Faith of My Fathers

by John McCain

  As room chaplain, I was given the assignment. I collected the Bible from where it had been left by a guard, on a table in the courtyard just outside our cell door. Hastily, I leafed through its tattered pages until I found an account of the Nativity. I quickly copied the passage, and finished just moments before a guard arrived to retrieve the Bible.

  On Christmas night we held our simple, moving service. We began with the Lord’s Prayer, after which a choir sang carols, directed by the former conductor of the Air Force Academy Choir, Captain Quincy Collins. I thought they were quite good, excellent, in fact. Although I confess that the regularity with which they practiced in the weeks prior to Christmas occasionally grated on my nerves.

  But that night, the hymns were rendered with more feeling and were more inspirational than the offerings of the world’s most celebrated choirs. We all joined in the singing, nervous and furtive at first, fearing the guards would disrupt the service if we sang too loudly. With each hymn, however, we grew bolder, and our voices rose with emotion.

  Between each hymn, I read a portion of the story of Christ’s birth from the pages I had copied.

  “‘And the Angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day, in the city of David, a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.’”

  The night air was cold, and we shivered from its effect and from the fever that still plagued some of us. The sickest among us, unable to stand, sat on the raised concrete sleeping platform in the middle of the room, blankets around their shaking shoulders. Many others, stooped by years of torture, or crippled from injuries sustained during their shootdown, stood, some on makeshift crutches, as the service proceeded.

  The lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling illuminated our gaunt, unshaven, dirty, and generally wretched congregation. But for a moment we all had the absolutely exquisite feeling that our burdens had been lifted. Some of us had attended Christmas services in prison before. But they had been Vietnamese productions, spiritless, ludicrous stage shows. This was our service, the only one we had ever been allowed to hold. It was more sacred to me than any service I had attended in the past, or any service I have attended since.

  We gave prayers of thanks for the Christ child, for our families and homes, for our country. We half expected the guards to barge in and force us to conclude the service. Every now and then we glanced up at the windows to see if they were watching us as they had during the Church Riot. But when I looked up at the bars that evening, I wished they had been looking in. I wanted them to see us—faithful, joyful, and triumphant.

  The last hymn sung was “Silent Night.” Many of us wept.

  We held a Christmas dinner after the service. We had arranged our room to resemble a “dining-in,” a much-loved military ritual, in which officers, attired in their best uniforms, sit at table according to rank, to dine and drink in elaborate formality. Lacking most of the necessary accouterments, we nevertheless made quite an evening of it. The senior officers sat at the head of the table, while numerous speeches and toasts to family, service, and country were honored. All of us were proud to have the opportunity to dine again, even in our less than elegant surroundings, like officers and gentlemen.

  After dinner we exchanged gifts. One man had used his cotton washcloth and a needle and thread he had scrounged somewhere to fashion a hat for Bud. Other men exchanged dog tags. Most of us exchanged chits for Christmas gifts we wished each other to have. We all gave one man who had been losing at poker lately an IOU for another $250 in imaginary chips.

  Back from Skid Row that Christmas, we were overjoyed to entertain ourselves again in the company of men who had managed through all those years to retain their humanity though our enemies had tried to turn us into animals. From then on, with brief exceptions, our existence in Hanoi was as tolerable as could be expected when you are deprived of your liberty.

  The Vietnamese had given us several decks of cards, and we played a lot of bridge and poker. My luck at the table usually ran bad, to the endless amusement of Orson, who liked to taunt me for what he considered my unskilled approach to the games. Almost every Sunday afternoon, we held a bridge tournament that included six tables of players.

  We had more profitable uses for our time as well, which made our days pass just as quickly as did our reproductions of various popular entertainments. An education officer was designated and classes were taught in almost every imaginable subject, all the POWs called on to share their particular field of learning. Language classes were popular and to this day I can read more than a few words in several languages. The guards frequently confiscated our notes, however, an impediment that greatly complicated our grasp of foreign languages. Other subjects ranged from quantum physics to meat-cutting.

