Bob Craner tried to reassure me that I had resisted all that I was expected to resist. But I couldn’t shake it off. One night I either heard or dreamed I heard myself confessing over the loudspeakers, thanking the Vietnamese for receiving medical treatment I did not deserve.
Many guys broke at one time or another. I doubt anyone ever gets over it entirely. There is never enough time and distance between the past and the present to allow one to forget his shame. I am recovered now from that period of intense despair. But I can summon up its feeling in an instant whenever I let myself remember the day. And I still wince when I recall wondering if my father had heard of my disgrace. The Vietnamese had broken the prisoner they called the “Crown Prince,” and I knew they had done it to hurt the man they believed to be a king.
The following month, Averell Harriman, then serving as President Johnson’s emissary to the fruitless peace negotiations in Paris with the North Vietnamese, sent the following cable to Secretary of State Dean Rusk:
1. At last tea break Le Duc Tho attended, he mentioned that DRV had intended to release Admiral McCain’s son as one of the three pilots freed recently, but he had refused. According to Tho, Commander McCain feared that if he was released before the war is over, President Johnson might “cause difficulties” for his father because people will wonder if McCain had been brainwashed.
2. We said that in past cases pilots had been reluctant to accept release because they did not want to feel that they were given preference over their fellow pilots. In McCain’s case, perhaps it was he did not want people to think he had been released because of his father’s position. Tho said that we were reversing what the pilot actually thought and that he feared difficulties would be created for his father. However, Tho added, this was only hearsay which he had picked up when he was back in Hanoi. We replied it would be difficult to understand McCain’s attitude as described by Tho, and that in past cases of this kind the pilot had wanted to be loyal to his comrades. In any event, we wished the DRV would release more pilots and that way we would know what they think. We agree with Tho that ending the war is the best way of securing pilot releases, but pending that we hope DRV will release more of them.
They came back at the end of two weeks for another statement. I didn’t give it to them. I had recovered enough to resist. The next year and a half would be the hardest months of my captivity.
The severe treatment of prisoners lasted until the end of 1969. During this period, we were beaten for communicating with one another, for declining to meet with visiting American “peace delegations,” for refusing to make statements and broadcasts, and for mouthing off to our guards. I had a hard time suppressing the urge to verbally assault my captors as they went about the business of humiliating me. Acts of defiance felt so good that I felt they more than compensated for their repercussions, and they helped me keep at bay the unsettling feelings of guilt and self-doubt that my confession had aroused.
Whenever I emerged from the interrogation room after a few hours or a few days of punishment, I tried to make a show of my indifference to my circumstances. Whether I walked of my own accord or was dragged by guards back to my cell, I always shouted greetings to the prisoners whose cells I passed, smiled, and flashed a thumbs-up. In the years since I came home, I have occasionally been embarrassed to hear some of my fellow POWs commend me for those attempts at good cheer. They believed they were intended to boost their spirits. In truth, they were mostly intended to boost my own.
On Christmas Eve in 1968, about fifty of us were taken to the theater where a few months earlier the events leading to my humiliation had begun. There the Vietnamese intended to film a religious service that they could use to demonstrate their humane treatment of us. I was placed next to a young apprentice seaman, Doug Hegdahl, who had fallen off his ship in the Tonkin Gulf during an evening artillery barrage.
I had often watched through cracks in my door as he swept the camp courtyard. The guards assigned Doug this enviable duty because they thought he was a harmless idiot. Doug possessed neither the survival training nor the familiarity with the Code of Conduct that captured pilots had.
Yet this teenage farm boy from North Dakota had devised a ploy to convince the Vietnamese that he was dim-witted, unthreatening, and without propaganda or military value. Given what the Vietnamese perceived as his low station in the Navy, they believed breaking him wouldn’t have any useful effect on the morale of the other prisoners either.
Doug convincingly played the role of an uneducated peasant who didn’t have the foggiest notion of what he was doing in this strange place. The Vietnamese left him alone and allowed him out of his cell to work at menial tasks. So engaged, Doug would serve as a conduit for communications from one part of the camp to the other, sweeping up in his pile of debris notes we had written on toilet and cigarette paper. He also seized opportunities for a little small-scale sabotage, pouring dirt into the gas tanks of trucks and making other clever minor assaults on the Vietnamese war effort.
Standing next to Doug, and realizing that the guards, knowing they were on camera, were restrained from forcing our cooperation, I began talking to Doug in a loud voice and recounting my recent experiences. Soft Soap Fairy motioned to me and in a stage whisper ordered, “Mac Kane, be quiet.” I responded by raising my middle finger for the camera and profanely telling him and the other guards present to leave us be. Soon almost all the other prisoners attending the service began talking and flashing hand signals to one another. Even the three-man prisoner choir joined in, smiling and laughing as they entered the general exchange of information. The guards hustled around vainly trying to get us to quiet down.
Trying to be heard above the commotion, a Vietnamese pastor offered a sermon in which he compared Ho Chi Minh to Jesus Christ and Lyndon Johnson to King Herod. Soon one very angry guard, forgetting that cameras were rolling, began making threatening gestures at me. I called him a son of a bitch and other less flattering things. He charged toward me, but other guards pulled him back. On the whole, it was a rejuvenating experience.
The service concluded, and I returned to my cell possessing a little bit more of the holiday cheer than I had expected to feel on my second Christmas in captivity. I expected to be beaten for interfering with the propaganda pageant. Two days later, I was.
The arrogance I sometimes displayed to my captors contradicted the humility I felt around other prisoners who were routinely and severely tortured. Dick Stratton had suffered horribly under torture. He had huge, infected scars on his arms from rope torture. His thumbnails had been torn off, and he had been burned with cigarettes. By such means, they had forced him to attend a “press conference.” When they ushered him into the room, Dick affected the vacant stare of a catatonic and bowed deeply in four directions toward his surprised captors, thereby signaling to the Americans who would see the broadcast that the POWs were obviously being tortured.
In May 1969, two Air Force officers, John Dramesi and Ed Atterbury, who had been captured a few months before my shootdown, managed a daring escape from the Zoo, the prison in the southwest of the city, where conditions were awful. For nearly a year, they had planned and physically trained for the escape. On a rainy Saturday night, their faces darkened, wearing conical Vietnamese hats and carrying knives they had fashioned from bits of metal they had found, they slipped through tiles they had loosened in the roof of their cellblock and climbed over the prison wall. They made for the Red River, intending to steal a boat and be well downriver before daylight. They were recaptured at dawn the next day, before they reached the river. They were cruelly tortured for their courage. Ed Atterbury was beaten to death. But John, one of the toughest men I have ever known, survived.