Faith of My Fathers

–– CHAPTER 14 –– The Forrestal Fire

Tom Ott had just handed me back my flight helmet after wiping off the visor with a rag. Tom was a second-class petty officer from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and a fine man. He had been my parachute rigger since I came aboard the USS Forrestal several months earlier to begin RAG training off Guantanamo Bay. A parachute rigger is responsible for the maintenance and preparation of a naval aviator’s equipment. Tom had heard me complain that I often found it difficult to see through my visor. So he always came on deck before launch to clean it one last time.

I was a thirty-one-year-old A-4 pilot, and like most pilots I was a little superstitious. I had flown five bombing runs over North Vietnam without incident, and I preferred that all preflight tasks be performed in the same order as for my previous missions, believing an unvarying routine portended a safe flight. Wiping off my visor was one of the last tasks executed in that routine.

Shortly before eleven on the morning of July 29, 1967, on Yankee Station in the Tonkin Gulf, I was third in line on the port side of the ship. I took my helmet back from Tom, nodded at him as he flashed me a thumbs-up, and shut the plane’s canopy. In the next instant, a Zuni missile struck the belly fuel tank of my plane, tearing it open, igniting two hundred gallons of fuel that spilled onto the deck, and knocking two of my bombs to the deck. I never saw Tom Ott again.

Stray voltage from an electrical charge used to start the engine of a nearby F-4 Phantom, also waiting to take off, had somehow fired the six-foot Zuni from beneath the plane’s wing. At impact, my plane felt like it had exploded.

I looked out at a rolling fireball as the burning fuel spread across the deck. I opened my canopy, raced onto the nose, crawled out onto the refueling probe, and jumped ten feet into the fire. I rolled through a wall of flames as my flight suit caught fire. I put the flames out and ran as fast as I could to the starboard side of the deck.

Shocked and shaking from adrenaline, I saw the pilot in the A-4 next to mine jump from his plane into the fire. His flight suit burst into flames. As I went to help him, a few crewmen dragged a fire hose toward the conflagration. Chief Petty Officer Gerald Farrier ran ahead of me with a portable fire extinguisher. He stood in front of the fire and aimed the extinguisher at one of the thousand-pound bombs that had been knocked loose from my plane and were now sitting in the flames on the burning deck. His heroism cost him his life. A few seconds later the bomb exploded, blowing me back at least ten feet and killing a great many men, including the burning pilot, the men with the hose, and Chief Farrier.

Small pieces of hot shrapnel from the exploded bomb tore into my legs and chest. All around me was mayhem. Planes were burning. More bombs cooked off. Body parts, pieces of the ship, and scraps of planes were dropping onto the deck. Pilots strapped in their seats ejected into the firestorm. Men trapped by flames jumped overboard. More Zuni missiles streaked across the deck. Explosions tore craters in the flight deck, and burning fuel fell through the openings into the hangar bay, spreading the fire below.

I went below to help unload some bombs from an elevator used to raise the jets from the hangar to the flight deck and dump them over the side of the ship. When we finished, I went to the ready room, where I could check the fire’s progress on the television monitor located there. A stationary video camera was recording the tragedy and broadcasting it on the ship’s closed-circuit television.

After a short while, I went to sick bay to have my burns and shrapnel wounds treated. There I found a horrible scene of many men, burned beyond saving, grasping the last moments of life. Most of them lay silently or made barely audible sounds. They gave no cries of agony because their nerve endings had been burned, sparing them any pain. Someone called my name, a kid, anonymous to me because the fire had burned off all his identifying features. He asked me if a pilot in our squadron was okay. I replied that he was. The young sailor said, “Thank God,” and died. I left the sick bay unable to keep my composure.

The fires were consuming the Forrestal. I thought she might sink. But the crew’s heroics kept her afloat. Men sacrificed their lives for one another and for their ship. Many of them were only eighteen and nineteen years old. They fought the inferno with a tenacity usually reserved for hand-to-hand combat. They fought it all day and well into the next, and they saved the Forrestal.

The fire on the flight deck was extinguished that first afternoon, but the last of the fires still burned belowdecks twenty-four hours later. By the time the last blaze was brought under control, 134 men were dead or dying. Dozens more were wounded. More than twenty planes were destroyed. But the Forrestal, with several large holes in its hull below the waterline, managed to make its way slowly to Subic Naval Base in the Philippines.

It would take almost a week for the Forrestal to reach Subic, where enough repairs would be made to the ship to enable it to return to the States for further repairs. It would take two more years of repairs before the Forrestal would be seaworthy enough to return to duty. All the pilots and crew who were fit to travel assumed we would board flights for home once we reached the Philippines. It appeared that my time at war was to be a very brief experience, and this distressed me considerably.

Combat for a naval aviator is fought in short, violent bursts. Our missions last but an hour or two before we are clear of danger and back on the carrier playing poker with our buddies. We are spared the sustained misery of the infantrymen who slog through awful conditions and danger for months on end. Some pilots like the excitement of our missions, knowing that they are of short duration, but most of us concentrate so fiercely on finding our targets and avoiding calamity that we recall more vividly our relief when it’s over than we do our exhilaration while it’s going on.

I did not take a perverse pleasure in the terror and destruction of war. I did not delight in the brief, intense thrill of flying combat missions. I was gratified when my bombs hit their target, but I did not particularly enjoy the excitement of the experience.

Nevertheless, I was a professional naval officer, and the purpose of my years of training had been to prepare me for this moment. As the crippled Forrestal limped toward port, my moment was disappearing when it had barely begun, and I feared my ambitions were among the casualties in the calamity that had claimed the Forrestal.

A distraction from my despondency appeared on the way to Subic in the person of R. W. “Johnny” Apple, the New York Times correspondent in Saigon. Serving as a pool reporter, he arrived by helicopter with a camera crew to examine the damaged ship and interview the survivors. When he finished collecting material for his report, he offered to take me back to Saigon with him for the daily press briefing irreverently referred to as the “Five O’Clock Follies.” Seeing it as an opportunity for some welcome R&R, I jumped at the invitation. I passed a few days there pleasantly, wondering about my future, and beginning a lifelong friendship with Johnny.

Shortly after I returned to the Forrestal, an officer from the carrier USS Oriskany addressed my squadron to ask if any of us would consider volunteering for combat duty aboard his ship. The Oriskany had lately lost a number of pilots, and the squadron was considerably undermanned. A few others and I signed up.

The year before the Forrestal fire, the Oriskany had also suffered a terrible disaster at sea when a magnesium flare had ignited a blaze that nearly destroyed the ship. The Oriskany fire was not as great a holocaust as the fire that had engulfed the Forrestal. Ordnance had not exploded in the blaze, and the fire was brought under control in four hours. But it was nevertheless a terrible calamity for the pilots and crew. Forty-four men had been killed. In addition, the carrier was suffering high casualties in 1967. The Oriskany was regarded as a dangerous place to live.

I was relieved at this unexpected change in my fortunes. The Oriskany was coming off Yankee Station for a few weeks, and my services would not be needed until it returned. I met Carol and the kids in Europe and spent a pleasant family holiday, visiting my parents in London and relaxing on the French Riviera. I was still waiting for my final orders when we returned to Orange Park, Florida, which was near my last squadron’s home base in Jacksonville, and where my family would await my return from combat duty. In September, my orders came through. I was an eager thirty-one-year-old lieutenant commander in the Navy, no longer worrying excessively about my career.

Many of my parents’ friends wrote to them after the Forrestal fire to express their concern for my welfare. My father wrote a brief response to all, informing them, “Happily for all of us, he came through without a scratch and is now back at sea.”

–– CHAPTER 15 –– Killed

On September 30, 1967, I reported for duty to the Oriskany and joined VA-163—an A-4 attack squadron nicknamed the Saints. During the three years of Operation Rolling Thunder, the bombing campaign of North Vietnam begun in 1965, no carrier’s pilots saw more action or suffered more losses than those on the Oriskany. When the Johnson administration halted Rolling Thunder in 1968, thirty-eight pilots on the Oriskany had been either killed or captured. Sixty planes had been lost, including twenty-nine A-4s. The Saints suffered the highest casualty rate. In 1967, one-third of the squadron’s pilots were killed or captured. Every single one of the Saints’ original fifteen A-4s had been destroyed. We had a reputation for aggressiveness, and for success. In the months before I joined the squadron, the Saints had destroyed all the bridges to the port city of Haiphong.

Like all combat pilots, we had a studied, almost macabre indifference to death that masked a great sadness in the squadron, a sadness that grew more pervasive as our casualty list lengthened. But we kept our game faces on, and our bravado became all the more exaggerated when the squadron returned to ship after a mission with one or more missing pilots. We flew the next raid with greater determination to do as much damage as we could, repeating to ourselves before the launch, “If we destroy the target, we won’t have to go back.”

We had one of the bravest, most resourceful squadron commanders, who was also one of the best A-4 pilots in the war, Commander Bryan Compton. In August, six weeks before I reported for duty, Bryan had led a daring raid on a thermal power plant in Hanoi. For the first time the Saints had been equipped with Walleye smart bombs, and their accuracy reduced the risk of killing great numbers of civilians when striking targets in densely populated areas. The Hanoi power plant was located in a heavily populated part of Hanoi and had consequently been off-limits to American bombers. Contrary to North Vietnamese propaganda and the accusations of Americans who opposed the war, the bombing of North Vietnam was not a campaign of terror and wanton destruction against innocent civilians. Pilots and their military and civilian commanders exercised great care to keep civilian casualties to a minimum. With the introduction of smart bombs, militarily significant targets that had previously been avoided to spare innocent lives could now be attacked.

Bryan Compton successfully petitioned for his squadron to receive smart bombs. Once the Saints were equipped with the new ordnance, he sought and received permission to bomb the power plant. He took just five other pilots from the squadron with him on the mission. Diving in from different points on the compass, through a terrible barrage of antiaircraft fire and surface-to-air missiles, five of the six A-4s hit their target. The mission was a huge success, but rather than leaving off the attack as soon as the bombs had struck their target, Bryan flew two more passes over the power plant, taking pictures of the bomb damage. For his courage and leadership of the raid, Bryan received the Navy Cross.

I was third pilot on another raid Bryan led, this time over Haiphong. During the raid, the plane of the number two pilot was shot down. None of us saw him eject. Bryan wanted to determine whether or not the missing pilot had managed to escape his destroyed aircraft and parachute safely to ground. He kept circling Haiphong at an extremely low altitude, about two thousand feet, searching in vain for some sign that the pilot had survived. We were taking a tremendous pounding from flak and SAMs. I was scared to death waiting for Bryan to call off the search and lead us back to the Oriskany and out of harm’s way. To this day, I will swear that Bryan made at least eight passes before he reluctantly gave up the search. Bryan has since dismissed my account of his heroism as an exaggeration, claiming, “You can’t trust a politician. They’ll lie every time.” But I remember what I saw that day. I saw a courageous squadron commander put his life in grave peril so that a friend’s family might know if their loved one was alive or dead. For his heroics and his ability to survive them, the rest of the squadron regarded Bryan as indestructible. We were proud to serve under his command.

In the early morning of October 26, 1967, I prepared for my twenty-third bombing run over North Vietnam. President Johnson had decided to escalate the war. The Oriskany’s pilots were on line twelve hours a day, flying raids from midnight to noon or from noon to midnight. We would rest for twelve hours while another carrier took up the battle, and then return to combat for another twelve-hour shift. The Saints were now dropping on Vietnam 150 tons of ordnance a day. Until this moment we had found Johnson’s prosecution of the war, with its frustratingly limited bombing targets, to be maddeningly illogical.

When I was on the Forrestal, every man in my squadron had thought Washington’s air war plans were senseless. The night before my first mission, I had gone up to the squadron’s intelligence center to punch out information on my target. Out came a picture of a military barracks, with some details about the target’s recent history. It had already been bombed twenty-seven times. Half a mile away there was a bridge with truck tracks. But the bridge wasn’t on the target list. The target list was so restricted that we had to go back and hit the same targets over and over again. It’s hard to get a sense that you are advancing the war effort when you are prevented from doing anything more than bouncing the rubble of an utterly insignificant target. James Stockdale, the air wing commander on the Oriskany who had been shot down and captured in 1965, aptly described the situation as “making gestures with our airplanes.”

Flying missions off the Oriskany, I often observed Soviet ships come into Haiphong harbor and off-load surface-to-air missiles. We could see the SAMs being transported to firing sites and put into place, but we couldn’t do anything about them because we were forbidden to bomb SAM sites unless they were firing on us. Even then, it was often an open question whether we could retaliate or not.

We lost a pilot one day over Haiphong. Another pilot released his bombs over the place he thought the SAM had been fired from. When we returned to the Oriskany, the pilot who had avenged his friend was grounded because he had bombed a target that wasn’t on Washington’s list. We all squawked so much that our commanders relented and returned the enterprising pilot to flight status. But the incident left a bad taste in our mouths, and our resentment over the absurd way we were ordered to fight the war grew much stronger, diminishing all the more our already weakened regard for our civilian commanders.

In 1966, Defense Secretary Robert Strange McNamara visited the Oriskany. He asked the skipper for the strike-pilot ratio. He wanted to make sure the numbers accorded with his conception of a successful war, and he was pleased with the figures he received from the skipper. He believed the number of missions flown relative to the number of bombs dropped would determine whether or not we won the war in the most cost-efficient manner. But when President Johnson ordered an end to Rolling Thunder in 1968, the campaign was judged to have had no measurable impact on the enemy. Most of the pilots flying the missions believed that our targets were virtually worthless. We had long believed that our attacks, more often than not limited to trucks, trains, and barges, were not just failing to break the enemy’s resolve but actually having the opposite effect by boosting Vietnam’s confidence that it could withstand the full measure of American airpower. In all candor, we thought our civilian commanders were complete idiots who didn’t have the least notion of what it took to win the war. I found no evidence in postwar studies of the Johnson administration’s political and military decision-making during the war that caused me to revise that harsh judgment.

When the orders came down to escalate the bombing campaign, the pilots on the Oriskany were ecstatic. As the campaign heated up, we began to lose a lot more pilots. But the losses, as much as they hurt, didn’t cause any of us to reconsider our support for the escalation. For the first time we believed we were helping to win the war, and we were proud to be usefully employed.

Today’s attack on Hanoi was to be an Alpha Strike, a large raid on a “militarily significant” target, involving A-4s from my squadron and our sister squadron on the Oriskany, the “Ghost Riders,” as well as fighter escorts from the carrier’s two F-8 squadrons. It would be my first attack on the enemy capital. The commander of the Oriskany’s air wing, Commander Burt Shepard, the brother of astronaut Alan Shepard, would lead the strike. Our target was the thermal power plant, located near a small lake almost in the center of the city, that the Saints had destroyed two months earlier; it had since been repaired.

The day before, I had pleaded with Jim Busey, the Saints’ operations officer, who was responsible for putting the flight schedule together, to let me fly the mission. The earlier raid on the power plant was the pride of the squadron, having earned Navy Crosses for Bryan and Jim. I wanted to help destroy it again. I was feeling pretty cocky as well. The day before, we had bombed an airfield outside Hanoi, and I had destroyed two enemy MiGs parked on the runway. Jim, who called me “Gregory Green-Ass” because I was the new guy in the squadron and had flown far fewer missions than had the squadron’s veteran pilots, consented, and put me on the mission as wingman.

I was still charged up from the previous day’s good fortune, and was anticipating more success that morning despite having been warned about Hanoi’s extensive air defense system. The Oriskany’s strike operations officer, Lew Chatham, told me he expected to lose some pilots. Be careful, he said. I told him not to worry about me, that I was sure I would not be killed. I didn’t know at the time that downed pilots imprisoned in the North referred to their shootdowns as the day they were “killed.”

Hanoi, with its extensive network of Russian-manufactured SAM sites, had the distinction of possessing the most formidable air defenses in the history of modern warfare. I was about to discover just how formidable they were.

We flew out to the west of Hanoi, turned, and headed in to make our run. We came in from the west so that once we had rolled in on the target, released our bombs, and pulled out we would be flying directly toward the Tonkin Gulf. We had electronic countermeasure devices in our planes. In 1966, A-4s had been equipped with radar detection. A flashing light and different tone signals would warn us of imminent danger from enemy SAMs. One tone sounded when a missile’s radar was tracking you, another when it had locked onto you. A third tone signaled a real emergency, that a launched SAM was headed your way. As soon as we hit land and approached the three concentric rings of SAMs that surrounded Hanoi, the tone indicating that missile radar was tracking sounded. It tracked us for miles.

We flew in fairly large separations, unlike the tight formations flown in World War II bombing raids. At about nine thousand feet, as we turned inbound on the target, our warning lights flashed, and the tone for enemy radar started sounding so loudly I had to turn down the volume. I could see huge clouds of smoke and dust erupt on the ground as SAMs were fired at us. The closer we came to the target the fiercer were the defenses. For the first time in combat I saw thick black clouds of antiaircraft flak everywhere, images familiar to me only from World War II movies.

A SAM appears as a flying telephone pole, moving at great speed. We were now maneuvering through a nearly impassible obstacle course of antiaircraft fire and flying telephone poles. They scared the hell out of me. We normally kept pretty good radio discipline throughout a run, but there was a lot of chatter that day as pilots called out SAMs. Twenty-two missiles were fired at us that day. One of the F-8s on the strike was hit. The pilot, Charlie Rice, managed to eject safely.

I recognized the target sitting next to the small lake from the intelligence photographs I had studied. I dove in on it just as the tone went off signaling that a SAM was flying toward me. I knew I should roll out and fly evasive maneuvers, “jinking,” in fliers’ parlance, when I heard the tone. The A-4 is a small, fast, highly maneuverable aircraft, a lot of fun to fly, and it can take a beating. Many an A-4 returned safely to its carrier after being badly shot up by enemy fire. An A-4 can outmaneuver a tracking SAM, pulling more G’s than the missile can take. But I was just about to release my bombs when the tone sounded, and had I started jinking I would never have had the time nor, probably, the nerve, to go back in once I had lost the SAM. So, at about 3,500 feet, I released my bombs, then pulled back the stick to begin a steep climb to a safer altitude. In the instant before my plane reacted, a SAM blew my right wing off. I was killed.

–– CHAPTER 16 –– Prisoner of War

I knew I was hit. My A-4, traveling at about 550 miles an hour, was violently spiraling to earth. In this predicament, a pilot’s training takes over. I didn’t feel fear or any more excitement than I had already experienced during the run, my adrenaline surging as I dodged SAMs and flak to reach the target. I didn’t think, “Gee, I’m hit—what now?” I reacted automatically the moment I took the hit and saw that my wing was gone. I radioed, “I’m hit,” reached up, and pulled the ejection seat handle.

I struck part of the airplane, breaking my left arm, my right arm in three places, and my right knee, and I was briefly knocked unconscious by the force of the ejection. Witnesses said my chute had barely opened before I plunged into the shallow water of Truc Bach Lake. I landed in the middle of the lake, in the middle of the city, in the middle of the day. An escape attempt would have been challenging.

I came to when I hit the water. Wearing about fifty pounds of gear, I touched the bottom of the shallow lake and kicked off with my good leg. I did not feel any pain as I broke the surface, and I didn’t understand why I couldn’t move my arms to pull the toggle on my life vest. I sank to the bottom again. When I broke the surface the second time I managed to inflate my life vest by pulling the toggle with my teeth. Then I blacked out again.

When I came to the second time, I was being hauled ashore on two bamboo poles by a group of about twenty angry Vietnamese. A crowd of several hundred Vietnamese gathered around me as I lay dazed before them, shouting wildly at me, stripping my clothes off, spitting on me, kicking and striking me repeatedly. When they had finished removing my gear and clothes, I felt a sharp pain in my right knee. I looked down and saw that my right foot was resting next to my left knee, at a ninety-degree angle. I cried out, “My God, my leg.” Someone smashed a rifle butt into my shoulder, breaking it. Someone else stuck a bayonet in my ankle and groin. A woman, who may have been a nurse, began yelling at the crowd, and managed to dissuade them from further harming me. She then applied bamboo splints to my leg and right arm.

It was with some relief that I noticed an army truck arrive on the scene to take me away from this group of aggrieved citizens who seemed intent on killing me. Before they put me in the truck, the woman who had stopped the crowd from killing me held a cup of tea to my lips while photographers recorded the act. The soldiers then placed me on a stretcher, loaded me into the truck, and drove me a few blocks to an ocher-colored, trapezoid-shaped stone structure that occupied two city blocks in the center of downtown Hanoi.

I was brought in through enormous steel gates, above which was painted the legend “Maison Centrale.” I had been shot down a short walk’s distance from the French-built prison, Hoa Lo, which the POWs had named “the Hanoi Hilton.” As the massive steel doors loudly clanked shut behind me, I felt a deeper dread than I have ever felt since.

They took me into an empty cell, in a part of the prison we called the Desert Inn, set me down on the floor still in the stretcher, stripped to my underwear, and placed a blanket over me. For the next few days I drifted in and out of consciousness. When awake, I was periodically taken to another room for interrogation. My interrogators accused me of being a war criminal and demanded military information, what kind of aircraft I had flown, future targets, and other particulars of that sort. In exchange I would receive medical treatment.

I thought they were bluffing, and refused to provide any information beyond my name, rank, serial number, and date of birth. They knocked me around a little to force my cooperation, and I began to feel sharp pains in my fractured limbs. I blacked out after the first few blows. I thought if I could hold out like this for a few days, they would relent and take me to a hospital.

For four days I was taken back and forth to different rooms. Unable to use my arms, I was fed twice a day by a guard. I vomited after the meals, unable to hold down anything but a little tea. I remember being desperately thirsty all the time, but I could drink only when the guard was present for my twice-daily feedings.

On about the fourth day, I realized my condition had become more serious. I was feverish, and was losing consciousness more often and for longer periods. I was lying in my own vomit, as well as my other bodily wastes. Two guards entered my cell and pulled the blanket down to examine my leg. I saw that my knee had become grossly swollen and discolored. I remembered a fellow pilot at Meridian who had broken his femur ejecting from his plane. His blood had pooled in his leg, and he had gone into shock and died. I realized the same thing was happening to me, and I pleaded for a doctor.

The two guards left to find the camp officer, who spoke some English. He was short and fat, with a strangely wandering right eye that was clouded white by a cataract. The POWs called him “Bug.” He was a mean son of a bitch.

Desperate, I tried to bargain with him. “Take me to the hospital and I’ll give you the information you want.” I didn’t intend to keep my word, reasoning that after my injuries had been treated, I would be strong enough to deal with the consequences of not holding up my end of the bargain.

Bug left without replying, but returned a short while later with a medic, a man the POWs called Zorba. Zorba squatted down and took my pulse. He turned to Bug, shook his head, and uttered a few words.

“Are you going to take me to the hospital?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “It’s too late.”

I appealed, “Take me to the hospital and I’ll get well.”

“It’s too late,” he repeated.

He and the doctor left my cell, and panic that my death was approaching briefly overtook me.

There were few amputees among the POWs who survived their imprisonment. The Vietnamese usually refused treatment to the seriously injured. I don’t know whether they were negligent for purposes of cost efficiency, reasoning that Americans, unused to unsanitary conditions, were likely to develop fatal infections following an amputation, or if they refused us treatment simply because they hated us. Whatever the reason, a lot of men died who shouldn’t have, the victims of genuine war crimes.

I lapsed into unconsciousness a few minutes after Bug and Zorba left me to my fate, a condition that blessedly relieved me of the terrible dread I was feeling. I was awakened a short while later when an excited Bug rushed into my cell and shouted, “Your father is a big admiral. Now we take you to the hospital.”

God bless my father.

My parents were in London when I was shot down. They were dressing for a dinner party when my father received a telephone call saying that my plane had been shot down over Hanoi. My father informed my mother what had happened. They kept their dinner engagement, never mentioning to any of the other guests the distressing news they had just learned.

When they returned home, my father got a call from his boss, Admiral Tom Moorer, Chief of Naval Operations. Admiral Moorer was a friend and had decided to break the sad news to my father himself. “Jack, we don’t think he survived.”

My parents then called Carol, who had already been notified of my shootdown by the Navy. My mother told her to prepare for the worst: that I was dead, and they would have to find a way to accept that. My father, very matter-of-factly, said, “I don’t think we have to.”

After speaking with Carol, my parents placed calls to my sister and brother to break the bad news to them. Joe was working as a reporter for the San Diego Tribune at the time. He knew something was wrong when he answered the phone and both our parents were on the line.

Without any preliminaries, my mother said: “Honey, Johnny’s been shot down.”

“What happened?”

“He was hit by a missile and went down.”

My brother’s question hung in the air unanswered for a moment until my father explained: “His wingman saw his plane explode. They don’t think he got out.”

Joe began to cry, and then asked my father, “What do we do now?” He recalled my father answering in a soft, sad voice, “Pray for him, my boy.”

The next day, October 28, Johnny Apple wrote a story that appeared on the front page of the New York Times: ADM. MCCAIN’S SON, FORRESTAL SURVIVOR, IS MISSING IN RAID.

I was moved by stretcher to a hospital in central Hanoi. As I was being moved, I again lapsed into unconsciousness. I came to a couple of days later and found myself lying in a filthy room, about twenty by twenty feet, lousy with mosquitoes and rats. Every time it rained, an inch of mud and water would pool on the floor. I was given blood and glucose, and several shots. After several more days passed, during which I was frequently unconscious, I began to recover my wits. Other than the transfusion and shots, I received no treatment for my injuries. No one had even bothered to wash the grime off me.

Once my condition had stabilized, my interrogators resumed their work. Demands for military information were accompanied by threats to terminate my medical treatment if I did not cooperate. Eventually, I gave them my ship’s name and squadron number, and confirmed that my target had been the power plant. Pressed for more useful information, I gave the names of the Green Bay Packers’ offensive line, and said they were members of my squadron. When asked to identify future targets, I simply recited the names of a number of North Vietnamese cities that had already been bombed.

I was occasionally beaten when I declined to give any more information. The beatings were of short duration, because I let out a hair-raising scream whenever they occurred. My interrogators appeared concerned that hospital personnel might object. I also suspected that my treatment was less harsh than might be accorded other prisoners. This I attributed to my father’s position, and the propaganda value the Vietnamese placed on possessing me, injured but alive. Later, my suspicion was confirmed when I heard accounts of other POWs’ experiences during their first interrogations. They had endured far worse than I had, and had withstood the cruelest torture imaginable.

Although I rarely saw a doctor or a nurse, I did have a constant companion, a teenage boy who was assigned to guard me. He had a book that he read at my bedside every day. In the book was a picture of an old man with a rifle sitting on the fuselage of a downed F-105. He would show me the picture, point to himself, and then slap me.

I still could not feed myself, so the boy would spoon-feed me a bowl of noodles with some gristle in it. The gristle was hard to chew. He would jam three of four spoonfuls in my mouth before I could chew and swallow any of it. Unable to force any more into my mouth, he would finish the bowl himself. I got three or four spoonfuls of food twice a day. After a while I really didn’t give a damn, although I tried to eat as much as I could before the boy took his share.

After about a week in the hospital, a Vietnamese officer we called Chihuahua informed me that a visiting Frenchman had asked to look in on me, and had volunteered to carry a message back to my family. I was willing to see him, assuming at the time that my family probably believed I was dead.

As I later learned, the Vietnamese, always delighted when a propaganda opportunity presented itself, had already announced my capture, and helpfully supplied quotes from the repentant war criminal commending the Vietnamese people’s strong morale and observing that the war was turning against the United States. And in an English-language commentary broadcast over the Voice of Vietnam, entitled “From the Pacific to Truc Bach Lake,” Hanoi accused Lyndon Johnson and me of staining my family’s honor.

Prior to the Frenchman’s arrival, I was rolled into a treatment room, where a doctor tried to set my broken right arm. For what seemed like an eternity, he manipulated my arm, without benefit of anesthesia, trying to set the three fractures. Blessedly, the pain at its most acute rendered me unconscious. Finally abandoning the effort, he slapped a large and heavy chest cast on me, an act I can hardly credit as considerate on the part of my captors. The cast did not have a cotton lining, and the rough plaster painfully rubbed against my skin. Over time, it wore two holes in the back of my arm down to the bone. My other arm was left untreated.

Exhausted and encased from my waist to my neck in a wet plaster cast, I was rolled into a large, clean room and placed in a nice white bed. The room contained six beds, each protected by a mosquito net. I asked if this was to be my new room, and was told that it was.

A few minutes later, a Vietnamese officer, a Major Nguyen Bai, paid me a visit, accompanied by Chihuahua. He was the commandant of the entire prison system, a dapper, educated man whom the POWs had nicknamed “the Cat.” The Cat informed me that the Frenchman who would arrive shortly was a television journalist, and that I should tell him everything I had told my interrogators. Surprised, I told the Cat I didn’t want to be filmed.

“You need two operations on your leg, and if you don’t talk to him, then we will take your cast off and you won’t get any operations,” he threatened. “You will say you are grateful to the Vietnamese people, and that you are sorry for your crimes, or we will send you back to the camp.”

I assured him that I would say nothing of the kind, but believing that the Cat would send me back to Hoa Lo, and worrying that I could not endure the truck ride back, I agreed to see the Frenchman.

A few minutes later, François Chalais entered the room with two cameramen. He questioned me for several minutes, asking about my shootdown, my squadron, the nature of my injuries, and my father. I repeated the same information about my ship and squadron and told him I was being treated well by the doctors, who had promised to operate on my leg. Off camera, the Cat and Chihuahua were visibly displeased with my answers. Chihuahua demanded that I say more.

“I have no more to say about it,” I replied.

Both Vietnamese insisted that I express gratitude for the lenient and humane treatment I had received. I refused, and when they pressed me, Chalais said, “I think what he told me is sufficient.”

Chalais then inquired about the quality of the food I was getting, and I responded, “It’s not like Paris, but I eat it.” Finally, Chalais asked if I had a message for my family.

“I would just like to tell my wife that I’m going to get well. I love her, and hope to see her soon. I’d appreciate it if you’d tell her that. That’s all I have to say.”

Chihuahua told me to say that I could receive letters and pictures from home. “No,” I replied. A visibly agitated Cat demanded that I say on camera how much I wanted the war to end so I could go home. Again, Chalais stepped in to help me, saying very firmly that he was satisfied with my answer, and that the interview was over. I appreciated his help.

Although I had resisted giving my interrogators any useful information and had greatly irritated the Cat by refusing his demands during the interview, I should not have given out information about my ship and squadron, and I regret very much having done so. The information was of no real use to the Vietnamese, but the Code of Conduct for American Prisoners of War orders us to refrain from providing any information beyond our name, rank, and serial number.

When Chalais had left, the Cat admonished me for my “bad attitude” and told me I wouldn’t receive any more operations. I was taken back to my old room.

