Trump’s slur hits former PoW hard
For comrade of Sen. John McCain, comment was throwback to past public attitudes in U.S.
WASHINGTON — Everett Alvarez Jr. sometimes goes days without thinking about the hell he endured — nearly nine years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, one of the longest periods of captivity in U.S. military history.
“I’m too busy,” says the former Navy commander, who is 77 now and runs his own multimilliondollar IT and management consulting company in Virginia.
But this month, it has been impossible for Alvarez to avoid those memories, thanks to Donald Trump. The Donald, who’s running for the Republican presidential nomination and leading in national polls, attacked Alvarez’s old comrade, Sen. John McCain.
McCain, Trump declared, is “not a war hero,” because he was captured and held as a PoW.
Alvarez says his “jaw hit the floor” when he heard those remarks from Trump, a guy who got repeated draft deferments during the Vietnam War. Hating on veterans publicly? A total throwback to a different era.
“You’re free to say and do what you want,” Alvarez says. “But today? You don’t go there.”
Because in today’s America, we treat service members with far more respect and honour than we did during the Vietnam War.
“Back then, when we came home, the kids who went over there were called the bad guys, the baby killers, the guys with the black hats,” remembers Alvarez, who was released in 1973 and awarded a Silver Star, two Legions of Merit, the Distinguished Flying Cross, two Bronze Stars and two Purple Hearts for his service.
“After Watergate settled down, Americans looked back at it and started to experience regret,’’ he says.
Except for Trump, who apparently has no regrets — and no shame either.
Alvarez is an amazing man. He’s the grandson of Mexican immigrants and grew up in Salinas, Calif., where there is a high school named after him. He had been in the “Hanoi Hilton” for two years when McCain was shot down and taken to the infamous North Vietnamese prison.
They were locked up, cuffed, beaten and tortured at the same time there. Alvarez was the first American pilot shot down over the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964. He spent 15 months in solitary confinement. He nearly starved on a diet of feathered blackbirds. His hands, even after repeated surgeries, remain unsteady because of the way they were constantly restrained in that prison.
During that time, Alvarez’s sister became a vocal antiwar protester, he says. His wife divorced him and married another man.
Although he was greeted warmly by some after his release, many Americans weren’t so generous toward his fellow veterans.
“Kids who came home had to take their uniforms off, because they were spit upon and derided in public,” says Alvarez, who remarried and lives in Potomac, Md. “And they were not helped by the government. The bureaucracy was no help. And a lot of these kids were troubled.”
It also felt as though the only peers they had — Second World War veterans — weren’t on their side, either.
“They went out, they won the big war, and 25 to 30 years later, they’re up in management, successful and then retiring,” Alvarez says. “And they saw the Vietnam vets as young complainers.”
America wasn’t in the mood to deal with veterans from that broken war. That began to change in the 1980s and early 1990s, he says.
“Starting with the Gulf War, it was recognized that what we did to these young kids was wrong,” he says. “If you disagree with the policies, you recognize that you don’t blame the young kids. Blame the politician, but don’t blame the war on the warrior.”
Alvarez’s son served two tours in Iraq as a Navy doctor. The 2.6 million men and women who have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan are saluted nearly everywhere they go. There are yellow ribbons, discounts at theme parks, applause at baseball games. Heck, veterans even have a healthy debate going on whether the knee-jerk “Thank you for your service” they get every day is grating or welcome.
Not that the lives of 21st-century veterans are easy. In a poll The Washington Post conducted with the Kaiser Family Foundation last year, most said their health is worse now than when they deployed. Nearly a quarter of the women who served in these wars said they had been sexually assaulted during their service. More than half who were polled said they know another veteran who has tried to commit suicide, and 20 per cent said they know a veteran who is homeless.
Those who served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan represent less than one per cent of the nation’s population. But, at least now, the tone from the other 99 per cent of Americans who aren’t service members is one of gratitude, even if it is sometimes fuelled by guilt or regret.
Alvarez, who has a post office named in his honour in Maryland, gets a load of America’s regrets everywhere he goes. It happens at business meetings, social events, fundraising galas.
Professionals come up to him and confess: “I was one of those protesters,” they tell him. “I didn’t serve,” they disclose. “I’m sorry about the way I treated you guys.”
“It’s 180 degrees from what it was back then,” he said.
And he doesn’t mind. He listens, gives them the forgiveness they want.
There’s just one person who doesn’t deserve absolution.
“Kids who came home (from Vietnam) had to take their uniforms off, because they were spit upon and derided in public. EVERETT ALVAREZ JR. VIETNAM WAR VETERAN AND POW