McCain's worldview shaped in prison camp

As a POW, GOP candidate developed firm beliefs about U.S. use of military might

Michael Dobbs | Washington Post

10/5/2008 -

HANOI, Vietnam — The lake into which John McCain parachuted after his Navy plane was shot down is now surrounded by chic restaurants, cell-phone stores and motorcycle dealerships. The prison camp where he confessed to being a "black criminal" has been turned into a multiplex cinema showing garish American movies. A five-star hotel occupies the site of the "Hanoi Hilton" jail, where he spent more than three years. The surface-to-air missile sites that once circled Hanoi have been replaced by sprawling industrial parks churning out sneakers and television sets for the U.S. market.

Hanoi and Vietnam have changed dramatically since the war with the United States ended 33 years ago. But for the Republican presidential nominee, the 5 1/2 years he spent as a prisoner of war had an indelible impact, not just because of the terrible injuries he suffered but because of how the ordeal shaped his worldview.

In hushed conversations with his fellow POWs four decades ago, he developed firm beliefs about how the United States should use its military power, lessons that he has sought to apply to the more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His resistance of his captors — especially his refusal to accept an offer that would have freed him before his comrades — forged his character, taught him the meaning of honor and, eventually, launched him on a meteoric political career.

Before his final, fateful bombing mission, McCain had been a gregarious flyboy "whose ambitions did not go much beyond being a commander of a squadron," according to Joe McCain, his younger brother. The decision to reject early release, Joe McCain believes, was "the most important single moment of his entire life" and turned him into a potential commander in chief. "It showed," his brother said, "that he can make tough decisions in tough times."

Although the story of his imprisonment has been told many times, including by the candidate, a review of tens of thousands of documents and interviews with several dozen Vietnamese and former POWs yields fresh insights into McCain's experience.

For McCain, communism was not a theoretical abstraction; it was an oppressive reality he endured every minute from his capture in October 1967 until his release in March 1973. As the son of a top Navy admiral, who became commander in chief of U.S. forces in Asia in 1968, he was known as the "Crown Prince" and subjected to special attention from his captors. The Vietnamese used McCain and other prisoners to try to convince Americans that their leaders were fighting an unjust war that could not be won.

By his own account, McCain eventually "broke" under torture, a blow to his sense of military honor and self-esteem that led to suicide attempts and hardened his hatred for the communists. Though he shunned efforts by his interrogators to persuade him to accept early release, which would have violated his obligations under the code of conduct for American prisoners, he was nevertheless pushed into making statements critical of the United States and thanking his captors for their "humane" treatment.

Reconstructing the crucial early phase of McCain's imprisonment is complicated by the lack of independently verifiable documentary evidence. He spent much of that time in solitary confinement, able to communicate with his fellow prisoners only sporadically, by whispering messages in shower stalls and tapping laboriously through a thick brick wall. Accounts of his torture by the Vietnamese are largely based on his own reminiscences, particularly his 1999 memoir, Faith of My Fathers.

The North Vietnamese kept detailed records on individual prisoner interrogations, known as the blue files, but these have never been released. Official U.S. documentation of the abuses suffered by the prisoners is also unavailable. Extensive debriefs of returning POWs remain classified because of privacy restrictions. The McCain campaign did not respond to requests for access to the candidate's postwar intelligence debriefs and his Navy personnel file. Unlike both George W. Bush and John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election, McCain has come under little outside pressure to release his military records.

This account is based on a review of records at the National Archives in College Park, Md., and the POW-MIA database at the Library of Congress, as well as interviews with former POWs and Vietnamese who had contact with McCain during his captivity.

McCain's last mission

McCain's last mission over Vietnam could serve as an almost perfect illustration of the futility of President Lyndon Johnson's bombing campaign known as Operation Rolling Thunder. The target on Oct. 26, 1967, was a thermal power plant in the center of Hanoi. The net result of the raid was three U.S. Navy planes down, minimal disruption of electricity supplies in the North Vietnamese capital and a propaganda windfall for the Vietnamese. The American bombs all fell wide of their target.

"He probably killed a few fish," said retired Maj. Nguyen Lan, the commander of the surface-to-air missile battery that brought down McCain, telling his story in public for the first time. "The Americans never did destroy that power plant," he said, laughing.

Like many of his fellow pilots, McCain was intensely frustrated by the carefully calibrated bombing of North Vietnam. In his view, the war-fighting strategy was "maddeningly illogical." Launching off aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin, the airmen would see Soviet ships unloading missiles in Haiphong Harbor but were forbidden to hit the SAM sites unless they opened fire on American planes.

On this day, McCain had taken off from the aircraft carrier Oriskany in an A-4 light bomber, part of a 20-plane strike force.

