Veterans Day - Congressional Heroes

I wasn't able to get this ready to post on Veterans Day, so here it is a bit late.

There are three veterans in Congress that I want to highlight for you. These individuals have compelling stories to tell about their military experiences that fit right in with the Veterans Day spirit.

Without further ado, here are three American Heroes in Congress.

Sen. John McCain (R, Arizona) - Vietnam War veteran and POW. US Navy.

Much has been said about John McCain and his military experiences. Most of you already know his story. Here it is, taken from Wikipedia (for my sake!).

McCain entered the Navy during the Vietnam War. On July 29, 1967 McCain was injured when a bomb eploded onboard his aircraft carrier, getting struck in the legs and chest by shrapnel. On October 26, 1967, McCain was flying his twenty-third mission, he was shot down over Hanoi. His plane went into a vertical inverted spin. Bailing out upside down at high speed, the force of the ejection fractured McCain's right arm in three places, his left arm, and his right leg at the knee, and knocked him unconscious. McCain nearly drowned after parachuting into a Hanoi Lake. A Vietnamese mob pulled him from the water and attacked him. His left shoulder was crushed with the butt of a rifle and he was bayoneted in his left foot and abdominal area. He was then transported to the "Hanoi Hilton".

McCain was beaten upon entering the "Hanoi Hilton". Only when the North Vietnamese discovered that his father was a top admiral did they give him medical care. McCain gave the North Vietnamese his ship's name, squadron's name, and the attack's intended target. Further coerced to give future targets, he named cities that had already been bombed, and responding to demands for the names of his squadron's members, he supplied instead the names of the Green Bay Packers' offensive line. McCain spent six weeks in the hospital, receiving marginal care in a dirty, wet environment. A prolonged attempt to set the fractures on his right arm, done without anesthetic, was unsuccessful; he received an operation on his broken leg but no treatment for his broken left arm.

Now having lost fifty pounds, in a chest cast, covered in grime and eyes full of fever, and with his hair turned white, in early December 1967 McCain was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp on the outskirts of Hanoi nicknamed "the Plantation". In March 1968, McCain was put into solitary confinement, where he remained for two years. In mid-June, Major Bai, commander of the North Vietnamese prison camp system, offered McCain a chance to return home early. The North Vietnamese wanted to score a worldwide propaganda coup by appearing merciful, and also wanted to show other POWs that members of the elite like McCain were willing to be treated preferentially. McCain turned down the offer of release, due to the POWs' "first in, first out" interpretation of the U.S. Code of Conduct: he would only accept the offer if every man captured before him was released as well.

In late August 1968, a program of vigorous torture methods began on McCain. The North Vietnamese used rope bindings to put him into prolonged, painful positions and severely beat him every two hours, all while he was suffering from dysentery. His right leg was reinjured, his ribs were cracked, some teeth were broken at the gumline, and his left arm was re-fractured. After four days of this, McCain signed and taped an anti-American propaganda "confession". He used stilted Communist jargon and ungrammatical language to signal that the statement was forced. McCain was haunted then and since with the belief that he had dishonored his country, his family, his comrades and himself by his statement, but as he later wrote, "I had learned what we all learned over there: Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine." Two weeks later his captors tried to force him to sign a second statement; his will to resist restored, he refused. He sometimes received two to three beatings per week because of his continued resistance; the sustained mistreatment went on for over a year. McCain refused to meet with various anti-Vietnam War peace groups coming to Hanoi, not wanting to give either them or the North Vietnamese a propaganda victory based on his connection to his father.

Altogether, McCain was held as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam for five and a half years, nearly five of them after his refusal to accept the out-of-sequence repatriation offer. His wartime injuries left him permanently incapable of raising either arm more than 80 degrees . For his actions as a POW, McCain was awarded the Silver Star, the Legion of Merit, three more instances of the Bronze Star, another instance of the Navy Commendation Medal, and the Purple Heart.

Whether you agree with his politics or not, John McCain is an American hero.

