Does Cindy McCain think that PTSD is a result of incompetence?
(h/t Brandon Friedman/Vetvoice)
In an interview with Marie Claire magazine, Cindy McCain was asked about whether her husband suffered any aftereffects from his time in Vietnam. Her response:
Marie Claire: You met your husband after his POW days. To what extent is that still with you - or is it a part of history?
Cindy McCain: My husband will be the first one to tell you that that’s in the past. Certainly it’s a part of who he is, but he doesn’t dwell on it. It’s not part of a daily experience that we experience or anything like that. But it has shaped him. It has made him the leader that he is.
Marie Claire: But no cold sweats in the middle of the night?
Cindy McCain: Oh, no, no, no, no, no. My husband, he’d be the first one to tell you that he was trained to do what he was doing. The guys who had the trouble were the 18-year-olds who were drafted. He was trained, he went to the Naval Academy, he was a trained United States naval officer, and so he knew what he was doing.
Is Cindy McCain insinuating that there is some kind of inverse correlation between PTSD and competence, and her husband doesn’t have it since he was trained at the Naval Academy, unlike those lowly grunts? Or that draftees experienced more combat stress because they hadn’t volunteered for military service like her valiant husband? Both? The answer has to be yes - there’s no other way to read this.
We have troops coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan with cold sweats in the middle of the night, and much worse, in thousands upon thousands. None of them are “18-year-olds who were drafted”. The suffering runs the gamut from infantrymen to Elite Special Forces.
It’s worth asking John McCain if he agrees with his wife. It would explain an awful lot of his reprehensible record on veterans issues. Indeed, McCain’s leading of the fight against the dwell time amendment would make a whole lot more sense if McCain in fact doesn’t believe that repeated, extended deployments have anything to do with combat stress — it’s just a matter of training, competence or faith in the mission.
The Senator brings up his wartime experience and his POW status at almost avery speech, contrary to Ms McCain’s statement. I do not know how well he was trained, but I do know that he is misquoting the Code of Conduct regarding his “first in, first out,” statements. The code states that prisioners will try to escape and aid others to escape. I have not seen anything about waiting you turn. I do not remember my training a an Air Force combat crew training as including the “first in, first out” rule.