‘Heroes’ Made Films, Not War : Veterans Day: Some of America’s great patriotic icons--John Wayne, for one--never set foot on a battlefield.

During the last month of the presidential campaign, as he blasted Bill Clinton for failing to serve in the armed forces during the Vietnam War, George Bush occasionally trotted out actor Gerald McRaney, who plays a Marine Corps officer on the television show “Major Dad.” McRaney questioned Clinton’s loyalty to the United States and told crowds that although he was a member of Clinton’s generation, “I stayed loyal to our country.”

As it turns out, McRaney served as many days in the military as Clinton did--zero. And his accounts about his draft status are just as ambiguous.

While campaigning with Bush, McRaney told reporters that he tried to enlist but was turned down because he was married and had a child. But in a TV Guide story last summer, the actor said he was so conflicted by the war that he had considered fleeing to Canada.

McRaney is the latest in a long series of actors to blur the distinction between being a real war hero and a Hollywood hero. And today, Veterans Day, is a good time to explore that venerable tradition.

During World War II, John Wayne saw plenty of action--but none of it overseas. He was busy on the Hollywood lots making “Flying Tigers,” “Back to Bataan” and “The Flying Seabees.” Wayne, 34 when World War II began, was eligible for a deferment because he had four children, and he took it.

But other stars who could have obtained deferments or landed cushy stateside assignments enlisted and saw combat. Clark Gable was 41 when he enlisted and flew numerous missions as a tail gunner on a bomber. Jimmy Stewart was 33 when he enlisted in the Army Air Corps, flew 20 bombing mission over Germany and won the Distinguished Flying Cross. Henry Fonda enlisted when he was 37 and won the Bronze Star as an air combat intelligence officer in the Pacific.

It was John Wayne, however, who made a career out of playing war heroes, who was elevated to a national patriotic icon. Maybe it was easier for Wayne to glorify the brutality of combat because he never saw it. Maybe it was easier for the public to identify with a character who pretends to shoot at actors than with one who has killed real people.

After the war, Wayne helped set up the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a group founded to extirpate communism in the movie business. While Wayne wasn’t willing to fight for the preservation of American ideals in Europe or in the South Pacific, he avidly fought for their preservation in the back rooms of Hollywood, rooting out communists, real and imagined, and destroying lives and careers in the process.

Ronald Reagan, an actor who later made his reputation as a politician with a decidedly hawkish military stance, did serve in the military during World War II. Reagan was a “Culver City Commando”--a captain in the First Motion Picture Unit, Army Air Corps, which made military training films. He worked on a Culver City movie lot from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., ate lunch at the studio’s commissary and slept at home in his own bed every night.

Yet Reagan came to be viewed as the epitome of a commander in chief, while 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern, a bomber pilot during World War II, was considered a wimp.

Clint Eastwood is another actor who loves playing war hero or fearless cop. Although Eastwood served in the Army during the Korean War, the greatest hazard he faced was sunburn. He was an Army swimming instructor at Ft. Ord in Monterey.

During the Gulf War, a number of Americans, including Eastwood, canceled trips to Europe because of Saddam Hussein’s terrorist threats. But Eastwood was singled out for derision by the British press after he canceled a TV talk show appearance in London. That kind of reaction didn’t jibe with his “make my day” image. The Times of London argued at the time that the war raised “the specter of the great American wimp.”

Sylvester Stallone, who portrays the mighty John Rambo, scourge of the North Vietnamese, also was lampooned by British reporters at the time for canceling a scheduled trip to the ski resort of St. Moritz. Stallone spent several years during the Vietnam War as a girls’ athletic coach at an American school in Switzerland. He did not serve in the military because of a student deferment and later a medical deferment.

So, if you want to know what war is like, don’t flip on “Destination Tokyo” or some of the other movies on television tonight. If you want to know what war is like, visit your local Veterans Administration hospital.