Rep. Sam Johnson (R, TX) - Korean War veteran, Vietnam War veteran and POW. USAF.

Sam Johnson is the least-well known of the three gentlemen that I am highlighting, but his story is every bit as real as the others. The following is taken from his congressional website (edited for brevity).

Johnson flew 62 combat missions during the Korean War, scoring one MiG fighter kill, one probable and one damaged. After Korea, he flew the solo and slot positions for the world-renowned Air Force Thunderbirds precision flying demonstration team in the F-100 Super Sabre.

In the Vietnam War during his second tour of duty, Johnson flew his 25th combat mission on April 16, 1966. Shot down at dusk over North Vietnam, Johnson suffered a broken right arm, dislocated left shoulder and a broken back. It was these injuries that the enemy captors would use in their constant efforts to glean information from Johnson.

Johnson spent nearly seven years as a prisoner of war, 42 months in solitary confinement. Forced into solitary when his captors labeled him a “die-hard,” Johnson committed 374 names to memory from tapping a special code on the prison wall. “We were all trying to memorize names in case anybody got out,” Johnson remembers.

While held in the infamous Hanoi Hilton, Johnson spent 72 days in leg stocks. A day after that torture ended, his captors forced him into leg irons for 2 ½ years. Weighing 200 lbs when shot down, an emaciated Johnson got down to an estimated 120 lbs while barely surviving on the occasional “meal” of weeds from the river, pig fat, white rice, or pumpkin soup.

Fellow POW Capt. James Mulligan, USN (Ret.) recalled the day Johnson was allowed to return to a joint cell. He walked into the room with the two other detained American officers, “stood at attention with tears in his eyes, and said simply, ‘Lieutenant Colonel Sam Johnson reporting for duty, sir’…after he had not talked to or directly been with an American for three and a half years.”

Whether you agree with his politics or not, Sam Johnson is an American hero.

Sen. Daniel Inouye (D, HI) - World War II veteran. US Army.

As you can tell from the above picture, Sen. Inouye does not have a right arm.

You see, Inouye was a soldier in the all Japanese-American 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most highly-decorated unit in Army history. Since Americans of Japanese descent were suspected of Axis sympathies (many were held in internment camps), members of the 442nd often volunteered for suicide missions in the European theater to prove how American they were. The following is again from Wikipedia.

In 1943, when the U.S. Army dropped its ban on Japanese-Americans, Inouye curtailed his premedical studies at the University of Hawaii and enlisted in the Army. Inouye was promoted to the rank of sergeant within his first year, and he was given the role of platoon leader. He served in Italy in 1944 during the Rome-Arno Campaign before he was shifted to the Vosges Mountains region of France, where he spent two weeks searching for the Lost Battalion, a Texas battalion that was surrounded by German forces. He was promoted to the rank of second lieutenant for his actions there. At one point while leading an attack a shot struck him in the chest directly above his heart, but the bullet was stopped by the two silver dollars he happened to have stacked in his shirt pocket. He continued to carry the coins throughout the war in his shirt pocket as good luck charms.

On April 21, 1945, Inouye was grievously wounded while leading an assault on a heavily-defended ridge called near Terenzo called Colle Musatello. The ridge served as a strongpoint along the strip of German fortifications known as the Gothic Line, which represented the last and most dogged line of German defensive works in Italy. As he led his platoon in a flanking maneuver, three German machine guns opened fire from covered positions just 40 yards away, pinning his men to the ground. Inouye stood up to attack and was shot in the stomach; ignoring his wound, he proceeded to attack and destroy the first machine gun nest with hand grenades and fire from his M1 Thompson submachine gun. After being informed of the severity of his wound by his platoon sergeant, he refused treatment and rallied his men for an attack on the second machine gun position, which he also successfully destroyed before collapsing from blood loss.

