A view of McCain that has the ring of truth

Replying to the recent post about John McCain, Howard Sutherland writes:

I have my own theory about McCain, based on serving in fighter squadrons with former inmates of the Hanoi Hilton, including one of my squadron commanders. I was active from the early ’80s through the mid ’90s, so quite a few were still around. The longest-imprisoned that I knew, the squadron commander, had been a POW for over six years, longer than McCain, while others ranged from four or five years down to only about one. No matter how long they had been in the hands of the NVA, they all had things in common. All had been tortured, at least when first caught. All had had very messy personal lives since coming home (divorces, too much drinking…). None took any particular pride in having been a POW and none liked to talk about it. Thinking objectively, getting shot down and captured is not something to celebrate. All were, to a degree usually correlated to time in captivity, crazy. McCain harps on his service as a POW. It is his personal Holocaust that, as you noted in 2000, he uses to suppress criticism. We should harp on it, too, to remind ourselves that someone who endured all that McCain suffered in Hanoi—and still suffers physically from it, 35-odd years later—is unlikely to be perfectly stable. McCain was shot down and tortured while still quite young. He did not have the maturity or the faith of older aviators like Stockdale who were better prepared to endure captivity. In short, the key to understanding McCain is realizing that he is nuts.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 02, 2005 12:20 PM | Send