Donald Trump is Right: John McCain is not a War Hero

Recently,  Donald Trump endured the wrath of his fellow Republican presidential candidates, and just about any American you could stick a microphone in front of, by declaring that Sen. John McCain was not a war hero. Trump went on to imply that it made no sense to ascribe heroic status to someone “because he was captured.” Sadly, The Donald has a point.

In making this controversial claim, Trump was merely echoing the oldest tradition of the heroic in the West, that of ancient Greece, and the moral code of the two classic works in that tradition, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Often referred to as the Bible of the Greeks, these two works set forth the heroic standards that guided not only the ancient world but centuries to come. In particular, Trump’s words call to mind a famous scene in the Iliad where Achilles, the greatest of all Greek heroes, is tasked by his mentor Phoenix to be “a maker of speeches and a doer of deeds.” Indeed, the Greek war heroes—Achilles, Agamemnon, Hector—were all admired for their physical strength, their leadership ability, and their prowess during wartime, that is, their capacity to impose their will on the world.

By contrast, McCain more resembles Philoctetes, the Greek warrior who is bitten by a deadly snake that causes him unimaginable suffering and forces his withdrawal from battle. Or Antigone, who is imprisoned for trying to bury her brother and ultimately punished with death for her resistance. Like McCain, these figures from Greek literature suffer wretched fates for reasons beyond their control and bear them nobly. Although a later tradition, Christianity, would view suffering injustice for a cause as a much more praiseworthy fate (Indeed, John McCain is much closer to a Christian martyr than he is to a Greek hero), the Greeks sided more with Trump in favoring “people who weren’t captured.” That is, the heroes of the Trojan War were envied and admired, while the tragic figures invoked above inspired, in the words of Aristotle, pity and fear.

To see the essential soundness of Trump’s point, consider another influence from ancient Greece: the Olympics.  It simply does not make sense to call someone an Olympic hero who, say, is tragically struck down by a disease but inspires his teammates by the noble way he endures. Such a character may be considered courageous, morally admirable, and a role model. But it simply defies a common sense understanding of the term to call such a character an Olympic hero.

The fact that not every positive term we can come up with necessarily applies in the case of John McCain does not undercut the moral significance of what he endured. That is, to deny that John McCain is a war hero is not to deny that his suffering and the way he bore it made him a role model, or a patriot, or even a warrior. He qualifies as all of the above, and more. And while the nation owes him a debt of gratitude it can never repay, such an obligation does not justify twisting language to make us feel good.  Nor does it allow us to vilify a candidate, no matter how you feel about his stance on other issues, who points this out.