What McCain Said in 1973
I had the singular misfortune to get caught communicating four times in the month of May of 1969. They had a punishment room right across the courtyard from my cell, and I ended up spending a lot of time over there.
It was also in May, 1969, that they wanted me to write—as I remember—a letter to U. S. pilots who were flying over North Vietnam asking them not to do it. I was being forced to stand up continuously—sometimes they'd make you stand up or sit on a stool for a long period of time. I'd stood up for a couple of days, with a respite only because one of the guards — the only real human being that I ever met over there — let me lie down for a couple of hours while he was on watch the middle of one night.
in 74
In 1974, he told a story at a Prayer Breakfast hosted by Reagan of a cell in Hanoi where the beginning of the Creed had been etched in the stone wall. So it's just baffling that an overwhelming moment of Christian witness would be absent from his first telling of the story - and never surface for another twenty-five years.
and, reported in 1995
No More Mr. Nice Blog points out that The Nightingale's Song, a 1995 book about five graduates of the Naval Academy, one of whom is McCain -- contains a chapter on, of all things, three Christmases McCain spent in captivity. (Thanks to Amazon's 'Search This Book' feature, and the fact that the chapter in question is only four pages long, I've read it, and you can too.) It contains no mention of this incident at all.
Is It At All Plausible, then, that Mc's heartwarming story of a Christian jailer sharing the good news with him, could be true? Wouldn't it have shown up before his Just-pre-2000 Campaign Auto-Bio?
Me thinks not.
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