John McCain sat on a stool in Hanoi, his teeth broken, his body battered from a savage beating, his arms tied behind him in torture ropes.
A guard entered the room.
"Are you ready to confess your crimes?" he asked.
"No," McCain replied.
Every two hours, one guard would hold McCain while two others beat him. They kept it up for four days.
Finally, McCain lay on the floor at "The Plantation," a bloody mess, unable to move. His right leg, injured when he was shot down, was horribly swollen. A guard yanked him to his feet and threw him down. His left arm smashed against a bucket and broke again.
"I reached the lowest point of my 5� years in North Vietnam," McCain would write later. "I was at the point of suicide."
What happened next, in that August of 1968, nearly a year after he was captured, is chronicled in The Nightingale's Song by Robert Timberg:
"(McCain) looked at the louvered cell window high above his head, then at the small stool in the room. He took off his dark blue prison shirt, rolled it like a rope, draped one end over his shoulder near his neck, began feeding the other end through the louvers."
A guard burst into the cell and pulled McCain away from the window. For the next few days, he was on suicide watch.
McCain's will had finally wilted under the beatings. Unable to endure any more, he agreed to sign a confession.
McCain slowly wrote, "I am a black criminal and I have performed the deeds of an air pirate. I almost died and the Vietnamese people saved my life, thanks to the doctors."
He would never forgive himself.
"I had learned what we all learned over there," he would write later. "Every man has a breaking point. I had reached mine."
The Forrestal Disaster
Lt. Cmdr. John McCain survived a major catastrophe on the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal a few months before he was shot down over Vietnam on Oct. 26, 1967.
On July 29, 1967, the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal was in the Tonkin Gulf, preparing for a mission.
McCain, 30, already the veteran of five bombing sorties, was strapped into his jet, warming up the engine. He was third in line to take off. Tom Ott, a second-class petty officer and McCain's parachute rigger, was wiping McCain's helmet visor, just as he always did.
Neither noticed the F-4 Phantom also revving up. An electrical surge from the engine combustion is believed to have triggered one of its wing's Zuni missiles. It accidentally fired, blasting across the deck and slamming into the fuel tank of McCain's A-4. The missile didn't detonate, but the impact spilled 200 gallons of highly flammable aviation fuel and knocked two of McCain's bombs to the deck. The fuel caught fire and McCain's plane was engulfed in smoke.
"I opened my canopy, raced onto the nose, crawled out onto the refueling probe, and jumped ten feet into the fire," McCain wrote in his 1999 book Faith of My Fathers. "I rolled through a wall of flames as my flight suit caught fire."
Slapping out the fire on his flight suit, McCain rushed to assist another A-4 pilot who also was on fire. He followed Chief Petty Officer Gerald Farrier, who wielded a fire-extinguisher, and other men carrying a hose.
Then the first bomb exploded.
McCain recalls the concussion blowing him back 10 feet. He was lucky. The other pilot, Farrier, and the men with the hose died on the spot. One man was decapitated; others were burned beyond recognition.
Flaming shrapnel whizzed across the flight deck, with small pieces of hot metal peppering McCain's chest and legs. As the crew frantically fought the fire, more bombs and planes exploded.
McCain recounts the carnage in his book: "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."
In the end, 134 men, including McCain's parachute rigger Ott, perished. The blaze damaged the Forrestal so severely that the Navy almost abandoned the ship.
"The crew's heroics kept her afloat," McCain recalled. "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 November 1967 issue of All Hands, the Bureau of Naval Personnel's magazine, included a series of first-person accounts in an article headlined "A ship full of heroes."
"Seamen and commanders both directed hoses into smoke-filled holes, aware all the time that more bombs were down there and could explode at any time," D. Harvey, a chief radarman, reported. "Men straddled those already dead to train streams of water into fires, backing off when the flames belched out, advancing in the lulls. Crews manned hoses on both sides of the holes punched in the flight deck while water at their feet boiled and the deck steamed."
The article lists McCain as recovering from shrapnel wounds.
After the accident, McCain transferred from the Forrestal to the USS Oriskany, another aircraft carrier.
Shot down
On Oct. 26, McCain would fly his 23rd run over North Vietnam, joining a 20-plane mission to bomb a power plant in the capital city of Hanoi, which had been off-limits to U.S. attacks.
An officer warned McCain to be careful, that some of the pilots might not return.
"Don't worry about me," McCain said.
Hanoi was well-defended against air attacks. As McCain approached his target, Russian-made surface-to-air missiles the size of telephone poles filled the sky. Suddenly, his instrument panel lit up. A missile had locked on to his plane.
McCain dropped his bombs and began to pull up. Then, a missile sheared off his right wing, sending his plane spinning toward earth, out of control.
"I pulled the ejection handle and was knocked unconscious by the force of the ejection - the air speed was about 500 knots," McCain would write in 1973 for U.S. News & World Report. "I didn't realize it at the moment, but I had broken my right leg around the knee, my right arm in three places, and my left arm. I regained consciousness just before I landed by parachute in a lake right in the center of Hanoi, one they called the Western Lake. My helmet and my oxygen mask had been blown off."
McCain's battered body sank 15 feet to the bottom of the muddy lake. He managed to kick his way to the surface with his one good leg, but his equipment dragged him back down. Finally, as he went down for a third time, McCain used his teeth to inflate his life preserver and bobbed to the surface.
North Vietnamese pulled McCain from the lake, stripping off his clothes. McCain felt a twinge in his right knee and was horrified to see his leg bent at a 90-degree angle.
"My God, my leg," McCain said.
A man slammed a rifle butt down on McCain's right shoulder, shattering it. Others bayoneted him in the foot and groin.
Eventually, he was thrown onto a truck and taken to Hanoi's main prison. He was placed in a cell and told he would not receive any medical treatment until he gave military information. McCain refused and was beaten unconscious.
On the fourth day, two guards entered McCain's cell. One pulled back the blanket to reveal McCain's injured knee.
"It was about the size, shape and color of a football," McCain recalled.
Fearful of blood poisoning that would lead to death, McCain told his captors he would talk if they took him to a hospital.
"They brought in this doctor we called Zorba, and he examined me, took my pulse and turned to this other guy we called The Bug and said something in Vietnamese. And The Bug said, 'It's too late, it's too late,'" McCain said.
"I said, 'If you take me to the hospital, I'll get well.' Zorba took my pulse again and shook his head, and The Bug said, 'It's too late.' And they took me back to my cell."
About two hours later, McCain's cell door burst open, and The Bug rushed in, saying, "Your father is a big admiral. Now we take you to the hospital."
