John McCain, Updated Edition

By Richard Kozar

Before he became a congressman, Senator, and presidential candidate, John McCain spent six years as a prisoner of war after his plane was shot down during the Vietnam War. He endured torture and horrific mistreatment at the hands of the North Vietnamese before returning to the U.S. As a politician, he had a reputation as a "maverick" for frequently breaking with his party on certain issues—a reputation he upheld until his death from brain cancer in 2018.

John McCain, Updated Edition chronicles his journey as a war hero and, later, as a legislator—a story of survival and honoring military code at all cost.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chelsea House
• Release date: Jun 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781438195605

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John McCain, Updated Edition

Copyright © 2019 by Infobase

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Contents

Cover

Copyright

Chapters

A Fighting Tradition

Rebel Without a Cause

Vietnam

Imprisonment

A Living Hell

Release

The Return Home

A Natural Politician

Pursuing the Presidency

The Distinguished Senator

Senator to the End

Support Materials

Timeline

Bibliography

Further Resources

About the Author

Chapters

A Fighting Tradition

There are two kinds of war heroes: those who are killed in action, and those who live to fight another day. On October 26, 1967, fate couldn't seem to decide in which category U.S. Navy pilot John McCain belonged.

While he was flying a bombing mission over Hanoi, North Vietnam, with 19 other U.S. pilots, the right wing of his A-4 Skyhawk jet was sheared off by a Russian-made surface-to-air missile (SAM). SAMs were so large they reminded some American pilots of flying telephone poles.

John McCain strikes a top gun pose. McCain's extraordinary personal odyssey would begin in the skies over North Vietnam during an ill-fated combat mission.

Lieutenant Commander McCain's mortally wounded A-4 began spinning wildly toward the earth. He dodged certain death seconds later by pulling the lever that blew his plane's glass canopy off and simultaneously launched him out of the cockpit. The ejection maneuver is hazardous when a plane is flying upright with both wings intact. McCain's jet was plummeting out of control at hundreds of miles per hour, and his body paid the price.

Fortunately, he barely knew what hit him because he lost consciousness after bailing out. He awoke moments later, having splashed down in a small lake in downtown Hanoi, the capital city of North Vietnam and heart of his enemies' country.

Battered though he was, the 31-year-old flier managed to kick off the muddy lake bottom-15 feet underwater-and struggle to the surface, where he gulped air once or twice before slowly sinking again. Helpless as a newborn because of his injuries, he avoided drowning only by inflating his life jacket.

Vietnamese soldiers towed him ashore, where a mob of civilians had gathered, intent on taking revenge. As they attacked him, he became aware of excruciating pain in his already crippled body.

Then, in one of the rare but remarkable acts of kindness he would witness after being shot down, a woman gave him a sip of tea. And someone in the crowd convinced the others not to kill the American soldier who had just dropped bombs on their city.

McCain was taken to Hoa Lo penitentiary, a compound that many American prisoners of war, or POWs, would be forced to call home for years-if they lived. John McCain himself was at death's door when he was thrown into a cell. His injuries were so severe, in fact, that they might have been life-threatening even had McCain found himself in one of America's finest hospitals. And no one would mistake McCain's quarters for a fine hospital. He was offered little more than bandages and stingy rations of food and water, which he could barely keep in his stomach, during his first terrifying days of imprisonment.

Moreover, because he refused to tell his captors anything more than his name, military rank, and serial number-which is precisely what military personnel are trained to do if captured-they beat him periodically until he blacked out. When he was alert enough to assess his injuries, their severity nearly made him pass out again.

His arms and leg broken, a helpless Lieutenant Commander John McCain is pulled from Truc Bach Lake by North Vietnamese soldiers, October 26, 1967. McCain had been forced to eject after his A-4 Skyhawk jet took a hit from a surface-to-air missile.

Source: Courtesy of Sen. John McCain's Office.

McCain pleaded with a guard and the prison's doctor, but they declined to help him because they doubted he would survive. It's too late, it's too late, the guard said as he and the doctor left.

But several hours later, McCain's heart leapt when another North Vietnamese official walked into his cell and asked whether he was the son of a high-ranking naval officer. Yes, my father is an admiral, answered the pilot, who instantly realized his captors might consider him worth patching up after all.

Hours later he was lying in bed in a decrepit hospital, undergoing a blood transfusion and other life-sustaining aid. For the moment he appeared to be surviving another brush with death. What McCain couldn't know was just how much more pain, abuse, and heartache he would endure before setting foot again in his beloved United States.

Thirty-three years later, in the year 2000, John McCain was a veteran U.S. senator, his grinning face a familiar sight on magazine covers, newspapers, and television news shows. Most people were vaguely aware the white-haired Arizona lawmaker was a war hero. But that's not why he was making headlines. McCain was undertaking a crusade many school kids have at one point entertained-running for president of the United States. At the age of 63, the feisty former POW displayed the same grit in the presidential race as he had during his hellish captivity decades before.

Of course, running for president isn't a life-or-death race, at least not to most candidates. And early on in the Republican primary season McCain wasn't even expected to seriously challenge his more famous, and better financed, opponents.

But they and the rest of America were about to learn what this war hero's Vietnamese captors had discovered three decades earlier-McCain wasn't an easy man to defeat, and he never backed down from a fight.

John Sidney McCain III came from a long line of people who didn't back down from a fight. Men from both branches of his Scotch-Irish family had fought in every U.S. war since the American Revolution, when ancestor Captain John Young served under George Washington. For two centuries this heritage had bestowed a badge of honor. But by John McCain III's generation, it also carried the burden of great expectations. He was expected to follow the path traveled by his father, Admiral John Sidney McCain Jr., who had a generation earlier retraced the steps of his father, Admiral John Sidney McCain Sr.

Thus, John III didn't wind up in the navy so much by choice as by tradition, a tough pill to swallow for a young man who had also inherited his family's rebellious streak. My life was charted out for me, and I resented that. Not consciously, but clearly subconsciously, he confessed in Esquire. You know, ever since I can remember, as a little boy [I heard]: 'He's going to the Naval Academy.'

Three generations of John McCains, 1936. Growing up, the youngest McCain would feel a certain amount of resentment over expectations that he'd follow in the footsteps of