’s, more than 30.

It’s the kind of pain that should serve as a warning, and not only as the measure of a man’s courage and devotion to country. It’s the kind of pain that should say: I know the awfulness of war. I know it well enough that I don’t want my children, or anyone else’s, to have to suffer as I have.

Please send news tips to Michael Olesker at olesker@baltimoreexaminer.com