It had taken some time, but the North Vietnamese figured out that McCain's father, Jack, was a major U.S. Naval commander.
They started calling McCain "The Crown Prince."
Maintaining silence
McCain was moved to a filthy hospital, where blood and plasma were administered. He recovered a little but was still in sorry shape.
Soon, McCain was told that a Frenchman wanted to talk to him and would take a message back to McCain's family.
Before the meeting, the North Vietnamese tried to set McCain's shattered right arm. Without anesthetic, a doctor using a fluoroscope worked on the arm for 90 minutes, with McCain screaming in pain. The arm had two floating bones, and the doctor could not set it properly.
Finally, the doctor gave up and wrapped a cast around McCain from his neck to his waist and down his right arm to his wrist.
They moved McCain to a new room with clean white sheets. Soon afterward, a North Vietnamese man known as "The Cat" arrived. He was the commander of all prison camps in Hanoi.
Through an interpreter, The Cat told McCain that "the French television man is coming."
It was at that point that McCain realized his visitor was a journalist.
"I don't think I want to be filmed," McCain said.
The Cat wouldn't be dissuaded. He told McCain that he needed two operations and that he would not get them if he didn't say he was grateful to the Vietnamese people and sorry for his crimes.
The French TV crew arrived, led by a reporter named Francois Chalais. On the film, which was shown later on CBS television, McCain looks drugged. He wasn't. He was in agony from the abortive attempt to set the bones in his right arm.
McCain told Chalais that his treatment was satisfactory. This upset The Cat, who stood behind McCain and told him to say he was grateful for humane and lenient treatment. McCain refused. When The Cat pressed it, Chalais broke in.
"I think what he told me is sufficient," he said.
On the film, McCain told his wife, Carol, and his children that he was getting well and that he loved them. When the North Vietnamese insisted that McCain call for a quick end to the war, Chalais waved them off.
"How is the food?" Chalais asked.
"Well, it's not Paris, but I eat it," McCain replied.
The interview ended, and McCain was taken to his dirty room. The North Vietnamese operated on his knee, accidentally cutting the ligaments on one side. Throughout his stay as a POW, McCain could never walk right. Among his fellow POWs, he earned the nickname "Crip."
Jack McCain, his father, and his mother went to CBS to watch the French film footage before its national broadcast, said Herbert Hetu, a naval public affairs officer quoted in Faith of My Fathers.
"I think Admiral McCain and his wife looked at the film twice," Hetu said. "His reaction afterward was very emotional, but he never talked to us about it. Some things are just too painful for words."
Blame the Americans
After six weeks in the hospital, McCain was taken to a prison camp known as The Plantation and placed in a cell with George "Bud" Day and Norris Overly, both Air Force majors.
Taking one look at McCain, Day was convinced that the North Vietnamese had brought McCain to their cell to die and planned on blaming the Americans.
"He was extremely skinny, and he was just about filthy," said Day, who after the war became a longtime Fort Walton Beach, Fla., attorney and veterans-affairs activist. "He had food and drink and liquids run all over his face. He had a pretty good beard. ... He probably weighed less than 100 pounds.
"He was in this great big white cast, and his hair was snow white. He just looked like he was absolutely on the verge of death."
Day said McCain's injured right arm jutted from his body cast like a stick "sticking out of a snowman."
But more than anything else, Day remembers McCain's eyes.
"His eyes were extremely bright; they had that real fever luster," Day said. "I just took one look at him and had no qualms that he was going to die, and soon."
Despite his poor condition, McCain still was happy to see fellow Americans. The men spent the night whispering among themselves.
By 6 a.m., Day was convinced that McCain had a decent chance to live, providing the fever did not get him. Slowly, McCain began to recover.
"He was just a very determined guy with a lot of spirit," Day said. "It's kind of like when you see a horse, a young colt, and you just know this is a strong-spirited animal. You could see all that in him."
McCain, it seemed, refused to die.
"John was not going to help the Lord take him out," Day said. "If the Lord was involved in taking him out, John was resisting all the way. If the Lord was helping him, John was giving him 100 percent of his effort."
In the first days, McCain could not wash or feed himself without help. The task of nursing McCain fell to Overly because Day had been tortured in ropes and had little use of his hands.
"I've got to give Norris a lot of credit," Day said. "Norris took care of John like a baby, like it was his own child. There was no question that he loved John. He did things for John that only a parent would do for their children."
Occasionally, North Vietnamese dignitaries would stroll by to gawk at the prize prisoner. Because McCain's father was an admiral, the North Vietnamese thought McCain's family was very wealthy. They would ask how many corporations his father owned.
McCain just laughed.
Slowly, he was nursed back to health. McCain's infections were healing because he could wash regularly. Soon, he could hobble around in his cell for a few minutes at a time.
Code talkers
After a time, Overly was removed from the cell and placed with two other prisoners who were going to be released early.
Early release was forbidden by the military's Code of Conduct. To prevent the enemy from subverting prisoners or using them as propaganda tools, officers were to accept release in the order they were captured.
The POWs kept tabs on each other via underground communication techniques, which the guards "went to extraordinary lengths to stop," with little success, according to McCain.
"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," McCain wrote in his book. "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."
McCain kept track of his 80 or so fellow American prisoners and even silently recited their names as he went to sleep. "Keeping an ever-lengthening account of the men we learned were prisoners was the solemn responsibility of every POW," McCain wrote.
So everybody knew that Navy Lt. Everett Alvarez, who had been shot down on Aug. 5, 1964, should have been the first prisoner released.
Nevertheless, Overly and two others accepted early release under a North Vietnamese "amnesty" program. The other POWs dubbed the practice the "Fink Release Program."
McCain and Day, who won the Medal of Honor for his service in Vietnam, don't judge Overly too harshly.
"If I had been in (Overly's) shoes, maybe I would have done things differently than I did," said Day, who retired from the Air Force in 1976 as a full colonel.
"I came back from Vietnam all crippled up and all screwed up, and a lot of that could have been avoided if I had given (them) a lot of the stuff they were really pushing me for.
"I didn't think it was the right thing, so I didn't do it."
In Faith of My Fathers, McCain credits Overly with saving his life.
"I thought him a good man then, as I do today," McCain wrote. "I feared he had made a mistake, but I couldn't stand in judgment of him. ... I wished him well as he departed, carrying a letter from me to (McCain's wife) Carol in his pocket."
