MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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United States Navy

Calamity John

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The Los Angeles Times today offered details about a previous post of mine that some people have told me is controversial because I deigned to question Sen. John McCain’s heroism during the Vietnam War.

My contention remains that McCain, at least initially, took valuable training and equipment of the American military for granted. But, because he was the son and grandson of Admirals, his carelessness was swept under the rug and he was allowed to become a navy pilot.

His subsequent capture in Vietnam could have easily been predicted, based on his performance during his military training.

The Times interviewed men who served with McCain and located once-confidential 1960s-era accident reports and formerly classified evaluations of his squadrons during the Vietnam War. This examination of his record revealed a pilot who early in his career was cocky, occasionally cavalier and prone to testing limits.

In today’s military, a lapse in judgment that causes a crash can end a pilot’s career. Though standards were looser and crashes more frequent in the 1960s, McCain’s record stands out.

“Three mishaps are unusual,” said Michael L. Barr, a former Air Force pilot with 137 combat missions in Vietnam and an internationally known aviation safety expert who teaches in USC’s Aviation Safety and Security Program. “After the third accident, you would say: Is there a trend here in terms of his flying skills and his judgment?”

Jeremiah Pearson, a Navy officer who flew 400 missions over Vietnam without a mishap and later became the head of human spaceflight at NASA, said: “That’s a lot. You don’t want any. Maybe he was just unlucky.”

Naval aviation experts say the three accidents before McCain’s deployment to Vietnam probably triggered a review to determine whether he should be allowed to continue flying. The results of the review would have been confidential.

The Times asked McCain’s campaign to release any military personnel records in the candidate’s possession showing how the Navy handled the three incidents. The campaign said it would have no comment.

The LA Times story provides invaluable service by digging into some of the details of this sorry affair. What they reveal is instructive because the same pattern would later emerge in Sen. McCain’s political career, especially in the case of the Keating 5 controversy.

October 6, 2008
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That “Ace” pilot, McCain

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In a lot of ways, this presidential campaign is about biography, who John McCain is and who Barack Obama is.

A lot of people say, for instance, despite his books, that they don’t know much about Sen. Obama. He’s still too new to the national scene.

Here’s my question: John McCain has occupied the national scene for decades. Does it matter that much of what we know about him is either incomplete, or outright fabrication?

For instance, his record in the United States Navy.

I came across an article, Will `Ace’ McCain Flame Out Again? by Kelly Patricia O’Meara, that lays out in more details what I’m about to tell you.

We’ve heard ad nauseum about how McCain came from a family of warriors, how his fathers and other forebears were admirals. How about McCain himself?

McCain has been a Congressman and United States Senator. We know him as a “war hero” (McCain spent all of 20 hours in combat, getting 28 medals) who was a prisoner of war for five and half years. Just this week, when John McCain could not remember just how many houses he owned, one of his campaign handlers mentioned that he was a prisoner of war for five and half years.

Before any of this, however, McCain was indeed a pilot in the navy and he did fly in Vietnam. But he probably should have never flown in anyone’s navy.

John McCain graduated 894th out of 899 cadets at the U.S. Naval Academy.

McCain got elite assignments in the Navy despite racking up an unusual number of crashes. Until his fateful crash that led to his capture and POW status in Vietnam, McCain had been involved in four other crashes.

McCain’s engine allegedly “quit” and his plane plunged into Corpus Christi Bay in 1958. He would regain consciousness at the bottom of the water. But, when the engine was tested afterward, there was no indication of engine failure. Later, while deployed in the Mediterranean, McCain flew too low over the Iberian Peninsula and took out power lines. Then, returning from flying solo to Philadelphia for an Army-Navy football game, McCain allegedly got a “flameout” and had to eject, landing on a deserted beach as the plane slammed into trees.

Then, in 1967, the ever snakebit McCain was seated in the cockpit when a rocket slammed into the exterior fuel tank of his assigned A-4 Skyhawk. McCain escaped from the burning aircraft but dozens of his shipmates were killed and injured in the explosions that followed.

Just three months after this incident, the Vietcong shot McCain’s A-4 Skyhawk down over Truc Bach Lake near Hanoi, North Vietnam.

“John McCain,” says one Navy pilot in the linked O’Meara article who was an acquaintance of McCain in that era, “was the kind of guy you wanted to room with — not fly with. He was reckless, and that’s critical when you start thinking about who’s going to be the president,” The old pilot laughs, and then continues: “But the Navy accident rate was cut in half the day John McCain was shot down.”

