In the many years since I came home, I have managed to prevent the bad memories of war from intruding on my present happiness. I was thirty-six years old when I regained my freedom. When I was shot down, I had been prepared by training, as much as anyone can be prepared, for the experiences that lay ahead. I wasn’t a nineteen-or twenty-year-old kid who had been drafted into a strange and terrible experience and then returned unceremoniously to an unappreciative country.
Neither have I been content to accept that my time in Vietnam would stand as the ultimate experience of my life. Surely it was a formative experience, but I knew that life promised other adventures, and, impatient by nature, I hurried toward them.
Vietnam changed me, in significant ways, for the better. It is a surpassing irony that war, for all its horror, provides the combatant with every conceivable human experience. Experiences that usually take a lifetime to know are all felt, and felt intensely, in one brief passage of life. Anyone who loses a loved one knows what great sorrow feels like. And anyone who gives life to a child knows what great joy feels like. The veteran knows what great loss and great joy feel like when they occur in the same moment, the same experience.
Such an experience is transforming. And we can be much the better for it. Some few who came home from war struggled to recover the balance that the war had upset. But for most veterans, who came home whole in spirit if not body, the hard uses of life will seldom threaten their equanimity.
Surviving my imprisonment strengthened my self-confidence, and my refusal of early release taught me to trust my own judgment. I am grateful to Vietnam for those discoveries, as they have made a great difference in my life. I gained a seriousness of purpose that observers of my early life had found difficult to detect. I had made more than my share of mistakes in my life. In the years ahead, I would make many more. But I would no longer err out of self-doubt or to alter a fate I felt had been imposed on me. I know my life is blessed, and always has been.
Vietnam did not answer all of life’s questions, but I believe it answered many of the most important ones. In my youth I had doubted time’s great haste. But in Vietnam I had come to understand how brief a moment a life is. That discovery did not, however, make me overly fearful of time’s brisk passing. For I had also learned that you can fill the moment with purpose and experiences that will make your life greater than the sum of its days. I had learned to acknowledge my failings and to recognize opportunities for redemption. I had failed when I signed my confession, and that failure disturbed my peace of mind. I felt it blemished my record permanently, and even today I find it hard to suppress feelings of remorse. In truth, I don’t even bother to try to suppress them anymore. My remorse shows me the limits of my zealously guarded autonomy.
My country had failed in Vietnam as well, but I took no comfort from its company. There is much to regret about America’s failure in Vietnam. The reasons are etched in black marble on the Washington Mall. But we had believed the cause that America had asked us to serve in Vietnam was a worthy one, and millions who defended it had done so honorably.
Both my confession and my resistance helped me achieve a balance in my life, a balance between my own individualism and more important things. Like my father and grandfather, and the Naval Academy, the men I had been honored to serve with called me to the cause, and I had tried to keep faith with them.
I discovered I was dependent on others to a greater extent than I had ever realized, but that neither they nor the cause we served made any claims on my identity. On the contrary, they gave me a larger sense of myself than I had had before. And I am a better man for it. We had met a power that wanted to obliterate our identities, and the cause to which we rallied was our response: we are free men, bound inseparably together, and by the grace of God, and not your sufferance, we will have our freedom restored to us. Ironically, I have never felt more powerfully free, more my own man, than when I was a small part of an organized resistance to the power that imprisoned me. Nothing in life is more liberating than to fight for a cause larger than yourself, something that encompasses you but is not defined by your existence alone.
When I look back on my misspent youth, I feel a longing for what is past and cannot be restored. But though the happy pursuits and casual beauty of youth prove ephemeral, something better can endure, and endure until our last moment on earth. And that is the honor we earn and the love we give if at a moment in our youth we sacrifice with others for something greater than our self-interest. We cannot always choose the moments. Often they arrive unbidden. We can choose to let the moments pass, and avoid the difficulties they entail. But the loss we would incur by that choice is much dearer than the tribute we once paid to vanity and pleasure.
During their reunion aboard the Proteus in Tokyo Bay, my father and grandfather had their last conversation. Near the end of his life, my father recalled their final moment together:
“My father said to me, ‘Son, there is no greater thing than to die for the principles—for the country and the principles that you believe in.’ And that was one part of the conversation that came through and I have remembered down through the years.”
On that fine March day, I thought about what I had done and failed to do in Vietnam, and about what my country had done and failed to do. I had seen human virtue affirmed in the conduct of men who were ennobled by their suffering. And “down through the years,” I had remembered a dying man’s legacy to his son, and when I needed it most, I had found my freedom abiding in it.
I held on to the memory, left the bad behind, and moved on.
–– About the Authors ––
JOHN MCCAIN is a United States senator from Arizona. He retired from the Navy as a captain in 1981, and was first elected to Congress in 1982. He is currently serving his third term in the Senate. He and his wife, Cindy, live with their children in Phoenix, Arizona.
MARK SALTER has worked on Senator McCain’s staff for ten years. Hired as a legislative assistant in 1989, he has served as the senator’s administrative assistant since 1993. He lives with his wife, Diane, and their two daughters in Alexandria, Virginia.
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by John McCain and Mark Salter
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in 1999 by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. A leatherbound, signed edition of this work was published by The Easton Press in 1999.
All photographs are from the McCain family collection.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McCain, John
Faith of my fathers/John McCain.
p. cm.
1. McCain, John, 1936—Religion. 2. McCain, John, 1936—Family. 3. Legislators—United States—Biography. 4. United States. Congress. Senate—Biography. 5. McCain, John S. (John Sidney), 1911–1981. 6. Fathers—United States—Biography. 7. McCain, John Sidney, 1884–1945. 8. Grandfathers—United States—Biography. 9. United States. Navy—Biography. I. Title.