As his squad distracted the third machine gunner, Inouye crawled toward the final bunker, eventually drawing within 10 yards. As he raised himself up and cocked his arm to throw his last grenade into the fighting position, a German inside fired a rifle grenade that struck him on the right elbow, severing most of his arm and leaving the primed grenade reflexively "clenched in a fist that suddenly didn't belong to me anymore". Inouye's horrified soldiers moved to his aid, but he shouted for them to keep back out of fear his severed fist would involuntarily relax and drop the grenade. As the German inside the bunker reloaded his rifle, Inouye managed to successfully pry the live grenade from his useless right hand and transfer it to his left. As the German aimed his rifle to finish him off, Inouye managed at last to toss the grenade off-hand into the bunker and destroy it. He stumbled to his feet and continued forward, silencing the last German resistance with a one-handed burst from his Thompson before being wounded in the leg and tumbling unconscious to the bottom of the ridge. When he awoke to see the concerned men of his platoon hovering over him, his only comment before being carried away was to gruffly order them return to their positions, since, as he pointed out, "nobody had called off the war".

The remainder of Inouye's mutilated right arm was later amputated at a field hospital without proper anesthesia, as he had been given too much morphine at an aid station and it was feared any more would lower his blood pressure enough to kill him. Inouye was initially awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his bravery in this action, with the award later being upgraded to the Medal of Honor (alongside 21 other Nisei servicemen who served in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and were believed to have been denied proper recognition of their bravery due to their race).

While recovering from WWII wounds and the amputation of his right forearm from the grenade wound (mentioned above) at Percy Jones Army Hospital, Inouye met future Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, then a fellow patient. Dole mentioned to Inouye that after the war he planned to go to Congress; Inouye beat him there by a few years. The two have remained lifelong friends. In 2003, the hospital was renamed the Hart-Dole-Inouye Federal Center in honor of the two WWII veterans and another U.S. Senator and fellow WWII veteran who had stayed in the hospital, Philip Hart.

Whether you agree with his politics or not, Daniel Inouye is an American hero.


And then finally, I end with this poem, which has been passed around so much that nobody really knows who the author is (often attributed to one Father Dennis Edward O'Brien, of the USMC):

It is the soldier, not the reporter,
who has given us freedom of the press.

It is the soldier, not the poet,
who has given us freedom of speech.

It is the soldier, not the campus organizer,
who has given us the freedom to demonstrate.

It is the soldier, not the lawyer,
who has given us the right to a fair trial.

It is the soldier,
who salutes the flag,
who serves under the flag,
and whose coffin is draped by the flag,
who allows the protester to burn the flag.

Another Contentious City Council Meeting

Muskogee's city council meetings have taken a contentious turn the past few months. The past two meetings have been attended by standing-room only crowds of over 100.

The two issues that have sparked the action are flying the POW/MIA flag at the Civic Center, and reviewing and changing the city charter. One seems to have been resolved at the this week's council meeting, while the other has gone back to square one.

Again, as at the July 13th council meeting, over 100 people came to hear the resolution of the POW/MIA flag issue. And again, the feeling in the room was very much against the way the council has handled this issue.

To review from last time, the city attorney wrote an ordinance that would address set the requirements for flag flying on city property. There were no copies of the ordinance available at the meeting, so one of the pro-POW/MIA attendees distributed copies at his own expense. That doesn't help public opinion...

The council decided to follow their standing policy of allowing public comment (without council response), but restricted to three minutes per person (and only one time speaking). They rarely follow this policy, which again, does not lend itself to a good public image for the council. Several citizens ran out of time, and had to have others finish their remarks. On a side note, three minutes is probably a little too short for common citizens who are not accustomed to speaking with a time limit.

The ordinance originally stated that the requesting parties would have to pay to put up the flagpole. City Manager Greg Buckley stated that the current flagpole cost between $500 and $700 to put up. Councilor James Gulley proceeded to move that the city pay for it instead. Buckley then clarified his statement, changing the figure to $10000 to $12000, on account that the city merely used the flagpole that had previously been up (before the remodeling of the Civic Center), and his cost estimate was just accounting for labor. I personally think that the $10-12,000 figure is a little high - a quick perusal on the internet found comparable flagpoles for half that price.