Carol went to see Chalais after he returned to Paris, and he gave her a copy of the film, which was shown in the States on the CBS evening news a short time later.

My parents saw it before it was broadcast nationally. A public affairs officer, Herbert Hetu, who worked for my father when my father was the Navy chief in Europe, had a friend who was a producer at CBS. His friend informed him that CBS had the film of my interview, and he offered to screen it for my parents. Hetu and my parents were in New York at the time. My father was scheduled to give a speech on the emerging strength of the Soviet Navy to the prestigious Overseas Press Club. It was an important and much-anticipated speech that he had been preparing for weeks.

Hetu viewed the film and decided not to show it to my father before he delivered his speech, fearing it would “uncork him.” Instead, he persuaded his friend at CBS to hold the film until the morning, when my parents could view it. He then contacted my father’s personal aide and told him: “After the speech, get with the admiral and tell him about this film. They’re going to hold it and we’ll take him over to CBS tomorrow. I’m sure he’ll want to see it.”

Hetu accompanied my parents to CBS the next day. He remembered my father reacting very emotionally to the film. “We took him over with Mrs. McCain, and I think I said to the admiral, ‘I think you and Mrs. McCain ought to see this by yourselves. You don’t want anybody else in there.’ So that’s the way they watched it, and it was a very emotional piece of film…. I think Admiral McCain and his wife looked at the film twice. His reaction afterward was very emotional, but he never talked to us about it. Some things are just too painful for words.”

It was hard not to see how pleased the Vietnamese were to have captured an admiral’s son, and I knew that my father’s identity was directly related to my survival. Often during my hospital stay I received visits from high-ranking officials. Some observed me for a few minutes and then left without asking any questions. Others would converse idly with me, asking only a few innocuous questions. During one visit, I was told to meet with a visiting Cuban delegation. When I refused, they did not force the issue, either out of concern for my condition or because they were worried about what I might say. One evening, General Vo Nguyen Giap, minister of defense and hero of Dien Bien Phu, paid me a visit. He stared at me wordlessly for a minute, then left.

Bug arrived one day and had me listen to a tape of a POW denouncing America’s involvement in the war. The POW was a Marine, a veteran who had flown in the Korean War. The vigor with which he criticized the United States surprised me. His language did not seem stilted, nor did his tone sound forced.

Bug told me he wanted me to make a similar statement. I told him I didn’t want to say such things.

He told me I shouldn’t be afraid to speak openly about the war, that there was nothing to be ashamed of or to fear.

“I don’t feel that way about the war,” I replied, and was threatened for what seemed like the hundredth time with a warning that I would be denied an operation because of my “bad attitude.”

In early December, they operated on my leg. The Vietnamese filmed the operation. I haven’t a clue why. Regrettably, the operation wasn’t much of a success. The doctors severed all the ligaments on one side of my knee, which has never fully recovered. After the war, thanks to the work of a kind and talented physical therapist, my knee regained much of its mobility—enough, anyway, for me to return to flight status for a time. But today, when I am tired or when the weather is inclement, my knee stiffens in pain, and I pick up a trace of my old limp.

They decided to discharge me later that December. I had been in the hospital about six weeks. I was in bad shape. I had a high fever and suffered from dysentery. I had lost about fifty pounds and weighed barely a hundred. I was still in my chest cast, and my leg hurt like hell.

On the brighter side, at my request, the Vietnamese were taking me to another prison camp. Bug had entered my room one day and abruptly announced, “The doctors say you are not getting better.”

The accusatory tone he used to relay this all too obvious diagnosis implied that I was somehow responsible for my condition and had deliberately tried to embarrass the Vietnamese medical establishment by refusing to recover.

“Put me with other Americans,” I responded, “and I’ll get better.”

Bug said nothing in reply. He just looked at me briefly with the expression he used to convey his disdain for an inferior enemy, then withdrew from the room.

That evening I was blindfolded, placed in the back of a truck, and driven to a truck repair facility that had been converted into a prison a few years earlier. It was situated in what had once been the gardens of the mayor of Hanoi’s official residence. The Americans held there called it “the Plantation.”

To my great relief, I was placed in a cell in a building we called “the Gun Shed” with two other prisoners, both Air Force majors, George “Bud” Day and Norris Overly. I could have asked for no better companions. There has never been a doubt in my mind that Bud Day and Norris Overly saved my life.

Bud and Norris later told me that their first impression of me, emaciated, bug-eyed, and bright with fever, was of a man at the threshold of death. They thought the Vietnamese expected me to die and had placed me in their care to escape the blame when I failed to recover.

Despite my poor condition, I was overjoyed to be in the company of Americans. I had by this time been a prisoner of war for two months, and I hadn’t even caught a glimpse of another American.

I was frail, but voluble. I wouldn’t stop talking all through that first day with Bud and Norris, explaining my shootdown, describing my treatment since capture, inquiring about their experiences, and asking for all the details of the prison system and for information about other prisoners.

Bud and Norris accommodated me to the best of their ability, and were the soul of kindness as they eased my way to what they believed was my imminent death. Bud had been seriously injured when he ejected. Like me, he had broken his right arm in three places and had torn the ligaments in his knee—the left knee in his case. After his capture near the DMZ, he had attempted an escape, and had nearly reached an American airfield when he was recaptured. He was brutally tortured for his efforts, and for subsequently resisting his captors’ every entreaty for information.

First held in a prison in Vinh before making the 150-mile trip north to Hanoi, Bud had experienced early the full measure of the mistreatment that would be his fate for nearly six years. His captors had looped rope around his shoulders, tightened it until his shoulders were nearly touching, and then hung him by the arms from the rafter of the torture room, tearing his shoulders apart. Left in this condition for hours, Bud never acceded to the Vietnamese demands for military information. They had to refracture his broken right arm and threaten to break the other before Bud gave them anything at all. He was a tough man, a fierce resister, whose example was an inspiration to every man who served with him. For his heroic escape attempt, he received the Medal of Honor, one of only three POWs in Vietnam to receive the nation’s highest award.

Because of his injuries, Bud was unable to help with my physical care. Norris shouldered most of the responsibility. A gentle, uncomplaining guy, he cleaned me up, fed me, helped me onto the bucket that served as our toilet, and massaged my leg. Thanks to his tireless ministration, and to the restorative effect Bud and Norris’s company had on my morale, I began to recover.

I slept a lot those first weeks, eighteen to twenty hours a day. Little by little, I grew stronger. A little more than a week after I had been consigned to his care, Norris had me on my feet and helped me to stand for a few moments. From then on, I could feel my strength return more rapidly each day. Soon I was able to stand unaided, and even maneuver around my cell on a pair of crutches.

In early January, we were relocated to another end of the camp, a place we called “the Corn Crib.” We had neighbors in the cells on either side of ours, and for the first time we managed to establish communications with fellow POWs. Our methods were crude, yelling to each other whenever the turnkeys were absent, and leaving notes written in cigarette ash in a washroom drain. It would be some time before we devised more sophisticated and secure communication methods.

One day a young English-speaking officer escorted a group of older, obviously senior party members into our cell. Their privileged status was evident in the quality of their attire, which, although perhaps not elegant by Western standards, was far better than that worn by most Vietnamese of our acquaintance.

For a few moments after entering, the entire group just stared at me. Finally, the young officer began asking me questions in English, translating my answers for the assembled dignitaries.

“How many corporations does your family own?”

Puzzled by the question, I looked at him for a moment before asking, “What do you mean?”

“How many corporations does your family own? Your father is a big admiral. He must have many companies that work with your government.”

Laughing at the absurd premise of the question, I replied, “You’ve got to be putting me on. My father is a military officer whose income is confined to his military salary.”

When my answer had been translated, the crowd of high-ranking officials, all of whom had thrived in a system of government infamously riddled with corruption, smiled and nodded at each other, dismissing my protest as unimaginative propaganda. In their experience, admirals and generals got rich. Surely in a country as wealthy and undisciplined as the United States, military officers used their influence to profit themselves and their families.

Around that time, we began to notice that the Vietnamese were showing us unusual leniency. Our diet improved a little. For a few days we received large bunches of bananas. The Cat would often visit us and inquire about our health and how we were getting along.

No one invested much effort in interrogating us or getting us to make propaganda statements. Once we were instructed to write summaries of our military histories. We invented all the details. Mine contained references to service in Antarctica and as the naval attaché in Oslo, two places, I am sorry to say, I had never visited.

We were suspicious of the Vietnamese’s motives, as we doubted that they had begun to take seriously their public commitments to a policy of humane treatment of prisoners. But initially we were at a loss to figure out their purpose.

We weren’t in the dark for long. One evening in early February, Norris told us that the Vietnamese were considering releasing him along with two other prisoners. For a couple of weeks, the Vietnamese had regularly interrogated Norris. Unbeknownst to us, they had been quizzing Norris to determine whether he was willing and suitable to be included in their first grant of “amnesty.” Bud advised him to reject the offer. The Code of Conduct obliged us to refuse release before those who had been captured earlier had been released.

The next day, Norris was removed from our cell. The day of his release, February 16, I was carried on a stretcher with Bud walking beside me to a room where we were to bid Norris good-bye. A crew was filming the departure ceremony. Bud asked if he had been required to make any propaganda statement or do anything else he might later on regret. Norris said that he had not, and we let the matter drop.

Some of the prisoners were pretty hard on Norris and the other two prisoners for taking early release. Norris had taken very good care of me. He had saved my life. I thought him a good man then, as I do today. I feared he had made a mistake, but I couldn’t stand in judgment of him. I thought too well of him, and owed him too much to stand between him and his freedom. I wished him well as he departed, carrying a letter from me to Carol in his pocket.

–– CHAPTER 17 –– Solitary

Bud and I remained roommates for about another month. When the Vietnamese observed that I could get around on my crutches, they moved Bud to another cell. In April 1968, Bud was relocated to another prison, and I was moved into another building, the largest cellblock in the camp, “the Warehouse.” I cannot adequately describe how sorry I was to part company with my friend and inspiration. Up until then, I don’t believe I had ever relied on any other person for emotional and physical support to the extent I had relied on Bud.

Although I could manage to hobble around on my crutches, I was still in poor shape. My arms had not yet healed, and I couldn’t pick up or carry anything. I was still suffering from dysentery, a chronic ailment throughout most of my years in prison, and I weighed little more than a hundred pounds. The dysentery caused me considerable discomfort. Food and water would pass immediately through me, and sharp pains in my stomach made sleeping difficult. I was chronically fatigued and generally weak from my inability to retain nourishment.

Bud, whose injuries were nearly as debilitating as mine, helped me enormously by building my confidence in my eventual recovery. He joked often about our condition, and got me to laugh about it as well. When other POWs teased us as they observed us hobbling along to the showers, no one laughed harder than Bud.

Bud had an indomitable will to survive with his reputation intact, and he strengthened my will to live. The only sustenance I had in those early days I took from the example of his abiding moral and physical courage. Bud was taken to a prison, “the Zoo,” where the conditions and the cruelty of camp authorities made the Plantation seem like a resort. He would suffer terribly there, confronting the full force of man’s inhumanity to man. But he was a tough, self-assured, and amazingly determined man, and he bore all his trials with an unshakable faith that he was a better man than his enemies. I was distraught when he left, but better prepared to endure my fate thanks to the months of his unflagging encouragement. I bid good-bye to him warmly, trying not to betray the sadness I felt to see him go. I would remain in solitary confinement for over two years.

It’s an awful thing, solitary. It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment. Having no one else to rely on, to share confidences with, to seek counsel from, you begin to doubt your judgment and your courage. But you eventually adjust to solitary, as you can to almost any hardship, by devising various methods to keep your mind off your troubles and greedily grasping any opportunity for human contact.

The first few weeks are the hardest. The onset of despair is immediate, and it is a formidable foe. You have to fight it with any means necessary, all the while trying to bridle the methods you devise to combat loneliness and prevent them from robbing your senses.

I tried to memorize the names of POWs, the names and personal details of guards and interrogators, and the details of my environment. I devised other memory games to keep my faculties sound. For days I tried to remember the names of all the pilots in my squadron and our sister squadron. I also prayed more often and more fervently than I ever had as a free man.

Many prisoners spent their hours exercising their minds by concentrating on an academic discipline or hobby they were proficient in. I knew men who mentally designed buildings and airplanes. I knew others who spent days and weeks working out complicated math formulas. I reconstructed from memory books and movies I had once enjoyed. I tried to compose books and plays of my own, often acting out sequences in the quiet solitude of my cell. Anyone who had observed my amateur theatrics might have challenged the exercise’s beneficial effect on my mental stability.

I had to carefully guard against my fantasies becoming so consuming that they took me permanently to a place in my mind from which I might fail to return. On several occasions I became terribly annoyed when a guard entered my cell to take me to the bath or to bring me my food and disrupted some flight of fantasy where the imagined comforts were so attractive that I could not easily bear to be deprived of them. Sadly, I knew of a few men in prison who had grown so content in their imaginary worlds that they preferred solitary confinement and turned down the offer of a roommate. Eventually, they stopped communicating with the rest of us.

For long stretches of every day, I would watch the activities in camp through a crack in my door, grateful to witness any unusual or amusing moment that broke the usual monotony of prison administration. As I began to settle into my routine, I came to appreciate the POW adage “The days and hours are very long, but the weeks and months pass quickly.”

Solitary also put me in a pretty surly mood, and I would resist depression by hollering insults at my guards, resorting to the belligerence that I had relied on earlier in my life when obliged to suffer one indignity or another. Resisting, being uncooperative and a general pain in the ass, proved, as it had in the past, to be a morale booster for me.

Hypochondria is a malady that commonly afflicts prisoners held in solitary confinement. A man becomes extremely conscious of his physical condition and can worry excessively over every ailment that plagues him. After Bud and I were separated, I struggled to resist concern bordering on paranoia that my injuries and poor health would eventually prove mortal.

I received nothing in the way of medical treatment. Three or four times a year, Zorba, the prison medic, would drop by for a brief visit. After a quick visual appraisal of my condition he would leave me with the exhortation to eat more and exercise. That I often could not keep down the little food allowed me after the guards had taken their share did not strike Zorba as paradoxical. Nor did Zorba bother to explain how I might manage to exercise given my disabling injuries and the narrow confines of my cell. I was routinely refused permission to spend a few minutes a day out of doors where I might have had the space necessary to concoct some half-assed exercise regimen.

I did try, despite my challenging circumstances and uncooperative guards, to build up my strength. In the summer of 1968, I attempted to do push-ups, but lacked the strength to raise myself once from my cell floor. I was able to perform a single standing push-up off the wall, but the experience was so painful that it only served to exacerbate my concern about my condition.

By late summer in 1969, my dysentery had eased. The strength I gained from holding down my food enabled me to begin exercising my leg. Whenever possible, I limped around my cell on my stiff leg, and I was greatly cheered when I noticed the limb slowly becoming stronger.

My arms were another matter. Over a period of two years, I began to regain some use of them, but even then exercise occasionally resulted in my arms’ total immobility for a period that could last up to a month. After I returned to the States, an orthopedic surgeon informed me that because the fracture in my left arm had not been set, using my arm as much as I had during my imprisonment had worn a new socket in my left shoulder.

In the last two years of my captivity, prisoners were quartered together in large cells. Because of the improvement in our food and living conditions, I was strong enough to perform a rigorous daily exercise routine. Lopsided push-ups and a form of running in place that resembled hopping more than it did running gave my daily workout a comical aspect. But in addition to endlessly amusing my roommates, the routine considerably strengthened both my mental and physical reserves.

Left alone to act as my own physician, I made diagnoses that were occasionally closer to hysterical than practical. Among its many unattractive effects, dysentery often causes rather severe hemorrhoids. When this affliction visited me, I became morose, brooding about its implications for my survival. After some time, it finally occurred to me that I had never heard of a single person whose hemorrhoids had proved fatal. When this latest infirmity disappeared after a couple of months, I made a mental note to stop acting like an old man who stayed in bed all day fussing about his angina.

There is little doubt that solitary confinement causes some mental deterioration in even the most resilient personalities. When in 1970 my period of solitary confinement was finally ended, I was overwhelmed by the compulsion to talk nonstop, face-to-face with my obliging new cellmate. I ran my mouth ceaselessly for four days. My cellmate, John Finely, who had once been held in solitary himself and understood my exuberant reaction to his company, listened intently, frequently nodding his head in assent to my rhetorical points even though he could not possibly have taken in more than a fraction of my rambling dialogue.

I have observed this phenomenon in many other men when they were released from solitary. One of the more amusing spectacles in prison is the sight of two men, both just released from solitary, talking their heads off simultaneously, neither one listening to the other, both absolutely enraptured by the sound of their voices. Most “solos” settled down after spending a few days with a roommate and recovered the strength and confidence of men who were sound in both mind and body.

We had a saying in prison: “Steady strain.” The point of the remark was to remind us to keep a close watch on our emotions, not to let them rise and fall with circumstances that were out of our control. We tried hard to avoid seizing on any small change in our treatment as an indication of an approaching change in our fortunes.

We called some POWs “gastro politicians,” because their spirits soared every time they found a carrot in their soup. “Look at this. They’re fattening us up,” they would declare. “We must be going home.” And when no omen appeared in the next day’s meal, the gastro politician’s irrational exuberance of the previous day would disappear, and he would sink into an equally irrational despondency, lamenting, “We’re never getting out of here.”

Most of the prisoners considered it unhealthy to allow themselves to interpret our circumstances like tea leaf readers divining some secret purpose in the most unremarkable event. Prison was enough of a psychological strain without riding an emotional roller coaster of our own creation. Once you began investing meals or an unexpectedly civil word from a guard with greater meaning than it merited, you might begin to pay attention to the promises or threats of your captors. That was the surest way to lose your resolve or even your mind.

“Steady strain, buddy, steady strain,” we cautioned each other whenever we began to take a short view of our lives. It was best to take the long view. We would get home when we got home. There wasn’t anything we could do to hasten that day’s arrival. Until then we had to manage our hardships as best we could, and hope that when we did get home we would have been a credit to ourselves and to the country.

When you’re left alone with your thoughts for years, it’s hard not to reflect on how better you could have spent your time as a free man. I had more than a normal share of regrets, but regret for choosing the career that had landed me in this place was not among them.

I regretted I hadn’t read more books so I could keep my mind better occupied in solitary. I regretted much of the foolishness that had characterized my youth, seeing in it, at last, its obvious insignificance. I regretted I hadn’t worked harder at the Academy, believing that had I done so, I might have been better prepared for the trial I now faced.

My regrets were never so severe that they made me despondent, but I did experience remorse to an extent I had never known in the past, an emotion that helped mature me. I gained the insight, common to many people in life-threatening circumstances, that the trivial pleasures of life and human vanity were transient and insignificant. And I resolved that when I regained my freedom, I would seize opportunities to spend what remained of my life in more important pursuits.

“All that’s beautiful drifts away/Like the waters,” lament Yeats’s old men. Except, I discovered, love and honor. If you valued them, and held them strongly, love and honor would endure undiminished by the passing of time and the most determined assault on your dignity. And to hold on to love and honor I needed to be part of a fraternity. I was not as strong a man as I had once believed myself to be.

Of all the activities I devised to survive solitary confinement with my wits and strength intact, nothing was more beneficial than communicating with other prisoners. It was, simply, a matter of life and death.

Fortunately, the Vietnamese—although they went to extraordinary lengths to prevent it—couldn’t stop all communication among prisoners. Through flashed hand signals when we were moved about, tap codes on the wall, notes hidden in washroom drains, and holding our enamel drinking cups up to the wall with our shirts wrapped around them and speaking through them, we were able to communicate with each other. The whole prison system became a complex information network, POWs busily trafficking in details about each other’s circumstances and news from home that would arrive with every new addition to our ranks.

The tap code was a simple device. The signal to communicate was the old rhythm “shave and a haircut,” and the response, “two bits,” was given if the coast was clear. We divided the alphabet into five columns of five letters each. The letter K was dropped. A, F, L, Q, and V were the key letters. Tap once for the five letters in the A column, twice for F, three times for L, and so on. After indicating the column, pause for a beat, then tap one through five times to indicate the right letter. My name would be tapped 3-2, 1-3, 1-3, 1-1, 2-4, 3-3.

It was an easy system to teach the uninitiated, and new guys would usually be communicating like veterans within a few days. We became so proficient at it that in time we could communicate as efficiently by tapping as we could by speaking through our drinking cups. But I preferred, whenever circumstances allowed, to speak to my neighbors. The sound of the human voice, unappreciated in an open society’s noisy clutter of spoken words, was an emblem of humanity to a man held at length in solitary confinement, an elegant and poignant affirmation that we possessed a divine spark that our enemies could not extinguish.

The punishment for communicating could be severe, and a few POWs, having been caught and beaten for their efforts, had their spirits broken as their bodies were battered. Terrified of a return trip to the punishment room, they would lie still in their cells when their comrades tried to tap them up on the wall. Very few would remain uncommunicative for long. To suffer all this alone was less tolerable than torture. Withdrawing in silence from the fellowship of other Americans and the doggedly preserved cohesion of an American military unit was to us the approach of death. Almost all would recover their strength in a few days and answer the summons to rejoin the living.

In October 1968, I heard the guards bring a new prisoner into the camp and lock him into the cell behind mine. Ernie Brace was a decorated former Marine who had flown over a hundred combat missions in the Korean War. He had been accused of deserting the scene of an aircraft accident, court-martialed, and discharged dishonorably from the service. Determined to restore his good name, he had volunteered as a civilian pilot to fly supply missions in Laos for the United States Agency for International Development, and, when asked, to secretly supply CIA-supported military units in the Laotian jungle.

During one such operation, Communist insurgents, the Pathet Lao, overran the small airstrip where he had just landed and captured him. His captors handed him over to soldiers in the North Vietnamese Army, who marched him to a remote outpost near Dien Bien Phu. He was imprisoned for three years in a bamboo cage with his arms and legs bound. He attempted three escapes. He was brutally tortured, held in leg stocks, and tethered to a stake by a rope around his neck. After his last failed escape attempt, the Vietnamese buried him in a pit up to his neck and left him there for a week.

In 1968, he was brought to Hanoi. Uncertain whether the United States government was aware he had been captured alive, he was greatly relieved to realize that he was now in the company of American POWs whose captivity was known to our government.

When the commotion in the cell behind me died down as the guards left Ernie alone in his new home, I tried to tap him up on the wall. In terrible shape, and fearful that the knocks he heard in the cell next door were made by Vietnamese trying to entrap him in an attempted violation of the prohibition against communicating, he made no response. For days I tried in vain to talk to him.

Finally, he tapped back, a faint but audible “two bits.” I put my drinking cup to the wall and spoke directly to my new neighbor.

“Do you have a drinking cup?”

No response.

“Tap twice if you have a drinking cup and once if you don’t.”

No response.

“I’m talking through my cup. Do you have a drinking cup? If you have a cup, wrap your shirt around it, hold it up to the wall, and talk to me.”

No response.

“You want to communicate, don’t you?”

No response.

I continued at some length, vainly trying to get him to talk to me. But as he had just been given a drinking cup, his suspicion that he was being set up by the Vietnamese intensified as I urged him to make illicit use of it.

A few days later, the possibility that he could talk with another American for the first time in three years overrode his understandable caution. When I asked him if he had a cup, he tapped twice for yes.

“I’m Lieutenant Commander John McCain. I was shot down over Hanoi in 1967. Who are you?”

“My name is Ernie Brace,” came the response.

“Are you Air Force? Navy? Marine?”

“My name is Ernie Brace.”

“Where were you shot down?”

“My name is Ernie Brace.”

To my every query, Ernie could only manage to say his name before he broke down. I could hear him crying. After his long, awful years in the jungle, the sound of an American voice, carrying with it the promise of fraternity with men who would share his struggle, had overwhelmed him.

It took some time before Ernie could keep his composure long enough to engage in informative conversation. But once he did, he became a tireless talker, hungry for all information about his new circumstances and eager to provide me with all the details of his capture and captivity.

I was somewhat surprised to learn he was a civilian. I assumed he was CIA, but refrained from asking him. As a civilian, Ernie was under no obligation to adhere to the Code of Conduct. The United States expected him not to betray any highly sensitive information, the disclosure of which would endanger the lives of other Americans. But other than that, he was not required to show any fidelity to his country and her cause beyond the demands of his own conscience.

But Ernie’s conscience demanded much from him. He kept our code faithfully. When the Vietnamese offered to release him, he declined, insisting that others captured before him be released first. No one I knew in prison, Army, Navy, Marine, or Air Force officer, had greater loyalty to his country or derived more courage from his sense of honor. It was an honor to serve with him.

Incongruous though it must seem, early on, POWs could be better informed about the circumstances of other prisons and the men held there than we were about the population of our own camp. Many cells at the Plantation were uninhabited when I first came there, and we had a hard time establishing a camp-wide communications network. Some prisoners were located in other buildings or in cells some distance away and separated by empty rooms from mine. Most of our senior officers at the Plantation were kept in isolated cells. They were out of reach of our tapping, and we did not walk by their cells when we were taken to the washroom and the interrogation room.

New arrivals who had been placed in cells within my communications bloc brought us information about the men held at Hoa Lo, the Zoo, and other prisons in and around Hanoi. But we often puzzled over the identity of men held a short distance from us in different parts of the camp. A tough resister, Ted Guy, an Air Force colonel, was living in a different building. Unable to communicate with him, the men in my block assumed for several months that the senior officer nearest to us, Dick Stratton, a Navy commander, was the senior ranking officer for the whole camp. Ernie Brace informed us of our error. He had learned about Colonel Guy’s presence in our ranks in a conversation with another POW.

There were about eighty Americans held at the Plantation during my first years in prison. Eventually I would come to know many of the men at the Plantation. Keeping an ever-lengthening account of the men we learned were prisoners was the solemn responsibility of every POW. We would fall asleep at night while silently chanting the names on the list. Knowing the men in my prison and being known by them was my best assurance of returning home. Communicating not only affirmed our humanity. It kept us alive.

–– CHAPTER 18 –– The Plantation

The walls of the Plantation enclosed what had once been a lovely estate. Numerous trees were all that remained of the gardens, but the large mansion that had formerly housed Hanoi’s mayor when Vietnam was a French colony still stood in reasonably good repair. We called it “the Big House,” and we were taken there for initial interrogation. It also provided receiving rooms for American peace delegations, who arrived with great fanfare to affirm how well we were being treated despite the terrible crimes we had committed against the Vietnamese people.

Several warehouses surrounded the mansion. They were divided into cells and housed the POW population. Various other smaller buildings dotted the estate and served as quarters for the guards and other prison workers. After Bud Day and I were separated, I was kept alone in Room 13 West at the south end of the Warehouse. Directly across the courtyard from my cell was the interrogation room, where I would often reside during periods of attitude adjustment.

The cells in the Plantation were large compared to those at other prisons. Mine was approximately fifteen by fifteen feet. Each cell had a wooden board for a bed and a naked lightbulb dangling on a cord in the center of the ceiling. The light was kept on twenty-four hours a day. I got used to it after a while. It didn’t bother me much in the winter, but in the summer heat, when most prisoners were suffering miserably from heat rash and boils, the extra warmth from the light made our discomfort all the harder to bear. Adding to the intensity of our discomfort was the building’s tin roof, which must have increased the summer heat by ten or more degrees.

The cell windows were boarded up to prevent us from seeing out and from communicating with one another, blocking all ventilation except for some small holes near the top of wall. Every door had a peephole that turnkeys used to look in on us. Every door also had cracks in it through which we could observe our turnkeys and the daily activities of camp personnel.

The daily routine was simple and excruciatingly dull. The guards struck a gong at six in the morning, signaling the start of a new day. We rose, folded our gear, and listened from the loudspeakers in our cells to Hanoi Hannah, the “Voice of Vietnam,” a half hour of witless propaganda, rebroadcast from the night before. For most POWs, Hannah was a pretty good source of entertainment.

“American GIs, don’t fight in this illegal and immoral war,” Hannah pleaded, before reporting the latest victories of the heroic people’s liberation forces. She brought us the news from home, which was, of course, limited to updates on antiwar activities and incidents of civil strife. She often played recordings of speeches by prominent American opponents of the war. In 1972, she unwittingly informed us that an American had landed on the moon by playing a portion of a campaign speech by George McGovern chastising Nixon for putting a man on the moon but failing to end the war. The musical interlude was a mix of Vietnamese patriotic songs and a few American songs, usually some scratchy old Louis Armstrong records that some fleeing Frenchman had left behind when France relinquished its Indochinese colony.

During the Tet Offensive, in 1968, Hannah couldn’t restrain her patriotic ardor as she gleefully regaled us with news of “many heroic victories” over the American imperialists and their puppet regime in the South. The guards shared her enthusiasm. On the night Tet began, they were all fired up, racing around the camp, yelling and shooting their rifles into the night air. The POWs were clueless about the cause of the commotion until Hannah brought us the news the next evening.

Hannah was especially excited about the siege of the American Marine base at Khe San, confidently predicting, night after night, its imminent surrender. Six weeks after she first alerted us to the siege, Hannah stopped updating us on the progress of the people’s heroic liberation of Khe San. Evidently the Marines defending Khe San had proved heroic as well.

About an hour after Hannah’s morning rebroadcast, the turnkeys opened each cell door, and, one at a time, each prisoner brought his waste bucket out, set it down, and stepped back into his cell. After all the waste buckets were placed outside and the guards had locked the prisoners back in their cells, two POWs were assigned the task of collecting the buckets, dumping their contents into a large hole in the back of the camp, washing them out, and returning them to their owners. For a brief while, the prisoners used this daily chore to pass notes on cigarette paper and other scraps of paper. The Vietnamese soon discovered our treachery and kept a closer eye on the unfortunate POWs who drew this duty.

After the buckets were returned, the guards filled our teapots. If it was a wash day, they would then take us to bathe. In winters, when water was plentiful, we would often bathe twice a week. In summer, when water was scarce, we would sometimes go weeks without bathing. After we had hung our wet clothes and washrag out to dry and returned to our cells, each prisoner was taken back out, one at a time, to pick up his breakfast, usually a piece of bread and a bowl of soup made by boiling something that vaguely resembled a pumpkin. Each prisoner was then returned to his cell and locked in before the next prisoner was allowed to collect his morning meal.

The food at the Plantation was notoriously bad, and, as the old joke goes, the portions were too small. Discipline among the Plantation’s guards was poor, and we suffered from a high rate of food thievery. The pots in which our meals were prepared were never washed, and the guards who served us were only slightly cleaner. I never enjoyed a reputation for cleanliness, but my frequent bouts of dysentery brought on by my filthy living conditions greatly increased my appreciation of the virtue, and I cringed whenever I watched our food being prepared.

