The Flying McCain : Just Unlucky, or A Truly Rotten Pilot

(H/t, P.O'Neill; cp'd at The Pond & MLW))
He "lost" five aircraft.
No, really.
Seems, even then, he was a big supporter of the the war bidness, personally accounting for 5 wrecked, crashed, or shot-down jet fighters.
No, really.

Navy pilot John Sidney McCain III should have never been allowed to graduate from the U.S. Navy flight school. He was a below average student and a lousy pilot. Had his father and grandfather not been famous four star U.S. Navy admirals, McCain III would have never been allowed in the cockpit of a military aircraft.

John Kerry managed to bring his boat home every time.

Oh, and speaking of John Kerry, and then of medals:

"(In his 23 missions,) McCain had roughly 20 hours in combat," explains Bill Bell, a veteran of Vietnam and former chief of the U.S. Office for POW/MIA Affairs -- the first official U.S. representative in Vietnam since the 1973 fall of Saigon. "Since McCain got 28 medals," Bell continues, "that equals out to about a medal-and-a-half for each hour he spent in combat (and just about one-and-a-quarter per mission, Ed.). There were infantry guys -- grunts on the ground -- who had more than 7,000 hours in combat and I can tell you that there were times and situations where I'm sure a prison cell would have looked pretty good to them by comparison. The question really is how many guys got that number of medals for not being shot down."

Only the one event, on the Forrestal, was utterly and unambiguously an accident. There's certainly room for 'pilot error' in all the rest.
And hao 'bout all dem medals? Woweeee...This information seems to me at least partly to help explain McStain's otherwise unaccountable unwillingness to at least refuse to endorse the Swiftboating of John Kerry. Perhaps because, as it now seems, he was aware of the very spuriousness of his own decorations?