what exactly are McCain's war injuries?

[patrick t. cakes]

i know he cant raise his arms above his head

and he looks like a flapping bird but

what exactly happened to him?

[FrenchieCat]

1. Discussion with information

here....
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x6659338

[patrick t. cakes]

3. thanks.

[NYC_SKP]

2. The emotional and mental injuries are the ones to worry about. nt

[curious one]

11. You nailed it.

[Hard Leftt]

4. pretty freakin' horrific actually

politics aside, they kept breaking his arms and he had to manually set the bones, he became good enough at it that he set at least one of the other guys bones that were broken.

I'm always amazed at what the human body can endure and what people will do to survive in plane crashes, ship wrecks, pow's etc. Amazing stuff.

Initially they were going to leave him to die, he was on the verge. The only reason he's alive is they found out who his family was. I also read that McCain tried to kill himself at one point and the guards stopped him.

My father was a Navy man in WWII. So some of the stuff I read here frankly turns me off. Give him credit for surviving. Doesn't mean I'm voting for him.

[formernaderite]

6. thank you for saying that

i've learned to bite my tongue at times because the kids tend to go overboard on this board. I don't think discussions where we denigrate his service or his injuries do any good to the Obama campaign. We've got to keep our eyes on the prize people.

[musicblind]

10. Thank you for that

I have said before. I do not hate John McCain. I respect McCain as a person. I hate his political opinions and there is a difference between the two. I do not want McCain for my president, but I respect him for having survived an awful predicament and having gone through that at the request of his country.

[my3boyz]

13. How can you respect someone that lies

over and over again? It is one thing to respect his service. However, I think it is another to say you respect the man that he is today.

[Arkansas Granny]

12. Thanks for saying this. Regardless how I feel about McCain's views and policies,

the fact remains that he was held as POW and that he endured treatment that I cannot imagine. Trying to denigrate his military service or his POW status can do nothing to help us win this election for Obama and could, conceivably, have a negative effect on Obama's campaign.

We need to attack McCain on the issues.

[City Lights]

14. He broke both arms and right leg initially during his ejection.

And they broke his left arm again during interrogation.

I pulled the ejection handle, and was knocked unconscious by the force of the ejection—the air speed was about 500 knots. I didn't realize it at the moment, but I had broken my right leg around the knee, my right arm in three places, and my left arm. I regained consciousness just before I landed by parachute in a lake right in the corner of Hanoi, one they called the Western Lake. My helmet and my oxygen mask had been blown off.

They told me that the Frenchman would visit me that evening. About noon, I was put in a rolling stretcher and taken to a treatment room where they tried to put a cast on my right arm. They had great difficulty putting the bones together, because my arm was broken in three places and there were two floating bones. I watched the guy try to manipulate it for about an hour and a half trying to get all the bones lined up. This was without benefit of Novocain. It was an extremely painful experience, and I passed out a number of times. He finally just gave up and slapped a chest cast on me. This experience was very fatiguing, and was the reason why later, when some TV film was taken, it looked to many people as if I had been drugged.

After about two weeks, I was given an operation on my leg which was filmed. They never did anything for my broken left arm. It healed by itself. They said I needed two operations on my leg, but because I had a "bad attitude" they wouldn't give me another one. What kind of job they did on my leg, I do not know. Now that I'm back, an orthopedic surgeon is going to cut in and see. He has already told me that they made the incision wrong and cut all the ligaments on one side.

When I said that, the guards, who were all in the room—about 10 of them—really laid into me. They bounced me from pillar to post, kicking and laughing and scratching. After a few hours of that, ropes were put on me and I sat that night bound with ropes. Then I was taken to a small room. For punishment they would almost always take you to another room where you didn't have a mosquito net or a bed or any clothes. For the next four days, I was beaten every two to three hours by different guards. My left arm was broken again and my ribs were cracked.

http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/2008/01/28/john-mccain-prisoner-of-war-a-first-person-account.html?PageNr=1

[Algorem]

5. the gooks ruint his typing muscles

[leftofcool]

7. pathetic

[LaPera]

8. Must of lost all his fingers cuz Rove said his POW injuries are the reason McCain can't

use a computer.... did McCain lose both hands? How does he feed himself?

[bridgit]

9. This isn't the proper tack, the VC fucked him up and that's pretty much the end of that...

find another way, any other way...this shit will come back to bite you

[Thothmes]

15. Actually it was not the VC that did this to him

it was North Vietnames army personnel.

[secondwind]

16. we shouldn't focus on this........but he really was injured horribly........

when his plane crashed. His arms were broken, and the Vietnamese broke them again and again. His arms were never "set" properly.

He spent two years in a box in solitary, with the hot sun beating down on him. That is sheer torture. That is why he has skin issues today.

I don't think we need to downplay what it must have been like in a Vietnamese prison for 5-1/2 years.

We need to focus on winning this G-D*** election!

(I am NOT a McCain fan at all.)