After we finished eating, the process was repeated in reverse as we returned our empty bowls. There were no other activities after breakfast until we were brought out for the afternoon meal. On wash days we collected our dry clothes with the afternoon meal.

Shortly after lunch, around noon, they rang the gong again to signal the afternoon nap, which lasted until two. Until the gong sounded we weren’t allowed to lie down unless we were ill. On some afternoons they piped in additional propaganda broadcasts over the loudspeakers, occasionally playing them all afternoon. Other times we went for weeks without afternoon tributes to the great patriotic struggle, although Hannah never missed an evening or morning broadcast.

Our boredom was periodically alleviated by the provision of reading materials. The camp literature offered little in the way of a rewarding read. Most often, I was given a copy of the Vietnam Courier, a propaganda rag full of decidedly tendentious news accounts of the war and current events.

Reading the Courier, I was always amused by its descriptions of Ho Chi Minh’s many remarkable attributes, powers normally associated with the Divinity. If a certain province reported a poor rice harvest one year, Uncle Ho would arrive on the scene, and, bingo, next year’s harvest set a record. Got a problem with your tractor, call Uncle Ho for an illuminating lecture on tractor maintenance. If air pirates were bombing your village, Uncle Ho would teach the village idiot how to target a surface-to-air missile and in no time at all he would be destroying whole squadrons. No task was too small for Ho. He would always take a few minutes from his busy administration of the war to cure whatever ailed you.

Other times, I received awkwardly written books boasting of extraordinary Vietnamese war victories, whole battalions of American infantry annihilated by a few determined peasants, grandmothers shooting down American aircraft. Of course, all our literary diversions required us to endure a fulminating condemnation of American war crimes.

We were also read aloud to quite often. Works by prominent American authors who were opposed to the war and by other, less distinguished pamphleteers were haltingly, and some times unintelligibly, broadcast throughout the camp. Dr. Spock’s works, sadly not his texts on child care, were a popular form of political enlightenment.

Sometimes we were made to watch movies in which Vietnamese nationalism was accorded even greater supernatural powers than it was in books and newspapers. A tank division or several American battalions were never a match for one lightly armed, gallant, kind-to-women-and-children Vietnamese fighting man. Of course, the Vietnamese took elaborate precautions when taking us to the movies, lest we hopelessly inferior Americans pull some kind of trick on our virtuous, all-knowing guards. Each prisoner watched the movies from a separate cubicle made with blankets or mosquito netting hung over a line.

Although I suppose I should have been insulted by such heavy-handed propaganda, it was so clumsy and so absurd that it seldom failed to amuse me. I came to welcome most of it as a reliably entertaining diversion, but it also exacerbated my yearning for a world in which all information was not portioned out sparingly and in disguise to advance someone’s military or political objectives.

We were deprived of even the most basic comforts. It would be too time-consuming a task to list all the things I missed in prison. I missed the staples of life, of course, good and plentiful food, a comfortable bed, being out of doors. But the thing I missed most was information—free, uncensored, undistorted, abundant information.

When we were released from prison in 1973, the first thing most of us did after arriving at Clark Air Base in the Philippines was order a steak dinner or an ice cream sundae or some other food we had longed for in prison. But I was as hungry for information as I was for a decent meal, and when I placed my dinner order I asked also for newspapers and magazines. I wanted to know what was going on in the world, and I grasped anything I could find that might offer a little enlightenment.

Every night at the Plantation, except Saturday night, all the camp personnel would attend what we derisively referred to as “revival” meetings. We would lie on our hard bunks and listen to the Vietnamese fervently cheer, clap, and shout expressions of nationalism and simplistic slogans epitomizing their national ideology. Each one would take a turn reading from a tract of anti-American propaganda.

At nine o’clock every evening, the guards rang the evening gong instructing us to go to sleep, and, shivering in the cold or sweating in the stifling heat, beset by mosquitoes, and in the glare of a naked lightbulb, we tried to escape to our dreams. That was our day.

The only thing that changed my daily regimen was an interrogation. Interrogations were irregular events. Three or four weeks could pass before I was subjected to one. Other times I was interrogated twice in one day, sometimes by senior officers, sometimes by lower-ranking officers or enlisted personnel whom we called “quiz kids.” The sound of jangling keys and fumbling with locks at night or at other irregular times had the effect of unexpected gunfire. I shot bolt upright the moment I heard it, gripped by terror, my heart beating so loud I thought it would be audible to the approaching guard. In the years after I came home, I never suffered from flashbacks or posttraumatic stress syndrome, as it is clinically termed. But for a long time after coming home, I would tense up whenever I heard keys rattle, and for an instant I would feel the onset of an old fear come back to haunt me.

They never interrogated or tortured us in our cells. They always took us to the interrogation rooms, spartan cells with bare walls, furnished with just a wooden table, a chair behind the table, and a stool in front of it, lower than the chair, for the prisoner to sit on.

Some interrogations were comparatively benign. Sometimes they were little more than training sessions for a new interrogator who was trying to learn English. The interrogators would demand information, or order me to confess my crimes into a tape recorder. When I refused, they would make a perfunctory threat to persuade me to reconsider. When I refused again, they just sent me back to my cell, the threatened beating forgotten.

Once I was instructed to draw a diagram of an aircraft carrier. I decided to comply with the order, but took considerable artistic license in the process. I drew a picture of a ship’s deck with a large swimming pool on the fantail, the captain’s quarters in a chain locker, and various other imagined embellishments.

Vietnamese propaganda about the soft, luxurious life that upperclass Westerners (a social class to which military officers were naturally thought to belong) led made the interrogators easy marks for a lot of the b.s. we devised to avoid giving them any useful information. My fantastic rendering of an American carrier didn’t arouse my gullible interrogator’s suspicions until I noted its keel was three hundred feet deep. Unfortunately, he knew that the shallow waters of the Tonkin Gulf couldn’t accommodate a ship that drew this much water. He denounced me as a liar and ordered me punished.

After a couple of physically intense interrogations, my captors forced me to read the “news” a few times over the camp loudspeakers. On each occasion, I managed to badly fracture the syntax of the prepared text and affect a goofy, singsong delivery. The Vietnamese, observing that my prisonmates laughed whenever my voice came over the speakers, soon despaired of my qualities as a broadcaster. One of my interrogators informed me that “the other prisoners say you make fun of us,” and soon my brief career as the Plantation’s Walter Cronkite was over.

One spring, a young interrogator I had not seen before decided to practice his English by chatting amiably with me about Western religious customs. “What is Easter?” he asked me. I told him that it was the time of year we celebrated the death and resurrection of the Son of God. As I recounted the events of Christ’s passion, His crucifixion, death, resurrection, and assumption to heaven, I saw my curious interrogator furrow his brow in disbelief.

“You say He died?”

“Yes, He died.”

“Three days, He was dead?”

“Yes. Then He came alive again. People saw Him and then He went back to heaven.”

Clearly puzzled, he stared wordlessly at me for a few moments, then left the room. A short time later, he returned, his friendly manner gone, an angry resolve replacing it.

“Mac Kane, the officer say you tell nothing but lies. Go back to your room,” he ordered, the mystery of my faith proving incomprehensible to him.

On other occasions the interrogators were deadly serious, and if they threatened to beat you into cooperation, you were certain they would give it a hell of a try.

Often we knew how difficult things were likely to become by the identity of the interrogator. We called one interrogator “the Soft Soap Fairy,” for his delicate manners and the solicitous good-cop routine he employed in well-spoken English to plead with prisoners for their cooperation. “How are you, Mac Kane,” he would greet me. If another interrogator who lacked Soft Soap’s gentility had recently roughed me up, he would tell me how sorry he was. “This terrible war,” he would say. “I hope it’s over soon.”

“Me too,” I would reply.

After these preliminary courtesies were concluded, Soft Soap would start questioning me with a schoolboy’s curiosity about life in the States, and American movie stars.

Soft Soap was a political officer, and theoretically he had authority at least commensurate with the camp commander’s. But he was never around for the less pleasant aspects of an interrogator’s work. He never threatened to torture us, but would advise us that our lack of cooperation was likely to incur the camp commander’s displeasure and warn us that the commander could be a harsh and unforgiving man. Whenever we personally experienced just how harsh and unforgiving, Soft Soap always claimed that he had been away from the camp at the time and unable to prevent our punishment from getting out of hand.

“I’m sorry, Mac Kane, I was not here. The camp commander sometimes cannot control himself.”

“No problem.”

Regrettably, I didn’t always draw Soft Soap as my interrogator. In the later years of my captivity, I sometimes sat on the stool looking into the cockeyed stare of the Bug. If I refused Bug’s demands or gave him any lip, he would order the guards to knock me around until I at least stopped trading insults with him. The Bug was a sadist. Or at least his hate for us was so irrational that it drove him to sadism. He was famous for accusing prisoners, when our recalcitrance had enraged him, of killing his mother. Given the wildness of his rage, I often feared that we had.

On occasions when he was particularly determined, I would find myself trussed up and left for hours in ropes, my biceps bound tightly with several loops to cut off my circulation and the end of the rope cinched behind my back, pulling my shoulders and elbows unnaturally close together. It was incredibly painful.

However, even during these difficult encounters I realized my captors were more careful not to permanently injure or disfigure me than they were with other prisoners. When they tied me in the ropes, they rolled my sleeves up so that my shirt served as padding between my arms and the ropes, a courtesy they seldom granted their other victims. The Vietnamese also never put me in ankle stocks or leg irons, a punishment they inflicted on many POWs.

With the exception of a rough time I would experience in the summer of 1968, and a few other occasions when a guard or interrogator acted impulsively out of anger, I always sensed that they refrained from doing their worst to me. The realization that my captors accorded me different treatment than the other prisoners made me bolder and at times more reckless than I should have been. It also made me feel guilty to know that my courage and loyalty had not been put to the test with the same cruelty and tenacity that marked our captors’ attempts to destroy the resolve of other prisoners.

There were others who, like Bug, seemed to enjoy their work. But many of the interrogators were bureaucrats who mistreated us simply because they had been ordered by their superiors to extract certain information from us. For them, it was a job, less dangerous than other jobs, to be sure, but not particularly pleasant. The word would come down from the ministry to get more war crimes confessions, and, dutiful to a fault, the interrogators would set about getting war crimes confessions by whatever means necessary.

We could always tell when new orders had arrived and things were about to take a turn for the worse. Prisoners would start disappearing from their cells, some for hours, others for days. When they returned to their cells they would start tapping, telling us they had been tortured, how bad it was, and what the Vietnamese were after. The rest of us sat in our cells, sometimes listening to the screams of a tortured friend fill the air, sweating out the hours until the guards came for us.

They never seemed to mind hurting us, but they usually took care not to let things get so out of hand that our lives were put in danger. We strongly believed some POWs were tortured to death, and most were seriously mistreated. But the Vietnamese prized us as bargaining chips in peace negotiations, and, with tragic exceptions, they usually did not intend to kill us when they used torture to force our cooperation.

In my case, I felt pretty certain that no matter how rough my periodic visits to the interrogation room were, my father’s rank gave me value as a potential propaganda opportunity and as a proffer in peace negotiations, and thus restrained my captors from killing me.

Authority was apportioned among four categories of prison authorities. The senior officers and interrogators occupied the top of the pecking order. The camp commander, a regular army officer, was nominally in charge of the prison. But it was obvious to all prisoners that the camp political officer, drawn from the ranks of the political bureau of the army, was the man in charge. He had responsibility for all matters involving prisoner indoctrination and behavior, interrogations, confessions, and propaganda displays.

The relationship between camp commander and political officer varied somewhat from camp to camp. At the Plantation, Soft Soap Fairy was the political officer, and he always referred to “Slopehead,” the camp commander, as the officer responsible for torture and punishment. Slopehead did most of the dirty work, but Soft Soap, for all his protestations of innocence, was responsible for getting the information from prisoners that Slopehead would eventually try to beat out of us.

Next in line were the turnkeys who supervised our daily routine. They let us out of our cells to collect our meals and to bathe, locked us back in when we had finished, monitored us constantly to prevent communication, and, if so disposed, responded when we called “Bao cao” to get their attention.

The turnkeys were younger than the interrogators; many of them were still in their teens. Some of them treated us no worse than their job description obliged, but others harbored considerable animosity toward us and seemed to relish opportunities to degrade us. Being so young, most turnkeys, when they first took up this line of work, were curious about the strange Americans they guarded. But in time, increasingly irritated by our evident disrespect for their authority, many of them grew to despise us, and they would go out of their way to give us a hard time.

For a time, I had a turnkey who ritualistically expressed his intense dislike of me. We called him “the Prick.” He would enter my cell and order me to bow. Our captors believed that their advantage over us entitled them to formal displays of deference. They expected us to bow whenever they approached us. We believed otherwise. When the Prick ordered me to bow, I would refuse, and he would respond to the discourtesy by smashing his fist into the side of my head and knocking me down. On a few occasions when I just didn’t feel up to the confrontation and bowed, he hit me anyway. These encounters were not episodic. They occurred every morning for nearly two years.

The Prick had other, less violent means of harassing me. He would often intentionally spill my food, trip me when I walked to the showers, or take me to the shower on a hot summer day and laugh when I discovered there was no water in the tank. But he seemed to regard his morning visitations as the most satisfying form of self-expression.

Occupying the last station in the camp hierarchy were the Vietnamese we called “gun guards.” These were young soldiers who wandered around the camp carrying a rifle on their shoulder. Many had physical handicaps or other limitations that made them unfit for jungle fighting. Most gun guards were largely indifferent to us. Their duty was certainly preferable to fighting at the front, wherever that might be on a given day, and I’m sure they appreciated the relative security of their work. But few ever displayed a particular zeal for lording their authority over the prisoners. They just did their job, in six-hour shifts, and counted their blessings.

After one difficult interrogation, I was left in the interrogation room for the night, tied in ropes. A gun guard, whom I had noticed before but had never spoken to, was working the night shift, 10:00 P.M. to 4:00 A.M. A short time after the interrogators had left me to ponder my bad attitude for the evening, this guard entered the room and silently, without looking at or smiling at me, loosened the ropes, and then he left me alone. A few minutes before his shift ended, he returned and tightened up the ropes.

On Christmas Day, we were always treated to a better-than-usual dinner. We were also allowed to stand outside our cells for five minutes to exercise or to just look at the trees and sky. One Christmas, a few months after the gun guard had inexplicably come to my assistance during my long night in the interrogation room, I was standing in the dirt courtyard when I saw him approach me.

He walked up and stood silently next to me. Again, he didn’t smile or look at me. He just stared at the ground in front of us. After a few moments had passed he rather nonchalantly used his sandaled foot to draw a cross in the dirt. We both stood wordlessly looking at the cross until, after a minute or two, he rubbed it out and walked away. I saw my good Samaritan often after the Christmas when we venerated the cross together. But he never said a word to me nor gave the slightest signal that he acknowledged my humanity.

An Air Force major lived in the cell next to me at the Plantation. Bob Craner and I were indefatigable communicators. We talked endlessly through our cups or by tap code on any subject that came to mind.

Bob was a naturally taciturn fellow. He had a roommate for a time, Guy Gruters, another Air Force officer. Had I also had a roommate, Bob might have been less inclined to talk to me as much as he did. But I was alone, and I needed to talk as much as possible with my neighbor to keep from lapsing into despair. So Bob kept up his end of our ceaseless conversation to get me through my years in solitary. We talked at great length every day about our circumstances, our families, and our lives back in the States.

He loved baseball and revered Ted Williams. Bob could recite Williams’s batting average in every year he had played in the major leagues. He was never more animated than when arguing over who was the better ballplayer, Williams or Stan Musial. In high school, Bob had developed a crush on a young girl. After admiring her from afar for many months, he worked up the nerve to ask her out. When he arrived at her home to collect her for their first date, they somehow fell into a conversation about baseball, during which the young lady ventured an opinion on the Williams-Musial dispute. She thought Musial the better player. From that moment on, Bob would have nothing to do with her.

He had grown up in a family of modest means and after high school had entered the cadet program started by the Air Force, which at that time didn’t have an academy of its own. He eventually earned a college degree while serving in the Air Force. He was a naturally gifted pilot, and, recognizing his talent, the Air Force had sent him to fighter weapons school at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, which only the best pilots were permitted to attend.

Air Force pilots were allowed to fly only one hundred combat missions in Vietnam. When Bob had completed his hundredth mission, he requested and was denied another tour by his commanding officer. He went to Saigon to argue his case with the Air Force command in Vietnam. After a long campaign, his superiors relented and granted him another tour. He was shot down on his 102nd mission.

He never complained about his misfortune nor regretted having prevailed on the Air Force to let him fly another combat tour. He joked when he told me about it, laughing when he remarked, “Well, I guess I got my wish.” But I never observed a trace of bitterness or self-reproach in Bob. We both were doing what we wanted to do, what we had so long prepared to do, when our luck turned for the worse. We chose our lives and were grateful for their rewards, and we accepted the consequences without regret.

He was my dear friend, and for two years I was closer to him than I had ever been to another human being. Bob spoke for both of us when, months after we were released from prison, he described how completely we had relied on each other to preserve our humanity.

A great deal of strength indeed. And I am certain I derived more strength from our friendship than he could possibly have derived from it. Bob Craner kept me alive. Without his strength, his wisdom, his humor, and his unselfish consideration, I doubt I would have survived solitary with my mind and my self-respect reasonably intact. I relied almost entirely on him for advice and for his unfailing ability to raise my spirits when I had lost heart.

He was a remarkably composed man with the courage to accept any fate with great dignity. There were times when I would start to lose my nerve. I would detect some sign that another camp purge was coming, and my dread of another beating would start to get the better of my self-control. Anticipating a beating could often prove more unnerving than the beating itself.

“Bob, I think it’s coming again, and I don’t think they’ll miss us.”

“If it comes, it comes,” he counseled me. “If it doesn’t, it doesn’t, and there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it.”

It may strike others as odd that such fatalism could have comforted us, but it did. It was the best attitude you could hold under the circumstances. It steeled me when I was weak, and made me feel better about myself. Worrying about a beating was pointless. There wasn’t much I could do to prevent it, save disgrace myself, and disgrace hurt more than the worst beating.

Whenever I was plagued by doubts about my situation or my own conduct, I turned to the voice on the other side of my wall. And it was to Bob I went for guidance one June evening in 1968, after the Vietnamese had offered me my freedom.

–– CHAPTER 19 –– The Fourth of July

For months, I had received conspicuously lenient treatment. By the time Bud and I were separated, I was able to walk for short distances, and the Vietnamese decided I was fit enough to withstand interrogations, or “quizzes,” as the POWs called them. The Vietnamese had caught me communicating several times, and I was forever displaying a “bad attitude” toward my guards. During this period, I possessed the camp record for being caught the most times in the act of communicating, yet the Vietnamese often only punished my offenses with threats. Sometimes they withheld my daily cigarette ration or my bathing privileges, a punishment that served to make me even surlier toward my guards. Once in a while they would cuff me around, but not often, and they never seriously hurt me.

In my first return to the interrogation room after being left alone for many weeks, Soft Soap had asked me if I would like to go home. I had replied that I would not go home out of turn. To this, and with uncharacteristic churlishness, Soft Soap had said, “You are all war criminals and will never go home.”

After I went back to my cell, I relayed Soft Soap’s offer up the communication chain to Hervey Stockman, an Air Force colonel who was our senior ranking officer at the time. Offers of early release were a fairly common practice at the time, and we regarded them as nothing more than psychological torture. So neither the SRO nor I took Soft Soap’s inquiry very seriously.

Sometime in the middle of June 1968, I was summoned to an interview with the Cat. His interpreter was an English-speaking officer we called “the Rabbit,” an experienced torturer who enjoyed his work. I had been brought to the large reception room in the Big House, the room they often brought visiting peace delegations to for their clumsily staged propaganda displays. The room was furnished with upholstered chairs, a sofa, and a glass coffee table supported by two decorative ceramic elephants. An inviting spread of tea, cookies, and cigarettes had been laid out on the table.

The Cat began telling me about how he had run the prison camps during the French Indochina War, and how he had given a couple of prisoners their liberty. He said he had seen the men recently, and they had thanked him for his kindness. He told me Norris Overly and the two Americans released with him had gone home with honor.

After about two hours of circuitous conversation, the Cat asked me if I wanted to go home. I was astonished by the offer and didn’t immediately know how to respond. I wasn’t in great shape, was still considerably underweight and miserable with dysentery and heat rash. The prospect of going home to my family was powerfully tempting. But I knew what the Code of Conduct instructed, and I held back from responding, saying I would have to think about it. He told me to go back to my cell and consider his offer carefully.

The Vietnamese usually required prisoners who were released early to make some statement that indicated their gratitude or at least their desire to be released. They viewed such expressions as assurances that the released prisoner would not denounce his captors once he was back home, and spoil whatever propaganda value his release was intended to serve. Accordingly, they would not force a prisoner to go home.

As soon as I could, I raised Bob Craner and asked for his advice. We talked the offer over for a while and speculated about what I might be asked to provide in exchange for my release. After a considerable time, Bob told me I should go home. I had hoped he would advise me not to take the offer, which would have made my decision easier. But he argued that the seriously injured should be excused from the Code’s restrictions on accepting amnesty and should take release if offered. He said I should go home, as my long-term survival in prison was in doubt.

Close confidants though we had been for months, Bob and I had never really seen any more of each other than a couple of brief glimpses when the turnkeys took one or the other of us to the interrogation room or to the showers. Bob had never observed my physical condition and had only reports from other prisoners and my own occasional references to the state of my health upon which to base his judgment about my fitness for prolonged imprisonment. Yet this good man, who revered our Code of Conduct, and who braved the worst adversity with dignity, offered me a rationale to go home, out of turn, while others in at least as bad shape as I was in remained behind.

“You don’t know if you can survive this,” he argued. “The seriously injured can go home.”

“I think I can make it,” I replied. “The Vietnamese tell me I won’t, but if they really thought that I’m in such bad shape they would have at least sent a doctor around to check on me.”

“You can’t be sure you’re up to this. What do they want from you in return?”

“They didn’t say.”

“Well, when you go back, just play along with them. See what they want to let you go. If it’s not much, take it.”

“I don’t think I should go down that road. I know and you know what they want, and we won’t let it go any further. If I start negotiating with them, it’s a slippery slope. They’ll tell me they don’t want anything, but they’ll just wait until the day I’m supposed to go, and then tell me what they want for it. No matter what I agree to, it won’t look right.”

I wanted to say yes. I badly wanted to go home. I was tired and sick, and despite my bad attitude, I was often afraid. But I couldn’t keep from my own counsel the knowledge of how my release would affect my father, and my fellow prisoners. I knew what the Vietnamese hoped to gain from my release.

Although I did not know it at the time, my father would shortly assume command of the war effort as Commander in Chief, Pacific. The Vietnamese intended to hail his arrival with a propaganda spectacle as they released his son in a gesture of “goodwill.” I was to be enticed into accepting special treatment in the hope that it would shame the new enemy commander.

Moreover, I knew that every prisoner the Vietnamese tried to break, those who had arrived before me and those who would come after me, would be taunted with the story of how an admiral’s son had gone home early, a lucky beneficiary of America’s class-conscious society. I knew that my release would add to the suffering of men who were already straining to keep faith with their country. I was injured, but I believed I could survive. I couldn’t persuade myself to leave.

Bob still counseled me to take the offer if the Vietnamese were willing to let me go without getting any antiwar propaganda from me. So I spelled out the reasons why I should not do it.

“Look, just letting me go is a propaganda victory for them. I can tell they really want me to do this. I mean, they really want me to go. And if they want something that much it’s got to be a bad thing. I can’t give them the satisfaction, Bob.

“Second, I would be disloyal to the rest of you. I know why they’re doing this—to make every guy here whose father isn’t an admiral think the Code is shit. They’ll tell all of you, ‘We let McCain go because his father’s an admiral. But your father’s not and nobody gives a damn about you.’ And I don’t want to go home and see my father, and he wouldn’t want to see me under those conditions. I’ve got to say no.”

Bob didn’t say much after that. He just wished me well, and then we dropped the matter. Several days later, I went to tell the Cat I wouldn’t accept his offer.

I sat for some time in the same well-furnished room with the Cat and the Rabbit, exchanging pleasantries and helping myself to their cigarettes. Eventually, again using the Rabbit to interpret, the Cat asked me if I had considered his offer. “I have,” I answered.

“What is your answer?”

“No, thank you.”

“Why?”

“American prisoners cannot accept parole, or amnesty or special favors. We must be released in the order of our capture, starting with Everett Alvarez”—the first pilot captured in the North.

He then suggested that my physical condition made my long-term survival doubtful. “I think I will make it,” I replied. He told me the doctors believed I would not survive without better medical care. His response amused me, and I smiled when I told him that I found that hard to believe, since I never saw a doctor except the indifferent Zorba, whose only prescribed treatment for my condition had been exercise and the consumption of my full food ration.

Cat, who evidently did not share my sense of irony, then tried to convince me that I had permission from my Commander in Chief to return home.

“President Johnson has ordered you home.”

“Show me the orders.”

“President Johnson orders you.”

“Show me the orders, and I’ll believe you.”

He handed me a letter from Carol in which she expressed her regret that I had not been released earlier with Norris and the other two prisoners. It was the kind of thing you expect your wife to say. I didn’t believe that Carol wanted me to dishonor myself, and the fact that the Vietnamese had kept her letter from me until now angered me, an emotion that usually serves to stiffen my resolve. I was dismissed with an order to reconsider my answer, and returned, holding my wife’s letter, to my cell.

A week later, I was summoned to a third interview, much weakened by dysentery, which had worsened since our last meeting. The interview was shortened by the effect of my illness. Shortly after I arrived, I asked permission to return to my cell to relieve myself. The request greatly irritated the Cat, who accused me of being “very rude.” “I’m sorry, but I have to go,” I responded. He angrily terminated the interview, and I was returned to my cell.

During these sessions, the Cat had promised me that I would not be required to make any propaganda statements in return for my release. I had no doubt that he was lying. I knew that once I agreed, the Vietnamese would exert enormous pressure on me to record a statement, and I worried that my resolve would dissipate as I faced the imminent prospect of homecoming.

On the morning of the Fourth of July, Soft Soap entered my cell and mentioned that he knew I had received a generous offer to go home. “You will have a nice family reunion, Mac Kane,” he suggested.

“Yes,” I acknowledged, “but I can’t accept it.”

A few hours later, I faced a solemn Cat. That morning, the camp loudspeakers broadcast the news that three prisoners had been chosen for early release. The Cat had summoned me to offer me one last chance to accept his offer. This time I was not taken to the large reception room but to an interrogation room. There were no cookies or cigarettes offered. The Rabbit spoke first.

“Our senior officer wants to know your final answer.”

“My final answer is no.”

In a fit of pique, the Cat snapped the ink pen he had been holding between his hands. Ink splattered on a copy of the International Herald Tribune lying on the table, opened to a column by Art Buchwald. He stood up, kicked over his chair, and spoke to me in English for the first time.

“They taught you too well, Mac Kane. They taught you too well,” he shouted as he abruptly left the room.

Yes, they had.

The Rabbit and I sat there for a few moments staring at each other in silence before he angrily dismissed me.

“Now it will be very bad for you, Mac Kane. Go back to your room.”

I did as instructed and awaited the moment when the Rabbit’s prediction would come true.

That same day my father assumed command of all U.S. forces in the Pacific. I wouldn’t learn of my father’s promotion for nearly a year, when two recently captured pilots were brought to the Plantation. A few months after they arrived, one of them managed to get a one-sentence message to me:

“Your father assumed Commander in Chief in the Pacific, July 4,1968.”

–– CHAPTER 20 –– Lanterns of Faith

At the end of the Korean War, America was shocked when a number of American prisoners of war chose to live in China rather than be returned to the United States. Reports about the brainwashing of POWs were publicly disclosed, along with even more disturbing accounts of some POWs who had treated their comrades inhumanely. Consequently, the military began to instruct American servicemen about what they could expect should they be captured and, more important, about what was expected of them. Toward that end, the Code of Conduct for American Prisoners of War was drafted. It reads as follows:

Although the experiences of prisoners in the Korean War had necessitated this formal declaration of an American prisoner’s responsibilities, the military did not anticipate how the North Vietnamese would regard POWs. Unlike the Japanese and Germans, and more insistently than the North Koreans and Chinese, the Vietnamese considered prisoner-of-war camps to be an extension of the battlefield. Ho Chi Minh had declared that the war would be won on the streets and campuses of American cities, and the Vietnamese were determined that we would serve that end. With the exception of incidents of arbitrary cruelty, many features of our treatment—forced confessions and antiwar declarations, meetings with peace delegations, early releases—were intended to help sway American public opinion against the war. Since the Vietnamese invested so much time and energy in coercing our cooperation, our fidelity to the Code was almost constantly challenged. Yet its principles remained the most important allegiance of our lives.

The days dragged on as I waited for the Cat to make good on his threat. I knew a bad time lay ahead, and that I would soon confront a greater measure of my enemy’s cruelty, an experience many of my comrades had already endured but I had been spared. I had seen the Cat’s fury, and it had made a deep impression on me. I tried to be fatalistic, and prepare myself to suffer the inevitable without dishonoring myself.

For almost two months nothing happened. Three prisoners had been released in early August. Their departure had been delayed for several weeks, and I assumed the Vietnamese had neglected my punishment to avoid complicating the release. Treatment for all prisoners in the camp was lax in advance of the event. I assumed that the Vietnamese were worried that if word got out that I had been tortured for refusing to leave, the prisoners who had accepted release might change their minds.

Then one evening in late August, several guards came and announced that the camp commander, the rough customer we called Slopehead, wanted to see me. They took me to a large room, a theater that had been used for Christmas services the year before.

Speaking through an interpreter, Slopehead accused me of committing “black crimes against the people” and violating all of the camp’s regulations. He told me the time had come for me to show gratitude to the Vietnamese people and sorrow for my war crimes. Knowing that I was in serious trouble and that nothing I did or said would make matters any worse, I replied:

“Fuck you.”

“Why do you treat your guards disrespectfully?”

“Because they treat me like an animal.”

Hearing this, Slopehead gave an order, and the guards lit into me. Shouting and laughing, they bashed me around the room, slamming their fists into my face and body, kicking and stomping me when I fell. Lying on the floor, bleeding, I heard Slopehead speak to the interpreter.

“Are you ready to confess your crimes?”

“No.”

With that, the guards hauled me up and set me on the stool. They cinched rope around my biceps, anchored it behind my back, and then left the room. The rope hurt and restricted my circulation, but, again, they had not tied it as tightly as they had on others, and I knew I could tolerate it. I remained there for the rest of the night.

