Contributor Geoffrey Norman shares this story from his book Bouncing Back, about a group of POWs who survived the Vietnam War. This scene is told from the point of view of Al Stafford, another POW who flew, coincidentally, in the same squadron as McCain: VA-163, The Saints, a legendarily aggressive unit. McCain had joined the squadron a few weeks after Stafford had been shot shot down. He was, in a sense, Stafford’s replacement who was being held in solitary:
[O]ne morning as he stood at the door, watching through the cracks, [Stafford] saw a POW on crutches being led slowly across the yard by a guard. The man had shockingly white hair, almost as though he had suffered from some traumatizing fright. Stafford knew that the man had to be John McCain. Nobody else in the Navy had hair like that.
McCain was the son and grandson of admirals. In fact, his father was commander of the Pacific Fleet. The Vietnamese knew this and had singled out McCain for special treatment, taking great satisfaction in extracting propaganda broadcasts from him. He had been filmed, heavily drugged, lying in a hospital bed after he was shot down and fished out of a lake [and] … had been a special target of the interrogators ever since.
McCain had an uncommon ability to endure abuse and had had bounced back from it again and again … [he] had become an inventive resister, one of the very best at screwing up the propaganda broadcasts. The other POWs considered him a master at garbling the syntax of the camp news.
As Stafford watched, McCain detoured out of his assigned path and hobbled a painful fifteen or twenty feet on his crutches before a guard could stop him. By then the was standing directly in front of Stafford’s cell.
“Hey, Al, baby,” he said, as though they were meeting on the street somewhere. “You hang in there, now. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
Before Stafford could answer, McCain was gone, hauled off by the guard.
Stafford, [who had felt isolated and suicidal] decided it was time.
Getting back on the network was not difficult—just a matter of of hand signals and coughing out messages in the tap code format. Within days he knew where the new mailboxes were. He began finding short messages when he went to bathe, and leaving a few as well, though he didn’t have anything of value to report, merely that he was all right.
One of the notes he found came from John McCain. It explained that he had been Stafford’s replacement in VA-163 and that he had also been through the Green Knobby Room, in a cell at Hoa Lo, and finally moved to Plantation, just like Stafford. The note ended with these words:
Listen Al, since I seem to be following you around I would appreciate it if you didn’t do anything stupid and get us both in real trouble.
