 http://www.arizonarepublic.com/special39/articles/1003mccainbook3.html . |
| Chapter III:
The Crown Prince
by Bill Muller ''THE PLANTATION,'' HANOI, AUGUST 1968 - John McCain sat on a stool, 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, 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 1/2 years in North Vietnam,'' McCain would write later. ''I was at the point of suicide.'' What happened next 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.'' As a pilot, McCain had led a charmed life, surviving a bad accident on the USS Forrestal about two months before. The Forrestal was stationed in the Tonkin Gulf, preparing for a mission. McCain was strapped into his jet, warming up the engine. Suddenly, a missile on another plane misfired, shooting across the deck and slamming into McCain's fuel tank. The missile didn't detonate, but the impact spilled hundreds of gallons of highly flammable aviation fuel on the deck. McCain's plane was engulfed in smoke. As a fire blazed beneath him, McCain scrambled out of the cockpit, then dropped and rolled through the burning aviation fuel. Slapping out the fire on his flight suit, McCain started back to assist another pilot. Then the first bomb exploded. Flaming shrapnel whizzed across the flight deck. One man was decapitated; others were burned beyond recognition. McCain was knocked backward, and small pieces of metal peppered his chest. As the crew frantically fought the fire, more bombs and planes exploded. In the end, 134 men lost their lives, and the Forrestal was almost abandoned. McCain's injuries were minor. After the accident, McCain transferred from the Forrestal to the Oriskany, another aircraft carrier. On Oct. 26, McCain would fly his 23rd sortie over Vietnam, joining a 20-plane mission to bomb a power plant in Hanoi, the North Vietnamese capital, 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 attack. As McCain approached his target, 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. Suddenly, a missile sheared off his right wing, sending his plane spinning toward earth, out of control. McCain ejected, breaking his right leg and both arms. He regained consciousness as he settled into a small lake in the center of Hanoi. 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 Naval commander for the United
States. They started calling McCain ''The Crown Prince.'' 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, which was broken in three places. 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 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.'' 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, a lawyer in Fort Walton Beach, Fla. ''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, was too tough 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, since 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. Since 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, now that he could wash regularly. Soon, he could hobble around in his cell for a few minutes at a time. 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. That meant that the first man to be released should have been Navy Lt. Everett Alvarez, who had been shot down on Aug. 5, 1964. Nevertheless, Overly and two others accepted early release. The other POWs soon dubbed the practice the ''Fink Release Program.'' McCain has spoken with Overly only once since the war, during a short phone conversation after McCain was released in 1973. But Day, who won the Medal of Honor for his service in Vietnam, has made his peace with Overly. ''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 the gooks 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.'' Once McCain was able to walk on his own, Day was moved 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.'' 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 awhile, 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 3 1/2 years in a bamboo cage with his feet in stocks and an iron collar around his neck. 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. 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 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. He was the son and grandson of admirals (his father, Adm. Jack McCain, had been made commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific in July 1968.) 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. McCain couldn't let down his father and grandfather. ''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 the ''black air pirate'' confession out of him. McCain's account was confirmed in 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. 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 was taken back 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 jumped 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 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-shape 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 Marlon Brando movie in which 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.'' Though the bombing had been conceived by Nixon, the actual orders had been given by McCain's father, Jack. McCain's father never wrote 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. John McCain Jr. 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 had been moved back to 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. |