In the morning, three guards came in, removed the rope, and took me to an interrogation room, where the deputy camp commander, a dull-witted man we called “Frankenstein” for his bulging forehead and numerous facial warts, waited for me. When I refused his order to confess, I was dragged to the room behind my cell where some time later Ernie Brace would be held.

The room was empty of any furnishings save a waste bucket. I had no bedding or personal belongings. The room didn’t have a door, only a louvered window large enough to pass through. I was kept there for four days.

At two-to-three-hour intervals, the guards returned to administer beatings. The intensity of the punishment varied from visit to visit depending on the enthusiasm and energy of the guards. Still, I felt they were being careful not to kill or permanently injure me. One guard would hold me while the others pounded away. Most blows were directed at my shoulders, chest, and stomach. Occasionally, when I had fallen to the floor, they kicked me in the head. They cracked several of my ribs and broke a couple of teeth. My bad right leg was swollen and hurt the most of any of my injuries. Weakened by beatings and dysentery, and with my right leg again nearly useless, I found it almost impossible to stand.

On the third night, I lay in my own blood and waste, so tired and hurt that I could not move. The Prick came in with two other guards, lifted me to my feet, and gave me the worst beating I had yet experienced. At one point he slammed his fist into my face and knocked me across the room toward the waste bucket. I fell on the bucket, hitting it with my left arm, and breaking it again. They left me lying on the floor, moaning from the stabbing pain in my refractured arm.

Despairing of any relief from pain and further torture, and fearing the close approach of my moment of dishonor, I tried to take my life. I doubt I really intended to kill myself. But I couldn’t fight anymore, and I remember deciding that the last thing I could do to make them believe I was still resisting, that I wouldn’t break, was to attempt suicide. Obviously, it wasn’t an ideal plan, but it struck me at the time as reasonable.

Slowly, after several unsuccessful attempts, I managed to stand. I removed my shirt, upended the waste bucket, and stepped onto it, bracing myself against the wall with my good arm. With my right arm, I pushed my shirt through one of the upper shutters and back through a bottom shutter. As I looped it around my neck, the Prick saw the shirt through the window. He pulled me off the bucket and beat me. He called for an officer, who instructed the guards to post a constant watch on me. Later I made a second, even feebler attempt, but a guard saw me fumbling with the shutter, hauled me down, and beat me again.

On the fourth day, I gave up.

“I am a black criminal,” the interrogator wrote, “and I have performed the deeds of an air pirate. I almost died and the Vietnamese people saved my life. The doctors gave me an operation that I did not deserve.”

I had been taken back to the theater after telling my guards I was ready to confess. For twelve hours I had written out many drafts of the confession. I used words that I hoped would discredit its authenticity, and I tried to keep it in stilted generalities and Communist jargon so that it would be apparent that I had signed it under duress.

An interrogator had edited my last draft and decided to rewrite most of it himself. He then handed it to me and told me to copy it out in my own hand. I started to print it in block letters, and he ordered me to write in script. He demanded that I add an admission that I had bombed a school. I refused, and we argued back and forth about the confession’s contents for a time before I gave in to his demand. Finally, they had me sign the document.

They took me back to my room and let me sleep through the night. The next morning, they brought me back to the theater and ordered me to record my confession on tape. I refused, and was beaten until I consented.

I was returned to my cell and left alone for the next two weeks.

They were the worst two weeks of my life. I couldn’t rationalize away my confession. I was ashamed. I felt faithless, and couldn’t control my despair. I shook, as if my disgrace were a fever. I kept imagining that they would release my confession to embarrass my father. All my pride was lost, and I doubted I would ever stand up to any man again. Nothing could save me. No one would ever look upon me again with anything but pity or contempt.

Bob Craner tried to reassure me that I had resisted all that I was expected to resist. But I couldn’t shake it off. One night I either heard or dreamed I heard myself confessing over the loudspeakers, thanking the Vietnamese for receiving medical treatment I did not deserve.

Many guys broke at one time or another. I doubt anyone ever gets over it entirely. There is never enough time and distance between the past and the present to allow one to forget his shame. I am recovered now from that period of intense despair. But I can summon up its feeling in an instant whenever I let myself remember the day. And I still wince when I recall wondering if my father had heard of my disgrace. The Vietnamese had broken the prisoner they called the “Crown Prince,” and I knew they had done it to hurt the man they believed to be a king.

The following month, Averell Harriman, then serving as President Johnson’s emissary to the fruitless peace negotiations in Paris with the North Vietnamese, sent the following cable to Secretary of State Dean Rusk:

They came back at the end of two weeks for another statement. I didn’t give it to them. I had recovered enough to resist. The next year and a half would be the hardest months of my captivity.

The severe treatment of prisoners lasted until the end of 1969. During this period, we were beaten for communicating with one another, for declining to meet with visiting American “peace delegations,” for refusing to make statements and broadcasts, and for mouthing off to our guards. I had a hard time suppressing the urge to verbally assault my captors as they went about the business of humiliating me. Acts of defiance felt so good that I felt they more than compensated for their repercussions, and they helped me keep at bay the unsettling feelings of guilt and self-doubt that my confession had aroused.

Whenever I emerged from the interrogation room after a few hours or a few days of punishment, I tried to make a show of my indifference to my circumstances. Whether I walked of my own accord or was dragged by guards back to my cell, I always shouted greetings to the prisoners whose cells I passed, smiled, and flashed a thumbs-up. In the years since I came home, I have occasionally been embarrassed to hear some of my fellow POWs commend me for those attempts at good cheer. They believed they were intended to boost their spirits. In truth, they were mostly intended to boost my own.

On Christmas Eve in 1968, about fifty of us were taken to the theater where a few months earlier the events leading to my humiliation had begun. There the Vietnamese intended to film a religious service that they could use to demonstrate their humane treatment of us. I was placed next to a young apprentice seaman, Doug Hegdahl, who had fallen off his ship in the Tonkin Gulf during an evening artillery barrage.

I had often watched through cracks in my door as he swept the camp courtyard. The guards assigned Doug this enviable duty because they thought he was a harmless idiot. Doug possessed neither the survival training nor the familiarity with the Code of Conduct that captured pilots had.

Yet this teenage farm boy from North Dakota had devised a ploy to convince the Vietnamese that he was dim-witted, unthreatening, and without propaganda or military value. Given what the Vietnamese perceived as his low station in the Navy, they believed breaking him wouldn’t have any useful effect on the morale of the other prisoners either.

Doug convincingly played the role of an uneducated peasant who didn’t have the foggiest notion of what he was doing in this strange place. The Vietnamese left him alone and allowed him out of his cell to work at menial tasks. So engaged, Doug would serve as a conduit for communications from one part of the camp to the other, sweeping up in his pile of debris notes we had written on toilet and cigarette paper. He also seized opportunities for a little small-scale sabotage, pouring dirt into the gas tanks of trucks and making other clever minor assaults on the Vietnamese war effort.

Standing next to Doug, and realizing that the guards, knowing they were on camera, were restrained from forcing our cooperation, I began talking to Doug in a loud voice and recounting my recent experiences. Soft Soap Fairy motioned to me and in a stage whisper ordered, “Mac Kane, be quiet.” I responded by raising my middle finger for the camera and profanely telling him and the other guards present to leave us be. Soon almost all the other prisoners attending the service began talking and flashing hand signals to one another. Even the three-man prisoner choir joined in, smiling and laughing as they entered the general exchange of information. The guards hustled around vainly trying to get us to quiet down.

Trying to be heard above the commotion, a Vietnamese pastor offered a sermon in which he compared Ho Chi Minh to Jesus Christ and Lyndon Johnson to King Herod. Soon one very angry guard, forgetting that cameras were rolling, began making threatening gestures at me. I called him a son of a bitch and other less flattering things. He charged toward me, but other guards pulled him back. On the whole, it was a rejuvenating experience.

The service concluded, and I returned to my cell possessing a little bit more of the holiday cheer than I had expected to feel on my second Christmas in captivity. I expected to be beaten for interfering with the propaganda pageant. Two days later, I was.

The arrogance I sometimes displayed to my captors contradicted the humility I felt around other prisoners who were routinely and severely tortured. Dick Stratton had suffered horribly under torture. He had huge, infected scars on his arms from rope torture. His thumbnails had been torn off, and he had been burned with cigarettes. By such means, they had forced him to attend a “press conference.” When they ushered him into the room, Dick affected the vacant stare of a catatonic and bowed deeply in four directions toward his surprised captors, thereby signaling to the Americans who would see the broadcast that the POWs were obviously being tortured.

In May 1969, two Air Force officers, John Dramesi and Ed Atterbury, who had been captured a few months before my shootdown, managed a daring escape from the Zoo, the prison in the southwest of the city, where conditions were awful. For nearly a year, they had planned and physically trained for the escape. On a rainy Saturday night, their faces darkened, wearing conical Vietnamese hats and carrying knives they had fashioned from bits of metal they had found, they slipped through tiles they had loosened in the roof of their cellblock and climbed over the prison wall. They made for the Red River, intending to steal a boat and be well downriver before daylight. They were recaptured at dawn the next day, before they reached the river. They were cruelly tortured for their courage. Ed Atterbury was beaten to death. But John, one of the toughest men I have ever known, survived.

I did not learn of the escape attempt until I had been moved back to Hoa Lo, where I met men who had been held at the Zoo with John and Ed. Nevertheless, those of us held at the Plantation surmised that something had happened. Our room inspections became more frequent and more thorough. Our interrogations became considerably more intense. One of the Plantation POWs had been severely tortured for information about suspected escape plans at the Plantation, his tormentors refusing to believe his protestations that there were none. These developments, together with the general worsening of our conditions, alerted us that someone had probably attempted to escape.

Incidents of surpassing courage and defiance were commonplace in those worst days of captivity, and they made my own attempts at rebellion seem minor in comparison. I derived my own resolve from the example of Bud Day, who, although seriously wounded, had valiantly attempted to evade capture, and from countless other examples of resistance that had been carried, flashed, and tapped from cell to cell, camp to camp. They were a lantern for me, a lantern of courage and faith that illuminated the way home with honor, and I struggled against panic and despair to stay in its light. I would have been lost without their example. In recurring moments of doubt and fear, I concentrated on their service, and on the service of my father, and his father, and I accepted my fate.

Of all the many legends of heroic devotion to duty I had come in this strange place to know as real, and to seek strength and solace from, none was more inspiring that the story of Lance Sijan. I never knew Lance Sijan, but I wish I had. I wish I had had one moment to tell him how much I admired him, how indebted I was to him for showing me, for showing all of us, our duty—for showing us how to be free.

He was gone before I heard of him. But Bob Craner and Guy Gruters had lived with Lance for a time, and Bob had told me his story very early in our friendship.

Air Force Captain Lance Sijan was shot down near Vinh on November 9, 1967. For a day and a half, he lay semiconscious on the ground, grievously injured, with a compound fracture of his left leg, a brain concussion, and a fractured skull. He made radio contact with rescue aircraft, but they were unable to locate him in the dense jungle. On November 11, they abandoned the search.

Crawling on the jungle floor at night, Lance fell into a sinkhole, further injuring himself. For six weeks he evaded capture. On Christmas Day, starved, racked with pain, he passed out on a dirt road, where a few hours later the North Vietnamese found him. Thus began the most inspiring POW story of the war, a story of one man’s peerless fidelity to our Code of Conduct. To Lance Sijan, the Code was not an abstract ideal, but the supreme purpose of his life.

The Code is a straightforward document. Its simply worded assertions might strike cynics as posturing, a simplistic and chauvinistic relic of a time when Americans carried with them to war a conceit that they were stronger, better, and more virtuous than any enemy they would face. In truth, few prisoners could claim that they never came close to violating one or more of its principles. But the Code had its appeal, and almost all of us were mindful not to take its demands lightly.

The Code instructs every prisoner to evade capture, and when captured, to seize opportunities for escape. Most of us imprisoned in Hanoi knew that escape was almost certainly impossible. The guards never seemed to be unduly worried about preventing escape because they knew we would have to escape from a city as well as a prison. Had we been able to slip out of camp undetected, our identity would have been impossible to disguise in an isolated Asian population of a million people. Few of us ever seriously contemplated escape, and our senior officers never encouraged it. A few truly brave men tried. All were caught and tortured.

Neither did every prisoner refrain from providing information beyond the bare essentials sanctioned by the Code. Many of us were terrorized into failure at one time or another.

But Captain Sijan wasn’t. He obeyed the Code to the letter.

A short time after he was captured, he overpowered an armed guard and managed to escape, taking the guard’s rifle with him. Recaptured several hours later, he was tortured as punishment for his escape attempt and for military information. He refused to provide his captors anything beyond what the Code allowed. By the time he reached Hanoi, he was close to death.

Over six feet tall, he weighed less than a hundred pounds when he was placed in a cell with Bob Craner and Guy Gruters. He lived there barely a month. In and out of consciousness, often delirious, he would push on the walls of his cell and scratch on the floor searching vainly for a way out. When he was lucid and not consumed with pain, he would quiz his cellmates about the camp’s security and talk with them about escaping again.

Interrogated several times, he refused to say anything. He was savagely beaten for his silence, kicked repeatedly and struck with a bamboo club. Bob and Guy heard him scream profanities at his tormentors, and then, after he had endured hours of torture, they heard him say in a weak voice: “Don’t you understand? I’m not going to tell you anything. I can’t talk to you. It’s against the Code.”

Bob and Guy tried to comfort him during his last hours. Working in shifts timed to the tolling of a nearby church bell, they cradled his head in their laps, talked quietly to him of his courage and faith, told him to hang on. Occasionally he shook off his delirium to joke with his cellmates about his circumstances.

Near the end, the guards came for him. Lance knew they were taking him away to die. As they placed him on a stretcher, he said to his friends, “It’s over… it’s over.” He called to his father for help as the guards carried him away.

A few days later, the Bug told Bob Craner what he already knew, that his friend was dead. And Bob, a good and wise man, resolved to share with any prisoner he could reach the legend of Lance Sijan so that all of us could draw strength from the example of a man who would not yield no matter how terrible the consequences. A few weeks later, when I was moved into the cell next to Bob’s, he told me the story of Lance Sijan: a free man from a free country, who kept his dignity to the last moment of his life.

To maintain our unity, prisoners relied heavily on the senior ranking officers to promulgate policies for the camps. The primary reason the Vietnamese worked so hard to disrupt our communications was to prevent any form of military unit cohesion from strengthening our resistance. Toward that end, they segregated senior officers from the rest of the prison population, making communication with them difficult, and they kept many of the most determined and inventive communicators in solitary confinement.

Contact with senior officers is a very important element of an effective campaign of resistance, and we worked as hard to maintain communications with them as the guards worked to prevent them. If we couldn’t communicate, we couldn’t organize, and if we couldn’t organize, the Vietnamese would pick us off one by one.

We relied on senior officers for more than affirmations or interpretations of the Code of Conduct. Frequently we needed little more than a word of encouragement from our commander to firm up our own resolve when we were preparing to endure the latest round of interrogations. Although there were periods, some quite long, when the Vietnamese succeeded in truncating our chain of command, we would eventually invent some way to restore our communication links to the SROs.

Our senior officers always stressed to us the three essential keys to resistance, which we were to keep uppermost in our mind, especially in moments when we were isolated or otherwise deprived of their guidance and the counsel of other prisoners. They were faith in God, faith in country, and faith in your fellow prisoners.

Were your faith in any of these three devotions seriously shaken, you became much more vulnerable to various pressures employed by the Vietnamese to break you. The purpose of our captors’ inhumanity to us was nothing less than to force our descent into a world of total faithlessness; a world with no God, no country, no loyalty. Our faith would be replaced with simple reliance on the sufferance of our antagonists. Without faith, we would lose our dignity, and live among our enemies as animals lived among their human masters.

There were times in many a prisoner’s existence when the Vietnamese came close to robbing his faith; when a prisoner felt abandoned, left to cling to faith in himself as his last strength, his last form of resistance. Certainly this had been my experience when I was broken in the fall of 1968.

Ironically for someone who had so long asserted his own individuality as his first and best defense against insults of any kind, I discovered that faith in myself proved to be the least formidable strength I possessed when confronting alone organized inhumanity on a greater scale than I had conceived possible. Faith in myself was important, and remains important to my self-esteem. But I discovered in prison that faith in myself alone, separate from other, more important allegiances, was ultimately no match for the cruelty that human beings could devise when they were entirely unencumbered by respect for the God-given dignity of man. This is the lesson I learned in prison. It is, perhaps, the most important lesson I have ever learned.

During the worst moments of captivity, keeping our faith in God, country, and one another was as difficult as it was imperative. When your faith weakened, you had to take any opportunity, seize on any sight of it, and use any temporary relief from your distress to recover it.

POWs often regard their prison experience as comparable to the trials of Job. Indeed, for my fellow prisoners who suffered more than I, the comparison is appropriate. Hungry, beaten, hurt, scared, and alone, human beings can begin to feel that they are removed from God’s love, a vast distance separating them from their Creator. The anguish can lead to resentment, to the awful despair that God has forsaken you.

To guard against such despair, in our most dire moments, POWs would make supreme efforts to grasp our faith tightly, to profess it alone, in the dark, and hasten its revival. Once I was thrown into another cell after a long and difficult interrogation. I discovered scratched into one of the cell’s walls the creed “I believe in God, the Father Almighty.” There, standing witness to God’s presence in a remote, concealed place, recalled to my faith by a stronger, better man, I felt God’s love and care more vividly than I would have felt it had I been safe among a pious congregation in the most magnificent cathedral.

The Vietnamese also went to great lengths to sow doubts in our minds about our country and one another. They threatened us constantly that we would never again be free. They taunted us with insults, disparaged our loyalty to a country they claimed never asked about us or made our return the subject of negotiations. We were abandoned, they insisted, by a country busy with a war that wasn’t going well and too torn apart by widespread domestic turmoil to worry about a few forgotten pilots in Hanoi.

During the long pause between bombing campaigns in the North, while the months and years dragged on, it was hard to take our interrogators’ ridicule of our conviction that our loyalty to America was returned, measure for measure, by our distant compatriots. But we clung to our belief, each one encouraging the other, not with overexuberant hopes that our day of liberation was close at hand, but with a steady resolve that our honor was the extension of a great nation’s honor, and that both prisoner and country would do what honor asked of us.

In prison, I fell in love with my country. I had loved her before then, but like most young people, my affection was little more than a simple appreciation for the comforts and privileges most Americans enjoyed and took for granted. It wasn’t until I had lost America for a time that I realized how much I loved her.

I loved what I missed most from my life at home: my family and friends; the sights and sounds of my country; the hustle and purposefulness of Americans; their fervid independence; sports; music; information—all the attractive qualities of American life. But though I longed for the things at home I cherished the most, I still shared the ideals of America. And since those ideals were all that I possessed of my country, they became all the more important to me.

It was what freedom conferred on America that I loved the most—the distinction of being the last, best hope of humanity; the advocate for all who believed in the Rights of Man. Freedom is America’s honor, and all honor comes with obligations. We have the obligation to use our freedom wisely, to select well from all the choices freedom offers. We can accept or reject the obligation, but if we are to preserve our freedom, our honor, we must choose well.

I was no longer the boy to whom liberty meant simply that I could do as I pleased, and who, in my vanity, used my freedom to polish my image as an I-don’t-give-a-damn nonconformist. That’s not to say that I had shed myself entirely of that attribute. I had not, and have not yet. But I no longer located my self-respect in that distinction. In prison, where my cherished independence was mocked and assaulted, I found my self-respect in a shared fidelity to my country. All honor comes with obligations. I and the men with whom I served had accepted ours, and we were grateful for the privilege.

When my interrogators played tapes to me of other POWs confessing to war crimes, expressing their gratitude for lenient treatment, or denouncing our government, I did not silently censure my comrades. I knew that they had made those statements under the most extreme duress, and I told the Vietnamese so.

“No, they are their true feelings,” the interrogator would rebut, “and you should not be ashamed to state your true feelings. We will not tell anyone if you do. No one would know.”

“I would know. I would know,” I responded.

In these instances when the enemy entreated me to betray my country by promising to keep my disloyalty confidential, my self-regard, which had for so long been invested with an adolescent understanding of my father’s and grandfather’s notions of character, obliged me to resist. But there was another force now at work to brace my resolve, and to give me insight into the essence of courage in war.

Tom Kirk, a fellow prisoner whom I hold in high regard, once explained, simply and exactly, the foundation of our resistance. “You live with another guy, and you go over there and you’re tortured and you’re brought back in that room and he says: ‘What happened?’

“‘They did this.’

“‘What’d you tell them?’

“…You’ve got to face this guy; you’re going to have to tell him the truth. I wanted to keep faith so that I knew that when I stood up at the bar with somebody after the war, that, by God, I could look him in the eye and say, ‘We hacked it.’”

We were told to have faith in God, country, and one another. Most of us did. But the last of these, faith in one another, was our final defense, the ramparts our enemy could not cross. In prison, as in any of war’s endeavors, your most important allegiance is to the men you serve with. We were obligated to one another, and for the duration of our war, that obligation was our first duty. The Vietnamese knew this. They went to great lengths to keep us apart, knowing we had great strength in unity.

A few men lost their religion in prison or had never been very devout. A few men were not moved by appeals to patriotism or to written codes of conduct. Almost all of us were committed to one another. I knew what the others were suffering. Sitting in my cell, I could hear their screams as their faith was put to the test. At all costs, I wanted, as Bob Craner often put it, “to hold up my end of the bargain.”

My first concern was not that I might fail God and country, although I certainly hoped that I would not. I was afraid to fail my friends. I was afraid to come back from an interrogation and tell them I couldn’t hold up as well as they had. However I measured my character before Vietnam no longer mattered. What mattered now was how they measured my character. My self-regard became indivisible from their regard for me. And it will remain so for the rest of my life.

Had I accepted that many of the others had surrendered their dignity voluntarily, had agreed to live with such reproachful self-knowledge, I doubt I would have resisted to the extent that I did, and thus I would probably not have recovered from the shame I felt when I was broken.

This is the truth of war, of honor and courage, that my father and grandfather had passed on to me. But before my war, its meaning was obscure to me, hidden in the peculiar language of men who had gone to war and been changed forever by the experience. So, too, had the Academy, with its inanimate and living memorials to fidelity and valor, tried to reveal this truth to me. But I had interpreted the lesson, as I had interpreted my father’s lesson, within the limits of my vanity. I thought glory was the object of war, and all glory was self-glory.

No more. For I have learned the truth: there are greater pursuits than self-seeking. Glory is not a conceit. It is not a decoration for valor. It is not a prize for being the most clever, the strongest, or the boldest. Glory belongs to the act of being constant to something greater than yourself, to a cause, to your principles, to the people on whom you rely, and who rely on you in return. No misfortune, no injury, no humiliation can destroy it.

This is the faith that my commanders affirmed, that my brothers-in-arms encouraged my allegiance to. It was the faith I had unknowingly embraced at the Naval Academy. It was my father’s and grandfather’s faith. A filthy, crippled, broken man, all I had left of my dignity was the faith of my fathers. It was enough.

–– CHAPTER 21 –– Commander in Chief

As my days in captivity lengthened, the man whose example had led me to Vietnam stood at the summit of his long naval career. I have heard several accounts of how my father managed to attain command of the Pacific. The most credible is the account provided by Admiral Tom Moorer, who, as Chief of Naval Operations, was my father’s boss. Although the Pacific Command is traditionally reserved for the Navy, all services vie for it, as it is one of the military’s most prestigious commands. Many months before a CINCPAC retires, jockeying begins among the services to get the President to appoint one of their own to the post. The Navy usually prevails, but the competition is intense, and the outcome is seldom certain from the outset.

In 1968, when Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp was scheduled to retire as CINCPAC, Admiral Moorer not only wanted to retain the command for the Navy, but wanted my father, to whom he was very close, to get the job. My father was not considered the most likely candidate for the post by many of his contemporaries. They had been surprised when he was appointed Commander of U.S. Naval Forces in Europe. His detractors in the Navy had attributed the promotion to his political connections and his assiduous cultivation of friendships with the most senior Navy brass. They would attribute his promotion to CINCPAC to those same relationships. There is some truth to their speculation, though not enough to justify their derision of my father’s success.

Both my father and my mother worked hard to build relationships with people who could help advance his career, but social networking was mainly my mother’s domain. She had the charm required for success in that field. My father won the regard of his superiors, military and civilian, by proving himself useful to them. He was a competent, reliable, often innovative, and always indefatigable subordinate who could be relied upon to accept any job without complaint and to make the most of it. Additionally, he had the gift of being able to articulate his and his superiors’ views with clarity and force.

My father worked awfully hard for his success, and by so doing rendered his country many years of good and faithful service. He had earned whatever help he was provided by powerful friends. In an interview for the Naval Institute’s Oral History Project, Admiral Moorer’s account of how my father got the Pacific Command reveals both the influence his patrons wielded on his behalf and how he came to enjoy their patronage.

Shortly before the Joint Chiefs of Staff were to meet to decide which service would assume command in the Pacific, with each service ready with its own nominee, Admiral Moorer, as luck would have it, was scheduled to attend a ceremony at the White House welcoming the king of Nepal. That morning, General Earl Wheeler, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had informed Moorer that the President was unlikely to consent to my father’s appointment and that he should select another nominee for the post. Moorer, however, knew that Ellsworth Bunker, the American ambassador to Vietnam, whose wife happened to be ambassador to Nepal, would also be attending the welcoming ceremony that afternoon. Bunker and my father had worked closely together during the U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965. Moorer knew my father had made a great impression on the ambassador, and he viewed the White House event as an opportunity to make the case for my father directly to the President and to enlist Bunker, whose judgment the President respected, in the cause.

Right after the conclusion of the ceremony, President Johnson indicated he wished to speak to Admiral Moorer. “Do you really think McCain should be CINCPAC?” the President asked. To which the admiral responded, “If I didn’t think Jack McCain would be a fine CINCPAC, I would never have nominated him in the first place.” Gesturing toward Bunker, Moorer suggested to the President that he solicit the ambassador’s views on the appointment. As Moorer knew he would, Bunker “just went into extremes of enthusiasm about McCain.” Persuaded by his trusted adviser’s unqualified endorsement, Johnson immediately called a press conference and announced my father’s appointment as Commander in Chief, Pacific, depriving the Joint Chiefs of the opportunity to formally consider and recommend a candidate.

“I stacked the deck and I’ve never regretted it,” Moorer remembered. “I’ve had many people work with me and for me, and I’ve worked for many people myself, but I’ve never known anyone as loyal as Jack McCain was.”

After his appointment as CINCPAC was announced, my father received a great many congratulatory notes. Several stand out. Among them was a letter from a chief bosun’s mate who had once served under my father:

A “fighting admiral in a fighting command,” my father was respected by his brother officers but loved by the bluejackets, the enlisted men who knew his respect for them was genuine and who returned his respect many times over.

He assumed command of the Pacific in the last year of the Johnson administration and held it until July 1972, the last year of Richard Nixon’s first term. My wife, mother, sister, and brother attended his change-of-command ceremony, which, at his request, was held aboard the Oriskany, the carrier I was flying off the day I was shot down.

Henry Kissinger once told me that whenever he suspected President Nixon’s resolve to make difficult decisions about the war was wavering, he arranged for my father to brief the President. My father’s no-nonsense determination, Dr. Kissinger claims, was infectious and served as a tonic for the President’s flagging spirits.

My father wasn’t much of a believer in fighting wars by half measures. He regarded self-restraint as an admirable human quality, but when fighting wars he believed in taking all necessary measures to bring the conflict to a swift and successful conclusion. The Vietnam War was fought neither swiftly nor successfully, and I know this frustrated him greatly. In a speech he gave after he retired, he argued that “two deplorable decisions” had doomed the United States to failure in Vietnam: “The first was the public decision to forbid U.S. troops to enter North Vietnam and beat the enemy on his home ground…. The second was… to forbid the [strategic] bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong until the last two weeks of the conflict…. These two decisions combined to allow Hanoi to adopt whatever strategy they wished, knowing that there would be virtually no reprisal, no counterattack.”

For the rest of his life, he believed that had he been allowed to wage total war against the enemy, fully employing strategic airpower, mining Vietnamese ports early on, and launching large-scale offensives in the North, he could have brought the war to a successful conclusion “in months, if not weeks.” He was exaggerating, I’m sure, to make a point. Given the resilience of the enemy, and their fierce willingness to pay a very high price and resolve to prevail over time, I doubt the war could have been wrapped up as quickly as my father envisioned even had we escalated our campaign to the extent he deemed necessary. But, given the dismal consequences of our haphazard, uncertain prosecution of the war, with its utterly illogical restraints on the use of American power, his frustration was understandable and appropriate.

Like other senior commanders, he believed the United States had squandered its best opportunity to win the war in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive, “when we had destroyed the back of the Viet Cong…. And when we had finally drawn North Vietnamese troops out into the open.”

He recalled with resentment Washington’s refusal to accede to the military’s plans for a major offensive to be launched from the old imperial capital, Hue. The plan called for an amphibious assault on Hue to spearhead a drive around the flanks of the North Vietnamese Army and across the country to the border, cutting the enemy’s supply lines from the North. “Permission for this operation was refused,” he lamented, “because Washington was afraid that the Red Chinese might then enter the war. It was a ridiculous conclusion based on no evidence. Just fear and anxiety.”

Even before he assumed command in the Pacific, when he was still the Navy chief in Europe, he had prepared and delivered a briefing to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the feasibility and necessity of mining the port of Haiphong. Like any other capable military strategist, he knew that the support the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong received from the Soviet Union and China was critical to their ability to simply outlast us. They hoped to suffer whatever losses were inflicted on them by their vastly more powerful adversary until they had exhausted America’s patience and will to see the war through to a successful conclusion. Without the massive support of their allies they would fail.

What my father didn’t share with his civilian commanders and many of his fellow military commanders was an overly acute fear that doing something about Chinese and Soviet support would involve us in a wider, perhaps global war. He doubted either country would be provoked to the point of war if we rightly decided to disrupt their efforts to aid our enemy, efforts that, after all, resulted in the deaths of many thousands of Americans. Indeed, he interpreted Soviet and Chinese actions as a far more reckless provocation of a great power than any response on our part was likely to be.

Like the men who flew missions to the North, he knew the enemy’s resolve was greatly strengthened by the material assistance their allies provided them, and he wanted to do something about it. As a submarine commander he had executed his country’s policy of total war, a policy that attacked the sources of the enemy’s material support just as vigorously as it attacked the enemy’s armed forces. He had sunk a great many merchant ships on his patrols in the Pacific. He couldn’t believe that the United States would simply leave unchallenged this clear threat to the war effort that he was now commanding.

