麻豆社

The late John McCain was regarded by millions of Americans as a personal hero. Brought down in a plane over Vietnam in 1967, he was held under appalling conditions as a prisoner of war until his release in 1973. When his death was announced at the weekend, Barack Obama, who ran against him for president in 2008, led the many tributes from both left and right. He said McCain had shown 鈥渢he courage to put the greater good above our own.鈥�

Not everyone felt that way, however. John Pilger, the veteran journalist, called him a 鈥減lastic hero鈥�. He wrote: 鈥淎s a pilot in Vietnam, McCain cravenly bombed a mostly undefended country of civilians.鈥�

Pilger had every right to speak his mind 鈥� and many would agree with him that the Vietnam war was immoral. The older I get, the more my own revulsion towards military intervention intensifies. I think it rarely solves anything and I find it hard to justify the deaths of innocents.

But where I depart from Pilger is my conviction that a soldier鈥檚 heroism can sometimes be judged separately from the cause in which they fight.

For example, remembrances of the First World War often contrast the self-sacrifice of the fighting man with the futility of the fight, even the madness of the orders that ordinary soldiers had to follow 鈥� captured by that controversial image of 鈥渓ions led by donkeys.鈥� And the key phrase here is 鈥渟elf-sacrifice鈥�. It鈥檚 indisputably relevant in the case of John McCain.

John McCain was captured, beaten and thrown into solitary confinement. The Vietnamese discovered that his father was an important man and saw the chance for a propaganda coup: they offered to release McCain early. But McCain had been taught that soldiers should only accept release in the order of capture, and because there were Americans who had been imprisoned longer than he, McCain refused. Just think about that: he refused his freedom. The Vietnamese resumed his torture.

My mind goes instantly to Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish friar at the Auschwitz death camp who volunteered to die in place of a stranger. Pope John Paul II called Kolbe the 鈥減atron saint of our difficult century鈥�, and that鈥檚 precisely what the twentieth century was 鈥� full of difficult, sometimes impossible choices. In its course there were many terrible orders given, but there were also opportunities for acts of the highest human decency, choices that led to people putting their lives on the line for others. For this, McCain deserves to be honoured as the very model of a good solider.

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