Ghosts of Vietnam war stir as Senator John McCain takes aim at US President Donald Trump’s deferments to avoid service
The renewed focus on Trump’s lack of service in Vietnam comes as he faces scrutiny over his treatment of the families of America’s war dead
For more than 50 years, every American president has been forced to grapple, in one way or another, with the quagmire of the Vietnam war. Now it’s Donald Trump’s turn.
The ghosts of Vietnam are stirring anew, just as Trump prepares to visit the nation on his first presidential tour of Asia. Vietnam war hero Senator John McCain, who spent more than five years in a prisoner of war camp after his plane was shot down, this week put an unwelcome spotlight on Trump’s five draft deferments to avoid military service. And Trump’s prolonged political tussle over the proper way for presidents to honour and grieve with the families of fallen soldiers has focused attention on his lack of military service as well.
Trump tried to set all that aside on Monday as he presented the Medal of Honour to retired Captain Gary Rose, a Vietnam era medic who repeatedly ran into the line of enemy fire and ignored his own wounds to save his colleagues during a fierce firefight in enemy-controlled territory in September 1970.
Your love for your fellow soldier, your devotion to your country inspires us all
“Mike, this is serious stuff,” Trump said. “Your love for your fellow soldier, your devotion to your country inspires us all.”
But the matter of Trump’s lack of service wasn’t far offstage.
McCain, the Arizona Republican who has frequently clashed with the president, made clear he had Trump in mind on Monday as he criticised the Vietnam draft system that forced low-income Americans to serve while the wealthy could avoid war with a doctor’s note. Trump, the son of a millionaire developer, received draft deferments, one attained with a physician’s letter stating that he suffered from bone spurs in his feet.
“I don’t consider him so much a draft dodger as I feel that the system was so wrong that certain Americans could evade their responsibilities to serve the country,” McCain said on ABC’s The View. McCain was being pressed about earlier comments on C-SPAN in which he lamented that the military “drafted the lowest income level of America and the highest income level found a doctor that would say they had a bone spur”.