Most of the arms and supplies used by North Vietnam’s armies entered the country through the port of Haiphong, with lesser amounts entering through the smaller ports of Cam Pha and Hong Gai. Thanks to the strategic foresight of Admiral Moorer, the Navy was well prepared to conduct mining operations in the enemy’s ports, and my father and other senior commanders repeatedly urged their civilian commanders to order the action. Washington invariably rejected their appeals on the grounds that the mining would probably result in damage to Soviet and Chinese merchant ships, and thus would seriously escalate the war by involving those countries further in the hostilities, and possibly even provoke a global war.

As early as 1966, military commanders began urging Washington to approve a mining operation, but they could not overcome Defense Secretary McNamara’s and President Johnson’s apprehension that the action entailed too great a risk of a wider war.

When the North Vietnamese launched a major offensive in December 1971, at a time when U.S. forces in Vietnam had been reduced to 69,000 men, President Nixon finally directed my father to mine Haiphong and other northern ports immediately. The Nixon administration had dispensed with much of the micromanaging of the war that had so ill served the Johnson administration, particularly the absurd target restrictions imposed on American bomber pilots. Relations between military commanders and their civilian superiors improved when President Nixon and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird entered office. The new administration was clearly more interested in and supportive of the views of the generals and admirals who were prosecuting the war. My father had a good relationship with both Nixon and Laird, as well as with the President’s National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger.

President Nixon had continued and even accelerated the drawdown of American forces in country begun by his predecessor, while seeking a negotiated end to the war. But he resolved to apply greater military pressure on the enemy while negotiations and “Vietnamization,” the name given to the strategy of preparing South Vietnam to ultimately fight the war on its own while simultaneously drawing down American forces, were under way. In the interim, Nixon intended to escalate hostilities, both to hasten his diplomacy’s successful conclusion and to strengthen the South Vietnamese regime.

In May 1970, with my father and General Abrams strongly urging it, the administration had authorized an incursion into Cambodia by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces. The enemy had used the sanctuary of the neighboring country to establish formidable military positions, especially along the border, from which they threatened much of the South, including Saigon. The incursion was of brief duration, and it was based on sound military reasoning. Nevertheless, given the considerable growth in domestic opposition to the war at the time, the decision provoked a firestorm of criticism. Neither the President nor his advisers nor his senior commanders wavered in their support for the action.

When North Vietnam launched its offensive in late 1971, Washington was very receptive to the requests of my father and his fellow commanders to respond to the North’s aggression decisively. The administration authorized the immediate use of B-52 bombers, for the first time, to strike North Vietnamese targets.

The following May, the administration ordered my father to commence mining operations in North Vietnamese harbors. The President announced to the nation his conclusion that “Hanoi must be denied the weapons and supplies it needs to continue the aggression.”

Most of the mining was conducted by carrier-based A-6 Intruders. The operation was a resounding success. Casualties were minimal. Twenty-seven foreign merchant ships remained trapped behind the blockade for the nine months the mining campaign was in effect. Almost all other ships were prevented from entering North Vietnamese ports. The flow of foreign arms and supplies to the North was abruptly and completely halted.

Neither did the war’s escalation, so long anticipated as the unavoidable result of mining the harbors, occur. The administration’s opening to China and its policy of détente with the Soviets were by this time well established and contributed significantly to the response of the Soviets and the Chinese to the mining of their client’s harbors. Their reaction to what was once feared as a casus belli was remarkably muted.

The reaction in both the higher and lower reaches of the United States military was relief. The men charged with fighting the war believed that for the first time a rational policy to undercut the enemy’s critical lifeline was in effect. Thus, they and their civilian bosses reasoned, the war’s end would be hastened.

The reaction among the Americans held as prisoners in Hanoi, who learned of the actions from new arrivals to our ranks, was unanimous approval.

Despite their approval of the administration’s more aggressive approach to the war, General Abrams and the other commanders in the field, including my father and most of the military establishment, doubted the efficacy of the administration’s overall strategy to Vietnamize the war while seeking a negotiated conclusion in Paris. Abrams had profound misgivings that the South Vietnamese could develop the military capability the administration assumed possible. My father concurred, and strongly supported his subordinate’s concerns.

Admiral Vasey, whom my father appointed as head of strategic plans and policies for the Pacific Command, told me that my father “fired some tough messages to Washington.” His most frequent backchannel correspondents were the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense. Henry Kissinger and Secretary of State William Rogers were also recipients of my father’s appeals to rethink their strategy. However, his arguments, while fairly considered, were not successful in persuading them of the necessity of the reevaluation he and Abrams believed was necessary. The drawdown of American forces continued, while the progress of the peace talks in Paris waxed and waned, and South Vietnam reluctantly and without adequate resolve or preparation approached nearer the day when it would stand alone. The American public grew ever more impatient for the war to end. The administration, even after the President was reelected in a landslide, did not possess enough political strength to oppose the people’s will. Washington did what it could to ensure “peace with honor,” but the country’s priority was to get out of Vietnam, and get out we would.

By the time the end did come, with the signing in Paris of the peace accords, my father had retired from active duty. No longer restrained by his role as a subordinate to civilian superiors, he dismissed the agreement. “In our anxiety to get out of the war, we signed a very bad deal.” This he offered even though the “very bad deal” would bring his son home. He was an honest man, with an exacting sense of duty.

Long after the war, I once rashly remarked that the entire senior command of the armed forces had a duty, which they shirked, to resign in protest over Washington’s management of the war, knowing it as they did to be grievously flawed. Obviously, my father was implicitly included in my indictment. It was a callous remark that I probably should have refrained from offering, but I felt strongly about the obligation of military leaders to place the country’s welfare before their own careers. So did the men whom I criticized. They were honorable people, including, certainly, my father. Their opposition to the war’s course, which in many of their cases they pressed in the strongest possible terms to the politicians who designed it, almost surely led many of them to consider resigning. But their country was at war. And I am sure that their sense of duty to help see the thing through to the end, a value first embraced in a great war thirty years before, far more than any career consideration, prevailed over a conscientious contemplation of a principled resignation.

Having once served as the Navy’s liaison officer to Congress and enjoying several close friendships with members of Congress, my father was quite familiar with the character of politicians. But he was puzzled and troubled by widespread and mounting congressional opposition to the war. Likewise, he was astonished at the breadth of opposition among the American people. He was, of course, respectful of the subordinate relationship of the military to the people of a democracy and their elected representatives. But it is fair to say that he believed something had gone badly wrong in a country that did not, by his lights, stand behind the men it had sent into harm’s way to fight for it.

As CINCPAC, my father was expected to testify periodically before the committees of the House and Senate that authorized and appropriated the Defense Department’s budget. The Pacific Command’s vast expanse, including all of the Pacific and Indian oceans, from the West Coast of the United States to the Persian Gulf, encompassed a number of highly charged security situations in addition to the ongoing hostilities in Vietnam. Although our forces in Vietnam were progressively reduced during my father’s watch, tensions on the Korean peninsula and in the Taiwan Strait were always a danger, and there was fear that the Soviets might generate a major crisis in the region while we were preoccupied with the war. It was the Pacific Command’s responsibility to safeguard the shipping lanes and air traffic of half the world.

Accordingly, it was necessary for the United States, as the only military guarantor of regional stability, to maintain a large and expensive presence in Asia while executing the endgame of an unpopular war in Indochina. And my father was not one to subordinate his responsibilities to the prevailing political sentiments of the time, which assumed that our presence in the Pacific should be accorded lesser significance once the unfortunate war in Vietnam was finally ended. Even if the region’s other tinderboxes were to become unexpectedly tranquil, my father’s long-standing apprehension of the emerging Soviet naval threat was enough to persuade him that Pacific Command should retain its priority for American military planners. Thus, he could not countenance on his watch force reductions that he believed would jeopardize our supremacy in the area whether we were engaged in open hostilities or not.

In his opening statement to a Senate committee in 1971, my father gave his projection of the necessary force requirements for the Pacific, after first assessing the state of the war and the various security threats in the region confronting the United States. Many of the senators in attendance were familiar with my father and his views. Some of them he considered friends. They listened respectfully to my father’s presentation, even if one or another of them had doubts about the size of the force level my father was advocating.

One senator, an outspoken opponent of the war, was not an intimate of my father’s, nor, apparently, was he familiar with my father’s ethics. When his turn came to question my father, he immediately took issue with his central argument, that we needed to increase our presence in the Pacific, and he did so in the one manner that anyone familiar with my father’s reputation for probity knew better than to pursue. In effect, he accused him of lying.

He callously implied that my father had intentionally exaggerated his threat assessments to justify force levels that were excessively large and unnecessary. To this senator, my father was an archetype, the old military hawk used to getting his way from unquestioning legislators who had always left military decisions to the military. But times had changed. The World War II–vintage military brass were no longer accorded automatic respect by younger members of Congress, who, though they may have lacked much if any military experience themselves, prided themselves on their modern sensibility and ability to see through an old hawk’s con. To this particular senator, men like my father had gotten us into an unwinnable, unpopular, and probably immoral war. They were not to be trusted.

This was not, of course, the first time my father had testified before a congressional committee. Nor was it the first time my father had encountered a quarrelsome legislator. He had forged personal relationships with a good many politicians and over the years had had any number of spirited debates with them on all manner of military subjects. It was, however, the first time any member of Congress had challenged his honesty, and that was an injury he would accept from no one.

Once the insult was offered, my father forgot all thought of the purpose of his testimony. Neither did he particularly give a damn about disputing the senator’s view of our force requirements. All that mattered to him was that he respond to the attack on his good name, which he did instantly and forcefully.

According to Admiral Vasey, who had accompanied my father to the hearing room and was seated right behind the witness table, the moment the senator finished making the offensive remark, my father jumped to his feet. Red-faced, and jabbing his finger in the direction of his accuser, he proceeded to deliver a heated and sarcastic lecture on strategy and the responsibilities of the Commander in Chief, Pacific. “I don’t remember his specific words,” Admiral Vasey recounted in a letter to me, “but he made it crystal-clear that he was an officer of the highest integrity, as was his father before him, and he strongly objected to any insinuation that reflected on the moral character of himself or his testimony, or of the United States military.”

When it appeared that my father was not about to let up on the offending senator, Admiral Vasey discreetly grasped the bottom of my father’s coat and pulled him down into his seat, “but not before observing the sly smiles on the faces of other committee members.”

Such outbursts were rare in those days in the ostentatiously formal precincts of Capitol Hill. They are even rarer today. There were few things in his life my father valued more dearly than his career. But his good name was one of them. He would have sacrificed anything to defend it, as the errant senator found out that day.

Of course, my father was at the end of his career, and already wore four stars. He had achieved his life’s ambition, and there was nothing an antagonistic member of Congress could do about it. My father did have hopes of extending his tour as CINCPAC, and that, of course, could have been put at risk by his publicly upbraiding a sitting member of Congress. I am confident, however, that my father did not give a damn about the risks involved in what some might have viewed as his astonishingly rash behavior. I doubt he believed any job was worth having if it required him to suffer such an insult in silence.

My father prided himself on being a strategic thinker. Obviously, the war consumed most of his time, but, as he had for most of his career, he focused much of his attention on the future threats to American naval supremacy in the Pacific. He had long been concerned about the growing strength of the Soviet Navy, and he believed one of his most important duties as CINCPAC was to ensure that the United States was prepared to contain the emerging Soviet naval threat. Toward that end, my father worked not just to maintain the Navy’s military advantage in the Pacific, but to strengthen the United States’ relationships with the countries in the region.

Needless to say, American diplomats in Asia were not always delighted to share their responsibilities with a naval officer, especially one as outspoken and often unpredictable as my father. But my father enjoyed warm, personal relationships with many Asian leaders and could speak to them more forthrightly and often to better effect than could a good many American ambassadors in Asia. Many Asian heads of state had come to power as military leaders. Many were not philosophically well disposed toward the virtues of democracy. They were often more comfortable in the company of a senior American military official who wished to talk with them only about questions of regional security and military power, and in a language familiar to them, than they were in the company of our diplomats.

My father’s reputation as a frank, gruff, and engaging American military representative was widespread throughout Asia. Most, if not all, of the Asian heads of state whose countries were either allies of the United States or officially nonaligned with either superpower considered him a personal friend. He was accorded extraordinary courtesies whenever he paid official visits to their countries.

A few years ago, I met with Lee Kuan Yew, who as Singapore’s “senior minister” has governed the city-state for decades and is considered by many to be the elder statesman of Asia. My visit was an official one, but Lee began our conversation by reminding me that he had been a friend of my father’s. He went on to talk at great length about my father, in a tone suffused with fond regard for his memory. He paid polite but rather less close attention to the official subjects I had come to discuss. Throughout our discussion, he kept returning to my father, and repeating how highly he had valued my father’s friendship and counsel. That was fine with me.

On another official visit, this time to Taiwan, I was invited to be the guest of honor at a luncheon banquet hosted by most of the Taiwan military command. The affair lasted over two hours, and considerable quantities of a Chinese rice wine that tastes more like whiskey than wine were consumed by the twenty or more aging generals in attendance. Every ten minutes or so, one or another of the generals rose to his feet and reverently offered a toast to the memory of my father, “the great American admiral, John McCain.”

Joe Vasey accompanied my father on his official visits to Asian capitals. He tells a humorous story about a trip they made to Indonesia during which they paid a call on President Suharto, who, until very recently, was one of Southeast Asia’s most durable dictators. The story illustrates my father’s diplomatic style and the respect accorded him by Asian leaders.

My father and Suharto enjoyed each other’s company, and the meeting lasted much longer than planned. Near the end of their conversation, my father surprised his host and the American diplomats who accompanied him to the meeting by commenting on Indonesia’s recent purchase of Soviet ships. “Why in the hell did you accept motor torpedo boats and submarines from the Soviets? Our intelligence reports indicate they are a bunch of junk.” Before Suharto could respond, my father asked his permission to visit one of the subs. After briefly consulting with an aide, Suharto agreed, and the next day my father and Admiral Vasey were flown to a naval base at the other end of Java.

When they arrived, they instantly confirmed the opinion of naval intelligence that the submarines in question were junk. They were freshly painted and immaculate, and the officers and crew were well turned out. But the two veterans of the American submarine service knew an antiquated ship when they saw one. It was clear to both of them that the sub had never been submerged or even under way since it had arrived some months earlier. Nevertheless, my father wanted to make a complete inspection. He asked the Indonesian admirals accompanying them to permit them to continue their inspection belowdecks, which, after a brief delay to prepare the crew, they were allowed to do.

When he reached the forward torpedo room, my father asked his host to fire a water slug, a standard test routinely performed by all navies. The outer door of the tube is opened, and after the tube fills with water a blast of air blows the water back out. The Indonesians agreed, assuring my father that the test was performed weekly on all their submarines. However, it seemed to take an inordinate amount of time for the demonstration to be performed, and it was obvious the Indonesians were uncertain how to proceed. When at length they attempted to fire the slug, the procedure was done in reverse. My father and Vasey were standing just a few feet behind the tube when high-pressure air blew open the tube’s heavy bronze inner door. The door narrowly missed Admiral Vasey, he recalled, and the “great whoosh of high pressure air and oily vapor immediately engulfed the entire torpedo room in a dark cloud as our Indonesian friends scrambled up the vertical ladder to safety.” As they gasped for air, Vasey guided my father to the ladder and out of harm’s way. Although much amused by the mishap, my father never remarked on it in subsequent meetings with his hosts.

Few, if any, American diplomatic or military officials could have expected such elaborate courtesies from the government of a country that was not an ally of the United States. But because of the respect Asian leaders had for my father he could use his influence to obtain important diplomatic and intelligence opportunities for the United States, always thinking ahead to future challenges to our security. He would even do his own intelligence work when the opportunity arose, as was the case on this occasion.

Admiral Vasey put the incident in a strategic perspective, observing that Washington was preoccupied with Vietnam and less concerned with Soviet overtures to Indonesia that were intended to promote political entente between the two nations. But Indonesia’s proximity to vital sea-lanes concerned my father very much. He feared that Indonesia’s drift into the Soviet sphere of influence would “drastically change the strategic face of Southeast Asia.” According to Vasey, after my father’s visit, “no further Russian military assistance was provided.”

In time, I think the State Department came to value my father’s somewhat unorthodox diplomacy, recognizing the opportunities his familiar relations with Asian rulers provided to U.S. statecraft. He was the first CINCPAC to be a regular participant in the annual conference of American ambassadors in Asia. Admiral Vasey observed that the ambassadors initially viewed my father “with great apprehension, but once they knew him and understood his style, they looked forward to his visits. His close rapport with and the confidence in him by Asian leaders always resulted in handsome dividends, insights and information.” I know that President Nixon and Dr. Kissinger valued his influence in the region, for in later years they told me so.

He flew to Vietnam about once a month to confer with General Creighton Abrams and assess the war’s progress. He held Abrams in very high regard, and I believe Abrams reciprocated his admiration. Their appointments were announced by the President in the same press conference. But where my father’s appointment had come as something of a surprise to official Washington, Abrams’s appointment had been expected. He had been his predecessor’s second in command, in which capacity he had acquitted himself well. My father outranked him, and Abrams was expected to report through my father to the Joint Chiefs. But as a practical matter, his opinion was expected to hold greater sway with Washington than my father’s, at least to the extent that any military commander’s could influence an administration that was so directly involved in both strategic and tactical decision making. And my father was a firm believer in giving his commanders in the field the full support they sought from CINCPAC, a policy he insisted on to his staff at Camp Smith, CINCPAC headquarters.

Disagreements and hard feelings within the Military Assistance Command in Vietnam, MACV, about Washington’s management of the war abated somewhat with the inauguration of the Nixon administration, but that is not to say that they disappeared altogether. No military operation, before or since, experienced the extraordinarily close involvement of political decision makers in day-to-day military decisions. But then no war since the Civil War was as politically controversial as Vietnam. MACV relied on my father to pass on its views and concerns to Washington, and he did not let MACV down. After every visit to the field, he dutifully passed up the line, unvarnished and with his full concurrence, whatever was bothering General Abrams and the other commanders of MACV.

Understandably, my father’s appointment initially occasioned some apprehension in the field. He was, after all, an admiral. Vietnam was essentially a ground war, and most of its commanders were generals. It was, I’m sure, MACV’s hope that my father would confine his visits to a few routine briefings and not attempt to impose a sailor’s views on the infantry’s war. But although he ably supported his commanders, he was not content to supervise the war from a distance. The war was his responsibility, and he never ducked his responsibilities. He quickly proved himself an astute commander and an important resource for MACV. He won the respect of Abrams and the other senior officers in Vietnam, who came to welcome his frequent visits as opportunities not just to vent their frustrations with Washington but to take advantage of the old man’s counsel.

My mother accompanied him on all his trips to Vietnam. Frequently, my mother’s sister, Rowena, joined them. My father’s contemporaries often kidded him for having two wives, a reference to the fact that my mother and aunt were identical twins and to their constant presence at his side. He delighted in amplifying the joke himself. Whenever anyone asked him how he managed to tell his wife and sister-in-law apart, he would gruffly respond, “That’s their problem.”

In truth, my father was delighted and flattered by the attention his wife and sister-in-law received. He was, in his way, as devoted to his wife and sister-in-law as they were to him. He enjoyed being constantly attended by two beautiful women, and what contentment he knew in his life, which was less, I think, than other men knew, he usually found in their company. My mother always traveled with my father. Had the Navy allowed it, I am sure she would have accompanied him on sea duty, and found in the alternately exciting and dull world of men at sea some useful and interesting way to occupy her time.

My father seldom went to Vietnam simply to receive official briefings. On most of his visits, after conferring with Abrams and senior officers, he would go into the field to talk with the younger officers and enlisted men who were doing the fighting. While he was in the field, my mother and Aunt Rowena remained in Saigon, shopping, sightseeing, visiting, and waiting for his return.

My father did not affect a regard for the opinion of his soldiers in a transparent attempt to boost their morale. He genuinely believed that their views about how the war was going were just as important as the views of their commanders in Saigon. Like his father before him, he believed that the men who executed combat orders were the best judges of their soundness. He wanted to know what they thought about operations that had been completed and about those that were imminent or in the planning stages. He wanted to know how news from home was affecting their morale. He wanted to know if they thought we would win the war. He based his own opinions on the war’s conduct in large part on what he learned from the colonels, captains, lieutenants, sergeants, and privates who were conducting it.

A participant in one of my father’s field briefings described the experience in a letter to me. In the summer of 1968, my father and General Abrams unexpectedly arrived at a battalion base camp in the Mekong Delta. There they received an improvised briefing on the battalion’s operations from the battalion commander. My correspondent, Randy Carpenter, was then a twenty-two-year-old draftee who had through attrition been made a platoon leader. He had been asked to present my father with a captured AK-47 rifle. He recounted what happened after the brief ceremony concluded.

He was the commander my grandfather surely had hoped he would become: forceful, determined, clear thinking, and respectful of his men. Had my grandfather held the post, I believe he would have commanded in the same way. I like to believe my father recognized this, and that the recognition strengthened his confidence, and brought him a good measure of satisfaction.

Late in the war, my father would give the order that sent B-52s to rain destruction upon the city where I was held a prisoner. That was his duty, and he did not shrink from it.

While I was imprisoned, he never spoke about me at length to anyone other than my wife and mother. When friends offered their sympathy, he would thank them politely and change the subject.

He received hundreds of letters from members of Congress, dignitaries, fellow officers, enlisted men, family friends, and acquaintances offering their sympathy and prayers for my return. He politely and briefly replied to each one.

His responses were almost always written in the same style. The first paragraph of each began with an expression of his appreciation for the correspondent’s sympathy, and closed, almost unvaryingly, with the line “God has a way of solving problems and we have great faith in the future.” The next paragraph would address another subject, often extending an invitation to visit my parents in London.

Copies of his letters are kept with my father’s official papers. There are only three I have reviewed that differ substantially from the others. The first is a letter my father wrote to the wife of Colonel John Flynn. John was the most senior American officer in captivity. He had been shot down the day after I was captured and taken to the same hospital where I was held. We never saw each other in the hospital, although one day Cat, in his usual bragging mood, had shown me his identity card. For the first three years of his captivity, John, like the other higher-ranking officers, was kept segregated from the rest of us and out of our communication chain.

My father wrote empathetically to Mrs. Flynn, commiserating with her that they must resign themselves to trusting in God and the courage of their loved ones as the only assurance that they would come home. “There is little anyone can say and even less they can do when personal tragedy strikes,” he wrote. “Our hearts are with you.”

The second letter was a reply to the friend with whom I had completed the escape and evasion course in Germany. He had written my parents to share his observations of me, assuring them that I had been well prepared for my present adverse circumstances and possessed the ability to “come away from this situation in good condition, and to be an example to others.” My father wrote back that he and my mother had “derived much reassurance from the account of your experiences [with John].”

The last letter was a reply to Admiral B. M. “Smoke” Strean, who was the Deputy Chief of Navy Personnel and had approved my transfer to the Oriskany after the Forrestal fire. Admiral Strean had “hesitated to write because I feel I had a part in this—in helping him get what he wanted—and thus a feeling of some blame in the outcome.” Strean assured my father that his normal practice was to go slowly when considering requests for “unscheduled assignments which carry some hazard…. [But] your son badly wanted this assignment.”

My father quickly wrote back to reassure his apologetic friend: “I deeply appreciate your letter. You are a great man in every respect. You should have no regrets. I have no regrets. John wanted to go back and I know he would not have been happy otherwise. I am proud of him.”

Few close observers of my father ever detected that my captivity caused him great suffering. He never let his concern affect his attention to duty or restrain him from prosecuting the war to the greatest extent his civilian commanders allowed.

However, his closest aides knew he kept a personal file containing all reported information about the POWs, the location and conditions of the camps, and every scrap of intelligence about me that could be obtained. Included in my father’s file were copies of the letters I had written to Carol, as well as some copies of letters that other prisoners had written to their wives.

During my first months of captivity I was allowed to write several letters to Carol, a privilege I attributed to the publicity surrounding my capture. Eventually, the Vietnamese withdrew the privilege and restricted me to one or two letters a year. Not until late in 1969 would prisoners be allowed to write home on a monthly basis.

Carol wrote me every month. The Vietnamese withheld all but a few of her letters from me. She also sent me many packages, few of which I received, and none of which contained all the items she had sent. With the exception of 1971 and 1972, I would usually receive a package at or sometime after Christmas.

It was always clear that the guards had taken most of the contents as their share before passing a package on to me. Sometimes I received candy, instant soup, socks, and underwear. Once I received pipe tobacco but not the pipe that had been included with it. One package contained only a single pair of skivvies and a bottle of vitamins. The Vietnamese had neglected to remove the shipping receipt that indicated the package had originally contained five pounds of material.

That I received so few of Carol’s letters and packages is probably attributable to Carol’s refusal to send them through the offices of the antiwar organization COLIAFAM, the Committee of Liaison with Families of Servicemen Detained in North Vietnam. COLIAFAM had arranged with the Vietnamese government to be exclusively authorized to process letters and packages to the POWs. Many families, including mine, refused to sanction this abridgment of a prisoner’s right under the Geneva Convention to receive mail without interference from his captors or any agency working on his behalf.

One Christmas, Carol received a letter from COLIAFAM denouncing the resumption of the bombing campaign in the North and demanding an immediate and total withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam. A postscript contained a none too veiled threat, warning her that letters that were not delivered by COLIAFAM “will not be accepted and… may jeopardize [the prisoner’s] mail rights.”

When I was a prisoner of war I resented the antiwar activists who had visited Hanoi and, wittingly or unwittingly, made our life in prison more miserable than it already was. Today I no longer bear any ill will for most of these people. I have made far too many mistakes in my own life to forever disparage people, most of whom were very young at the time, who long ago, and in the name of peace, made a bad mistake. I have not yet, however, managed to relinquish my resentment of COLIAFAM.

To exploit the anguish of families for the purpose of propagandizing and giving aid and comfort to the enemy is an offense so grievous that it merits denunciation even today, many years after the fact. Had COLIAFAM not intervened, the Vietnamese, for their own sake, would have eventually allowed us to send and receive mail without insisting that it serve the antiwar cause at home. Although I would have dearly loved to receive more mail, I was proud of Carol for refusing to cooperate in a plan to dishonor me. It took courage and wisdom on her part not to be enticed by COLIAFAM’s “humanitarian gesture” into aiding my enemies.

My father never wrote me a letter during the war. He knew that the Vietnamese would have regarded a missive from him as a propaganda bonanza. He did try once to secretly pass a message to me.

Prisoners were required to write letters home on a preprinted six-line form. We were instructed to write only on the lines provided, to write legibly, and to restrict our message to comments about our health and family. Many POWs, however, managed to exceed our captors’ instructions and pass encoded messages in their letters home.

For example, after my years in solitary ended, my first cellmate, John Finley, wrote a letter to his wife that asked her to say “hi to cousin King Mc, Abel and his brother.” His wife was puzzled by the request, as she knew no one by the name of Mc or Abel. Naval intelligence analyzed the letter, interpreted “Abel and his brother” as an allusion to Cain, and thus concluded that the writer was making a reference to McCain.

Two months later, John wrote another letter to his wife in which he very subtly distinguished certain letters. When the letters were read together they spelled MCCAIN MY MATE.

I, too, tried to pass hidden messages in my letters. Lacking John Finley’s ingenuity, I was considerably less subtle in the means I used. Vietnamese writing makes frequent use of accent marks. I borrowed the fashion for my letters to Carol, placing marks above certain letters to spell out my secret message.

My technique was quite obvious, and Carol noticed it immediately. In the first letter in which I attempted covert communication, the marked letters spelled out LCOL GUY, a reference to Ted Guy, who was then my senior at the Plantation. In another I passed on that CRANERMATE [Craner and Gruters] WELL. In another, I informed her that I GET NO MAIL I AM OK.

After reading these letters, Carol, properly, sent them on to naval intelligence, where my lack of sophistication in encryption aroused considerable concern. An intelligence officer wrote my father’s aide to apprise him of my efforts, and of their concern that my messages were so indiscreet that it was “hard to see how they passed even basic censorship.”

The officer asked my father’s permission to use one of Carol’s letters to me to transmit a carefully hidden caution. My father agreed and ordered the message to read, JUNIOR URGES CAUTION PLEASE STOP THIS.

I would have been surprised to receive the message, for I thought I was a fairly clever communicator, or, more honestly, I trusted in the dull wits of the Vietnamese censors to compensate for my indiscretion. As it turned out, my trust was well placed. I never received my father’s warning, because the Vietnamese withheld Carol’s letters from me. So I kept on sending messages in my letters. The Vietnamese never caught me.

Had I received the old man’s message, I might have been a little put out, but I think I also would have appreciated the indication of his concern. I would have taken some comfort in the knowledge that he was, as best he could, watching out for me.

The Navy did manage to get one message through to me. Some weeks after my transfer to Hoa Lo in late 1969, the Vietnamese gave me a package from Carol that they had been holding for a while. It had survived inspection with a few of its original contents intact: a few cans of a vitamin-rich baby formula, a bottle of vitamins, several handkerchiefs, and one tin of candy.

Carol hoped the baby formula would compensate for the nutrition-free diet the Vietnamese provided us. It was intended to be mixed with milk. Lacking any, I had to mix it with water. The result was so unpalatable that despite my chronic hunger, I simply couldn’t stomach the stuff, and I threw the rest away.

The candy was another matter. The can contained about twenty pieces of chocolate with vanilla centers. They were such a prized treat that I decided to ration them, savoring one piece each day. On the fourth or fifth day, as I was rejoicing in the pleasure of eating my daily ration, chewing it slowly and deliberately, I felt a foreign particle in the center of the chocolate. I spit it on the ground and finished eating.

A few moments later, thinking it strange that the manufacturers of the candy would have tolerated such poor quality control, I picked the object up to inspect it. It was a tiny plastic capsule. Excitedly, I moved into the shadows in a corner of my cell, where I tried to open the capsule. Although a naked lightbulb lit my cell twenty-four hours a day, it was of such low wattage that it only dimly illuminated a small area. Almost no natural light infiltrated my cell, and I was free to work on the capsule unseen even in daylight hours.

The capsule was fitted very tightly, and I had a difficult time prying it open. I spent a long time working at it unsuccessfully. Finally I found a sliver of bamboo and used it to push the capsule apart. Inside was a small, folded, incredibly thin piece of plastic. I unfolded it and read the message that the Navy had written on it.

The message read something like:

I was elated and very encouraged. The Navy was trying to communicate with me, a clear sign that our country had not forgotten about us. I extracted the white paper liner from the can, inspected it to see if I could detect the invisible residue that coated it, and impatiently waited for my first opportunity to put the thing to good use.

Unfortunately, the Vietnamese chose this particular time to change their normal practice of supervising the prisoners’ letter writing. Over the last year, they had allowed me to write home once every few months. They would give me the form, and I would write my few lines, which they then took away and inspected. If it met with their approval, they would return with it and tell me to copy it word for word on a second form. Up until this time, I had always been left alone in my cell to transcribe the letter onto the second form.

