McCain/Hagel: Different Paths From Vietnam to War in Iraq

[BeyondGeography]

The New York Times
By JANNY SCOTT
Published: March 18, 2007

Senator Chuck Hagel spent 13 months as a lowly grunt in the Mekong Delta in the deadliest period of the Vietnam War. He saw the horror of war from the bottom up — men sheared in half by explosives, half-decapitated by sniper fire, bleeding to death in the gloomy swelter of the jungle. Thirty years later, he came to believe he had been used.

Two Senators' Views on Iraq Senator John McCain was shot down 3,500 feet above Hanoi on a bombing run one month into his tour. He spent five and a half years as a prisoner of war; he was held in solitary confinement, tortured, beaten until he could not stand. An admiral’s son and a Navy pilot, he came to believe, like many pilots, that the war had been winnable, if only it had been fought right.

<...(Hagel's) faith in the rightness of the Vietnam War was worn down by reading history and traveling abroad, but what changed his mind most, he said, was listening to tape recordings released in the late 1990’s of telephone conversations in which President Lyndon B. Johnson confided that he saw the war as pointless. That was in 1964, and Mr. Johnson said he feared impeachment if he tried to withdraw.

<“The dishonesty of it was astounding — criminal, really,” Mr. Hagel said. “I came to the conclusion that they used those people, used our young people. So I am very careful, especially now. We’d better ask all the tough questions. This administration dismissed every tough question we asked. We were assured, ‘We know what we’re doing.’ That’s what they said in Vietnam.”>

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/washington/18vietnam.html?hp

[pwb]

1. McCain was shot down after only a month?

another senators son that should not really have been a pilot.