by John McCain
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 difficu
lt 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.