A true American hero

J. Michael Sharman
Published: June 30, 2008

After John McCain had been a prisoner of war for six months, the North Vietnamese offered him an early release. McCain turned it down because it violated the military code that said those captured before him should be released before him. He remained a POW for five more years.

Jacob Weisberg has written that, “As extraordinary as his decision to remain a prisoner seems, it was entirely in character. McCain, one begins to understand, has been essentially the same person throughout his life.”

John Sidney McCain III gave the 1993 commencement address at the Naval Academy where he had graduated 35 years earlier: “Here we learned to dread dishonor above all other temptations. ... I have watched men suffer the anguish of imprisonment, defy appalling human cruelty ... break for a moment, then recover inhuman strength to defy their enemies once more. All these things and more, I have seen. And so will you. ... You will know where your duty lies. You will know.”

The sense of duty is enormous in the McCain family, and particularly the obligation of military service. John McCain’s grandfather, Adm. John S. McCain Sr., was present at the Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri. His father, Adm. John S. McCain Jr., was commander in chief of the Pacific and of all U.S. forces in Vietnam when John McCain III was captured and held prisoner.

Doug McCain, the oldest son of the Republican presidential candidate, became a Navy pilot after graduating from the University of Virginia. Two other McCain sons are currently in the military: Jack McCain (John S. McCain IV) has just finished his first year at the Naval Academy, and youngest son Jimmy McCain did an early enlistment with the Marine Corps at age 17 and is now a lance corporal stationed in Iraq.

Doug remembers the day his dad was captured. “It was my first day of Cub Scouts,” he said. “I came home and my mother was crying at the kitchen table.” 
On that October day in 1967, during his 23rd bombing mission, a missile struck McCain’s plane over central Hanoi. Ejecting from his plane, he landed in Truc Bach Lake, with both arms and one leg broken.  An angry mob attacked him, and his shoulder was broken with the butt of a rifle and his left foot and abdomen were bayoneted. He was then taken to Hoa Loa Prison, the “Hanoi Hilton.”

In a speech John McCain gave in Virginia Beach on Feb. 28, 2000, he offered a unique perspective, spoken in the third person, from his time as a POW:
“Many years ago a scared American prisoner of war in Vietnam was tied in torture ropes by his tormentors and left alone in an empty room to suffer through the night.

Later in the evening a guard he had never spoken to entered the room and silently loosened the ropes to relieve his suffering. Just before morning, that same guard came back and re-tightened the ropes before his less humanitarian comrades returned.

“He never said a word to the grateful prisoner, but some months later, on a Christmas morning, as the prisoner stood alone in the prison courtyard, the same Good Samaritan walked up to him and stood next to him for a few moments. Then with his sandal, the guard drew a cross in the dirt. Both prisoner and guard both stood wordlessly there for a minute or two, venerating the cross, until the guard rubbed it out and walked away.

“That is my faith; the faith that unites and never divides; the faith that bridges unbridgeable gaps in humanity. It is the faith I would die to defend.”

Thank you for defending that faith, Mr. McCain. Happy Fourth of July to you and to Doug, Jack and Jimmy, and to all of those others who have served and suffered in order to give the rest of us here at home our blessings of peace, prosperity and freedom.

J. Michael Sharman is an independent columnist who practices law in Culpeper. His column appears Tuesday in the Star-Exponent.