The next time they gave me leave to write home, I hurriedly scribbled a few lines on the first form and anxiously awaited the guards’ return with the second. To my great disappointment, after my letter passed inspection, the guards took me to the interrogation room to copy it while they watched. I have no idea what precipitated this change in the routine. Perhaps they had begun to suspect that I was writing in some kind of code. Or perhaps they had discovered another prisoner using a device to pass hidden messages in his letters home. I never learned what had aroused their suspicions. But whatever it was, it effectively prevented me from ever using the device the Navy had hoped would enable me to pass messages by less obvious means than I had been employing.

After this latest letter, the Vietnamese curtailed my letter-writing privilege for a long time. When many months later they restored the privilege, they never again allowed me to write a single word outside the presence of guards. I was never able to use the liner.

Despite my disappointment, the experience, on the whole, was an uplifting one. The attempt to facilitate communication with naval intelligence was welcome evidence of the Navy’s concern and its desire to gain a fuller understanding of our situation, information I assumed it would use to our benefit. I was cheered and gratified by the effort even though it was unsuccessful.

My father did not meet with any of the prisoners who had been released early. But his file contained all their debriefing reports and reports from officers who had talked with them about me.

In a conversation that was reported to my father, a prisoner, one of the August 1968 releases whom I had been invited to join, informed his debriefing officer that according to camp rumor I had refused release.

Doug Hegdahl and two other prisoners were released in August 1969. An intelligence officer who interviewed Hegdahl asked them for information about me, and cabled my father the following report:

In a subsequent report from Hegdahl, my father was informed about my efforts to disrupt the Christmas service in 1968. Hegdahl also remarked that “John is known in the camp as a daredevil. He frequently gets caught attempting to communicate with other PWs.” Hegdahl thoughtfully concluded his report with the observation that the other prisoners respected me for refusing to cooperate with the North Vietnamese.

As grateful as the old man must have been to receive this information, the men providing it had been released nearly a year after I had been broken and made my confession. The knowledge of this diminished considerably the satisfaction I otherwise would have derived from knowing my father had, at last, received a report that his son had good grease.

Hegdahl and the others knew I had been offered release, and they were also certainly aware of the events that occurred after my refusal. I had told Hegdahl at the Christmas service that I had been beaten for turning down the Vietnamese offer. And had the Vietnamese played over the camp loudspeakers a tape of my confession, as I believed happened, they would have heard it. But they made no mention of this in their report, or, if they had, the reporting officer failed to pass it on to my father.

They need not have bothered. A month before my father was apprised of their debriefing, he had received a report that a heavily edited propaganda broadcast, purported to have been made by me, had been analyzed, and the voice compared to my taped interview with the French journalist. The two voices were judged to be the same. In the anguished days right after my confession, I had dreaded just such a discovery by my father.

After I came home, he never mentioned to me that he had learned about my confession, and, although I told him about it, I never discussed it at length. I only recently learned that the tape I dreamed I heard playing over the loudspeaker in my cell had been real; it had been broadcast outside the prison and had come to the attention of my father.

If I had known at the time my father had heard about my confession, I would have been distressed beyond imagination, and might not have recovered from the experience as quickly as I did. But in the years that have passed since the event, my regard for my father and for myself has matured. I understand better the nature of strong character.

My father was a strong enough man not to judge too harshly the character of a son who had reached his limits and found that they were well short of the standards of the idealized heroes who had inspired us as boys. And I am strong enough now to know that my father had sufficient faith in me to assume I had done the best I could, and that learning I had been broken would only have aroused in him an increased concern for my welfare.

On the one occasion when I briefly recounted the experience for him, he listened impassively until I finished, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “You did the best you could, John. That’s all that’s expected of any of us.”

My mother knew that my father suffered from the burden of commanding a war in a country where his son was imprisoned. She believes the strain aged him considerably. She told me later of how she would hear him in his study, praying aloud on his knees, beseeching God to “show Johnny mercy.” He continued to politely rebuff all attempts by friends to discuss with him what he considered to be his personal misfortune. To the world, he was, as ever, a competent, tireless naval officer, strictly devoted to his duty. Whatever private anguish he suffered, he suffered in silence.

I received a letter once from a retired Army colonel who had been a Cobra helicopter platoon commander in Vietnam. He recounted for me a New Year’s Day he had spent unhappily at Quang Tri, having flown a fire team north to guard against violations of the holiday ceasefire. As he ate his lunch and waited miserably for nightfall, a Navy helicopter unexpectedly landed near his Cobra. An officer stepped out of the helicopter, walked to the end of the strip, and remained there for a while.

“One of his pilots came over to us to look at our ships and visit, and one of my warrants remarked, ‘Who’s that?’—referring to the officer about fifty yards from us. The Navy pilot said, ‘That’s Admiral McCain. He has a son up north and this is as close as he can get to him.’”

Every year he was CINCPAC, my father spent the Christmas holidays with troops near the DMZ. The letter quoted above represents dozens of reports I have received over the years that mentioned my father’s custom of withdrawing from his company at the end of the meal, walking north, and standing alone for a long time, looking toward the place where he had lost his son.

My father served two tours as CINCPAC. During his second tour, he suffered a mild stroke. Admiral John Hyland, who commanded the Pacific Fleet at the time, and with whom my father had a somewhat difficult relationship, remembered being told by my father’s executive assistant that the old man would “never be able to come back. He’s finished.” But my father had other plans. According to Hyland, “Things just continued to run…. We’d all go down… to see him every day or so and talk with him and so on. But, not very long after that, he came back to duty, and he was fine.”

As the end of his second tour approached, my father lobbied Washington to extend his tenure for another year so that he could continue in command until the war ended. His request was turned down. President Nixon flew to Honolulu to attend the ceremony that officially ended my father’s command in the Pacific. Two months later, after forty-one years on active duty, he retired from the Navy.

Despite his apparent recovery, he was never again a well man after his stroke. He lived for nearly nine years after he retired. But, in truth, he had, like his father before him, sacrificed his life to hold a command in his country’s war.

–– CHAPTER 22 –– The Washrag

Our treatment reached its nadir after the Atterbury and Dramesi escape attempt. Reprisals were ordered at every camp. Many prisoners were tortured to reveal other escape plans. Beatings were inflicted for even minor infractions of prison rules. The food was worse. Security was tightened and our cells were frequently and thoroughly inspected. Many of us suffered from boils—in the sweltering heat, our lymph glands clogged up and baseball-sized boils developed under our arms. All we had to treat them with was small vials of iodine. The guards took them away from us because Ed and John had used iodine to darken their faces the night of their escape.

During that spring and summer, I was caught communicating several times. Sometimes I earned a beating for my efforts, but other times I was just made to sit on a stool in the corner for a day or two like a disobedient schoolboy. Once I was ordered to stand facing the wall for two days and two nights. On the second day, exhausted, I sat down. A guard discovered me, mistook my weariness for insolence, and, in a rage, beat and jumped on my bad leg. The resulting pain and swelling in my leg forced me to use a crutch again. Surprisingly, camp officials chastised the guard for physically abusing me without their approval.

During another of my punishments, a severe one, I again complained that I was being treated like an animal. My guards were then ordered to feed me like an animal. Every day for a week, they brought me a bowl of soup with a piece of bread thrown in it and ordered me to eat it with my hands.

The summer of 1969 was a long, difficult time. But as autumn arrived, our treatment began to improve. By the end of the year, the routine beatings had all but stopped. Prisoners were still physically mistreated as punishment for communicating or other violations of camp regulations. But beatings to extract propaganda information all but ceased. We occasionally received extra rations of food. For a brief period, the guards came to my cell every night and removed the boards blocking the transom over my cell to let in the evening breeze. At times, some of the guards were almost pleasant in their dealings with us. We had hard times ahead of us, but from October of that year until our release, our circumstances were never as dire as they had been in those long early years of captivity.

This welcome change in our treatment coincided with the death of Ho Chi Minh, leading many POWs to think that old Uncle Ho must have had a less than avuncular affection for the air pirates occupying his prisons. A funereal dirge was broadcast over loudspeakers everywhere in Hanoi on the morning of September 4, and the black-and-red mourning patches worn by the guards that day aroused our suspicion that old Ho had passed on to his eternal reward.

I don’t know for certain whether the terrible summer of 1969 was partly a consequence of Ho’s animosity to us, and the change in our fortunes explained by the fact that death had finally silenced his exhortations to the people to treat us like criminals. What we learned from new shootdowns late in the war was that word of our treatment had finally reached the rest of the world, and the discovery that there was a darker side to the plucky North Vietnamese nationalists had begun to cloud Hanoi’s international horizons.

In August 1969, the Vietnamese released, to an American antiwar delegation, Doug Hegdahl, Wes Rumble, and Robert Frishman. Defense Secretary Melvin Laird had showed photographs of Hegdahl and Frishman to members of the Vietnamese delegation in Paris and demanded their release. All of them were in bad shape. Frishman had no elbow, just a limp, rubbery arm. Rumble had a broken back. Hegdahl had lost seventy-five pounds. Dick Stratton and our senior ranking officer, Ted Guy, had ordered him to accept the release. He had memorized the names of most of the POWs held in the North.

In a change from Johnson administration policy, the Nixon administration allowed the three returned POWs to publicly reveal details of torture and deprivation. The ensuing public fury, led by the newly organized National League of Families of POWs and MIAs in Southeast Asia, of which my brother, Joe, was an active member, began to turn world opinion against Hanoi. And the Vietnamese, ever mindful of their reliance on international goodwill, decided to suspend their campaign to beat and starve us into submission.

The first indication that the Vietnamese had revised their “humane and lenient” policy was evident in changes in the way we were exploited for propaganda purposes. We were no longer threatened or tortured to make us confess war crimes or renounce our country. The Vietnamese were now extremely anxious to convince the world that we were well treated.

POWs were filmed playing cards and other games, reading their mail, attending religious services, and opening packages from home. Fewer and fewer prisoners were kept in solitary confinement, although I remained alone for several more months. The Vietnamese more often dispensed with physical intimidation to extract statements from us and instead appealed to our thoughts about our families, or tried to plant doubts about the progress of the war or our government’s good faith to win our cooperation.

Their present public relations dilemma was much on our captors’ minds. “The whole world supports us” was Hanoi’s proudest boast, parroted by politburo member and lowly prison guard alike. They were clearly exasperated by this setback in their design to win the war on America’s campuses and streets, and at odds over what to do about it.

Soft Soap burst into my cell once, highly agitated, and complained, “Even the Russians criticize us. You tell lies about us. You say we pull out your fingernails and make you live in rooms with no ventilation.” That Soft Soap made this complaint while I languished in the suffocating environment of my unventilated cell made the experience only slightly less surreal than listening to the loudspeaker in my cell inform me that the American government was lying about Vietnam’s mistreatment of prisoners.

There were, at this time, various personnel shake-ups among camp authorities that were evidently related to our change in treatment. My turnkey, the Prick, who had started every day by attempting to humiliate me, disappeared from the prison’s guard roster. I derived considerable satisfaction from imagining him humping it down the Ho Chi Minh Trail cursing his bad luck and carrying an impossibly heavy burden, or sweating out a night firefight with a company of better-armed Marines.

The Cat may have suffered the most from the bad turn in Vietnam’s public relations. He was relieved as commander of all the camps and thereafter seemed to function as the senior officer of one part of the Hanoi Hilton. He was still accorded the deference due a senior officer, but he was no longer the highest authority.

From this period on, he seemed almost solicitous of the prisoners’ well-being. He often appeared nervous and distressed. He was observed complaining that prisoners should not be badly mistreated, and, reportedly, he would grow quite agitated upon discovering that a guard had discharged too enthusiastically the responsibilities of his office.

Later on, I learned from another POW that the Cat had been obliged to denounce himself in front of the party for mistreating prisoners in violation of Vietnam’s policy of “humane and lenient” treatment for all prisoners.

On a bitter cold Christmas night in 1969, after I had been transferred from the Plantation back to Hoa Lo, the prison where I had spent my first days of captivity, I received an unexpected visitor. Moments after the last Christmas song had played over the camp loudspeakers, my cell door burst open, and to my complete surprise, the Cat entered my room, dressed in suit and tie, and began to chat with me about home and Christmas. Unlike our previous encounters, he had no need of an interpreter. He spoke English well enough. He offered me cigarettes, which I smoked one after the other. He talked about his experiences in the war, and in the French Indochina War before it. He talked about his family, showing me a diamond tie pin his father had given him. He asked about my family, and expressed his regret that I could not be with them this holiday.

At one point he told me about a particularly beautiful part of Vietnam, near the Chinese border, Ha Long Bay, famous for the thousands of volcanic islands that rise dramatically from its waters. He mentioned that Ho Chi Minh loved the place, and had occasionally enjoyed resting in an old French villa on one of the bay’s islands. Not long ago I visited Ha Long Bay, and I can attest to Ho’s good taste in vacation spots.

As he got up to leave, he reminded me that had I accepted release the year before, I would be enjoying a far more pleasant holiday this evening.

Without rancor, he remarked, “You should have accepted our generous offer. You would be with your family tonight.”

“You will never understand why I could not,” I responded.

“I understand more than you think,” he shot back as he left my cell.

I didn’t know what to make of this unusual encounter at first, fearing that it was the precursor to another attempt to release me. After a while, however, it occurred to me that the Cat was simply in an expansive holiday mood, and being a man who evidently possessed some Western tastes, he had wanted to affect the image of a courtly enemy enjoying a brief Christmas truce with a fellow officer. I didn’t mind. I enjoyed the cigarettes.

Despite our improved fortunes in the fall and winter of 1969, we continued to suffer moments of despair, occasioned by grim misfortune, and sometimes by less serious experiences.

Keeping a sense of humor was indispensable to surviving a long imprisonment without losing our minds, and most of us looked hard to find some humor in our experiences. Many greeted the most difficult moments with a dark gallows humor, and we were always grateful for occasions to laugh about the embarrassments and absurdities of daily prison life. When we are asked today about our years in prison, many of us are apt to include in our account, “We had a lot of fun, too.”

As implausible as that glib response is—and surely it is exaggerated—we did manage to have some fun despite our dreary, often depressing existence. And the prisoners whose company we valued the most were those who could make the rest of us laugh at our circumstances and ourselves.

Bob Craner had a ready wit, and he favored a droll, ironic brand of humor that never failed to cheer me up when I was down. When the death of seventy-nine-year-old Ho Chi Minh and the appointment of his seventy-six-year-old successor was announced, Bob commented, “Ah, the Young Turks are taking over.” Our daily dose of propaganda often included tributes to the skilled marksmen who defended North Vietnam from American bombers. Hannah’s frequent reports of downed American aircraft invariably claimed that the plane had been destroyed “with the very first round.” Bob often responded to Hannah’s familiar boast by speculating that the Vietnamese must have a warehouse somewhere where thousands of crates of shells were stored, each one labeled “Very First Round.”

Although we were neighbors during the worst years of my imprisonment, we managed to make light of our conditions whenever we could, and to laugh about the peculiar predicaments we frequently found ourselves in as we tried to make the most of our dismal existence.

Queenie was a pretty, slender young girl with lovely long hair. She worked as a secretary at the camp and occasionally helped out in the kitchen. We would see her when the guards brought us out to collect our bowls of soup, and Bob Craner and I would look through cracks in our cell doors to see her float around the camp, giggling and tossing her ponytail. All the guards mooned over her, but child though she was of a classless society, she only had eyes for the camp officers.

There were only two other women in the camp, a kitchen worker we called “Shovel” for her unusually flat profile, and the cook, “Mammy Yokum,” a wizened old crone who chewed betel nut and screamed bloody murder at any guard who had the temerity to enter her kitchen unbidden.

Inevitably, we began to have fantasies about Queenie, which she kindled with shy smiles when she caught either of us gazing at her. Bob and I would joke about plans for the day we won the war, when we would forsake family and country to live quietly with Queenie in Thailand. But our love was unrequited.

One terrible day, my ardor got the better of me. A guard had taken me, hobbling on my crutches, to the stall where we were allowed to bathe and wash our clothes by taking water from a tank, a cup at a time, and pouring it on ourselves and our belongings. The stalls the prisoners used were directly across the open courtyard from a washroom the Vietnamese used. They had old, splintered wooden doors. When we were inside, the guard would place a steel bar in brackets across the door to prevent our escape, then wander away to chat with his friends.

The door had cracks in it, which I would look through to observe the daily activities in camp. On this day, I was thrilled to discover that Queenie had decided to take a turn at the washroom; I saw her carrying a load of her clothes in that direction. I suspended my bath to watch her while she washed her clothes, holding each article up to closely inspect her progress. As I maneuvered for a better view, I lost my balance and fell against the door. The guard had decided he didn’t need to lock me in, as I was unlikely to get very far on crutches, and had set the bar next to the door. The door flew open, and I fell, naked and noisily, onto the bricks in front of the washroom.

Because of my bum leg, I couldn’t stand up, and I thrashed around on the ground frantically trying to scramble back into the stall. Startled, Queenie briefly appraised my humiliating situation, then demurely covered her eyes. My guard, hearing the commotion, rushed back, saw what had happened, cuffed me around a bit, and threw me back in the stall, where I finished cleaning up in abject misery. From that moment on, whenever Queenie saw me she would shoot me a look of utter disdain. I suffered her contempt in agony. My kind friend Bob Craner commiserated with me, but did not bother to restrain his laughter over my misfortune, and by so doing turned my embarrassment into a welcome source of amusement for both of us.

I was, and remain, deeply indebted to Bob for his warm fellowship and for the humor he used so effectively to brighten our small, hostile world. So it was with deep guilt, second only to the guilt I felt over my confession, that I discovered I had done Bob a grave injustice. That the experience concluded humorously is a testament to the kind of guy Bob was, and how important his friendship was to me.

The Vietnamese allowed us certain amenities. We all received one short-sleeved shirt, one long-sleeved shirt, one pair of pants, and one pair of rubber sandals fabricated from old tires. We each had a drinking cup, a teapot, a toothbrush, toothpaste, and a bar of soap stamped “37%” (37 percent of what we never learned). We received a daily ration of three cigarettes (often withdrawn as punishment). But our most prized possession was a small, coarse square of cotton rag that served as both washcloth and towel.

I appreciate how difficult it must be for the reader to understand the inflated value of such an unremarkable article. But to a man who is deprived of almost all material possessions, who lies day after day in a dirty, oppressively hot cell, glazed in sweat and grime, a washcloth, no matter how undistinguished, is an inestimable comfort.

On wash day, when we were brought out to collect our first meal of the day, we would each hang our wet clothes and our washrag to dry on a wire strung in the courtyard. We would retrieve the articles as we brought back the afternoon meal.

On one such day in the fall of 1968, between our two meals, the guards hauled me out of my cell and took me to a punishment room for ten days of attitude adjustment. This was during a time when my attitude was frequently adjusted. As I was being transported, I noticed my belongings drying nicely in the sun and immediately began to long for the comfort of my cherished washrag.

Ten days later, my attitude well adjusted, I returned to my cell, and to my intense sorrow found that my washrag was no longer on the wire. Nor was it anywhere else to be found. I was beside myself, and, I am ashamed to admit, I began to feel resentful of the good fortune of my fellow POWs, who were not suffering the deprivation I was then experiencing. Some POWs in the camp had roommates, each with his own washrag—two and three washrags to the cell! Surely, I rationalized, three men could make do with two washrags.

When next I saw a rag hanging on the line, I took it, and joyfully used it for days, although I had to suppress incipient feelings of remorse to sustain my joy.

Some months later, on my way back to my cell, I spied my old washrag drying on the line. I recognized it as my long-lost rag by a distinctive hole in its center. With a sigh of relief, I retrieved it and hung the stolen rag in its place.

That evening Bob Craner tapped me up on the wall. He was enraged.

“Dammit, the worst thing ever has happened to me,” he exclaimed. “A couple of months ago some rotten bastard stole my washrag, and I went for weeks without one. One day when I was sweeping leaves in the courtyard, I found an old rag in the dirt. I spent a long time cleaning it up. I never hung the thing on the wire because I was afraid some jerk would steal this one too. But today was such a nice, sunny day, I couldn’t resist, and I hung it out to dry. And can you believe it, some son of a bitch stole it. Dammit. I can’t believe it. Again I have no washrag.”

I said nothing as he poured out his troubles. When he finished, I sank to the floor, feeling as remorseful as I ever have, but I was not brave enough to confess my crime.

Every day, I heard Bob yell, “Bao cao, bao cao”—the phrase we used to summon the guards—“Washrag, washrag, give me a washrag, goddammit.” They ignored him.

On Christmas Day, after a good meal and a few minutes spent outside, Christmas carols played from the camp loudspeakers. They were a welcome relief to the atonal patriotic hymns the Vietnamese favored most other days, trying to crush our resolve with “Springtime in the Liberated Zone” and “I Asked My Mother How Many Air Pirates She Shot Down Today.”

That evening, listening to “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” on a full stomach, longing for home, and feeling the spirit of Christmas, I resolved to confess my crime to Bob. I tapped him up on the wall, reminded him that Christmas was a time for forgiveness, and explained what I had done. When I finished, he made no response. He just thumped on the wall, which was our sign for approaching danger and the signal to cease communicating.

Later in the evening, he called me.

“Listen. In the Old West the worst thing you could do to a man was steal his horse. In prison the worst thing you can do to a man is steal his washrag. And you stole my washrag, you son of a bitch.” Although he intended his complaint to be humorous, I still felt terribly guilty.

Bob remained without the comfort of a washrag for quite a while after my confession, and he would often decry the injustice of it to me. “I get so sick of drying my hair with my pants,” he would lament as pangs of guilt stabbed at my conscience. I felt bad about the injury I had done Bob throughout the remainder of our captivity, finally relieving my guilt on our first Christmas as free men by sending Bob a carton of five hundred washrags as a Christmas present.

–– CHAPTER 23 –– Hanoi Hilton

By next Christmas, in 1969, Bob and I were no longer neighbors. On December 9, another prisoner and I were moved to Hoa Lo, where most of our most senior officers were held. Loaded into the back of a truck, we were blindfolded during the short ride to the Hilton. Unaware of who my traveling companion was, I placed my hand on his leg and tapped: “I am John McCain. Who are you?” He tapped back a reply: “I am Ernie Brace.”

Ernie and I were taken to a section of the prison the POWs called “Little Vegas,” where each building was named after a different casino. We were locked in “the Golden Nugget.” We were given cells near each other, with only one other cell between us, and we were able to communicate with each other with little difficulty. Our cells faced the bath area, and by the end of my first day in Vegas I was able to contact many of the men in the camp.

I occupied three different rooms in Little Vegas that year. All of them offered excellent opportunities for communication, and I formed many close friendships with men whom I greatly admired. Treatment continued to improve, although we were periodically subjected to physical abuse for communicating.

I remained alone in the Golden Nugget until March, when my period of solitary confinement was finally ended with the arrival of John Finley, whom I was relieved to welcome as my new roommate.

That first Christmas in the Golden Nugget, while I was puzzling over my surprise social visit from the Cat, my wife was hovering between life and death in the emergency room of a Philadelphia hospital.

Carol had taken the kids to her parents’ house for the holidays. After dinner on Christmas Eve, she drove to our friends the Bookbinders’ to exchange gifts. It had begun to snow by the time she started back to her parents, and the roads were icy. She skidded off the road and smashed into a telephone pole, and was thrown from the car. The police found her some time later in shock, both legs fractured in several places, her arm and pelvis broken, and bleeding internally.

Several days passed before she was out of immediate danger. It would be six months and several operations before she was released from the hospital. Over the next two years, she would undergo many more operations to repair her injured legs. By the time the doctors were finished she would be four inches shorter than she was before the accident. After a year of intensive physical therapy she was able to walk with the aid of crutches.

Carol has a determined spirit. Had she less courage and resolve, I doubt she would have walked again. Her injuries had been so serious that at first the doctors had considered amputating her legs, but she had refused them permission. With her husband in prison on the other side of the world and three small children to raise alone, she now faced a long, painful struggle to recover from her nearly fatal injuries, resisting the prospect of having to live the remainder of her life in a wheelchair. I’ve known people with better odds who gave in to despair and self-pity. Not Carol. She suffered her hardships with courage and grace. She persevered, brave and hopeful, confident that our luck would turn and all our lives would somehow work out all right.

When the doctors told her they would attempt to notify me about her accident, she told them not to; she didn’t wish to add to my burdens. She would see her way through her misfortune without even the small comfort she might have derived from a few words of concern from me. I’ve never known a braver soul.

My family was often on my mind. I spent a part of each long day wondering and worrying about them. I didn’t worry about their material well-being. I knew they were receiving my pay. But I worried, as all POWs worry, about the psychological burden my long absence imposed on my wife and children.

My children were so young when I had left for war. Sidney had not yet reached her first birthday. I feared my absence, and the uncertainty about my ever coming home, would rob them of part of the joy of living that children from happy homes naturally possess. I had to fight back depression sometimes, thinking that they might have become sullen, insecure kids.

Not too long after my capture, Sidney’s memories of me had faded. To her I had become an object of curiosity, a man in a photograph whom her mother and brothers talked about a lot. She did not remember me so much as anticipate me, praying at night and on holidays with the rest of the family for the long-awaited reunion with a father she did not really know. In the years I was away, Carol allowed the children to accumulate a menagerie of pets—dogs, cats, fish, and birds. In 1973, when my release from prison had been announced and Carol informed the kids that I would be home soon, Sidney was confused.

“Where will he sleep?” she asked.

“With me,” Carol answered.

“And what will we feed him?”

In prison, I pictured my family as they had been when I last saw them: my wife healthy and happy; my sons, not much older than toddlers, rambunctious and curious; my daughter a contented, beautiful infant; all of them safe and sound and carefree. So few of Carol’s letters ever reached me that I had little detailed knowledge of how they were all getting along. I didn’t know how Carol was managing to raise the kids alone or how the children’s personalities were developing. The boys were now old enough to take an interest in sports, but I couldn’t think of them as budding athletes. I had a hard time even picturing them at their current age. Sidney was no longer a baby, but I couldn’t imagine what she looked like. When I closed my eyes, I just saw the small faces I had bid good-bye to, and I worried that the calamity that had befallen us might have touched them with a sadness they were too young to sustain.

I derived much comfort, however, from knowing that the Navy takes care of its own. Growing up in the Navy, I had known many families that had met with misfortune, the man of the house having gone off to war and not returned. And I had seen the Navy envelop them in a supportive embrace, looking after their material needs, the men from other Navy families helping to fill the void in fatherless households. I knew that the Navy was now looking after my family, and would, to the best of its ability, see to their needs and happiness, trying to keep the disruption caused by our misfortune from devastating their lives.

Our neighbors in Orange Park, many of whom, but not all, were Navy families, were extraordinarily kind and generous to my family while I was in Vietnam. They were the mainstay of my family’s support, and I owe them a debt I can never adequately repay. They helped with the maintenance of our home, took my kids to sporting events, offered whatever counsel and support were needed, and generally helped my family hold together, body and soul, until I could get back to them. During Carol’s long convalescence and therapy they were nothing less than an extended family to my family, and their love and concern was as much a mark of their good character as it was a blessing to the people they helped.

Today, at odd times, I find myself becoming quite sentimental about America. In the distant past, that was not how my patriotism typically found expression. I attribute much of my emotion to the good people of Orange Park, Florida. I no longer think of the country’s character in abstract terms. Now, when I think about Americans, and how fortunate I am to be included in their number, I see the faces of our neighbors in Orange Park, and give thanks that by a lucky accident of birth, I was born an American.

The Cat came to see me one day and asked that I meet with a visiting “Spanish” delegation. I told him that it would not be worth his while, because I wouldn’t make any antiwar or pro-Vietnam statements or say anything positive about the way prisoners were being treated. To my surprise, he said I would not be asked to make such statements.

I consulted Commander Bill Lawrence, the SRO of the Golden Nugget and “the Thunderbird,” another nearby building. He told me to go ahead. That night I was taken to a hotel to meet the delegation, which turned out to be one man, Dr. Fernando Barral, a Cuban propagandist masquerading as a psychiatrist and moonlighting as a journalist. He interviewed me for half an hour, asking rather innocuous questions about my life, the schools I had attended, and my family. When he asked me if I hoped to go home soon, I replied, “No. I think the war will last a long time, but the U.S. will eventually win.”

He then asked me if I felt remorse for bombing the Vietnamese. “No, I do not.” The interview was published in a Cuban publication, Gramma, and later broadcast over the Voice of Vietnam. In it my interviewer observed that I had the attributes of a psychopath, as I showed no remorse for my crimes against the peace-loving Vietnamese people. Near the end of the interview, Barral offered his professional opinion of my personality:

After I returned to my cell, I reported the interview to Bill Lawrence and to Commander Jeremiah Denton, the SRO of Little Vegas. Bill thought I had handled the situation appropriately, but something about it must have troubled Jerry. He made no comment immediately, but a little while later, he issued a new policy, that prisoners were to refuse all requests to meet with “visitors.” Given that our enemies made some use of every such exchange, Jerry’s order was certainly a sound one, even though it deprived me of further opportunities to demonstrate my “psychic equilibrium” to disapproving fraternal socialists, not to mention the extra cigarettes and coffee.

About a month later, both John Finley and I declined to meet with another peace delegation. That afternoon I was taken to a courtyard of the prison and ordered to sit on a stool for three days and nights. I was not beaten, although Bug checked in periodically to threaten me. After my punishment had ended, I was taken to the Cat’s office, where I was puzzled to hear him apologize for my three days on the stool. He claimed he had been absent from the camp when the punishment was ordered. “Sometimes,” he allowed, “my officers do the wrong thing.”

In April, John and I were moved to a cell in Thunderbird, and were delighted to receive news that the POWs in Little Vegas would be allowed out of their cells for a period each day to play pool and Ping-Pong on tables set up in an empty cell. Our new recreation period, besides being a welcome distraction from prison drudgery, provided an excellent opportunity to improve communications between different parts of the camp.

I was designated as the Thunderbird “mailman,” responsible for carrying notes to and from Stardust, where Jerry Denton was held. Air Force Major Sam Johnson, a great friend and an imaginative and always cheerful resister, was the mailman for Stardust. We hid encoded notes behind a wooden light switch in our new recreation room and thus managed to disseminate Jerry Denton’s policies to all the parts of the camp under his command.

In June, I was involuntarily relieved of my duties as mailman. I was caught trying to communicate with Dick Stratton, who was held at that time in a cell in “the Riviera,” next door to the pool room. I declined when ordered to confess my crime, and spent a night sitting on the stool.

The next day, I was taken to “Calcutta,” a filthy punishment room, six feet by three feet, with only a tiny louvered window for ventilation. I would be confined there for three months.