Once McCain was able to walk on his own, guards moved Day out. For two years, McCain would be alone in his cell, which he described in U.S. News & World Report after his release:
"My room was fairly decent-sized - I'd say about 10 by 10. The door was solid. There were no windows. The only ventilation came from two small holes at the top in the ceiling, about 6 inches by 4 inches. The roof was tin, and it got hot as hell in there.
"The room was kind of dim - night and day - but they always kept on a small light bulb so they could observe me."
In October 1968, McCain heard a clamor in the cell behind him at The Plantation and began tapping on the wall to contact his new neighbor. The call-up sign was the five-tap "shave and a haircut," and the other prisoner would answer with two taps.
For two weeks he got no answer, but finally two taps came back. Using a cup to the wall, McCain could hear the other prisoner and managed to give him the tap code. He finally gave McCain his name: Ernie Brace. For a while, all Brace could do was tap out "I'm Ernie Brace" and then collapse into sobs.
Brace was a decorated former Marine who had flown more than 100 combat missions in Korea. He had been accused of deserting the scene of an aircraft accident, was court-martialed and received a dishonorable discharge.
But that didn't keep Brace out of the war. As a civilian pilot, he flew for a CIA-backed airline and was shot down over Laos.
Brace had spent 31/2 years in a bamboo cage with his feet in stocks and his neck in an iron collar. During the ordeal, he almost lost the use of his legs. He escaped three times, and when he was captured the third time, he was buried in the ground up to his neck. After a year had passed, McCain and Brace were communicating with other prisoners in the camp, shuttling messages back and forth with the tap code.
On Dec. 9, 1969, a guard jerked open Brace's cell door. The incident is recounted in Brace's book, A Code to Keep.
"You are in bad trouble for communicating," the guard said. "You are being taken to a harsher place."
Blindfolded, Brace was put into a truck with soldiers and other prisoners. As the vehicle rolled through Hanoi, Brace felt someone tapping a message on his thigh.
"Hi," said the message. "I John McCain. Who U?"
Brace said tears began forming in his eyes as he grabbed his friend's hand, squeezing out the answer.
"EB here."
Offered early release, Brace turned it down, citing the military code. He was the longest-held civilian POW in Vietnam.
An offer to go home
In June 1968, McCain was taken to an interrogation room, where "The Cat" awaited him. He was joined by another man, "The Rabbit," who spoke very good English.
The Cat spent two hours in seemingly aimless conversation, telling McCain about how he had run French prison camps in the early 1950s. He said that he had released some prisoners early and that they had thanked him later. He also mentioned that Norris Overly had gone home "with honor."
All of a sudden, The Cat blurted out: "Do you want to go home?"
McCain told him he'd have to think about it. He'd been hit by a bout of dysentery and was in poor shape. He was losing weight.
But McCain knew the real reason the North Vietnamese wanted to release him. Adm. Jack McCain, his father, was an important U.S. military figure. In July he would assume command of all U.S. forces in the Pacific. McCain's release would help the North Vietnamese propaganda machine.
McCain realized that the Code of Conduct gave him no choice. Alvarez, who was being held elsewhere, was supposed to be the first man released.
"I just knew it wasn't the right thing to do," he said. "I knew that they wouldn't have offered it to me if I hadn't been the son of an admiral.
"I just didn't think it was the honorable thing to do."
Three days later, McCain met with The Cat again. The North Vietnamese turned the screws. The Cat told McCain that President Johnson had ordered McCain home. McCain asked to see the orders. The Cat didn't have any.
Then the North Vietnamese commander produced a letter from McCain's wife, Carol, saying, "I wished that you had been one of those three who got to come home."
McCain calmly told The Cat that the prisoners must be released in the order they were captured, starting with Alvarez.
On the Fourth of July, McCain had a final sit-down with The Cat and The Rabbit.
"Our senior officer wants to know your final answer," The Rabbit said.
"My final answer is the same," McCain said. "It's no."
"That is your final answer?"
"That is my final answer."
The Cat, who had been seated behind a pile of papers, grabbed a pen and snapped it in half. Ink spurted all over the desk. He rose and kicked the chair over behind him.
"They taught you too well," he said, then left, slamming the door.
Before long, McCain would find himself tied to a stool, and the guards would literally beat him into confessing that he was a "black criminal" and an "air pirate."
McCain's account was corroborated by a cable from Averell Harriman, who was President Johnson's envoy to the Paris peace talks. Harriman had tea with a Vietnamese official, who mentioned that McCain had refused early release.
A Christmas service
On Christmas Eve 1968, about 50 POWs, including McCain, were herded into a room decorated with flowers for a makeshift church service.
The North Vietnamese were intent on milking the ceremony for every bit of PR value. Cameramen moved around the room, filming the ceremony. Flash bulbs popped in the background.
Meanwhile, McCain and other prisoners were busy exchanging information. One of the guards, conscious that he was being filmed, smiled while he told McCain to stop talking.
McCain cursed the guard and kept briefing another prisoner.
"I refused to go home," McCain said. "I was tortured for it. They broke my rib and rebroke my arm."
McCain pressed on, and the guards kept trying to quiet him.
"Our senior ranking officer is Colonel Larson," McCain said.
"No talking!"
McCain cursed them again and flashed his middle finger toward the camera.
He returned to his cell, where he waited for his beating. It didn't come until the day after Christmas.
In May 1969, the North Vietnamese asked McCain to write a letter to U.S. pilots asking them not to fly over North Vietnam. When he refused, they made him stand for hours and hours.
When McCain tired and sat down, a guard stomped on his injured leg. McCain was back on crutches for the next 18 months.
In late 1969, things began to look up for the POWs for the first time.
President Nixon had taken office in January. During the Johnson administration, released POWs weren't allowed to talk about bad conditions in the prison camps for fear that such complaints would make things even worse for the men still being held.
That changed under Nixon.
In August 1969, under pressure, the North Vietnamese began releasing sick and injured prisoners. Among them were Navy Lt. Robert Frishman, who had a badly injured arm, Air Force Capt. Wes Rumble, who was in a body cast with a broken back, and Navy Seaman Doug Hegdahl, who had lost 75 pounds.
The men held press conferences, telling the horrifying details of torture and mistreatment. After that, treatment of POWs began to improve.
By fall, the torture had almost stopped. The food improved. The guards seemed almost friendly.
McCain's barred cell door had been covered with wood to keep him from looking out and from getting any ventilation. But in fall 1969, the board was removed at night to cool McCain's cell. And prisoners were allowed to bathe more often.
"It was all very amazing," McCain would write later.
In December 1969, McCain was moved to the Hanoi Hilton. There, he met with a Cuban journalist who asked McCain general questions about the war. After the interview, a photographer came in and started snapping pictures, though McCain had said he didn't want his picture taken. After that, he refused to meet with visitors.
