Lt. Cmdr. John S. McCain III, with first wife
Carol, waves to well-wishers at Jacksonville Naval Air Station in
Florida on March 18, 1973, upon returning home from Vietnam after being
held as a prisoner of war for more than five years.
(Associated Press)
By Michael Leahy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 13, 2008;
Page A01
To endure their long ordeal, John McCain
and the other U.S. servicemen held as prisoners of war in North Vietnam
in the 1960s developed a number of survival techniques. None was quite
as effective as the one former Navy pilot Richard Stratton remembers:
"If you kept your mind occupied, you were going to be okay."
Stratton would imagine meticulously assembling a large glider and
flying it over the Alps. Another prisoner imagined himself fishing. But
McCain had the most audacious dream of all, and he shared his vision
one day with a group of fellow POWs. "He was talking about his father
to us and then he said: 'I want to be president of the United States.
Someday I'm going to be president,' " Stratton recalls. "If the cell
wasn't so small, we'd have been rolling around laughing."
His friend, thought Stratton, ought to be concentrating far less on
his fantasy and more on how to redirect a naval career that had been
adrift before he was shot down over Hanoi. "We reminded him that he had
dug himself a big hole with his demerits in the past and nearly being
the bottom man of his class at the Naval Academy," Stratton recalls.
"And now he was talking about being president? 'Come on, John. Get your
career straightened out.' "...
Post new comment