  Lectures were held on the four nights when we were not required to stage a movie reproduction. Orson and I taught classes in literature and history, and I took as much pride in my history lectures as I did in my movie performances, calling our tutorial “The History of the World from the Beginning.”

  Our classes and amateur theatrics made time, the one thing we had in abundance, pass relatively pleasantly and helped temper the small conflicts that inevitably arise when men are confined together in close quarters. No matter how irritated we occasionally felt over slight grievances with one another, nothing could ever seriously detract from the pleasure we took from our own company in the last full year of our captivity.

  Our situation improved even more in April 1972, when President Nixon resumed the bombing of North Vietnam and, on my father’s orders, the first bombs since March 1968 began falling on Hanoi. Operation Linebacker, as the campaign was called, brought B-52s, with their huge payload of bombs, into the war, although they were not used in attacks on Hanoi.

  The misery we had endured prior to 1972 was made all the worse by our fear that the United States was unprepared to do what was necessary to bring the war to a reasonably swift conclusion. We could never see over the horizon to the day when the war would end. Whether you supported the war or opposed it—and I met few POWs who argued the latter position—no one believed the war should be prosecuted in the manner in which the Johnson administration had fought it.

  No one who goes to war believes once he is there that it is worth the terrible cost of war to fight it by half measures. War is too horrible a thing to drag out unnecessarily. It was a shameful waste to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere through awful afflictions and heartache, for a cause that half the country didn’t believe in and our leaders weren’t committed to winning. They committed us to it, badly misjudged the enemy’s resolve, and left us to manage the thing on our own without authority to fight it to the extent necessary to finish it.

  It’s not hard to understand now that, given the prevailing political judgments of the time, the Vietnam War was better left unfought. No other national endeavor requires as much unshakable resolve as war. If the government and the nation lack that resolve, it is criminal to expect men in the field to carry it alone. We were accountable to the country, and no one was accountable to us. But we found our honor in our answer, if not our summons.

  Every POW knew that the harder the war was fought the sooner we would go home. Long aware of the on-and-off peace negotiations in Paris, we were elated when the Nixon administration proved it was intent on forcing the negotiations to a conclusion that would restore our freedom.

  As the bombing campaign intensified, our morale soared with every sortie. It was after one raid, and our raucous celebration of its effect, that the guards dragged Mike Christian from our room.

  Mike was a Navy bombardier-navigator who had been shot down in 1967, about six months before I arrived. He had grown up near Selma, Alabama. His family was poor. He had not worn shoes until he was thirteen years old. Character was their wealth. They were good, righteous people, and they raised Mike to be hardworking and loyal. He was seventeen when he enlisted in the Navy. As a young sailor, he sho
wed promise as a leader and impressed his superiors enough to be offered a commission.

  What packages we were allowed to receive from our families often contained handkerchiefs, scarves, and other clothing items. For some time, Mike had been taking little scraps of red and white cloth, and with a needle he had fashioned from a piece of bamboo he laboriously sewed an American flag onto the inside of his blue prisoner’s shirt. Every afternoon, before we ate our soup, we would hang Mike’s flag on the wall of our cell and together recite the Pledge of Allegiance. No other event of the day had as much meaning to us.

  The guards discovered Mike’s flag one afternoon during a routine inspection and confiscated it. They returned that evening and took Mike outside. For our benefit as much as Mike’s, they beat him severely, just outside our cell, puncturing his eardrum and breaking several of his ribs. When they had finished, they dragged him bleeding and nearly senseless back into our cell, and we helped him crawl to his place on the sleeping platform. After things quieted down, we all lay down to go to sleep. Before drifting off, I happened to look toward a corner of the room, where one of the four naked lightbulbs that were always illuminated in our cell cast a dim light on Mike Christian. He had crawled there quietly when he thought the rest of us were sleeping. With his eyes nearly swollen shut from the beating, he had quietly picked up his needle and thread and begun sewing a new flag.