In June 1970, McCain was moved into a room called Calcutta, which had no ventilation. There, McCain suffered from heat prostration and another bout of dysentery and was cut to half rations.
In December 1970, McCain was moved to a room that housed 45 to 50 prisoners. In February 1971, the prisoners defied their captors and held a church service. When the men presiding over the service were taken away by guards, the men started singing The Star-Spangled Banner very loudly.
Fearing a riot, the guards rushed in with ropes and subdued the men. A few days later, McCain and others were moved to a punishment camp the prisoners called Skid Row. Though the conditions were filthy, McCain said, the prison was a piece of cake compared with conditions in 1969.
In 1971 and 1972, conditions gradually improved. McCain, whose weight had dropped to 105 pounds during his first years in Hanoi, began to regain some of his health. He was allowed to exercise, which eased the boredom and made it easier to sleep.
"He was crippled but mentally fierce," recalled Orson Swindle, who roomed with McCain for the last two years of their incarceration. "He was stiff-legged and had awkward movement of both arms. He did the funniest push-ups I've even seen.
"One of his arms was sort of crooked. . . . He did push-ups with a tilt to it."
The men were in a big room with a large concrete slab in the center and a 3-foot-wide, horseshoe-shaped path around the slab. They would exercise by walking along the path.
"When John would run in place, it was sort of humorous to watch him," Swindle said. "One leg would bend, and the other wouldn't. It was a sight to behold."
To entertain themselves and the other men, McCain and Swindle organized "Sunday Night at the Movies," retelling, and in some cases performing, scenes from Hollywood films they had seen.
One of their favorites was One-Eyed Jacks, a 1961 movie in which Marlon Brando is beaten by a worthless sheriff played by Slim Pickens. McCain and Swindle especially loved the part where Brando calls Pickens a "scum-sucking pig."
In December 1972, McCain had a front-row seat to a full-scale bombing attack on Hanoi.
"It was the most spectacular show I'll ever see," McCain later wrote in U.S. News and World Report. "The bombs were dropping so close that the building would shake. The SAMs were flying all over, and the sirens were whining - it was really a wild scene."
Although the bombing had been conceived by Nixon, the orders had been given by McCain's father, Jack.
McCain's father never wrote to him during the war because of the propaganda value of such a letter. He did, however, try to pass McCain a secret message once, according to a passage in Faith of My Fathers.
In letters to his wife, McCain was using a fairly obvious code to send messages back to the States. Naval intelligence, fearing that McCain would be caught, apprised the admiral.
Adm. Jack McCain sent a hidden message in a letter Carol wrote to McCain: "JUNIOR URGES CAUTION PLEASE STOP THIS."
The younger McCain never saw it because the North Vietnamese withheld Carol's letters.
By January 1973, McCain was back at The Plantation. The prisoners sensed that the war was nearing its end. The guards hardly bothered them.
Around that time, McCain was playing bridge with Swindle and two others when he was dealt a perfect hand. But McCain made a rookie mistake and lost his advantage. The other men teased him unmercifully.
Finally, McCain stopped talking to Swindle, who slept right next to him on the floor. This went on for several days.
"We would be walking on the path, and I would say, 'Hi, John,' and John wouldn't respond," Swindle said.
Then one day, the guards came in and ordered Swindle to pack his gear. As one of the first pilots captured, Swindle was in line to be released.
As Swindle was being ushered out, a frantic McCain rushed up to his side.
"John comes running up and says, 'Orson, Orson, I've really been a jerk the last few days.' I said, 'I don't even want to talk to you,' and I turned away.
"Then I looked back at him and winked, and I had a big grin on my face, and I said, 'I'll see you at home.'"
In March, McCain joined a group of prisoners who were put onto trucks and driven to Gia Lam Airport in Hanoi. McCain said he didn't believe he was leaving until he actually spoke with an American in uniform.
It was the best day of his life.
"At the time, it wasn't that overwhelming. It was one of those things that you had anticipated for so long, nothing could have lived up to my expectations," McCain said. "It's like when a kid waits for Christmas, and then it arrives, and it can't quite live up to what he expected."
One by one, The Rabbit read off their names, and they boarded the plane.
im just trying to treat the tragic passing of this american hero with the solemnity it deserves. i say "tragic" because it came several decades too late (the vietcong should have tortured him to death)
I actually do too. It was a nationalist reaction to a western-led world order in a time where the political position most antithetical to that order was communism. It's unsurprising the commieness would fade away.
Mark my words, this November there will be at least one flipped congressional seat where the Democratic margin will be narrow enough for the Viet Cong to say they gave the Dems the win.
You have a talent of making absolute garbage worded so terrifically boring that people don't even read your full comment. You are a tl;dr, and whichever father of yours gave birth to you should have considered putting you up for adoption.
50 comments
1 jko831 2018-08-26
F
1 automatic_cluck 2018-08-26
FUCK YEAH!!!!
1 AnnoysTheGoys 2018-08-26
F
1 PressFBot 2018-08-26
F
1 Yiin 2018-08-26
F
1 ioiidnsksi 2018-08-26
F
1 dootwiththesickness 2018-08-26
F
1 Ed_ButteredToast 2018-08-26
🅱️️
1 dootwiththesickness 2018-08-26
U
1 quality_bratwurst 2018-08-26
S
1 automatic_cluck 2018-08-26
FUCK YEAH!!!!
1 Baconlightning 2018-08-26
Dude died 81 yet his mother still witnessed his death
1 MalevolentCretin 2018-08-26
She will die within a week now.
1 PM_Pics_of_your_Nips 2018-08-26
Right now she is receiving her third currency transfusion... she might just make it throughout the year.
1 Torobasa 2018-08-26
holy shit. She's 106 years old!!!!
1 MasterLawlz 2018-08-26
That’s insane. I feel like living that long would be kind of a curse since you would see your own children die of natural causes.
1 Yiin 2018-08-26
F
1 ImJustaBagofHammers 2018-08-26
F
1 automatic_cluck 2018-08-26
FUCK YEAH!!!!
1 hyledog 2018-08-26
F
1 Starship_Litterbox_C 2018-08-26
Wrong guy, this John's just trying to navigate the complexities of the female mind.
1 Yiin 2018-08-26
John McCain sat on a stool in Hanoi, his teeth broken, his body battered from a savage beating, his arms tied behind him in torture ropes.
A guard entered the room.
"Are you ready to confess your crimes?" he asked.
"No," McCain replied.
