Faith of My Fathers

by John McCain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The message read something like:

  I HOPE YOU ARE WELL. YOUR FAMILY IS FINE. THE LINER OF THIS CAN WORKS LIKE INVISIBLE INK. PLACE IT OVER YOUR LETTERS. PRESS A HARD OBJECT ON IT. IT WILL WRITE SECRET MESSAGE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  YOUR SON WAS SERIOUSLY WOUNDED WHEN SHOT DOWN IN HANOI BUT HAS MADE FINE RECOVERY AND NOW, ACCORDING THIS GROUP, LOOKS “QUITE WELL.” HE HAS BEEN EVERYTHING YOU WANT YOUR SON TO BE AND HAS STOOD UP MANFULLY AGAINST ALL EFFORTS TO PERSUADE HIM TO UTTER TRAITOROUS STATEMENTS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Despite his apparent recovery, he was n
ever again a well man after his stroke. He lived for nearly nine years after he retired. But, in truth, he had, like his father before him, sacrificed his life to hold a command in his country’s war.

  CHAPTER 22

  The Washrag

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

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

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