Prior to my arrival, Bill Lawrence had been languishing in Calcutta for weeks. He had been shot down four months before me, taken to Hoa Lo, and locked in a torture room, known only by its number, Room 18. There he suffered five days of beatings and rope torture. From his cell he could hear the screams of his backseater, Lieutenant j.g. Jim Bailey, who was being tortured in a nearby room.

Bill Lawrence was a natural leader. He had already had a remarkable Navy career. He had been brigade commander at the Naval Academy, a four-letter man, and president of the Class of 1951. After graduation, he was asked to remain at the Academy to rewrite the honor code. He was sent to test pilot school, where he graduated first in his class, and went on to fly the new F-4 Phantom. He had been one of the first members of his class, if not the first, to be selected early for lieutenant commander.

While commanding a squadron in Vietnam, Bill received word that Admiral Tom Moorer, the Chief of Naval Operations, wanted him to serve as his aide, the most prestigious assignment that a young officer could be offered. Bill asked that he be allowed to remain in Vietnam to finish his squadron command tour.

When I was moved to Little Vegas, many of our most senior officers were kept isolated from the rest of us. Bill was my immediate superior. He was a model commander, steady as a rock, always in control of his emotions, never excited, never despairing or self-consumed. Several guys in Vegas had been Bill’s classmates. Because he had been promoted early, he outranked them. Thus, Bill had to provide leadership not only to junior guys like me, but to his peers. He had to tell his classmates what to do. That is a challenging assignment, but I never heard a single man reject, dispute, or resent Bill’s commands. He was universally respected.

I used to tap him up on the wall for guidance all the time. I shared with Bill every question or concern I had. He had a way about him, very calm and reassuring, that put you at ease and inspired confidence in his judgment.

Some guys, burdened with despair, needed to be fired up. Bill would do it, convincing them that they were more than a match for their antagonists. Rambunctious and impatient, I needed a commander with quiet resolve who could help rein in my impulsiveness.

“Take it easy, John. Do the best you can, John. Resist as much as you can. Don’t let them break you completely,” Bill would caution me, gently warning me not to be so reckless that I plunged headlong into trouble. He was a remarkable commander.

Calcutta had space enough for only one prisoner. My dread of being confined in squalid, isolated Calcutta was alleviated a bit by the knowledge that my bad luck would liberate Bill. When I returned from Calcutta, considerably the worse for wear, Bill cheerfully thanked me for going to so much trouble to get him out.

I was a fairly skillful communicator, adept at tapping and better than average at recognizing and seizing unexpected opportunities for passing messages. I was not, I’m sorry to say, a very cautious one, and I often had reason to regret it. As was the case at the Plantation, the guards frequently apprehended me in the act.

Most of the punishments I received from 1969 on, some tolerable, others less so, were a result of my repeated indiscretions. Calcutta was one of the less tolerable punishments. I had been roughed up a few times, but not severely. Nor was the prospect of a few months’ solitary confinement particularly terrifying to me. I certainly didn’t welcome it, but I had survived worse before.

What made Calcutta so miserable was its location, at least fifty feet from the next occupied cell. It was impossible to communicate with anyone. Communicating was the indispensable key to resistance. Without that, it was hard to derive strength from others. Absent the counsel of fellow prisoners, I would begin to doubt my own judgment, whether I was resisting effectively and appropriately. If I was in communication only for a brief moment once a day, I would be okay. When I was deprived of any contact with my comrades, I was in serious trouble.

Calcutta was the first time since I had been released from the hospital that I was unable to communicate with anyone for an extended period of time. My isolation was awful, worse than the beatings I had been sentenced to for communicating. Compounding my misery was the cell’s poor ventilation, and I suffered severe heat prostration in the extreme warmth of a Vietnamese summer, one of the effects of which was a constant buzzing in my ears that nearly drove me crazy. I was seldom allowed to bathe or shave. The quality of my food rations worsened. I became ill with dysentery again, and started to lose weight.

During my confinement in Calcutta, I was periodically taken to an interrogation room for quizzes. Unlike the bad old days, quizzes were now comparatively benign events. We were seldom beaten for information. My Calcutta quizzes were usually pro forma attempts to persuade me to meet with delegations. Mindful of Jerry Denton’s order, I refused them.

On one occasion, an interrogator we called “Staff Officer” told me, “Everybody wants to see Mac Kane. They all ask about Mac Kane. You can see anybody you want.”

“Well, I hate to disappoint them,” I replied, “but I have to.”

I had become very accustomed to close contact with my fellow prisoners since I had been released from solitary confinement. My state of mind had become so dependent on communicating with them that I worried my spell in isolation would fill me with such despair that I might break again. Blessedly, my fears were unfounded.

I had been greatly strengthened by the company of the good men of Little Vegas, and my resolve was firmer than it had ever been. I was sustained by the knowledge that the others knew where I was and were concerned about me. I knew they were demanding my release. And, most important, I knew they would be proud of me when I returned if I successfully resisted this latest tribulation. This was especially comforting to me because I suffered still from the knowledge that I had usually been better treated by the Vietnamese than had most of my comrades.

I was finally released from Calcutta in September and moved with John Finley to a cell in the Riviera, two doors down from Air Force Colonel Larry Guarino, with whom we immediately established good communications. I also managed to cut a small hole in the louvers above our cell door. Standing on my upended waste bucket, I could talk to a great many prisoners from different parts of the camp who were, by this time, allowed outside for a few moments to exercise. In retaliation for my various offenses, I was denied this privilege and allowed outside only once a week to bathe.

In what had now become a routine occurrence, I was again caught communicating, and once more confined for a period in an interrogation room. There I encountered the only two prisoners of my acquaintance who had lost their faith completely. They had not only stopped resisting but apparently crossed a line no other prisoner I knew had even approached. They were collaborators, actively aiding the enemy.

I do not know what caused these men to forsake their country and their fellow prisoners. Maybe they had despaired of ever being released, fearing the war wouldn’t end before they were old men. They might have eventually fallen for routine Vietnamese denouncements of the “criminal American government,” and grown to resent their civilian commanders for leaving them in this godforsaken place. Maybe they bought the whole nine yards of Vietnamese propaganda, that the war was unjust, their leaders warmongers, and their country a craven, imperial force for evil. Or maybe they were that rarest breed of American prisoners in Vietnam, POWs who, in exchange for certain comforts and privileges, had surrendered their dignity voluntarily and agreed to be the camp rats.

Whatever the cause, it cannot excuse their shameful conduct. I cannot say I ever observed any trace of shame in them as they whiled away the months and years in their unique circumstances. Indeed, during the time I closely observed them, they seemed to thrive, apparently undisturbed by the contempt of the rest of us.

When I encountered them, they had been kept away from the other POWs for some time. The interrogation room I had been taken to was located close to their cells. To pass the time until I was returned to the Thunderbird, I would stand on my waste bucket and look out through the louvered window at the top of my cell door. From my vantage point I could watch the two spend what in Hoa Lo amounted to fairly pleasant days.

The guards would bring them eggs, bananas, and other delicacies to eat. They were on quite friendly terms with the guards, who spoke to them politely and seemed almost solicitous about their comfort. They spent most of every day in a small courtyard back of the washroom where bamboo mats had been erected to screen them from observation by the rest of us. But from my elevated position standing on top of my bucket, I could see over the mats, and I watched them as they sunned themselves, read their mail, and talked to each other, apparently entirely at ease.

I had a nearly devout belief in the restorative power of communicating, as my recurring detentions for violating the camp rule indicate. I assumed, wrongly in this instance, that any American who was in regular communication with his superiors and other prisoners would, by and large, adhere to the Code of Conduct. Even when broken, a man could recover his dignity if he was able to contact his friends for support. Certainly that had been my experience when, my defenses shattered, I had relied on Bob Craner to bring me back from the dead.

But my two new neighbors waged the first assault on my until-then unassailable regard for communications as the force that bound us together and gave us the courage and strength to resist.

One morning as I set my bowl outside my cell after finishing breakfast, the guard walked away from me for some reason without locking me back in and was briefly out of sight. For a moment, I was at liberty. I decided to make good use of the unexpected privilege to establish contact with the two men, who were in their usual place of recreation.

I hustled over to the courtyard and pulled down the bamboo mat. “Hey, guys, my name’s McCain. Who are you?”

I did not intend to chastise them for their disloyalty or even encourage them to start acting like officers and recover their dignity. I only hoped that I could briefly establish contact, and by taking that risk motivate them to try to keep in communication with me, reasoning that a few days’ contact with another prisoner might bring them back to their senses. I was wrong.

Startled by my greeting, they looked at me for a second as I grinned back at them, and then, to my intense disappointment, they began shouting “Bao cao” to summon the guard. I was stunned, and the few blows I received for my audacity from the annoyed turnkey were insignificant compared to the melancholy I felt after discovering that there were at least two men who were indifferent to my evangelical zeal for communicating.

The two men who had betrayed my concern by ratting me out to the guard remained segregated from the rest of us for the duration of the war. They never attempted, as far as I know, to atone for their disloyalty and regain their self-respect. When we were all released, the two were brought up on charges. The charges were dropped, but they were dismissed from the service. Their superiors, like the rest of the country, wanted to put the war and all its bitter memories behind them. I wasn’t disappointed in the decision. The two have to live with the memory of their treachery. I suspect that is punishment enough.

Not long after that discouraging experience, in early December, I was moved to another cell next door to my dear friend Bob Craner. A couple of weeks later, I was allowed outside half of each day. Prison life was improving, and it was about to get a whole lot better.

–– CHAPTER 24 –– Camp Unity

Christmas, 1970. The most welcome event of my imprisonment. I was transferred with a great many other prisoners to large rooms in an area we called “Camp Unity.” Camp Unity had seven cellblocks with, initially, thirty to forty prisoners held in each. Ultimately, after captured B-52 pilots and crewmen began to arrive and more prisoners from other camps were brought in, our total number would reach over 350.

In the center of each room was a concrete pedestal on which we all slept. A few of the badly injured POWs and our senior ranking officers were kept in different cells. The Vietnamese refused to recognize rank and never allowed our seniors to speak for us. This angered us greatly and worked to the disadvantage of our captors. Had they worked through our SROs, they would have found it a little easier to deal with us.

At Camp Unity I was reunited with many old friends, including Bob Craner and my first roommate, Bud Day. I was moved there when many of the toughest men in prison were moved into the camp. Jerry Denton, Jim Stockdale, Robbie Risner, Dick Stratton, George Coker, Jack Fellowes, John Dramesi, Bill Lawrence, Jim Kasler, Larry Guarino, Sam Johnson, Howie Dunn, George McKnight, Jerry Coffee, and Howie Rutledge, all legendary resisters, were relocated in Unity’s cellblocks. We were overjoyed to be in one another’s company, and a festival atmosphere prevailed.

If you have never been deprived of liberty in solitude, you cannot know what ineffable joy you experience in the open company of other human beings, free to talk and joke without fear. The strength you acquire in fraternity with others who share your fate is immeasurable.

That first night, when so many of us were unexpectedly allowed one another’s company, not a single man slept. We talked all night, and well into the next day. We talked about everything. What might this change in our fortunes mean? Were we going home soon? Had the Vietnamese some public relations reason for putting us together? Had they been embarrassed by some new disclosure of their abusive treatment of us? We talked about what we had endured at the hands of the enemy; about the escapes some men had attempted and the consequences they suffered as a result. We talked about news from home. We talked about our families, and the lives we hoped to return to soon.

No other experience in my life could ever replicate my first night in Camp Unity, and the feeling of relief that overcame me to be living among my friends. I have lived many happy years since, and am a blessed and contented man. But I will never experience again the supreme happiness I felt my fourth Christmas in Hanoi.

POWs who had been lately held at camps outside Hanoi had learned of a recent, nearly successful American rescue attempt at a camp twenty miles outside Hanoi called Son Tay. The attempt had scared the hell out of the Vietnamese, and they had begun to bring prisoners from all outlying camps into prisons in Hanoi. Many of the Son Tay prisoners had been moved into Camp Unity a couple of weeks before the rest of us were.

In Camp Unity our SROs ordered us to form into a cohesive military unit—the Fourth Allied POW Wing. The wing’s motto was “Return with Honor.” Colonel Flynn would soon end his long years of isolation when he was moved into a room with the other Air Force colonels and assumed command of the wing.

Each room served as a squadron, with the senior ranking officer in each room in command. Each squadron was broken into flights of about six men, each with a flight commander. We were organized to continue resisting. It was a lot easier to defy your enemy when you are surrounded by fellow resisters.

Among my closest friends was Orson Swindle, one of the Son Tay prisoners, a tough, good-natured Marine pilot from Georgia. In our first months in Unity, he lived in the room next to mine, and we first met by tapping through the wall that separated our rooms. Orson had been shot down near the DMZ on November 11, 1966. He had been beaten and rope-tortured repeatedly during the thirty-nine days it took his captors to reach Hanoi. From the beginning of his captivity, Orson had impressed the Vietnamese as a hard man to crack.

In August 1967, Orson was held at “the Desert Inn” with three other determined resisters, George McKnight, Wes Schierman, and Ron Storz. One night an enraged Vietnamese officer accompanied by several guards burst into their cell accusing the Americans of various infractions of camp regulations. They locked Ron Storz in leg stocks, roped his arms behind him, and stuffed a towel down his throat. When George McKnight screamed at them to stop, they did the same to him.

Orson and Wes were also put in the stocks and rope-tortured, but not gagged. When the guards began savagely beating McKnight and Storz, the two ungagged men screamed, “Torture!” The guards turned to Orson and Wes and began beating them, trying to force gags into their mouths. Twisting their heads to avoid the gags, the two kept shouting, “Torture, torture,” until all the prisoners in Little Vegas began screaming with them.

The beatings continued mercilessly until the men were an unrecognizable bloody mess. McKnight had nearly suffocated to death before his gag was removed. Eventually the four were led through a crowd of cursing, spitting, striking Vietnamese to separate stalls in the washroom. There they were beaten all night long.

The next morning, shortly after several American planes had flown over the city, the guards rushed at Orson, kicking him repeatedly in retaliation for the appearance of American airpower. The four spent the rest of the day in separate interrogation rooms, enduring long hours of continued torture until they were all forced to make a confession.

Later that day, Orson, George, and Wes were transferred to a prison they called “Dirty Bird,” for its exceptionally filthy conditions, and kept, shackled, in solitary confinement. The prison was nothing more than a single building. The Vietnamese had decided to convert it into a jail because of its advantageous location. It was adjacent to an important target for American bombers, and the Vietnamese hoped that the presence of American prisoners in the vicinity would dissuade American military commanders from ordering any air strikes on it. The target was a thermal power plant—the target I had attempted to bomb in my last moment of freedom. Orson would joke later that “as scared as I was when they bombed the power plant, I would have really been scared had I known John was on the way, knowing he’d hit everything around the target except the power plant itself.”

McKnight, along with another inmate, George Coker, eventually managed to free themselves from their leg irons and make a daring escape from Dirty Bird. They were recaptured the next day.

Ron Storz had not been taken with his cellmates to Dirty Bird. After they tortured him to the point of submission, the Vietnamese intended to use Ron to inform on his SRO, Jim Stockdale. Attempting to kill himself, Ron used an ink pen to cut his wrists and chest. He was eventually taken to a place its inhabitants called “Alcatraz,” located behind the defense ministry a short distance from Hoa Lo. He was one of eleven men kept there, among them several high-ranking Americans including Jim Stockdale and Jerry Denton, and McKnight and Coker, who had been taken there after their failed escape.

The Alcatraz Eleven had distinguished themselves as die-hard resisters. Their new prison, situated across the courtyard from an open cesspool, reflected their distinction as special cases. The cells were tomblike, windowless, and measuring four feet across. They were locked in leg irons at night.

Ten of the men kept there, most of them for over two years, would remember the place as the worst of many difficult experiences. The eleventh, Ron Storz, would never leave Alcatraz. He had been physically and mentally abused for so long that he had lost either the will or the ability to eat, and had slowly wasted away. The Vietnamese kept Ron behind when they released the others from Alcatraz, claiming he was too sick to move. He died there, alone.

Orson had been spared the deprivations of Alcatraz. He had been taken from Dirty Bird to Little Vegas shortly after we bombed the power plant. In November 1968, he was transferred to the prison at Son Tay, where his captors ordered him to write approvingly to prominent American politicians who opposed the war. He refused.

His steadfastness earned Orson a trip to the punishment room, where he was seated on a low stool and locked in leg irons. The guards were ordered to prevent him from sleeping. Whenever he nodded off, a guard slapped him awake. After several days and nights, Orson began to suffer from hallucinations. Still he would not write. During one particularly vivid hallucination, Orson became violent. After subduing him, the guards relented and let him sleep. He was given food and allowed to rest for three days.

On the third day, he was again ordered to write. Refusing, he was subjected to further mistreatment. Chained to his stool and denied sleep for another ten days and nights, he finally relented.

After Orson’s ordeal, another prisoner who had refused to write was given the same punishment. He broke after a day. The guards told him, “You’re not like Swindle.”

Although I did not meet Orson Swindle until I was moved into Unity, I, like most other prisoners, had heard of him. His reputation for being as stouthearted as they come was a camp legend by the time I met him.

As a resistance leader, Jim Stockdale had few peers. He was a constant inspiration to the men under his command. Many of his captors hated him for his fierce and unyielding spirit. The Rabbit hated him the most. One day, the Rabbit ordered Jim cleaned up so that he could be filmed for a propaganda movie in which he would play a visiting American businessman. He was given a razor to shave. Jim used it to hack off his hair, severely cutting his scalp in the process and spoiling his appearance, in the hope that this would render him unsuitable for his enemies’ purpose. But the Rabbit was not so easily dissuaded. He left to find a hat to place on Jim’s bleeding head. In the intervening moments, Jim picked up a wooden stool and repeatedly bashed his face with it. Disfigured, Jim succeeded in frustrating the Rabbit’s plans for him that evening.

On a later occasion, after being whipped and tied in ropes at the hands of the demented Bug, Jim was forced to confess that he had defied camp regulations. But Bug was not through with him. He informed Jim that he would be back tomorrow to torture him for more information. Jim feared he would be forced to give up the names of the men he had been communicating with. In an effort to impress his enemies with his determination not to betray his comrades, he broke a window and slashed his wrist with a shard of glass. For his extraordinary heroism, Jim Stockdale received the Medal of Honor when he returned home, a decoration he had earned a dozen times over.

Robbie Risner was another of my Camp Unity cellmates whose reputation preceded him. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Robinson Risner commanded a squadron in Vietnam. He had also been a much-decorated pilot in the Korean War. Early in 1965, Time magazine had featured the air ace on its cover, praising Robbie as one of America’s greatest combat pilots.

Several months later, on September 16, 1965, Robbie was shot down ninety miles south of Hanoi. When he arrived at Hoa Lo two days later, he was taken to an interrogation room. There the Rabbit, seated at a table with a copy of the aforementioned issue of Time in full view, greeted him: “Ah, Colonel Risner, we’ve been waiting for you.”

I can only imagine the sinking feeling Robbie must have had as he discovered the Vietnamese were regular readers of American periodicals. Nevertheless, from the first moment of his imprisonment to the last, Robbie Risner was an exemplary senior officer, an inveterate communicator, an inspiration to the men he commanded, and a source of considerable annoyance to his captors. Among the longest-held prisoners, he suffered the appalling mistreatment regularly inflicted on POWs during the brutal early years of imprisonment. Throughout his trials, he gave the Vietnamese good cause to appreciate the physical courage and strength of character that had landed him on the cover of Time.

In my first cellblock in Unity, Building Number 7, I lived with many of the more senior prisoners. Air Force Colonel Vernon Ligon was the senior ranking officer. Robbie Risner, Jim Stockdale, and Jerry Denton were his deputies. Near the end of 1971, I would be moved into another cellblock, Number 2, with Orson. Bud Day, the ranking officer in Number 3, assumed command of our squadron.

Until we were all moved into Unity, I had not had the pleasure of Bud’s company since we had parted at the Plantation three years earlier. Bud had been held at Hoa Lo while I was living in Little Vegas, but out of reach of my communication chain. For most of the years preceding our reunion, Bud had suffered awful conditions and monstrous cruelty at the Zoo, where mass torture was a routine practice. For a time, the camp personnel at the Zoo included an English-speaking Cuban, called “Fidel” by the POWs, who delighted in breaking Americans, even when the task required him to torture his victim to death.

Bud was the third-ranking officer at the Zoo, after Larry Guarino and Navy Commander Wendell Rivers. When Larry and Wendy were moved to Vegas, Bud became the SRO. To the poor souls who shared the misfortune of being imprisoned in the Zoo, Bud was as great an inspiration as he had been to me during our few months together.

I doubt I will ever meet a tougher man than Bud Day. After the Dramesi-Atterbury escape, treatment worsened in all the camps, but it reached an astonishing level of depravity in the camp they had escaped from—the Zoo. Men were taken in large groups to various torture rooms where they were beaten, roped, stomped on, and struck with bamboo clubs. Their wrists and ankles were shackled in irons. Few were gagged. The Vietnamese wanted the others to hear the screams of the tortured. This new terror campaign was intended to destroy any semblance of prisoner resistance. It lasted for months.

The Vietnamese introduced a new torment to their punishment regime—flogging with fan belts. Prisoners were stripped and forced to lie facedown on the floor. Guards would take turns whipping them with fan belts, which unlike ropes and cords would only raise welts on the sufferer’s back and not tear his flesh. They would not relent until their victim had mumbled his assent to whatever statement their torturers demanded he make. The senior officers were spared this treatment for some time. The Vietnamese wanted them to witness the suffering of their subordinates before turning the full brunt of their malevolence on them.

Guarino was the first senior to be taken. He was rope-tortured, sleep-deprived, clubbed, and whipped for weeks, until at long last he broke and gave the Vietnamese an acceptable confession.

Bud was next. His arms were still useless from the rope torture he had experienced after his capture. This time they would flog him nearly to death before he relented. They made him confess to knowledge of elaborate escape planning in the camp, planning that John or Ed would have been grateful for had it truly existed. The Vietnamese wanted names. Bud would only give them his. They flogged him some more until to his great sorrow he gave them two more names. When they stopped, he took it back, claiming that the men he named were innocent, as indeed they were.

They resumed the torture, demanding that Bud inform on another prisoner, Wendy Rivers. Bud refused, and was whipped again. After six weeks his ordeal finally ended.

Nothing that happened to me during my time in prison approximated the suffering that these men, who had steeled themselves with an unyielding devotion to duty, survived. That they had survived was itself an act of heroism. I had experienced a few rough moments, and, out of spite for my enemies as much as from my sense of duty, I had tried to fight back. But these men, and the many other prisoners whose heroism made them legends, humbled me, as they humble me today whenever I recall what they did for their country and for those of us who were once privileged to witness their courage.

–– CHAPTER 25 –– Skid Row

In February 1971, we began a dispute with the Vietnamese over their refusal to allow us to conduct religious services in a manner we thought fitting. The Church Riot began when the camp edict against POWs gathering in groups larger than six and against one man addressing large groups was used to forbid us to hold services. Our SRO ordered us to challenge the prohibition. On Sunday, February 7, we held a church service. We had informed our warden, Bug, of our intentions. George Coker began the service, and Rutledge gave the opening prayer. Robbie Risner read the closing prayer. A four-man choir sang hymns.

Soon Bug arrived and yelled at us to stop. He ordered the choir to cease singing. He was ignored, and the service continued. In a rage, Bug had the guards haul Risner, Coker, and Rutledge out into the courtyard. As they were led out, Bud Day started singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and soon every man in every cellblock joined in. When we finished the anthem, we started on a succession of patriotic tunes. The whole prison reverberated with our singing, and the wild applause that erupted at the end of every number. It was a glorious moment.

Finally, the Vietnamese managed to disrupt our fun when they marched in en masse, arrayed in full riot gear, and broke up the party.

Risner, Rutledge, and Coker were taken to a punishment cell in the part of the Hilton we called “Heartbreak Hotel.” Our SRO, Vernon Ligon, warned Bug that we would hold church services next Sunday, and every Sunday after that.

Bud Day, Jim Kasler, and I were among a number of POWs ordered out of the room to be interrogated and harangued by camp authorities for our criminal behavior. We were taken out separately, and the expression on the guards’ faces as they escorted us at bayonet point indicated the seriousness of the situation.

A number of senior Vietnamese officers from various camps were standing together in the courtyard, officers who had been responsible for the brutality we had endured in the bad old days. But they were no longer permitted to use torture as a first resort to coerce our submission, and they appeared anxious and uncertain about how to cope with our new assertiveness.

When we were returned to our room, Bud, Bill Lawrence, and I discussed our captors’ predicament, and how at odds they all seemed. We were emboldened by their confusion. The guards placed ladders against our building and stood on the rungs to peer into our window and scribble notes about our behavior. Their notes were used by the camp officers to determine which POWs should be moved to other cells and camps. The quality of the food declined from bad to awful. Jerry Denton ordered us to begin a hunger strike until our grievances were settled and Risner, Rutledge, and Coker were returned to us.

One evening, a few nights after the riot, one of the two collaborators at Hoa Lo who had ratted on me for trying to talk to them read a poem over the camp loudspeakers that he had written about the riot. The poem was titled “Cowards Sing at Night.” It scorned us for raising our voices in protest to sing the national anthem.

By this time, the poem’s author did not have any friends in camp besides the Vietnamese and his fellow collaborator. Most of us pitied him more than we hated him. That night, however, after he finished his poetry reading, there were any number of prisoners who would have killed him had they had the opportunity to do so.

At week’s end, Soft Soap Fairy announced that it had always been the policy of camp authorities to permit religious expression. Therefore, we would be allowed to hold brief religious services as long as we didn’t abuse their tolerance to further our “black schemes.”

As part of Vietnamese efforts to convince the world that we were being well treated, they had recently stopped using letter-writing privileges as a tool to force our cooperation and begun encouraging us to write home often. It occurred to me that this change in prison policy offered an excellent opportunity to take advantage of our enemy’s eagerness to improve their public image. I thought it fitting to use a privilege that had often been denied us to suit Hanoi’s war ends as a means to suit our own.

I proposed to our senior officers that we begin a letter-writing moratorium until our treatment and conditions were improved. If men were physically abused for refusing to write home, I suggested we write honestly about our mistreatment. I was confident the Vietnamese would never let such letters reach our worried families.

After some discussion our senior officers agreed, but, wisely, made the no-letter policy voluntary. Some men had not communicated with their families for years and were understandably anxious to let their families know they were all right. By summer, however, nearly everyone was refusing to write home.

On the evening of March 17, less than three months after we had begun living in large groups, Bud Day, Orson Swindle, and I were taken from our rooms. Along with twenty-four others, several men from each room in Camp Unity, we were blindfolded, loaded into trucks, and driven to a punishment camp ten miles outside Hanoi, a place we called “Skid Row.”

During the trip, some of the prisoners tried to fix the location of our destination. It was a common practice for POWs to keep a mental record of directions and distance when we were being relocated. One man was designated to control the vectors by memorizing each turn of the truck in sequence while another silently counted the time that elapsed between turns.

The exercise required extraordinary concentration, but usually yielded a remarkably accurate estimate of our location. It was not something that I was very good at it, however, and so I never seriously attempted to join in the exercise. Wherever we were heading, we would still be prisoners of war in North Vietnam when we arrived there. While I was as curious as the next guy about our destination, I knew that those basic facts of our existence would not be affected by a change of scenery. So that night I bounced along in the back of the truck, blindfolded and tied in ropes, silently cursing my bad luck, while my friends concentrated on their labors.

We had been singled out for our bad attitude, which I somewhat regretted, for it had cost me the open society of Camp Unity. But punishment wasn’t the only purpose of our exile from Camp Unity. The Vietnamese had decided to round up all the troublemakers whose influence with the other prisoners made it difficult to maintain order and discipline in the new living arrangements at Hoa Lo. Thus, though we were not happy about our relocation, we all took a certain pride in our distinction as the camp’s hard cases. The POWs who remained at Camp Unity called us the “Hell’s Angels.”

We were kept in solitary confinement in small cells, six by four feet, each with a narrow wooden bunk. The cells had no ventilation and were without lights or bathing facilities. The camp had a stinking well with human waste floating in its dank water. My morale sank.

Bud Day remained our SRO. He was kept in one of the cells in the back of the building, while I occupied one in the front. Miserable, we took to insulting and arguing with our guards. Bud ordered us to knock it off, believing that beatings were unlikely to improve our wretched circumstances. His order was occasionally disobeyed, as our anger undermined our discipline. Frustrated, Bud kept insisting that while we should not accept mistreatment without complaint, we should also refrain from unnecessarily provoking the guards.

Bud himself had been beaten and threatened with a fan belt a few weeks after our arrival at Skid Row, and had for a few days been locked on his bunk in stocks. He wanted to spare the rest of us such abuse if it could be avoided without compromising our principles. Overall, when we left the guards alone, they left us alone, satisfied that leaving us to suffer in such squalor was adequate punishment for our crimes. But Bud had a hard time keeping control over several of us. I regret that I occasionally added to my dear friend’s burden. My temper, worsened by my return to solitary confinement in this dismal camp, occasionally got the better of me.

A small space separated the cells in the front of the building from a brick wall. The upper part of each cell door was barred, but otherwise uncovered. Wooden shutters that could have been used to cover the bars were kept open for those of us in the front, while the windows in the back cell were usually kept closed. The Vietnamese routinely tried to undermine our solidarity by according some prisoners a privilege of open shutters while denying it to others. I was pleased to receive this particular privilege, as it mitigated the effect solitary confinement had on my morale.

During our first days in Skid Row, we communicated freely with each other through our barred windows, talking constantly and loudly, our voices bouncing off the wall in front of us. Initially the guards didn’t seem to mind our ceaseless chattering. Occasionally they warned us not to talk so loudly, but they made no other objection to our conversations.

After a week or so, senior prison authorities must have reminded our guards that Skid Row was meant to be a punishment camp for recalcitrant prisoners and instructed them not to show any leniency to us. One morning, as soon as we resumed our conversations of the previous day, the guards appeared, shouting, “No talking. No talking.”

“Bullshit,” I yelled back. “I’m going to talk.” Too accustomed now to unconstrained conversation, and still angry over our expulsion from Unity, I was in no mood to be silenced.

“No talking, Mac Kane!”

“Bullshit. I’m going to talk. You bastards kept me in solitary for years. You’re not going to shut me up now.”

One of the guards, intending to terminate any further protest on my part, slammed and locked the wooden shutter over the bars of my door, leaving me fuming in my darkened cell.

