Trump’s words rile, amuse, and resonate with former POWs
Many take exception to being cast as heroes for surviving their plight
Brown, who grew up in Newton and graduated from Boston University, spent the next four-plus years — “1,693 days to be exact,” he said — as a prisoner of war, until his release in 1973. It plagues his mind and body 47 years later.
But when Donald Trump last weekend disputed the heroism of America’s best-known Vietnam-era POW — “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said of senator and fellow Republican John McCain at an Iowa forum for presidential candidates, “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured” — Brown’s reaction was not indignance or outrage.
“It made me smile, to tell you the truth,” said Brown, who left the Marines as a lieutenant colonel and now lives in California. “I don’t consider myself a hero because I got shot down. . . . I was a survivor.”
For many men who spent years of their lives in hellish Southeast Asian prison camps, the controversy struck an unexpected chord. Their service records made them collateral damage in Trump’s widely-derided attack on McCain. But instead of finding the same offense in Trump’s comments that so many on both sides of the political aisle did, some former Vietnam POWs say the insult that lit up the presidential primary race mirrors their own misgivings about a label they have long worn uneasily: hero.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/massachusetts/2015/07/25/among-some-pows-trump-strikes-unexpected-chord/d5tkeXRJJGou5CNXVguWiI/story.html