Every two hours, one guard would hold McCain while two others beat him. They kept it up for four days.
Finally, McCain lay on the floor at "The Plantation," a bloody mess, unable to move. His right leg, injured when he was shot down, was horribly swollen. A guard yanked him to his feet and threw him down. His left arm smashed against a bucket and broke again.
"I reached the lowest point of my 5� years in North Vietnam," McCain would write later. "I was at the point of suicide."
What happened next, in that August of 1968, nearly a year after he was captured, is chronicled in The Nightingale's Song by Robert Timberg:
"(McCain) looked at the louvered cell window high above his head, then at the small stool in the room. He took off his dark blue prison shirt, rolled it like a rope, draped one end over his shoulder near his neck, began feeding the other end through the louvers."
A guard burst into the cell and pulled McCain away from the window. For the next few days, he was on suicide watch.
McCain's will had finally wilted under the beatings. Unable to endure any more, he agreed to sign a confession.
McCain slowly wrote, "I am a black criminal and I have performed the deeds of an air pirate. I almost died and the Vietnamese people saved my life, thanks to the doctors."
He would never forgive himself.
"I had learned what we all learned over there," he would write later. "Every man has a breaking point. I had reached mine."
The Forrestal Disaster
Lt. Cmdr. John McCain survived a major catastrophe on the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal a few months before he was shot down over Vietnam on Oct. 26, 1967.
On July 29, 1967, the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal was in the Tonkin Gulf, preparing for a mission.
McCain, 30, already the veteran of five bombing sorties, was strapped into his jet, warming up the engine. He was third in line to take off. Tom Ott, a second-class petty officer and McCain's parachute rigger, was wiping McCain's helmet visor, just as he always did.
Neither noticed the F-4 Phantom also revving up. An electrical surge from the engine combustion is believed to have triggered one of its wing's Zuni missiles. It accidentally fired, blasting across the deck and slamming into the fuel tank of McCain's A-4. The missile didn't detonate, but the impact spilled 200 gallons of highly flammable aviation fuel and knocked two of McCain's bombs to the deck. The fuel caught fire and McCain's plane was engulfed in smoke.
"I opened my canopy, raced onto the nose, crawled out onto the refueling probe, and jumped ten feet into the fire," McCain wrote in his 1999 book Faith of My Fathers. "I rolled through a wall of flames as my flight suit caught fire."
Slapping out the fire on his flight suit, McCain rushed to assist another A-4 pilot who also was on fire. He followed Chief Petty Officer Gerald Farrier, who wielded a fire-extinguisher, and other men carrying a hose.
Then the first bomb exploded.
McCain recalls the concussion blowing him back 10 feet. He was lucky. The other pilot, Farrier, and the men with the hose died on the spot. One man was decapitated; others were burned beyond recognition.
Flaming shrapnel whizzed across the flight deck, with small pieces of hot metal peppering McCain's chest and legs. As the crew frantically fought the fire, more bombs and planes exploded.
McCain recounts the carnage in his book: "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."
In the end, 134 men, including McCain's parachute rigger Ott, perished. The blaze damaged the Forrestal so severely that the Navy almost abandoned the ship.
"The crew's heroics kept her afloat," McCain recalled. "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 November 1967 issue of All Hands, the Bureau of Naval Personnel's magazine, included a series of first-person accounts in an article headlined "A ship full of heroes."
"Seamen and commanders both directed hoses into smoke-filled holes, aware all the time that more bombs were down there and could explode at any time," D. Harvey, a chief radarman, reported. "Men straddled those already dead to train streams of water into fires, backing off when the flames belched out, advancing in the lulls. Crews manned hoses on both sides of the holes punched in the flight deck while water at their feet boiled and the deck steamed."
The article lists McCain as recovering from shrapnel wounds.
After the accident, McCain transferred from the Forrestal to the USS Oriskany, another aircraft carrier.
Shot down
On Oct. 26, McCain would fly his 23rd run over North Vietnam, joining a 20-plane mission to bomb a power plant in the capital city of Hanoi, which had been off-limits to U.S. attacks.
An officer warned McCain to be careful, that some of the pilots might not return.
"Don't worry about me," McCain said.
Hanoi was well-defended against air attacks. As McCain approached his target, Russian-made surface-to-air missiles the size of telephone poles filled the sky. Suddenly, his instrument panel lit up. A missile had locked on to his plane.
McCain dropped his bombs and began to pull up. Then, a missile sheared off his right wing, sending his plane spinning toward earth, out of control.
"I pulled the ejection handle and was knocked unconscious by the force of the ejection - the air speed was about 500 knots," McCain would write in 1973 for U.S. News & World Report. "I didn't realize it at the moment, but I had broken my right leg around the knee, my right arm in three places, and my left arm. I regained consciousness just before I landed by parachute in a lake right in the center of Hanoi, one they called the Western Lake. My helmet and my oxygen mask had been blown off."
McCain's battered body sank 15 feet to the bottom of the muddy lake. He managed to kick his way to the surface with his one good leg, but his equipment dragged him back down. Finally, as he went down for a third time, McCain used his teeth to inflate his life preserver and bobbed to the surface.
North Vietnamese pulled McCain from the lake, stripping off his clothes. McCain felt a twinge in his right knee and was horrified to see his leg bent at a 90-degree angle.
"My God, my leg," McCain said.
A man slammed a rifle butt down on McCain's right shoulder, shattering it. Others bayoneted him in the foot and groin.
Eventually, he was thrown onto a truck and taken to Hanoi's main prison. He was placed in a cell and told he would not receive any medical treatment until he gave military information. McCain refused and was beaten unconscious.
On the fourth day, two guards entered McCain's cell. One pulled back the blanket to reveal McCain's injured knee.
"It was about the size, shape and color of a football," McCain recalled.
Fearful of blood poisoning that would lead to death, McCain told his captors he would talk if they took him to a hospital.
"They brought in this doctor we called Zorba, and he examined me, took my pulse and turned to this other guy we called The Bug and said something in Vietnamese. And The Bug said, 'It's too late, it's too late,'" McCain said.
"I said, 'If you take me to the hospital, I'll get well.' Zorba took my pulse again and shook his head, and The Bug said, 'It's too late.' And they took me back to my cell."
About two hours later, McCain's cell door burst open, and The Bug rushed in, saying, "Your father is a big admiral. Now we take you to the hospital."
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That degree finally paying off
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1 Yiin 2018-08-26
It had taken some time, but the North Vietnamese figured out that McCain's father, Jack, was a major U.S. Naval commander.
They started calling McCain "The Crown Prince."