The rest of the story–McCain’s torture during five-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war–we pretty much know. He came home a war hero, cheated on the wife who raised his family while he was away, then dumped her for a much younger woman who then financed his political career.

I just would have loved to see what Karl Rove would have done with McCain, especially his conduct as a POW, if he had had the opportunity. There are Vietnam veterans (in the video above) now who see McCain as less than a hero for his conduct as a POW. They are calling for the record from that time to be declassified.

August 22, 2008
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Finding MIA’s Kin Stumps U.S. Army By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

Sunday, May 13, 2001

The United States government believes that Charles Arce of Brooklyn kept faith with his country. He went to Korea with the Army more than half a century ago and almost certainly died there.

Now, his country would like to keep faith with his memory and his family. But it isn’t easy to do so many years later.

One trail of Charles Arce’s family petered out at a Brooklyn Bridge entrance, where the family’s 41-43 Sands St. residence is now a parking lot.

Similarly, the 130 Fulton St. residence of Ramon Arce, an uncle listed with the Army as Charles’ beneficiary, no longer exists.

Visits to three other Brooklyn locations where his family lived before Arce enlisted with the Army to fight in Korea proved just as futile.

It has been more than 50 years since Pfc. Charles Arce, seven weeks short of his 20th birthday, went missing in action and was presumed killed in the brutal battle of Unsan in the early months of the Korean War.

As arduous and painstaking as the task of finding and recovering the remains of nearly 8,200 American servicemen missing in action from the Korean War has been, finding their living relatives is proving just as difficult, said Therese Fisher, director of genealogy at The American History Company.

The Army hired the company, which does genealogical research and publishes history books, to track down the relatives as part of the overall outreach of the U.S. Department of Defense to contact them.

Access to North Korea has improved in recent years and joint American and Korean teams have been recovering remains of servicemen in areas where American units fought during the war.

But finding relatives is another matter, said Maj. Horace Bowden, operations officer for the Repatriation and Family Affairs Division of the U.S. Army Casualty and Memorial Affairs Operation Center.

“After 50 years, the trail has gone pretty dark,” Bowden said.

The Army’s database has about 2,500 families. The identification process includes using mitochondrial DNA, meaning samples collected from the mother’s side of a serviceman’s family, to identify recovered remains.

Some of those remains may belong to Charles Arce, but the Army needs to make contact with his relations to verify that.

“Just because we’re looking for Charles Arce’s family doesn’t mean we have a set of bones, or remains that we believe to be his,” Bowden cautioned.

Army spokeswoman Shari Lawrence said the work of recovering remains and trying to connect them to family is extremely important.

“It’s a commitment we make to our soldiers that, if they’re injured or killed, that we will bring them home as quickly as possible,” Lawrence said. “It’s an obligation we have … whenever we know where they are and we can identify them as Americans, we will bring them home.”

Arce’s mother and father, Pedro and Dolores, came to Brooklyn from Puerto Rico in 1920. Born in Brooklyn on Dec. 21, 1930, Arce enlisted in the Army on Sept. 8, 1948. He soon found himself on the Korean peninsula as the Cold War turned hot when North Korea’s Stalinist government mounted an invasion of South Korea in June 1950.

The United States, heading the United Nations forces, jumped in to head off the aggression.

China, wary of U.S. forces so near its territory, sent human-wave attacks to aid the North Koreans. In fact, Chinese soldiers routed Arce’s 8th Calvary Regiment and the 1st Calvary Division on Nov. 1, 1950.

Arce was declared missing in action the next day. Very few American soldiers survived the battle over the next few days.

“It appears no one ever saw him killed,” Fisher said.

Arce was automatically promoted to the rank of corporal in 1953, but then was declared dead on Dec. 31 that year.

Complicating the search is a disastrous 1972 fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, part of the National Archives, that destroyed about 80% of personnel files of anyone discharged from the Army between Nov. 1, 1912 and Jan. 1, 1960. The Army wasn’t even able to provide a photograph of Arce.

Fisher, whose company boasts a 100% success rate finding families of servicemen so far, said the missing records are crucial. She is left to trying to track down the family the old-fashioned way — using the telephone book. She has called most people named Arce in Brooklyn without luck.

Anyone with information about Arce or his family should call the Army at (800) 892-2490. For anyone with information about relatives of other MIA servicemen, the Navy’s number is (800) 443-9298; Air Force is (800) 531-5501 and the Marine Corps is (800) 847-1597. Families of American civilians missing in combat should contact the State Department at (202) 647-6769.

Original Story Date: 05/13/01

May 13, 2001
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