Hanoi’s Revenge?

It seems Sen. John McCain is always looking for new ways to create murder, misery, and mayhem in the world. A look at his life seems to confirm that view. McCain’s latest offering (with fellow gangster Joe Lieberman) is the “Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010.” According to the Atlantic Monthly, the act “sets out a comprehensive policy for the detention, interrogation and trial of suspected enemy belligerents who are believed to have engaged in hostilities against the United States by requiring these individuals to be held in military custody, interrogated for their intelligence value and not provided with a Miranda warning.”

At the age when civilized people are going to college, building businesses, and creating and caring for families, Johnny Mac was happily bombing and murdering Vietnamese peasants from the skies. Unfortunately (for him and later for us) McCain was shot down and held as a POW for six years. One of McCain’s partners in crime in Vietnam included Sam Johnson. Both McCain and Johnson were eventually released from their imprisonment and returned home to be rewarded with numerous pieces of scrap metal, national esteem, and election to political office. Both men seemed to have learned a lot from their Communist captors as both have continually supported wars of aggression, torture (despite being tortured themselves), continual increases in the scope and power of the American police state, promotion of neo-Marxist economic policies and an abiding, irrevocable reverence for the nation state. And of course, let’s not forget McCain/Feingold, which was a direct assault on the First Amendment.

I’ve long wondered why the Vietnamese, once they had captured the likes of McCain and Johnson, didn’t retaliate for these pilot’s war crimes by carving them up and tossing their remains into a rice paddy. They certainly would have been justified in doing so. I realize the captured pilots had intelligence value. But it’s not unrealistic to think that thoughts of revenge would overpower the decision to keep them alive for their obvious strategic importance.

I then began to consider another possibility why the North Vietnamese allowed these two to live. Perhaps they somehow understood the havoc these two warriors would create after returning home. They both have certainly done their part, have they not? Perhaps, the Vietnamese perceived the darkness that lived within these two men and realized their enemies in the US would be harmed more by these men returning home, rather than having them killed. If so, how diabolical is that?

I understand that this hypothesis is kind of “out there.” But after witnessing years of these men’s oppressive actions to make our freedoms and lives ever more restricted and miserable, it’s not hard to start believing it must be part of some great plan or conspiracy. After all, if these two men had never been POWs, let alone military pilots, do you think either of these men (both with mediocre intellects) would have wound up being elected to office?

Or is our suffering merely the often seen consequence of leaving unchecked the despicable actions of evil men?

"The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones."
William Shakespeare