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Trump’s words rile, amuse, and resonate with former POWs

Many take exception to being cast as heroes for surviving their plight

“I don’t consider myself a hero because I got shot down. . . . I was a survivor,” said Charles A. Brown Jr., a US Air Force captain and former prisoner of war.Airforce photo

Taking fire during a nighttime mission over enemy territory, the A-6A Intruder was flaming and falling fast toward the North Vietnamese delta when Captain Paul G. Brown ejected on the night of July 25, 1968.

Brown, the bombardier/navigator on the two-man attack plane, broke his back on ejection. His arm was hit by rifle fire on the way down. He hid all night in a clump of bamboo as the villagers searched for him. At first light, they found him.

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.

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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.

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“They throw this word out all the time,” said Air Force Captain Hubert E. Buchanan, a former POW in Vietnam who now lives in Amherst, N.H. “Hero? I never use that word.”

John McCain was captured by civilians in a lake near Hanoi.Library of Congress/File 1967

Of course, the status of hero is not self-appointed, but rather conferred by the grateful fellow citizens the captives fought for. But it’s a label few former POWs say they feel comfortable wearing — largely because it honors a kind of defeat, however unavoidable, they endured, and not an act of bravery they initiated.

“I always wished I wasn’t captured,” said Buchanan. “But there’s not a whole lot of choice in the matter.”

Born and raised in Indiana, Buchanan was a systems operator on an F-4C Phantom when the four-plane squadron he was in came under heavy fire in 1966. With the two-man fighter plane going down, Buchanan ejected and was captured. He spent the next 6½ years in seven different North Vietnamese POW camps until his release in 1973.

Buchanan, 74, returned to a hero’s welcome. Thousands lined the streets as he rode through his Indiana hometown on a fire engine.

“Why are you doing all this?” Buchanan remembers thinking at the time. “I was the guy that got captured. I was nothing but a negative for the United States.”

So when he heard that Trump said he favors those who were not captured, his reaction was blunt:

“I do, too,” said Buchanan. “I bet John McCain was sort of laughing when he heard the comment.”

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Others were not. Veterans groups, politicians, and the public lined up to denounce Trump’s antagonism of McCain, who endured brutal torture and refused to participate in a North Vietnamese propaganda campaign that would have led to his release.

The difference between McCain and Trump — who avoided the war thanks to student deferments and one medical draft deferment for a bone spur — was that “Trump shot himself down. McCain and American veterans are true heroes,” Mitt Romney wrote on Twitter.

Leaders of the National League of POW/MIA Families, the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars also denounced Trump sternly for his criticism of McCain and disrespect for the service of millions of others.

Several former POWs with New England roots reached for this story were likewise irked that Trump would go after McCain.

“I don’t think much of Mr. Trump — I think he’s somewhat screwy,” said Colonel Charles A. Brown Jr., a Melrose native who retired to Arizona after a long career in the Air Force. “Obviously he’s one of those people who didn’t serve in Vietnam, criticizing those who did serve.”

Brown was shot down over Hanoi while on a B-52 bombing mission in December 1972, just three days before his wife was scheduled to visit. Instead, he spent Christmas in captivity.

He was freed with the rest of the prisoners 101 days later, but his time as a POW was “still too long,” he wrote in the 1977 book “We Came Home,” a collection of photos, biographies, and statements from the Vietnam POWs who made it back.

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Brown said Trump ought to apologize to all veterans for what he said, but it’s not the specific insult to POWs that chafes. Perhaps unwittingly, given that the jab was intended as an insult, Trump’s barb carried an odd resonance for Brown and others who went through what McCain did.

“I think most POWs wouldn’t call themselves heroes. We’d call ourselves survivors,” said Brown, 68. “The people who we like to call heroes are the ones who didn’t return, or who came back severely wounded.”

US Air Force Colonel Charles A. Brown Jr.Christopher Evans/Republican of Springfield

Captain James A. Mulligan Jr., who grew up in Lawrence and joined the Navy in 1947, was shot down near Vinh in 1966 after more than 80 missions. He bounced between POW camps in the years that followed — the Hanoi Hilton, Little Vegas, Camp Alcatraz — spending more than 30 months in leg irons and more than 40 months in solitary.

He said he hasn’t paid much attention to Trump’s remarks and their aftermath, and defended McCain as a “good POW” who held up under brutal treatment.

The citation that accompanies one of his two Silver Stars describes Mulligan’s “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity while interned as a Prisoner of War in North Vietnam. In January 1969, his captors, completely ignoring international agreements, subjected him to extreme mental and physical cruelties in an attempt to obtain military information and false confessions for propaganda purposes.”

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Mulligan resisted the torture.

“That’s a tough price to pay for what you believe in,” said Mulligan, now 89 and living in Virginia. “But I don’t think any of the POWs consider themselves heroes.”

Insultingly and perhaps unwittingly, Donald Trump is one of the few who agrees.


Nestor Ramos can be reached at nestor.ramos@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @NestorARamos.