Maintaining silence
McCain was moved to a filthy hospital, where blood and plasma were administered. He recovered a little but was still in sorry shape.
Soon, McCain was told that a Frenchman wanted to talk to him and would take a message back to McCain's family.
Before the meeting, the North Vietnamese tried to set McCain's shattered right arm. Without anesthetic, a doctor using a fluoroscope worked on the arm for 90 minutes, with McCain screaming in pain. The arm had two floating bones, and the doctor could not set it properly.
Finally, the doctor gave up and wrapped a cast around McCain from his neck to his waist and down his right arm to his wrist.
They moved McCain to a new room with clean white sheets. Soon afterward, a North Vietnamese man known as "The Cat" arrived. He was the commander of all prison camps in Hanoi.
Through an interpreter, The Cat told McCain that "the French television man is coming."
It was at that point that McCain realized his visitor was a journalist.
"I don't think I want to be filmed," McCain said.
The Cat wouldn't be dissuaded. He told McCain that he needed two operations and that he would not get them if he didn't say he was grateful to the Vietnamese people and sorry for his crimes.
The French TV crew arrived, led by a reporter named Francois Chalais. On the film, which was shown later on CBS television, McCain looks drugged. He wasn't. He was in agony from the abortive attempt to set the bones in his right arm.
McCain told Chalais that his treatment was satisfactory. This upset The Cat, who stood behind McCain and told him to say he was grateful for humane and lenient treatment. McCain refused. When The Cat pressed it, Chalais broke in.
"I think what he told me is sufficient," he said.
On the film, McCain told his wife, Carol, and his children that he was getting well and that he loved them. When the North Vietnamese insisted that McCain call for a quick end to the war, Chalais waved them off.
"How is the food?" Chalais asked.
"Well, it's not Paris, but I eat it," McCain replied.
The interview ended, and McCain was taken to his dirty room. The North Vietnamese operated on his knee, accidentally cutting the ligaments on one side. Throughout his stay as a POW, McCain could never walk right. Among his fellow POWs, he earned the nickname "Crip."
Jack McCain, his father, and his mother went to CBS to watch the French film footage before its national broadcast, said Herbert Hetu, a naval public affairs officer quoted in Faith of My Fathers.
"I think Admiral McCain and his wife looked at the film twice," Hetu said. "His reaction afterward was very emotional, but he never talked to us about it. Some things are just too painful for words."
Blame the Americans
After six weeks in the hospital, McCain was taken to a prison camp known as The Plantation and placed in a cell with George "Bud" Day and Norris Overly, both Air Force majors.
Taking one look at McCain, Day was convinced that the North Vietnamese had brought McCain to their cell to die and planned on blaming the Americans.
"He was extremely skinny, and he was just about filthy," said Day, who after the war became a longtime Fort Walton Beach, Fla., attorney and veterans-affairs activist. "He had food and drink and liquids run all over his face. He had a pretty good beard. ... He probably weighed less than 100 pounds.
"He was in this great big white cast, and his hair was snow white. He just looked like he was absolutely on the verge of death."
Day said McCain's injured right arm jutted from his body cast like a stick "sticking out of a snowman."
But more than anything else, Day remembers McCain's eyes.
"His eyes were extremely bright; they had that real fever luster," Day said. "I just took one look at him and had no qualms that he was going to die, and soon."
Despite his poor condition, McCain still was happy to see fellow Americans. The men spent the night whispering among themselves.
By 6 a.m., Day was convinced that McCain had a decent chance to live, providing the fever did not get him. Slowly, McCain began to recover.
"He was just a very determined guy with a lot of spirit," Day said. "It's kind of like when you see a horse, a young colt, and you just know this is a strong-spirited animal. You could see all that in him."
McCain, it seemed, refused to die.
"John was not going to help the Lord take him out," Day said. "If the Lord was involved in taking him out, John was resisting all the way. If the Lord was helping him, John was giving him 100 percent of his effort."
In the first days, McCain could not wash or feed himself without help. The task of nursing McCain fell to Overly because Day had been tortured in ropes and had little use of his hands.
"I've got to give Norris a lot of credit," Day said. "Norris took care of John like a baby, like it was his own child. There was no question that he loved John. He did things for John that only a parent would do for their children."
Occasionally, North Vietnamese dignitaries would stroll by to gawk at the prize prisoner. Because McCain's father was an admiral, the North Vietnamese thought McCain's family was very wealthy. They would ask how many corporations his father owned.
McCain just laughed.
Slowly, he was nursed back to health. McCain's infections were healing because he could wash regularly. Soon, he could hobble around in his cell for a few minutes at a time.
Code talkers
After a time, Overly was removed from the cell and placed with two other prisoners who were going to be released early.
Early release was forbidden by the military's Code of Conduct. To prevent the enemy from subverting prisoners or using them as propaganda tools, officers were to accept release in the order they were captured.
The POWs kept tabs on each other via underground communication techniques, which the guards "went to extraordinary lengths to stop," with little success, according to McCain.
"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," McCain wrote in his book. "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."
McCain kept track of his 80 or so fellow American prisoners and even silently recited their names as he went to sleep. "Keeping an ever-lengthening account of the men we learned were prisoners was the solemn responsibility of every POW," McCain wrote.
So everybody knew that Navy Lt. Everett Alvarez, who had been shot down on Aug. 5, 1964, should have been the first prisoner released.
Nevertheless, Overly and two others accepted early release under a North Vietnamese "amnesty" program. The other POWs dubbed the practice the "Fink Release Program."
McCain and Day, who won the Medal of Honor for his service in Vietnam, don't judge Overly too harshly.
"If I had been in (Overly's) shoes, maybe I would have done things differently than I did," said Day, who retired from the Air Force in 1976 as a full colonel.
"I came back from Vietnam all crippled up and all screwed up, and a lot of that could have been avoided if I had given (them) a lot of the stuff they were really pushing me for.
"I didn't think it was the right thing, so I didn't do it."
In Faith of My Fathers, McCain credits Overly with saving his life.
"I thought him a good man then, as I do today," McCain wrote. "I feared he had made a mistake, but I couldn't stand in judgment of him. ... I wished him well as he departed, carrying a letter from me to (McCain's wife) Carol in his pocket."
Once McCain was able to walk on his own, guards moved Day out. For two years, McCain would be alone in his cell, which he described in U.S. News & World Report after his release:
"My room was fairly decent-sized - I'd say about 10 by 10. The door was solid. There were no windows. The only ventilation came from two small holes at the top in the ceiling, about 6 inches by 4 inches. The roof was tin, and it got hot as hell in there.
