You have to wonder after all these years. He claimed he was "suicidal" and that's why he made anti-American remarks. Remarks he later said he felt "ashamed" of saying. But of course that shame was after he was released.
Has the man been a fraud all along?
I have to wonder since he's currently furthering the talking points of terrorists.
REALLY!!!!!!!!!!
Do you even know the story of how and why it happened?
John McCain sat on a stool in Hanoi, his teeth broken, his body battered from a savage beating, his arms tied behind him in torture ropes.
The torture ropes; Returned prisoners described the torturers' use of "the ropes".
They said the North Vietnamese would pull the prisoners arms behind him and tie them together at the elbows.
The prisoner's wrists were then locked in "torture cuffs" and "jumbo irons" were placed over his ankles.
A two-inch thick bar was slid through the "jumbo irons".
The torturers then looped a rope around the bar, over his shoulders, pulling the prisoner's head between his knees.
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 at "The Plantation," 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 years in North Vietnam," McCain would write later. "I was at the point of suicide."
What happened next, in that August of 1968, nearly a year after he was captured, 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."
I get upset at some of his politics as my Senator, but never over what happened to him and what he said or wrote as a POW.
How well would you do with your teeth broken, your body battered from a savage beatings and your arms tied behind you in torture ropes.