  I witnessed many acts of heroism in prison, but none braver than that. As I watched him, I felt a surge of pride at serving with him, and an equal measure of humility for lacking that extra ration of courage that distinguished Mike Christian from other men.

  CHAPTER 27

  Release

  The bombing of North Vietnam was halted in October when peace talks resumed in Paris. By December, it was clear that the talks had stalled because of North Vietnamese intransigence. On December 18, at around nine o’clock in the evening, it was renewed with a vengeance as Operation Linebacker II commenced and the unmistakable destructive power of B-52s rained down on Hanoi.

  Despite our proximity to the targets, we were jubilant. We hollered in near euphoria as the ground beneath us shook with the force of the blasts, exulting in our guards’ fear as they scurried for shelter. We clapped each other on the back and joked about packing our bags for home. We shouted “Thank you!” at the night sky.

  No prisoner betrayed the slightest concern that we were in any danger. I didn’t hear anyone say, “We might be hit.” We just cheered the assault on and watched the show. Once in a while a guard came by and yelled at us to shut up, to which we responded by cheering even louder.

  When a Vietnamese SAM hit a B-52, as, regrettably, happened on several occasions, the explosion and burning fuel would illuminate the whole sky, from horizon to horizon, a bright pink-and-orange glow. In this unnatural light, we could see the Vietnamese gasping at the strange sight and tearing around the camp in a panic.

  Some of the gun guards had responded to the shriek of the air raid sirens by manning their defense stations slowly, joking and laughing with each other, apparently indifferent to the coming assault. They probably believed it to be only a drill. Now they were racing around trying to figure out how to defend themselves from this unexpected, massive bombardment. Terrified, some of them fired their rifles into the sky at targets that were miles above them.

  For many of our guards this was their first taste of modern warfare, and their confidence in the superiority of their defenses was visibly shaken. Many of them cowered in the shadows of our cellblocks, believing, correctly, that the B-52 pilots knew where Americans were held in Hanoi and were trying to avoid dropping their bombs near us.

  It was quite a spectacular show. Antiaircraft guns booming, bombs exploding, fires raging all over the city. It is sinful to take pleasure in the suffering of others, even your enemies, and B-52s can deliver a lot of suffering. But the Vietnamese had never before experienced the full extent of American airpower. They believed that the airpower they had previously witnessed was all we were capable of delivering, and that their formidable air defenses were more than a match for it. Now they stood in awe and terror of the real thing, the full measure of conventional American power.

  Before the B-52 raids, the Vietnamese had always stepped up the pressure on us whenever the United States escalated the air campaign. They knocked us around a little more often and a little more enthusiastically, just to make the point that they were still confident of victory. In the aftermath of the B-52 raids, some of the guards who had treated us the most contemptuously became almost civil when speaking to us. Some of them even began to smile at us, almost comically. It was impossible for us not to feel pride and relief as we watched people who had badly mistreated us recognize, at long last, how powerful an enemy we represented.

  The first raid lasted until four-thirty in the morning. As the raids continued over the following nights, we could see that the Vietnamese air defenses were diminishing. They had few missiles left to fire, and the antiaircraft guns fell silent. Bridges were destroyed, arsenals blown up, the city’s defense infrastructure devastated. They were being beaten, and they knew it.

  The day after the first bombing raid, one of the officers burst into our room and screamed hysterically, “We are not afraid! We are not afraid!” He added that the Vietnamese were certain to win the war, thereby convincing us that, for the moment at least, he thought they were losing. After the last raid, an officer entered our cell smiling broadly as he informed us that they had destroyed all the B-52s. I was standing with Bud Day and Jack Fellowes when we received this distressing news. Bud looked at the officer for a moment, then laughed and said, “Bullshit.”

  In the bad old days, Bud would have been dragged out of there and tied in ropes for such defiance. Now all the officer was disposed to do was argue with Bud. “Look, no more bombs. We destroyed all your bombers.”

