What does it mean to be a war hero?

One of the things I've found fascinating during the campaign has been the narrative of John McCain's heroic, honorable service in Vietnam. One of the funniest jokes I've heard is how they just discovered a previously unknown Amazon tribe, still using stone tools, who were nevertheless aware that John McCain spent five and a half years as a POW.

We hear that he was a "fighter pilot." But for the most part, his service is confined to those years in Hanoi.

I know that we are still fighting the Vietnam War. And I know that Americans -- and people of every other country (even Germany and Japan) -- never speak ill of their nation's soldiers. So this is a subject no one really seems to want to touch. But here it is: What did John McCain do before he his aircraft was shot out of the sky?

Fighter pilot brings visions of dog fights over the rice paddies, but North Vietnam did not have much of an airforce.

So the other night, when you heard Fred Thompson describe, in gruesome detail, what happened to McCain when he crashed -- beaten, arm broken, etc. -- we didn't hear who was doing the beating.

Peasants. Angry North Vietnamese rice farmers rushing at the opportunity to beat a representative of the source of the tons of bombs and napalm that had been dropped on them, their capital city, and their levies.

Look, John McCain did not set policy during the Vietnam War. He did not direct where and when to bomb North Vietnam "back to the stone age." And it in no way lessens his heroism as a POW.

But it was a complicated war. And if McCain and the GOP want to hinge his entire appeal on his service in the 1960s, we should at least be allowed to get the full picture of the Naval pilot's role in a war that is generally agreed was a murderous, useless disaster.