Fuck off McCain

War hero? Fuck off. You’re an army brat, the spoilt offspring of an elite army general. You flew a mach-speed fighter over a country full of peasant fighters and dropped napalm on them from thousands of feet in the air. You burned peasants to death, from a distance. And this makes you a hero? Fuck off McCain.

And did you ever apologise to the people of Vietnam for what you did to them McCain? Did you hell. Instead you go on and on like a stuck record about freedom and democracy and truth. You proclaim your service to your country, as though it was a virtue to bomb peasants fighting against colonialism. But can you tell me how you served the Vietnamese people by shredding them with bombs?

You can’t tell me how you served the Vietnamese people McCain, because you can’t even see them as people. Back then they were thousands of feet below you, and because you never saw them it was okay to bomb them. But just to be sure you called them “gooks”, because a gook is inferior – a sub-human – and killing a gook is not a crime. But over 30 years later you still call the Vietnamese people gooks. It’s because you do not have the courage to admit that what you did was wrong that you use the same language of hatred to continue to justify your crimes.

Let me explain what I mean by a crime. Some of the bombs you dropped were filled with sharp plastic spikes. When the bombs exploded, the plastic spikes flew in all directions, and if they hit a human they worked their way deep into the flesh. They buried themselves so deep they couldn’t be removed. The spikes were designed to tunnel through the body and into the vital organs. And because they flew everywhere, the plastic spikes flew into children’s bodies and tunnelled their way slowly into their livers, kidneys or hearts. When I say slowly, I mean 10, 11, 12, 13 days of screaming. Then the children died – there was no anaesthetic, your government’s bombing and embargoes had seen to that, and that’s why the children screamed. There was rarely an X-Ray machine to detect the spikes, and even when there was it could not find the spikes because they were designed to be undetectable. The bomb was an instrument of terror, a weapon that killed by a slow torture. It was an instrument designed to torture the Vietnamese people into submission.

I never hear you talk about the weapons you used against the Vietnamese people, but you’ve made something of a living out of your status as a torture victim, haven’t you John? Let me speak bluntly here: you weren’t fucking tortured McCain. You got a bit of a slapping, which is less than you deserved.

Let me explain again. You know what happens to most downed airmen, don’t you? See, the people you bomb don’t see you as a war hero. All they know is you just bombed their street. You just killed grandma, and you just killed the old bloke down the street who was a bit off – he had a room full of old football magazines going back 35 years, but he never did any harm to anyone. You blew him up. His leg is now lying in the middle of the road.

So the people don’t see you as a hero. When you crash-land in their street they bash your skull in with the bricks that used to be their houses, or they drown you, or they cut your throat. The British did it to the Luftwaffe during WW2. I can introduce you to fishermen who used to surround any downed pilot in their boats, then circle him, laughing and pointing and waiting for him to drown.

You got lucky. You lived. The Vietcong saved you from drowning in a lake after you crashed, then saved you from the mob who wanted to bash your brains out. You got lucky McCain.

So what did you do? You complained. Oh, there was no proper medical treatment for your broken limbs. Of course there wasn’t. You bombed the hospitals, you bombed the power stations, you bombed the sewage and water systems, and you bombed the supply lines. Remember?

You complained about the food, but you got the same food that everyone else had in Vietnam at that time. The frontline Vietcong lived on taro and salt. There was no food in Vietnam. You bombed the supply lines, remember?

You got dysentery. Well John, that’s what happens when you bomb a country back to the stone age: everyone gets dysentery. Didn’t you know that that’s what happens when you cut off medical supplies and food like you were conducting a Mediaeval siege?

Like I say, you got lucky. You lived. You got slapped around a bit, sure. Get over it. You’re alive. The Vietnamese you bombed are not. And let me tell you, if you bombed my street then crashed your plane in it, I’d be first in line with electrodes for your testicles. Or perhaps just a brick for your skull.

Think yourself lucky you didn’t land in England McCain. We’re not as civilised as the Vietnamese that way.

To sum up. You have never apologised for what you did to the people of Vietnam. Worse, you propose that we continue a war in Iraq that is estimated to have left over 1 million Iraqi civilians dead already. The only conclusion I can draw from this is that you have learned nothing from your life experience, which is a poor recommendation for a politician, let alone a man who aspires to be a “world leader”. But I will go further. I strongly believe that you continue to make the same mistakes because it serves your career to do so. Rather than find the strength and human dignity to relive the past and address the immoral conduct or yourself, and your country, you continue to further your career by proclaiming yourself a war hero.

War hero? Fuck off.