Refusing to back down, my anger now completely beyond control, I screamed at the guards, “Bao cao, bao cao. Open it up. Bao cao, bao cao. Open it up, you bastards, open it up.” The guards scurried off to find an officer. When they located one, they led him back to my cell and opened up the shutter, finding me red-faced and glaring at them through the bars.

“What’s wrong with you, Mac Kane?” the officer inquired.

“I’m not putting up with this shit anymore. That’s what’s wrong with me,” I answered. “I want to talk, and you’re not going to shut me up.”

The officer left without responding to my declaration, the guards hurrying after him. Ten minutes later, the guards returned and instructed me to roll up my sleeping mat and other belongings. I did as instructed. They escorted me from my cell and chucked me into the cell next door, which was occupied by Navy Lieutenant Pete Schoeffel.

This new arrangement suited me fine, and I quickly cooled off. But I doubt Pete welcomed the idea of sharing quarters as much as I did. The cells were hardly suited to cohabitation, measuring little larger than a cardboard box. Two men could barely stand shoulder to shoulder. Nevertheless, Pete took it all in good humor, graciously giving me leave to sleep in his bunk because of my bad leg, while he found what little comfort he could on the concrete floor.

In August, monsoon rains threatened to flood the Red River and Skid Row, and we were transferred back to Hoa Lo. For a brief moment we held out hope that we were being returned to Camp Unity.

Our hope was crushed when were marched into Heartbreak Hotel, where we were kept four and five to a room. The rooms were small and the conditions miserable. Many of the men became ill; a few were suffering from hepatitis. Tempers were frayed, and morale sank even lower. A couple of months later we were taken back to Skid Row, which, given the awful conditions at Heartbreak, was almost a relief. While conditions remained miserable, the Vietnamese lightened up on the discipline, and we were allowed to talk among ourselves without fear of further punishment.

We were released from Skid Row in three groups. Bud, Orson, and I, our bad attitudes uncorrected by our time in exile, were in the last group to leave. In November 1971, we were finally reunited with our friends at Camp Unity and put into a cellblock together, our morale restored.

–– CHAPTER 26 –– Pledge of Allegiance

During the last fourteen months at Camp Unity, I served as entertainment officer, appointed to the post by Bud Day. In this capacity I was ably assisted by a number of my roommates, most notably Orson Swindle and Air Force Captains Jim Sehorn and Warren Lilly. We enjoyed the work.

Bud designated me room chaplain, an office I took quite seriously even though I lacked any formal training for it. Orson and I also served as the communication officers for the room, charged with maintaining regular contact with the other rooms in Unity. We both had plenty of experience for the work, and despite my reputation for recklessness, I prided myself on the job we did.

We never let a holiday or a birthday pass without arranging a small, crude, but welcome celebration. Gifts fashioned out of odd scraps of material and our few meager possessions were bestowed on every prisoner celebrating a birthday. A skit, always ribald and ridiculous, was performed to commemorate the occasion by embarrassing the celebrant. Marine Corps, Navy, and Air Force anniversaries were also formally observed.

Both an avid reader and a movie fan, I took great pride in narrating movies and books from memory. With a captive audience, I would draw out the telling of a novel, embellishing here and there to add length and excitement, for hours before I lost the audience’s interest. Among the texts both the audience and I enjoyed most were works of Kipling, Maugham, and Hemingway.

Our most popular entertainments, however, were our productions of Sunday, Wednesday, and Saturday Nights at the Movies. I told over a hundred movies in prison, some of them many times over. I tried to recall every movie I had ever seen from Stalag 17 to One-Eyed Jacks (a camp favorite). Often running short of popular fare, I would make up movies I had never seen. Pilots shot down during air raids in 1972 were a valuable resource for me. They had seen movies that I had not. Desperate for new material, I would pester them almost as soon as they arrived and before they had adjusted to their new circumstances. “What movies have you seen lately? Tell me about them.” On first acquaintance, they probably thought prison life had seriously affected my mind. But they would give me a few details, and from that I would concoct another movie for Saturday night. Movies had become a lot more risqué in the five years I had been away. I narrated a few of these as well, and my audience was all the more attentive.

My performance was usually well received, although on occasion some of the men’s interest flagged when watching a repeat performance for the fourth or fifth time. However, I always enjoyed the undivided attention of one inveterate movie fan.

Air Force Major Konrad Trautman, a reserved, precise son of German immigrants, never missed a performance. He would take his seat early and wait patiently for the movie to begin. With a pipe filled with cigarette tobacco clenched tightly between his teeth, he sat impassively, never making a sound. He listened intently to every word I uttered. No matter how many times he had seen a movie or how crude the production, Konrad never betrayed the least hint of disappointment. Fans like that are hard to come by for even the most celebrated actor, and I always took great encouragement from Konrad’s evident appreciation of my qualities as a thespian.

During the Christmas season we performed a different skit and sang carols in our crudely decorated room every night for the five nights before Christmas. A longer production was saved for Christmas night. Orson Swindle and I, with a few other guys, staged a mangled production of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. We livened up the venerable tale with parody, most of it vulgar, to the great amusement of our howling audience. Jack Fellowes played Tiny Tim, attired in nothing but a makeshift diaper. Another, not known for his particularly feminine appearance, was chosen to play Bob Cratchit’s wife.

A week before, Bud had asked Bug for an English-language Bible. Bug initially dismissed the request with a lie, claiming that there were no Bibles in North Vietnam. A few days later, perhaps remembering that his interference with the practice of our religion had resulted in the Church Riot earlier that year, Bug announced that a Bible, “the only one in Hanoi,” had been located. One prisoner was to be designated to copy passages from it for a few minutes.

As room chaplain, I was given the assignment. I collected the Bible from where it had been left by a guard, on a table in the courtyard just outside our cell door. Hastily, I leafed through its tattered pages until I found an account of the Nativity. I quickly copied the passage, and finished just moments before a guard arrived to retrieve the Bible.

On Christmas night we held our simple, moving service. We began with the Lord’s Prayer, after which a choir sang carols, directed by the former conductor of the Air Force Academy Choir, Captain Quincy Collins. I thought they were quite good, excellent, in fact. Although I confess that the regularity with which they practiced in the weeks prior to Christmas occasionally grated on my nerves.

But that night, the hymns were rendered with more feeling and were more inspirational than the offerings of the world’s most celebrated choirs. We all joined in the singing, nervous and furtive at first, fearing the guards would disrupt the service if we sang too loudly. With each hymn, however, we grew bolder, and our voices rose with emotion.

Between each hymn, I read a portion of the story of Christ’s birth from the pages I had copied.

“‘And the Angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day, in the city of David, a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.’”

The night air was cold, and we shivered from its effect and from the fever that still plagued some of us. The sickest among us, unable to stand, sat on the raised concrete sleeping platform in the middle of the room, blankets around their shaking shoulders. Many others, stooped by years of torture, or crippled from injuries sustained during their shootdown, stood, some on makeshift crutches, as the service proceeded.

The lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling illuminated our gaunt, unshaven, dirty, and generally wretched congregation. But for a moment we all had the absolutely exquisite feeling that our burdens had been lifted. Some of us had attended Christmas services in prison before. But they had been Vietnamese productions, spiritless, ludicrous stage shows. This was our service, the only one we had ever been allowed to hold. It was more sacred to me than any service I had attended in the past, or any service I have attended since.

We gave prayers of thanks for the Christ child, for our families and homes, for our country. We half expected the guards to barge in and force us to conclude the service. Every now and then we glanced up at the windows to see if they were watching us as they had during the Church Riot. But when I looked up at the bars that evening, I wished they had been looking in. I wanted them to see us—faithful, joyful, and triumphant.

The last hymn sung was “Silent Night.” Many of us wept.

We held a Christmas dinner after the service. We had arranged our room to resemble a “dining-in,” a much-loved military ritual, in which officers, attired in their best uniforms, sit at table according to rank, to dine and drink in elaborate formality. Lacking most of the necessary accouterments, we nevertheless made quite an evening of it. The senior officers sat at the head of the table, while numerous speeches and toasts to family, service, and country were honored. All of us were proud to have the opportunity to dine again, even in our less than elegant surroundings, like officers and gentlemen.

After dinner we exchanged gifts. One man had used his cotton washcloth and a needle and thread he had scrounged somewhere to fashion a hat for Bud. Other men exchanged dog tags. Most of us exchanged chits for Christmas gifts we wished each other to have. We all gave one man who had been losing at poker lately an IOU for another $250 in imaginary chips.

Back from Skid Row that Christmas, we were overjoyed to entertain ourselves again in the company of men who had managed through all those years to retain their humanity though our enemies had tried to turn us into animals. From then on, with brief exceptions, our existence in Hanoi was as tolerable as could be expected when you are deprived of your liberty.

The Vietnamese had given us several decks of cards, and we played a lot of bridge and poker. My luck at the table usually ran bad, to the endless amusement of Orson, who liked to taunt me for what he considered my unskilled approach to the games. Almost every Sunday afternoon, we held a bridge tournament that included six tables of players.

We had more profitable uses for our time as well, which made our days pass just as quickly as did our reproductions of various popular entertainments. An education officer was designated and classes were taught in almost every imaginable subject, all the POWs called on to share their particular field of learning. Language classes were popular and to this day I can read more than a few words in several languages. The guards frequently confiscated our notes, however, an impediment that greatly complicated our grasp of foreign languages. Other subjects ranged from quantum physics to meat-cutting.

Lectures were held on the four nights when we were not required to stage a movie reproduction. Orson and I taught classes in literature and history, and I took as much pride in my history lectures as I did in my movie performances, calling our tutorial “The History of the World from the Beginning.”

Our classes and amateur theatrics made time, the one thing we had in abundance, pass relatively pleasantly and helped temper the small conflicts that inevitably arise when men are confined together in close quarters. No matter how irritated we occasionally felt over slight grievances with one another, nothing could ever seriously detract from the pleasure we took from our own company in the last full year of our captivity.

Our situation improved even more in April 1972, when President Nixon resumed the bombing of North Vietnam and, on my father’s orders, the first bombs since March 1968 began falling on Hanoi. Operation Linebacker, as the campaign was called, brought B-52s, with their huge payload of bombs, into the war, although they were not used in attacks on Hanoi.

The misery we had endured prior to 1972 was made all the worse by our fear that the United States was unprepared to do what was necessary to bring the war to a reasonably swift conclusion. We could never see over the horizon to the day when the war would end. Whether you supported the war or opposed it—and I met few POWs who argued the latter position—no one believed the war should be prosecuted in the manner in which the Johnson administration had fought it.

No one who goes to war believes once he is there that it is worth the terrible cost of war to fight it by half measures. War is too horrible a thing to drag out unnecessarily. It was a shameful waste to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere through awful afflictions and heartache, for a cause that half the country didn’t believe in and our leaders weren’t committed to winning. They committed us to it, badly misjudged the enemy’s resolve, and left us to manage the thing on our own without authority to fight it to the extent necessary to finish it.

It’s not hard to understand now that, given the prevailing political judgments of the time, the Vietnam War was better left unfought. No other national endeavor requires as much unshakable resolve as war. If the government and the nation lack that resolve, it is criminal to expect men in the field to carry it alone. We were accountable to the country, and no one was accountable to us. But we found our honor in our answer, if not our summons.

Every POW knew that the harder the war was fought the sooner we would go home. Long aware of the on-and-off peace negotiations in Paris, we were elated when the Nixon administration proved it was intent on forcing the negotiations to a conclusion that would restore our freedom.

As the bombing campaign intensified, our morale soared with every sortie. It was after one raid, and our raucous celebration of its effect, that the guards dragged Mike Christian from our room.

Mike was a Navy bombardier-navigator who had been shot down in 1967, about six months before I arrived. He had grown up near Selma, Alabama. His family was poor. He had not worn shoes until he was thirteen years old. Character was their wealth. They were good, righteous people, and they raised Mike to be hardworking and loyal. He was seventeen when he enlisted in the Navy. As a young sailor, he showed promise as a leader and impressed his superiors enough to be offered a commission.

What packages we were allowed to receive from our families often contained handkerchiefs, scarves, and other clothing items. For some time, Mike had been taking little scraps of red and white cloth, and with a needle he had fashioned from a piece of bamboo he laboriously sewed an American flag onto the inside of his blue prisoner’s shirt. Every afternoon, before we ate our soup, we would hang Mike’s flag on the wall of our cell and together recite the Pledge of Allegiance. No other event of the day had as much meaning to us.

The guards discovered Mike’s flag one afternoon during a routine inspection and confiscated it. They returned that evening and took Mike outside. For our benefit as much as Mike’s, they beat him severely, just outside our cell, puncturing his eardrum and breaking several of his ribs. When they had finished, they dragged him bleeding and nearly senseless back into our cell, and we helped him crawl to his place on the sleeping platform. After things quieted down, we all lay down to go to sleep. Before drifting off, I happened to look toward a corner of the room, where one of the four naked lightbulbs that were always illuminated in our cell cast a dim light on Mike Christian. He had crawled there quietly when he thought the rest of us were sleeping. With his eyes nearly swollen shut from the beating, he had quietly picked up his needle and thread and begun sewing a new flag.

I witnessed many acts of heroism in prison, but none braver than that. As I watched him, I felt a surge of pride at serving with him, and an equal measure of humility for lacking that extra ration of courage that distinguished Mike Christian from other men.

–– CHAPTER 27 –– Release

The bombing of North Vietnam was halted in October when peace talks resumed in Paris. By December, it was clear that the talks had stalled because of North Vietnamese intransigence. On December 18, at around nine o’clock in the evening, it was renewed with a vengeance as Operation Linebacker II commenced and the unmistakable destructive power of B-52s rained down on Hanoi.

Despite our proximity to the targets, we were jubilant. We hollered in near euphoria as the ground beneath us shook with the force of the blasts, exulting in our guards’ fear as they scurried for shelter. We clapped each other on the back and joked about packing our bags for home. We shouted “Thank you!” at the night sky.

No prisoner betrayed the slightest concern that we were in any danger. I didn’t hear anyone say, “We might be hit.” We just cheered the assault on and watched the show. Once in a while a guard came by and yelled at us to shut up, to which we responded by cheering even louder.

When a Vietnamese SAM hit a B-52, as, regrettably, happened on several occasions, the explosion and burning fuel would illuminate the whole sky, from horizon to horizon, a bright pink-and-orange glow. In this unnatural light, we could see the Vietnamese gasping at the strange sight and tearing around the camp in a panic.

Some of the gun guards had responded to the shriek of the air raid sirens by manning their defense stations slowly, joking and laughing with each other, apparently indifferent to the coming assault. They probably believed it to be only a drill. Now they were racing around trying to figure out how to defend themselves from this unexpected, massive bombardment. Terrified, some of them fired their rifles into the sky at targets that were miles above them.

For many of our guards this was their first taste of modern warfare, and their confidence in the superiority of their defenses was visibly shaken. Many of them cowered in the shadows of our cellblocks, believing, correctly, that the B-52 pilots knew where Americans were held in Hanoi and were trying to avoid dropping their bombs near us.

It was quite a spectacular show. Antiaircraft guns booming, bombs exploding, fires raging all over the city. It is sinful to take pleasure in the suffering of others, even your enemies, and B-52s can deliver a lot of suffering. But the Vietnamese had never before experienced the full extent of American airpower. They believed that the airpower they had previously witnessed was all we were capable of delivering, and that their formidable air defenses were more than a match for it. Now they stood in awe and terror of the real thing, the full measure of conventional American power.

Before the B-52 raids, the Vietnamese had always stepped up the pressure on us whenever the United States escalated the air campaign. They knocked us around a little more often and a little more enthusiastically, just to make the point that they were still confident of victory. In the aftermath of the B-52 raids, some of the guards who had treated us the most contemptuously became almost civil when speaking to us. Some of them even began to smile at us, almost comically. It was impossible for us not to feel pride and relief as we watched people who had badly mistreated us recognize, at long last, how powerful an enemy we represented.

The first raid lasted until four-thirty in the morning. As the raids continued over the following nights, we could see that the Vietnamese air defenses were diminishing. They had few missiles left to fire, and the antiaircraft guns fell silent. Bridges were destroyed, arsenals blown up, the city’s defense infrastructure devastated. They were being beaten, and they knew it.

The day after the first bombing raid, one of the officers burst into our room and screamed hysterically, “We are not afraid! We are not afraid!” He added that the Vietnamese were certain to win the war, thereby convincing us that, for the moment at least, he thought they were losing. After the last raid, an officer entered our cell smiling broadly as he informed us that they had destroyed all the B-52s. I was standing with Bud Day and Jack Fellowes when we received this distressing news. Bud looked at the officer for a moment, then laughed and said, “Bullshit.”

In the bad old days, Bud would have been dragged out of there and tied in ropes for such defiance. Now all the officer was disposed to do was argue with Bud. “Look, no more bombs. We destroyed all your bombers.”

I’ve often thought that the more perceptive Vietnamese must have realized, as we did, that the raids would shorten the war, and though they were distressed by the ferocity of the attacks, they might have regarded them as a harbinger of peace.

During one raid that did not involve B-52s, a bomb fell so close to us that shrapnel sprayed the camp courtyard. Our momentary apprehension that the pilot’s targeting was not so accurate that our safety was guaranteed did not dampen our high spirits. We took what shelter we could, of course, just in case. But we greeted the low distant grumble of every approaching sortie like a long-lost friend.

We knew that the peace talks were entering their last phase. With the encouragement of the B-52s, we were confident they would be concluded in short order. We all believed, for the first time, that this would be our last Christmas in prison, and we were drunk with the thought of going home.

The B-52s terrorized Hanoi for eleven nights. Wave after wave they came. During the days, while the strategic bombers were refueled and rearmed, other aircraft took up the assault. The Vietnamese got the point. The Paris peace talks resumed on January 8, 1973, and were swiftly concluded. The accords were signed on the 27th, but we were not informed of the event until the next day, when we were ordered to form in the courtyard for an important announcement.

As a Vietnamese officer read the full text of the peace agreement, including the part that provided for the release of prisoners of war, we stood silently at attention. Our senior officers, knowing that this moment was imminent, had warned us not to demonstrate our emotions when the agreement was announced. They suspected that the Vietnamese intended to record the event for its propaganda value and broadcast pictures of jubilant POWs celebrating peace to a worldwide audience.

They were right. Film crews were on hand for the ceremony, with their cameras rolling. Not a single POW betrayed the slightest emotion as the accords were read and we were informed we would all be released in two months. When the ceremony concluded we broke ranks and walked quietly back to our cells, seemingly indifferent to the news we had just received. Back in our cells, we waited for the disappointed film crew and the other assembled Vietnamese to disperse before we began to embrace one another and express our unrestrained joy.

By this time I had been transferred back to the Plantation, where I remained until my release. The guards left us alone for the remaining weeks, and we walked about the courtyard freely, played volleyball, and talked with whomever we pleased. We were not yet at liberty, but we were beginning to remember what it felt like to be free.

Henry Kissinger arrived in Hanoi to sign the final agreement. Near the end of his visit, the Vietnamese offered to release me to him. He refused the offer. When I met Dr. Kissinger back in the States some weeks later and he informed me of the Vietnamese offer and his response, I thanked him for saving my honor.

The prisoners were released in four increments in the order in which we had been captured. On March 15, the Rabbit called my name off the roster of POWs to be released that day. A few days earlier we had received, for the first time, Red Cross packages. The night before, we were given a large dinner, complete with wine, our first substantial meal in a long time.

On the day before my release, I had been ordered to see the camp commander and a high-ranking political officer who spoke English. The political officer told me that he had recently seen the doctor who had operated on my leg, and that he had expressed his concern about my condition.

“Would you like to write a note to your doctor or see him to tell him how you are, and to thank him for your operation?”

Noticing a tape recorder sitting on the table, I answered in the negative.

“Why not?”

“Well, I haven’t seen the asshole in five years and I wonder why he should have his curiosity aroused at this point. I know he’s been very busy.”

Dressed in cheap civilian clothes, we boarded buses for Gia Lam airport on the outskirts of Hanoi. As I stepped off the bus at the edge of the airport tarmac, I saw a big, green, beautiful American C-141 transport plane waiting to take us to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines. I nearly cried at the sight of it. At the airport, lined up in formation according to our shootdown date, we maintained our military bearing as a noisy crowd of Vietnamese gawked at us. I could hear cameras whirring and shutters clicking. Vietnamese and American officers were seated at a table, each holding a list of prisoners. When it was time for a prisoner to step forward, representatives of both militaries called off his name. An officer from his service then escorted each prisoner across the tarmac and up the ramp into the plane. When my name was called, I stepped forward. The American officers seated at the table outranked me, so I saluted them.

Just prior to my departure, the Vietnamese had supplied me with another pair of crutches, even though I had been getting along fine without any. I decided to leave them behind. I wanted to take my leave of Vietnam without any assistance from my hosts.

Three days before my release, the Los Angeles Times had run a huge banner headline proclaiming: HANOI TO RELEASE ADMIRAL’S SON. My father had been invited to join his successor as CINCPAC, Admiral Noel Gaylor, at the welcoming ceremony at Clark. He asked if the parents of other POWs had been invited. Told they had not, my father declined the offer.

–– CHAPTER 28 –– Free Men

We cheered loudly when the pilot announced that we were “feet wet,” which meant that we were now flying over the Tonkin Gulf and in international airspace. A holiday atmosphere prevailed for the rest of the flight. We were served sandwiches and soft drinks, which we hungrily consumed. We clowned around with each other and with the military escorts and nurses who accompanied us and seemed as happy to see us as we were to see them. Our animated conversations rose above the droning of the aircraft’s engines.

Although I am sure I celebrated my liberation with as much exuberance as the next man, I recall feeling that the short flight to Clark lacked the magnitude of drama I had expected it to have. I had envisioned the moment for many years. The event itself seemed somewhat anticlimactic. I enjoyed it, but before we arrived at our destination I was thinking ahead to the next flight, the flight home. The flight to Clark resides in my memory as an exceptionally pleasant ride to the airport.

I felt a little different when we left Clark for home and I bade farewell to men with whom I had formed such strong bonds of affection and respect. We sent one another off with best wishes and promises to reunite soon. But the sudden separation hurt a little, and on the flight home a strange sense of loneliness nagged me even as my excitement to see my family became more intense as every passing hour brought me closer to them.

Bud Day and Bob Craner were on my flight to Clark. They and Orson Swindle had become the closest friends I had ever had. We were brothers now, as surely as if we had been born to the same parents. Even after we resumed our crowded, busy lives as free men, we remained close. I still see Bud and Orson often, and I am most at ease in their company. Bob Craner died of a heart attack in 1981, too young and too good to have left this earth so long before the rest of us. I have never stopped missing him.

In an interview he gave not long after our homecoming, Bob explained, as well as anyone could explain, how regret mixed with happiness on the day when our dreams came true. “It was with just a little melancholia that I finally said good-bye to John McCain,” he remembered. “Even at Clark, we were still a group… and the outsiders were trying to butt in, but we weren’t having too much of that…. On the night before I was to get on an airplane at eight o’clock the following morning, I could sense that here was the end. Now this group is going to be busted wide open and spread all over the United States. It may be a long time, years, before we rejoin, and when we do, it won’t be the same.”

I flew to freedom in the company of many men who had suffered valiantly for their country’s cause. Many of them had known greater terror than I had; resisted torture longer than I had held out, faced down more daunting challenges than I had confronted, and sacrificed more than had been asked of me. They are the part of my time in Vietnam I won’t forget.

Bob was right—it was an end, and it would never again be quite the same. But the years that followed have had meaning and value, and I am happy to live in the present.

Prior to the pilot’s announcement that we had left Vietnamese airspace, most of us were restrained, having not quite shaken off the solemn formality with which our departure ceremony was conducted.

Of course, we expected it would take much longer to shake off entirely the effects of our experiences in prison. Many of us were returning with injuries, and at best it would take some time for our physical rehabilitation to make satisfactory progress. I worried that my injuries might never heal properly, having been left untreated for so many years, and that I might never be allowed to fly again or perhaps even remain in the Navy. I faced a difficult period of rehabilitation, and I was for a long time uncertain that I would ever recover enough to regain flight status. Although I never regained full mobility in my arms and leg, I did recover, thanks to my patient family and a remarkably determined physical therapist, and I eventually flew again.

Neither did we expect to soon forget the long years of anguish we had suffered under our captors’ “humane and lenient” treatment. A few men never recovered. They were the last, tragic casualties in a long, bitter war. But most of us healed from our wounds, the physical and spiritual ones, and have lived happy and productive lives since.

We were all astonished at the reception we received first at Clark and later when we stopped at Hickham Air Force Base in Hawaii en route to our homes. Thousands of people turned out, many of them wearing bracelets that bore our names, to cheer us as we disembarked the plane. During our captivity, the Vietnamese had inundated us with information about how unpopular the war and the men who fought it had become with the American public. We were stunned and relieved to discover that most Americans were as happy to see us as we were to see them. A lot of us were overcome by our reception, and the affection we were shown helped us to begin putting the war behind us.

I once heard the Vietnam War described as “America’s fall from grace.” Disagreements about the purpose and conduct of the war as well as its distinction of being the first lost war in American history left some Americans bereft of confidence in American exceptionalism—the belief that our history is unique and exalted and a blessing to all humanity. Not all Americans lost this faith. Not all Americans who once believed it to be lost believe it still. But many did, and many still do.

Surely, for a time, our loss in Vietnam afflicted America with a kind of identity crisis. For a while we made our way in the world less sure of ourselves than we had been before Vietnam. That was a pity, and I am relieved today that America’s period of self-doubt has ended. America has a long, accomplished, and honorable history. We should never have let this one mistake, terrible though it was, color our perceptions forever of our country’s purpose. We were a good country before Vietnam, and we are a good country after Vietnam. In all of history, you cannot find a better one.

I have often maintained that I left Vietnam behind me when I arrived at Clark. That is an exaggeration. But I did not want my experiences in Vietnam to be the leitmotif of the rest of my life. I am a public figure now, and my public profile is inextricably linked to my POW experiences. Whenever I am introduced at an appearance, the speaker always refers to my war record first. Obviously, such recognition has benefited my political career, and I am grateful for that. Many men who came home from Vietnam, physically and spiritually damaged, to what appeared to be a country that did not understand or appreciate their sacrifice carried the war as a great weight upon their subsequent search for happiness. But I have tried hard to make what use I can of Vietnam and not let the memories of war encumber the rest of my life’s progress.

In the many years since I came home, I have managed to prevent the bad memories of war from intruding on my present happiness. I was thirty-six years old when I regained my freedom. When I was shot down, I had been prepared by training, as much as anyone can be prepared, for the experiences that lay ahead. I wasn’t a nineteen-or twenty-year-old kid who had been drafted into a strange and terrible experience and then returned unceremoniously to an unappreciative country.

Neither have I been content to accept that my time in Vietnam would stand as the ultimate experience of my life. Surely it was a formative experience, but I knew that life promised other adventures, and, impatient by nature, I hurried toward them.

Vietnam changed me, in significant ways, for the better. It is a surpassing irony that war, for all its horror, provides the combatant with every conceivable human experience. Experiences that usually take a lifetime to know are all felt, and felt intensely, in one brief passage of life. Anyone who loses a loved one knows what great sorrow feels like. And anyone who gives life to a child knows what great joy feels like. The veteran knows what great loss and great joy feel like when they occur in the same moment, the same experience.

Such an experience is transforming. And we can be much the better for it. Some few who came home from war struggled to recover the balance that the war had upset. But for most veterans, who came home whole in spirit if not body, the hard uses of life will seldom threaten their equanimity.

Surviving my imprisonment strengthened my self-confidence, and my refusal of early release taught me to trust my own judgment. I am grateful to Vietnam for those discoveries, as they have made a great difference in my life. I gained a seriousness of purpose that observers of my early life had found difficult to detect. I had made more than my share of mistakes in my life. In the years ahead, I would make many more. But I would no longer err out of self-doubt or to alter a fate I felt had been imposed on me. I know my life is blessed, and always has been.

Vietnam did not answer all of life’s questions, but I believe it answered many of the most important ones. In my youth I had doubted time’s great haste. But in Vietnam I had come to understand how brief a moment a life is. That discovery did not, however, make me overly fearful of time’s brisk passing. For I had also learned that you can fill the moment with purpose and experiences that will make your life greater than the sum of its days. I had learned to acknowledge my failings and to recognize opportunities for redemption. I had failed when I signed my confession, and that failure disturbed my peace of mind. I felt it blemished my record permanently, and even today I find it hard to suppress feelings of remorse. In truth, I don’t even bother to try to suppress them anymore. My remorse shows me the limits of my zealously guarded autonomy.

My country had failed in Vietnam as well, but I took no comfort from its company. There is much to regret about America’s failure in Vietnam. The reasons are etched in black marble on the Washington Mall. But we had believed the cause that America had asked us to serve in Vietnam was a worthy one, and millions who defended it had done so honorably.

Both my confession and my resistance helped me achieve a balance in my life, a balance between my own individualism and more important things. Like my father and grandfather, and the Naval Academy, the men I had been honored to serve with called me to the cause, and I had tried to keep faith with them.

I discovered I was dependent on others to a greater extent than I had ever realized, but that neither they nor the cause we served made any claims on my identity. On the contrary, they gave me a larger sense of myself than I had had before. And I am a better man for it. We had met a power that wanted to obliterate our identities, and the cause to which we rallied was our response: we are free men, bound inseparably together, and by the grace of God, and not your sufferance, we will have our freedom restored to us. Ironically, I have never felt more powerfully free, more my own man, than when I was a small part of an organized resistance to the power that imprisoned me. Nothing in life is more liberating than to fight for a cause larger than yourself, something that encompasses you but is not defined by your existence alone.

When I look back on my misspent youth, I feel a longing for what is past and cannot be restored. But though the happy pursuits and casual beauty of youth prove ephemeral, something better can endure, and endure until our last moment on earth. And that is the honor we earn and the love we give if at a moment in our youth we sacrifice with others for something greater than our self-interest. We cannot always choose the moments. Often they arrive unbidden. We can choose to let the moments pass, and avoid the difficulties they entail. But the loss we would incur by that choice is much dearer than the tribute we once paid to vanity and pleasure.

During their reunion aboard the Proteus in Tokyo Bay, my father and grandfather had their last conversation. Near the end of his life, my father recalled their final moment together:

“My father said to me, ‘Son, there is no greater thing than to die for the principles—for the country and the principles that you believe in.’ And that was one part of the conversation that came through and I have remembered down through the years.”

On that fine March day, I thought about what I had done and failed to do in Vietnam, and about what my country had done and failed to do. I had seen human virtue affirmed in the conduct of men who were ennobled by their suffering. And “down through the years,” I had remembered a dying man’s legacy to his son, and when I needed it most, I had found my freedom abiding in it.

I held on to the memory, left the bad behind, and moved on.