Buckley did note that the original remodeling plan did include several flagpoles, mentioning the U.S., POW/MIA, Oklahoma, and Indian tribes' flags as planned, but the project ran out of money and had to cut them out.

Gulley maintained his motion, and the council voted unanimously to pass the resolution as amended. In later conversations with councilmembers, they expressed frustration at the animosity towards them. One councilor said that he wanted to tell the people present that the only thing keeping this ordinance from passing was their arguing in favor of it - all of the councilors were planning on voting for the measure, but were being kept from it by the citizens dragging the public input time out. Another councilor accused Mayor Hammons of stirring the veterans up and starting the whole controversy for his own political self-interests.

With the POW/MIA issue settled, most of the crowd left; still leaving about 30, which is much higher than a usual city council meeting. Before exiting, veteran Pat Davis presented Mayor Hammons with a POW/MIA flag, to be flown whenever the flagpole is set up.

The next issue taken up was the implementation of a new city council policy. Policy 1-4 dealt with requests from the councilmembers or mayor to city staff, i.e. writing new ordinances for presentation to the council.

Basically, the policy states that if the staff member estimates the request to take more than one hour of his time, the request must go on the next council meeting's agenda for approval by the whole council. The council can then give or deny permission for the staff member to fulfill the request.

The argument from those in favor was that no one member should be able to monopolize the time of the city manager, city attorney or other staff members. Mayor Hammons protested, but he was the only vote against the policy. Essentially, now the council can vote down an ordinance before actually voting on an ordinance.

The council then moved on to the city charter issue. As mentioned in my post on the last council meeting, the city council formed a committee to review the charter last September. We learned more about the committee at this council meeting. At this meeting, the council was to go over the reccommendations of the committee.

Each councilor appointed a citizen to serve on this committee (Councilor Jackie Luckey did not appoint anyone, since the charter was not to be reviewed in whole). Councilor Bob Luttrull chaired the group, with Councilor Jim Ritchey also serving on the committee.

Mayor Hammons asked if the review committee ever voted on the reccommendations; John Vincent, the city attorney, said that he did not know if they did. Hammons pressed his point - "It is my opinion that if the charter review committee did not vote on these reccommendations, then these are not the reccommendations of the committee." Councilor Shawn Raper then asked if they were going to follow their policy of public input first; Hammons wanted to make sure that they were actually dealing with the reccommendations as voted on by the committee, but moved the meeting to the public hearing.

Since the council was following their public-input-first policy at this particular meeting (although they did not keep to the time-restriction policy), several citizens spoke. One person in particular had several very good points.

Brian Fuller, president of the local firefighters union, had requested and received from the city the list of the members on the charter review committee.

According to Fuller's research, most of the members only attended one committee meeting. The majority of those members were either never notified of other meetings, or were told that the meeting was canceled without being told when or where it would be held. One of the members is not a current resident of the city.

Fuller's findings also showed that the meetings were not properly posted, and were not held in a public forum; both violations of the Open Meetings Act. Several other provisions were, according to Fuller, in direct violation with state law.

There was a section that dealt with firefighter residency in the reccommendations, which said that firefighters had to live within 20 miles of the intersection of Main and Okmulgee - a change from the previous within-city-limits-for-one-year-before-hiring requirement. Fuller stated that 1/3 of the city's employees live farther than 20 miles from the aforementioned intersection, including many department heads.

Fuller closed by asking that the council start the whole process over again, do it right, and include the three city unions in the review process.

After the public hearing was closed, Mayor Hammons proceeded to ask Councilor Ritchey if the committee ever voted on the reccommendations. Ritchey said that he was never under the impression that the committee was to vote on reccommendations, but thought they were to complie them. Hammons restated his question, "Did the committee vote to approve these?" Ritchey again repeated himself statement. After several rounds of Hammons repeating the question, and Ritchey repeating his statement, Hammons asked Councilor Luttrull the question. Luttrull said that the committee voted on them, but he could not remember when the meeting was.