"The room was kind of dim - night and day - but they always kept on a small light bulb so they could observe me."
In October 1968, McCain heard a clamor in the cell behind him at The Plantation and began tapping on the wall to contact his new neighbor. The call-up sign was the five-tap "shave and a haircut," and the other prisoner would answer with two taps.
For two weeks he got no answer, but finally two taps came back. Using a cup to the wall, McCain could hear the other prisoner and managed to give him the tap code. He finally gave McCain his name: Ernie Brace. For a while, all Brace could do was tap out "I'm Ernie Brace" and then collapse into sobs.
Brace was a decorated former Marine who had flown more than 100 combat missions in Korea. He had been accused of deserting the scene of an aircraft accident, was court-martialed and received a dishonorable discharge.
But that didn't keep Brace out of the war. As a civilian pilot, he flew for a CIA-backed airline and was shot down over Laos.
Brace had spent 31/2 years in a bamboo cage with his feet in stocks and his neck in an iron collar. During the ordeal, he almost lost the use of his legs. He escaped three times, and when he was captured the third time, he was buried in the ground up to his neck. After a year had passed, McCain and Brace were communicating with other prisoners in the camp, shuttling messages back and forth with the tap code.
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This is one of the worst post I have EVER seen. Delete it.
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1 Yiin 2018-08-26
On Dec. 9, 1969, a guard jerked open Brace's cell door. The incident is recounted in Brace's book, A Code to Keep.
"You are in bad trouble for communicating," the guard said. "You are being taken to a harsher place."
Blindfolded, Brace was put into a truck with soldiers and other prisoners. As the vehicle rolled through Hanoi, Brace felt someone tapping a message on his thigh.
"Hi," said the message. "I John McCain. Who U?"
Brace said tears began forming in his eyes as he grabbed his friend's hand, squeezing out the answer.
"EB here."
Offered early release, Brace turned it down, citing the military code. He was the longest-held civilian POW in Vietnam.
An offer to go home
In June 1968, McCain was taken to an interrogation room, where "The Cat" awaited him. He was joined by another man, "The Rabbit," who spoke very good English.
The Cat spent two hours in seemingly aimless conversation, telling McCain about how he had run French prison camps in the early 1950s. He said that he had released some prisoners early and that they had thanked him later. He also mentioned that Norris Overly had gone home "with honor."
All of a sudden, The Cat blurted out: "Do you want to go home?"
McCain told him he'd have to think about it. He'd been hit by a bout of dysentery and was in poor shape. He was losing weight.
But McCain knew the real reason the North Vietnamese wanted to release him. Adm. Jack McCain, his father, was an important U.S. military figure. In July he would assume command of all U.S. forces in the Pacific. McCain's release would help the North Vietnamese propaganda machine.
McCain realized that the Code of Conduct gave him no choice. Alvarez, who was being held elsewhere, was supposed to be the first man released.
"I just knew it wasn't the right thing to do," he said. "I knew that they wouldn't have offered it to me if I hadn't been the son of an admiral.
"I just didn't think it was the honorable thing to do."
Three days later, McCain met with The Cat again. The North Vietnamese turned the screws. The Cat told McCain that President Johnson had ordered McCain home. McCain asked to see the orders. The Cat didn't have any.
Then the North Vietnamese commander produced a letter from McCain's wife, Carol, saying, "I wished that you had been one of those three who got to come home."
McCain calmly told The Cat that the prisoners must be released in the order they were captured, starting with Alvarez.
On the Fourth of July, McCain had a final sit-down with The Cat and The Rabbit.
"Our senior officer wants to know your final answer," The Rabbit said.
"My final answer is the same," McCain said. "It's no."
"That is your final answer?"
"That is my final answer."
The Cat, who had been seated behind a pile of papers, grabbed a pen and snapped it in half. Ink spurted all over the desk. He rose and kicked the chair over behind him.
"They taught you too well," he said, then left, slamming the door.
Before long, McCain would find himself tied to a stool, and the guards would literally beat him into confessing that he was a "black criminal" and an "air pirate."
McCain's account was corroborated by a cable from Averell Harriman, who was President Johnson's envoy to the Paris peace talks. Harriman had tea with a Vietnamese official, who mentioned that McCain had refused early release.
A Christmas service
On Christmas Eve 1968, about 50 POWs, including McCain, were herded into a room decorated with flowers for a makeshift church service.
The North Vietnamese were intent on milking the ceremony for every bit of PR value. Cameramen moved around the room, filming the ceremony. Flash bulbs popped in the background.
Meanwhile, McCain and other prisoners were busy exchanging information. One of the guards, conscious that he was being filmed, smiled while he told McCain to stop talking.
McCain cursed the guard and kept briefing another prisoner.
"I refused to go home," McCain said. "I was tortured for it. They broke my rib and rebroke my arm."
McCain pressed on, and the guards kept trying to quiet him.
"Our senior ranking officer is Colonel Larson," McCain said.
"No talking!"
McCain cursed them again and flashed his middle finger toward the camera.
He returned to his cell, where he waited for his beating. It didn't come until the day after Christmas.
In May 1969, the North Vietnamese asked McCain to write a letter to U.S. pilots asking them not to fly over North Vietnam. When he refused, they made him stand for hours and hours.
When McCain tired and sat down, a guard stomped on his injured leg. McCain was back on crutches for the next 18 months.
In late 1969, things began to look up for the POWs for the first time.
President Nixon had taken office in January. During the Johnson administration, released POWs weren't allowed to talk about bad conditions in the prison camps for fear that such complaints would make things even worse for the men still being held.
That changed under Nixon.
In August 1969, under pressure, the North Vietnamese began releasing sick and injured prisoners. Among them were Navy Lt. Robert Frishman, who had a badly injured arm, Air Force Capt. Wes Rumble, who was in a body cast with a broken back, and Navy Seaman Doug Hegdahl, who had lost 75 pounds.
The men held press conferences, telling the horrifying details of torture and mistreatment. After that, treatment of POWs began to improve.
By fall, the torture had almost stopped. The food improved. The guards seemed almost friendly.
McCain's barred cell door had been covered with wood to keep him from looking out and from getting any ventilation. But in fall 1969, the board was removed at night to cool McCain's cell. And prisoners were allowed to bathe more often.
"It was all very amazing," McCain would write later.
In December 1969, McCain was moved to the Hanoi Hilton. There, he met with a Cuban journalist who asked McCain general questions about the war. After the interview, a photographer came in and started snapping pictures, though McCain had said he didn't want his picture taken. After that, he refused to meet with visitors.