  I’ve often thought that the more perceptive Vietnamese must have realized, as we did, that the raids would shorten the war, and though they were distressed by the ferocity of the attacks, they might have regarded them as a harbinger of peace.

  During one raid that did not involve B-52s, a bomb fell so close to us that shrapnel sprayed the camp courtyard. Our momentary apprehension that the pilot’s targeting was not so accurate that our safety was guaranteed did not dampen our high spirits. We took what shelter we could, of course, just in case. But we greeted the low distant grumble of every approaching sortie like a long-lost friend.

  We knew that the peace talks were entering their last phase. With the encouragement of the B-52s, we were confident they would be concluded in short order. We all believed, for the first time, that this would be our last Christmas in prison, and we were drunk with the thought of going home.

  The B-52s terrorized Hanoi for eleven nights. Wave after wave they came. During the days, while the strategic bombers were refueled and rearmed, other aircraft took up the assault. The Vietnamese got the point. The Paris peace talks resumed on January 8, 1973, and were swiftly concluded. The accords were signed on the 27th, but we were not informed of the event until the next day, when we were ordered to form in the courtyard for an important announcement.

  As a Vietnamese officer read the full text of the peace agreement, including the part that provided for the release of prisoners of war, we stood silently at attention. Our senior officers, knowing that this moment was imminent, had warned us not to demonstrate our emotions when the agreement was announced. They suspected that the Vietnamese intended to record the event for its propaganda value and broadcast pictures of jubilant POWs celebrating peace to a worldwide audience.

  They were right. Film crews were on hand for the ceremony, with their cameras rolling. Not a single POW betrayed the slightest emotion as the accords were read and we were informed we would all be released in two months. When the ceremony concluded we broke ranks and walked quietly back to our cells, seemingly indifferent to the news we had just received. Back in our cells, we waited for the disappoin
ted film crew and the other assembled Vietnamese to disperse before we began to embrace one another and express our unrestrained joy.

  By this time I had been transferred back to the Plantation, where I remained until my release. The guards left us alone for the remaining weeks, and we walked about the courtyard freely, played volleyball, and talked with whomever we pleased. We were not yet at liberty, but we were beginning to remember what it felt like to be free.

  Henry Kissinger arrived in Hanoi to sign the final agreement. Near the end of his visit, the Vietnamese offered to release me to him. He refused the offer. When I met Dr. Kissinger back in the States some weeks later and he informed me of the Vietnamese offer and his response, I thanked him for saving my honor.

  The prisoners were released in four increments in the order in which we had been captured. On March 15, the Rabbit called my name off the roster of POWs to be released that day. A few days earlier we had received, for the first time, Red Cross packages. The night before, we were given a large dinner, complete with wine, our first substantial meal in a long time.

  On the day before my release, I had been ordered to see the camp commander and a high-ranking political officer who spoke English. The political officer told me that he had recently seen the doctor who had operated on my leg, and that he had expressed his concern about my condition.

  “Would you like to write a note to your doctor or see him to tell him how you are, and to thank him for your operation?”

  Noticing a tape recorder sitting on the table, I answered in the negative.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, I haven’t seen the asshole in five years and I wonder why he should have his curiosity aroused at this point. I know he’s been very busy.”

  Dressed in cheap civilian clothes, we boarded buses for Gia Lam airport on the outskirts of Hanoi. As I stepped off the bus at the edge of the airport tarmac, I saw a big, green, beautiful American C-141 transport plane waiting to take us to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines. I nearly cried at the sight of it. At the airport, lined up in formation according to our shootdown date, we maintained our military bearing as a noisy crowd of Vietnamese gawked at us. I could hear cameras whirring and shutters clicking. Vietnamese and American officers were seated at a table, each holding a list of prisoners. When it was time for a prisoner to step forward, representatives of both militaries called off his name. An officer from his service then escorted each prisoner across the tarmac and up the ramp into the plane. When my name was called, I stepped forward. The American officers seated at the table outranked me, so I saluted them.