Hammons and Shawn Raper both suggested to restart the review process, since the facts were muddled. The council voted unanimously to take no action on the agenda item, and to come back another day to start the process over.

So, the POW/MIA flag will fly, but the charter review situation is unresolved. Stay tuned for the latest developements, available on the blogosphere exlusively at Muskogee Politico.

Muskogee City Council Meeting - July 27th

Post to come soon on this very interesting and contentious city council meeting (seems that they've all been that lately!).

Follow-up on July 13th City Council Meeting - Part 1

The July 13th Muskogee City Council meeting was a council meeting to remember. Two very hot topics were on the agenda: charter changes (see previous post), and whether to fly the POW/MIA flag at the Civic Center (I was unaware this was to be discussed, actually).

All of the council meetings I have been to were sparsely attended, and fairly non-controversial. Boy, was this one different! This was this most controversial, most attended, most contentious city council meeting seen in years, perhaps decades.

I knew something was up when both KOTV and KJRH had television crews in the parking lot at City Hall. The crowd of American Legion, military veterans, and motorcycle club members going through the doors also gave a hint of what to expect.

There were over 120 people packed into the Council chambers - literally standing room only, and almost not enough room for people to stand. It was evident that most of the crowd was there for the POW/MIA item, so Mayor Hammons moved for that item to be taken up first, instead of last (its original order in the agenda).

When the Civic Center was remodeled recently, due to lack of funds no flagpole was put up. This created quite a bit of outrage, and on July 2nd they installed a flagpole. In years past, the POW/MIA flew at times at the Civic Center, however, no provision was made for any flag to be flown save the American and Oklahoman flags.

Mayor Hammons' proposal was to fly the POW/MIA flag on the six congressionally mandated days for said flag to be flown on federal property. Councilman Shawn Raper then said that this needed to be brought in the form of an actual ordinance, and since this would be setting a precedent, he wondered how the council would decide which flags could be flown, and which flags could not be flown. Hammons clarified by stating that only flags flown by Congressional order would be flown.

This started a discussion over where to put the flags, and how many flagpoles to be used. During the whole meeting, many councilmen complained of being called unpatriotic for not flying the POW/MIA flag. The crowd was very interactive (which is never the case), to the point of a severe lack of decorum. During the public input times, councilors would get into heated back-and-forths, even though it is the council's stated policy that they cannot respond to the public during a meeting.

There were boos and hisses, applause and cheering all throughout the entire meeting. It was certainly the most raucous council meeting in recent history.

Many people addressed the council, including several out-of-towners, the daughter of a Vietnam MIA, and a self-proclaimed Vietnam POW. The latter appears to have started an entirely different controversy, since national POW groups do not recognize him on their official lists as a Vietnam POW, as he claimed he was. He claimed several medals as well, which if he did not receive, could land him in jail for up to two years as a federal crime of stolen valor. The Muskogee Phoenix has a short article on the issue here (though not all that was printed in the newspaper, for some reason).

Finally, councilman James Gulley suggested placing two flagpoles beside the centennial arch at the Civic Center, and flying the POW/MIA flag on one of those poles. The other flagpole could be utilized for any other flag recognized by Congress (the other five possible flags being the service ensigns).

The council then directed the city attorney to draft a proposal to fit the suggestion, in order to bring it back to the council for a vote on July 27th. The reasoning was that if they ordered the city manager to fly the flag now, they could not deny any other request (and requests were allegedly already coming in) until they had legal language setting the restrictions.

This ended the POW/MIA item on the agenda. After a short recess, the council continued business. About 35 people stayed for the rest of the meeting, still a very significant increase in attendance from usual council meetings.

Click here for part two of the meeting.

Muskogee City Council Meeting - July 13th

If you've got several hours to kill, this is the most interesting, most attended, and most contentious city council meeting I have ever been to.

Two topics (charter changes, and whether to fly the POW/MIA flag at the Civic Center) took up nearly three hours.

I will be posting in more detail about the meeting, but here is the video.