Nearing Hanoi, the U.S. planes ran into thick, black clouds of anti-aircraft fire. The pilots maneuvered furiously to avoid the incoming missiles, which resembled long telephone poles hurtling through the sky.

Navy Lt. Verlene Daniels, flying an A-4 bomber like McCain, was the first to go down, about 20 miles southwest of Hanoi. Moments later, one of the F-8 fighter escorts, piloted by Lt. Charles Rice, was hit by another missile half a dozen miles west of the capital. Both Daniels and Rice ejected and were promptly captured by angry Vietnamese peasants.

McCain pressed onward toward the target, diving from 9,000 to 4,000 feet to release his bombs as he spotted the power plant on the eastern bank of a small lake in the center of the city.

Nguyen Lan's unit, the 61st Missile Battalion, was camouflaged in a grove of wispy casuarina trees 13 miles south of Hanoi, near the Red River. Lan, an army captain at the time, had received his initial training in 1965 from Soviet military advisers and had downed more than a dozen U.S. planes. This day, he had already used up two of his five functioning missiles, missing the target both times, and was desperate for a "kill."

The order to fire over "the forbidden sector" of the city — which contained the residences of Ho Chi Minh and other top Vietnamese officials — reached Lan's unit at 11:49 a.m. Hanoi time. The captain tracked McCain's A-4 from 12 miles away, identifying it on his radar screen as the plane made its final approach to the target. Seconds later, he ordered the firing of a single missile.

McCain was knocked unconscious as he ejected at more than 500 miles an hour, breaking both his arms and his right knee. He came to as he plunged into Truc Bach Lake, less than half a mile from the presidential palace. He twice sunk in the shallow water before he inflated his life vest with his teeth, giving him enough buoyancy to remain on the surface.

A paper factory worker, 19-year-old Tran Lua, watched the American pilot fall into the lake. The crowd was yelling "He's got a gun," so Lua ran into his house to grab a meat cleaver before jumping into the water. Together with an older neighbor, he pushed two bamboo rafts toward the center of the lake. The water had turned a bright blue from the pilot's emergency identification dye.

The two men hauled McCain onto a raft and paddled toward the shore, shouting "haut les mains" at their bewildered captive. Lua had picked up the expression — French for "hands up" — from old war movies.

"I held the American firmly by the hair to prevent him from using his pistol," Lua recalled. "He was lucky because there was a police station nearby and we were able to take him there before anybody could hurt him."

McCain tells a somewhat different story in his memoir. He says a bystander smashed a rifle butt into his shoulder, breaking it, while someone else stuck a bayonet into his ankle and groin.

There was a small clinic at the back of the police station. The nurse there, Nguyen Thi Thanh, now 81, said she yelled at everyone to get out of the room so that she could examine the American.

A truck arrived. The future U.S. senator was loaded onto a stretcher, then deposited a few blocks away at a forbidding yellow building bearing the inscription "Maison Centrale," a French-built prison better known to a generation of American POWs as the "Hanoi Hilton."

Code of conduct

Article 5 of the code of conduct for American prisoners of war contains a very simple admonition: "I am required to give name, rank, service number, and date of birth. I will evade answering further questions to the utmost of my ability."

Like the vast majority of American POWs in Vietnam, McCain did not live up to a narrow interpretation of the code. He ended up telling his captors much more.

Promulgated in 1955 in the wake of the Korean War, the code was an attempt by the Pentagon to counter the communist exploitation of American prisoners that had led to widespread charges of brainwashing and collaboration with the enemy.

While the Vietnamese were always eager to obtain military information, an even more important goal was propaganda. They delighted in destroying the myth of the American "superman" by extracting "confessions" from POWs and getting them to violate their code. "I was what the Americans called a brainwasher," said former military interrogator Luu Dinh Mien, who participated in the initial questioning of McCain, soon after he was brought to the Hanoi Hilton.

While acknowledging a concerted effort to indoctrinate the captives, Mien denies they were ever tortured, a claim that conflicts with the testimony of numerous American POWs and a well-documented historical record.

In his memoir, McCain says he was denied medical treatment for four or five days until his captors discovered that his father was "a big admiral" and took him to a hospital. In fact, it seems likely that the Vietnamese understood the propaganda value of their new prisoner even earlier. Radio Hanoi was boasting about the capture of "John Sidney McCain" within hours of his shootdown.

The "Crown Prince" received a steady stream of curious visitors during his first few weeks in Hanoi.

