John McCain: War Hero or War Criminal?

John McCain: War Hero or War Criminal?

It is a matter of perspective of whether you see John McCain, the former Navy pilot and present Senator from the safety of the U.S. today or from the ground up in Vietnam when his payload of napalm bombs were reigning down on downtown Hanoi residents in 1967.

He flew 23 missions into North Vietnam, a nation that never attacked our country, unless you believe the fabricated “wmd” of that era, that we were attacked in international waters 14 miles from their coast and 8,000 miles from our nation.

Google “Operation 34A,” the CIA’s smoking gun to bait the North Vietnamese into the coastal islands just south of the 17th parallel. No evidence of any attack was ever presented to justify the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution presented by President Johnson to Congress three days later after the so-callled incident that justified the prior 13 years of war, the vast secret expansion of the war into Cambodia, and the next eight years and three million more Vietnamse deaths along with further tens of thousands American maimed and killed.

Bombing mostly civilians in any nation’s capital, as the 9-11 hijackers tried to do to our nation, does not qualify for war hero status, but rather for war criminal.


Gil Villagrán, MSW
Lecturer, School of Social Work
San Jose State University