Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is under fire for comments he made about Sen. John McCain not being a war hero because he got captured.

Trump, a vocal critic of the initial U.S. invasion of Iraq, told pollster Frank Luntz at a forum that McCain “is a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured, OK? I hate to tell you. He is a war hero because he was captured. OK, you can have — I believe perhaps he is a war hero.”

McCain, a major proponent of U.S. war in the Middle East, was held in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp for five years.

Trump, blasted by fellow GOP candidates, later tweeted “captured or not, all our soldiers are heroes!”

The line originated in Obama-supporting comedian Chris Rock’s HBO special during the 2008 election.

“He a war hero. He a war hero,” Rock said of McCain. “He a war hero that got CAPTURED. There’s a lot of guys in jail that got captured. I don’t want to vote for nobody that got captured. I want to vote for the motherfucker that got away.”

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