JFK had PT-109 Dead in the water, and got run over by a ship five times his side, and a bit slower.
LBJ got his Silver Star for a halfway bombing mission that saw no one, dropped nothing and had a bit of engine trouble.
Yes, interesting. Only Dems? Or are there a few Pubbie ‘heros’ out there too? Here is a bit about Juan McLame...
“In all the tales of wartime courage peppering John McCain’s presidential campaign trail, perhaps the most outstanding example of selfless heroism involves not the candidate but a humble Vietnamese peasant.
On October 26, 1967, Mai Van On ran from the safety of a bomb shelter at the height of an air raid and swam out into the lake where Lieutenant Commander McCain was drowning, tangled in his parachute cord after ejecting when his Skyhawk bomber was hit by a missile.
In an extraordinary act of compassion at a time when Vietnamese citizens were being killed by US aerial bombardments, he pulled a barely conscious McCain to the lake surface and, with the help of a neighbour, dragged him towards the shore.
And when a furious mob at the water’s edge began to beat and stab the captured pilot, Mr On drove them back. Nearly three decades later, a Vietnamese government commission confirmed he was indeed the rescuer and, in a 1996 meeting in Hanoi, McCain embraced and thanked Mr On and presented him with a Senate memento.
From that brief encounter to his death at the age of 88 two years ago, Mr On never heard from the senator again, and three years after their meeting, McCain published an autobiography that makes no mention of his apparent debt to Mr On. It is a snub Mr On took to his death. His widow, Bui Thi Lien, 71, said: ?In his last years, my husband was very sad sometimes. He would say, ‘Mr McCain has forgotten me. Mr McCain would be dead if it weren’t for my husband.’”
More, from http://educate-yourself.org/cn/earlhopperinterview08feb08.shtml
“The impression that McCain and the media has attempted to portray of McCain’s 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam is about as far from the truth that one could possible go. McCain, from the first moments of his capture, had behaved as a COLLOBORATOR and propaganda tool for his North Vietnamese captors. McCain had engaged in no less than 30, and likely as many as 38 anti-American propaganda broadcasts for Radio Hanoi during the period of his captivity. Far from the image of a dedicated American “hero” sweating it out in a North Vietnamese prisoner’s “hotbox” for 5 1/2 years, McCain was often given “special” treatment by his captors, who were fully aware of his father’s and grandfather’s 4 star admiral positions with the Navy. No one has ever witnessed McCain’s supposed “torture” at the hands of his jailers. The consensus opinion of other POWs in McCain’s camps was that McCain was NEVER tortured by the North Vietnamese. McCain’s disgraceful and wholly reprehensible conduct (along with John Kerry) during the 1991-93 Senate Committee on POW/MIAs leaves no doubt that McCain is a traitor to this country and its veterans and especially to the families of POWs and MIAs...”