In June 1970, McCain was moved into a room called Calcutta, which had no ventilation. There, McCain suffered from heat prostration and another bout of dysentery and was cut to half rations.
In December 1970, McCain was moved to a room that housed 45 to 50 prisoners. In February 1971, the prisoners defied their captors and held a church service. When the men presiding over the service were taken away by guards, the men started singing The Star-Spangled Banner very loudly.
Fearing a riot, the guards rushed in with ropes and subdued the men. A few days later, McCain and others were moved to a punishment camp the prisoners called Skid Row. Though the conditions were filthy, McCain said, the prison was a piece of cake compared with conditions in 1969.
In 1971 and 1972, conditions gradually improved. McCain, whose weight had dropped to 105 pounds during his first years in Hanoi, began to regain some of his health. He was allowed to exercise, which eased the boredom and made it easier to sleep.
"He was crippled but mentally fierce," recalled Orson Swindle, who roomed with McCain for the last two years of their incarceration. "He was stiff-legged and had awkward movement of both arms. He did the funniest push-ups I've even seen.
"One of his arms was sort of crooked. . . . He did push-ups with a tilt to it."
The men were in a big room with a large concrete slab in the center and a 3-foot-wide, horseshoe-shaped path around the slab. They would exercise by walking along the path.
"When John would run in place, it was sort of humorous to watch him," Swindle said. "One leg would bend, and the other wouldn't. It was a sight to behold."
To entertain themselves and the other men, McCain and Swindle organized "Sunday Night at the Movies," retelling, and in some cases performing, scenes from Hollywood films they had seen.
One of their favorites was One-Eyed Jacks, a 1961 movie in which Marlon Brando is beaten by a worthless sheriff played by Slim Pickens. McCain and Swindle especially loved the part where Brando calls Pickens a "scum-sucking pig."
In December 1972, McCain had a front-row seat to a full-scale bombing attack on Hanoi.
"It was the most spectacular show I'll ever see," McCain later wrote in U.S. News and World Report. "The bombs were dropping so close that the building would shake. The SAMs were flying all over, and the sirens were whining - it was really a wild scene."
Although the bombing had been conceived by Nixon, the orders had been given by McCain's father, Jack.
McCain's father never wrote to him during the war because of the propaganda value of such a letter. He did, however, try to pass McCain a secret message once, according to a passage in Faith of My Fathers.
In letters to his wife, McCain was using a fairly obvious code to send messages back to the States. Naval intelligence, fearing that McCain would be caught, apprised the admiral.
Adm. Jack McCain sent a hidden message in a letter Carol wrote to McCain: "JUNIOR URGES CAUTION PLEASE STOP THIS."
The younger McCain never saw it because the North Vietnamese withheld Carol's letters.
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I've known more coherent downies.
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1 Yiin 2018-08-26
By January 1973, McCain was back at The Plantation. The prisoners sensed that the war was nearing its end. The guards hardly bothered them.
Around that time, McCain was playing bridge with Swindle and two others when he was dealt a perfect hand. But McCain made a rookie mistake and lost his advantage. The other men teased him unmercifully.
Finally, McCain stopped talking to Swindle, who slept right next to him on the floor. This went on for several days.
"We would be walking on the path, and I would say, 'Hi, John,' and John wouldn't respond," Swindle said.
Then one day, the guards came in and ordered Swindle to pack his gear. As one of the first pilots captured, Swindle was in line to be released.
As Swindle was being ushered out, a frantic McCain rushed up to his side.
"John comes running up and says, 'Orson, Orson, I've really been a jerk the last few days.' I said, 'I don't even want to talk to you,' and I turned away.
"Then I looked back at him and winked, and I had a big grin on my face, and I said, 'I'll see you at home.'"
In March, McCain joined a group of prisoners who were put onto trucks and driven to Gia Lam Airport in Hanoi. McCain said he didn't believe he was leaving until he actually spoke with an American in uniform.
It was the best day of his life.
"At the time, it wasn't that overwhelming. It was one of those things that you had anticipated for so long, nothing could have lived up to my expectations," McCain said. "It's like when a kid waits for Christmas, and then it arrives, and it can't quite live up to what he expected."
One by one, The Rabbit read off their names, and they boarded the plane.
McCain's long ordeal was over.
1 DeathByDragonDildo 2018-08-26
TL;DR
1 Yiin 2018-08-26
Man got punches
1 subpoutine 2018-08-26
For the record, i enjoyed all of these.
1 westofthetracks 2018-08-26
yeah, the vietcong really should have finished what they started, i agree
1 Yiin 2018-08-26
imagine thinking being an edgy commie is clever
1 westofthetracks 2018-08-26
im just trying to treat the tragic passing of this american hero with the solemnity it deserves. i say "tragic" because it came several decades too late (the vietcong should have tortured him to death)
1 shallowm 2018-08-26
Why do you hate America?
1 westofthetracks 2018-08-26
not islamic enough
1 shallowm 2018-08-26
tru
1 Tobans 2018-08-26
He will come down and spread the teachings of islam in a final crusade insh'allah.
1 dootwiththesickness 2018-08-26
Not necessarily a commie. I just like the Viet Cong.
1 Yiin 2018-08-26
I actually do too. It was a nationalist reaction to a western-led world order in a time where the political position most antithetical to that order was communism. It's unsurprising the commieness would fade away.
1 dootwiththesickness 2018-08-26
Mark my words, this November there will be at least one flipped congressional seat where the Democratic margin will be narrow enough for the Viet Cong to say they gave the Dems the win.
1 LifeIsVanilla 2018-08-26
You have a talent of making absolute garbage worded so terrifically boring that people don't even read your full comment. You are a tl;dr, and whichever father of yours gave birth to you should have considered putting you up for adoption.
1 Yiin 2018-08-26
He probably wanted to.
1 LifeIsVanilla 2018-08-26
John Buckle Up Buckaroo McCain
1 snallygaster 2018-08-26
sauce?
1 Yiin 2018-08-26
http://archive.azcentral.com/news/election/mccain/articles/2007/03/01/20070301mccainbio-chapter3.html
1 sweetyellowknees 2018-08-26
This was so hot.
1 Yiin 2018-08-26
Extreme BDSM 🤫
1 Strictlybutters 2018-08-26
Yippie-ki-yay, motherfucker!
1 edu-fk 2018-08-26
Claims to be pro-life, dies anyway. What a hypocrite.
1 ATissu 2018-08-26
Best day of my life.
ok but I can celebrate if he caused the death of thousands 🤔
1 CordialCalamity 2018-08-26
F