Around this time, a French television reporter, Francois Chalais, recorded a five-minute interview with McCain in his hospital bed. Snippets of the interview, in which the injured pilot is shown providing his name, rank and serial number, have been aired in McCain campaign advertisements. The most emotional exchange came at the end when Chalais invited McCain to send a message to his family. Clearly in great pain from his injuries, McCain choked up and seemed to have trouble getting out the words: "I would just like to tell ... my wife ... I'm gonna get well ... I love her."

Trials at the Plantation

The prison camp that served as the backdrop for McCain's greatest trials in Vietnam was not the Hanoi Hilton, but a place known to the Americans as the "Plantation." A former military film studio, it was the stage for what another POW, Sam Johnson, called "the best-orchestrated propaganda show this century has beheld."

McCain was sent to the Plantation around Dec. 8 after a clumsy operation in the hospital to reset his arm. He was placed in a room with Air Force Col. George "Bud" Day and another recent shootdown, Air Force Maj. Norris Overly.

The new arrival seemed "on the verge of death" to Day. His right arm poked out of a body cast that had not been aligned properly, and he was unable to feed himself.

Since Day also was in bad shape, Overly had the job of cleaning McCain up and nursing him back to health. McCain would later credit Overly with saving his life, but their paths diverged in February 1968, when Overly accepted a Vietnamese offer of early release. The code of conduct forbade POWs from accepting amnesty or other "special favors" from their captors; commanders insisted prisoners should be released in order of capture. McCain would never speak to Overly again.

Conditions at the Plantation were somewhat better than at some of the other camps, including the Hanoi Hilton. According to Day, there was "very little obvious torture going on." Many of the prisoners, including McCain, were candidates for early release.

A staple topic of conversation between McCain and Day was the 1968 presidential campaign. Both men liked the Republican governor of California, Ronald Reagan, who was emerging as Richard Nixon's chief rival and had a reputation for being firmly anti-communist.

By putting a reverse spin on their captors' propaganda, the two pilots guessed that the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive was being beaten back. At the same time, the anti-war movement in the United States was gathering momentum, causing President Johnson to suspend the bombing of North Vietnam. Day traces his old friend's decision to support the "surge" in Iraq back to his dismay at the way, in their view, Johnson allowed himself to be browbeaten by domestic critics. "We got the opportunity to watch a really inept president screw up a war," Day said.

At the end of March, Day was moved out of the Plantation, and McCain found himself in solitary confinement, in a long block on the eastern side of the camp dubbed the "Warehouse." He was placed in Cell 13. The toughest endurance test of his life was about to begin.

Beaten to a confession

After being left alone for nearly two months, McCain was accused of "black crimes against the people," left overnight in ropes in stress positions, and beaten and kicked. When he refused to confess, he was thrown into a punishment cell at the back of the Warehouse, where guards returned to administer beatings every two to three hours. After two attempts to commit suicide, McCain signed a "confession," thanking the Vietnamese people for saving his life and describing himself as a "black criminal."

Alone in his cell, McCain shared his humiliation at being forced to "confess" his crimes with his neighbor, Air Force Lt. Col. Robert Craner. In his acceptance speech to the Republican convention last month, McCain credited Craner with restoring his self-esteem.

While torture was unusual at the Plantation, it was not unknown. Air Force Capt. Ronald Webb, who also ended up in the Warehouse, said guards broke his front teeth and both his wrists because he communicated with his fellow prisoners, in violation of rules. He remembers the boastful claim by one of his interrogators that American prisoners could be divided into the "willing" and "partially willing." The "unwilling" did not survive.

Webb put McCain into the category of the "partially willing ... those of us who did the very best we could to resist exploitation by the communists."

Operation Homecoming

In December 1972, the walls of the Hanoi Hilton reverberated with the sound of a massive bombing campaign ordered by President Nixon to force the communists back to the suspended Paris peace talks. The POWs greeted the roar of B-52s with undisguised glee. "There was a lot of yelling and screaming," recalled Lt. Cmdr. Richard Stratton, one of McCain's cell mates at the prison, where McCain was moved three years earlier. "We knew we were going home."

One month later, the North Vietnamese agreed to release the POWs and sign a peace settlement. A total of 591 Americans, including McCain, were repatriated in Operation Homecoming in the spring of 1973.

Modern-day Vietnam is a reminder that history can take surprising turns. With its vibrant consumer culture, it is a vastly different country than the grim, repressive society that McCain fought against.

Vietnamese historians dispute McCain's argument that the United States could have prevailed had it not been for the anti-war movement back home. Nguyen Tung, a researcher at the Vietnamese Institute for International Relations, says Americans were fighting a "limited war" in Vietnam, while Ho Chi Minh and his followers were fighting a "total war." People who fight a limited war tend to think in terms of a "limited time frame," Tung said, while people who fight a total war are willing to "fight forever."