Part I: Skyhawk Down
The Fall and Rise of John McCain
“The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” ― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
No Way Back
Lieutenant Commander John McCain grabbed the throttle, feeling the A-4E Skyhawk surge as he entered Hanoi airspace. At 650 miles per hour, the earth’s surface looked like a patchwork of rice paddies and winding rivers. Narrow dirt roads, crowded with ox carts and bicycles, crisscrossed the landscape, a picture of rural serenity — if you were able to ignore the plumes of smoke rising where his squadron had struck North Vietnamese military positions.
Then, just ahead, the Long Biên Bridge came into view — a crucial supply route that supplied enemy forces. His grip tightened. He toggled the bombsight.
This was the Annapolis grad’s 23rd run. By now, he had a natural feel for his Skyhawk, his movements were acrobatic, formations were tight. The radio chatter clipped and professional. McCain lined up the A4 in the direction of the bridge just as he was trained. He adjusted for altitude and wind speed. His hand was steady. A moment passed.
And the world went dark.
A shockwave slammed through the Skyhawk like a thunderbolt pounding a tin roof. The plane lurched, its right wing shredded by a Soviet-made SA-2 missile. Alarms shrieked as the flames erupted along the fuselage. McCain was choking on smoke. He pitched the nose forward, it spiraled into a dive. The ground below twisted into a disorienting blur of dark brown and gray matter.
Before he had a chance to think, the ejection seat ignited with a force of 400 MPH launching McCain out of the cockpit. His body slammed against the rock-hard acrylic canopy on his way out — both arms snapped instantly, and his right leg shattered under the force. Pain blurred into unconsciousness. The world stopped and he got off.
The last thing McCain remembered was tumbling into a swirl of deep blue beyond. A sense of wonder tugged at the far corners of his unconscious mind. Where was he? What was happening? Why was it all so strange? By the time his parachute deployed, he was as pliable as a ragdoll, gravity dragging him toward oblivion.
Then, suddenly, a splash.
The icy grip of Trúc Bạch Lake swallowed him whole. He barely felt the impact, but the shock of fetid water flooded his lungs as his hands grasped the surface for air. His limbs were useless, dead weight. He flailed, but the more he struggled, the deeper he sank.
The momentous issue of war, as Lincoln once lamented, was no longer in his hands. Only survival mattered now, and that was well out of his control.
He later joked in our interview that this was not his greatest moment, “I have written about my ability to intercept a North Vietnamese surface-to-air missile with my plane, which is not the way we want to win wars.” In all, 363 A4s were lost in Vietnam, martyrs to a long-forgotten cause. But McCain barely had time to register the searing sting of defeat before another enemy, waiting furtively, set upon him like scavengers.
The War For Survival
“Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”
The line of T.S. Eliot’s poem reveals an ancient truth: most of our lives are lived as if in a dream. But eventually, reality wakes us. It was John McCain’s turn — any preconceptions about the mission, his power, and his sense of control vanished. He was at the mercy of human nature, and under these circumstances, that was not a good thing.
A furious North Vietnamese mob saw the barely conscious aviator descend from the skies, and they were waiting to give him a warm greeting. Dragging McCain to the bank of the lake, dazed, bleeding, and broken, they laid into him with bamboo poles. A rifle stock came down hard, deliberately shattering his shoulder. A bayonet plunged into his left ankle — then, with careful precision, into his groin. It wasn’t a capture. It was a ritual of brutality as if they couldn’t decide whether to kill him outright or savor his suffering.
And just like that, McCain’s war was finished. He had woken from his dream.
The real battle was about to begin.
Ironically, the Viet Cong, the North’s guerrilla army, came to McCain’s rescue at the lake, before hauling him off to Hỏa Lò Prison — the largest POW facility in North Vietnam. Originally built by the French in 1886 who named it Maison Centrale, it was intended to house colonial dissidents. By the time McCain arrived, American POWs had rebranded The Hanoi Hilton. Those words were crudely carved into a waste pail by an Air Force pilot — either as a gruesome welcome or a grim warning to those who would follow.
In Vietnamese, the name Hỏa Lò means something else. “Fiery furnace.”
It would prove all too accurate.
Prisoner 241
Midshipman John McCain had an authority problem.
At the U.S. Naval Academy, he went to great lengths to be anything but a model midshipman. He bristled against naval discipline, mocked the brass, and racked up demerits like battle ribbons. He finished near the bottom of his class — 894th out of 899 — more out of defiance than lack of ability. He later admitted to being a “smart-ass” who treated the Academy’s rules with contempt. Yet, despite his disciplinary issues, he had something that couldn’t be graded on an academic scale: an unshakable instinct to resist conformity when it didn’t make sense to him, and a deep love of what his country stood for, although he would not always agree with the tenor of the debate. That was his problem. McCain liked consistency when it came to the mission.
That instinct to question followed him into the cockpit of his A-4E Skyhawk and came to define his captivity in the brutal confines of Hỏa Lò Prison. The maverick who once bucked regulations for the hell of it was in a place where hell was home, and once again, it didn’t make any sense, and once again, that was his problem. That streak of defiance he learned in Annapolis would eventually serve him well in Hanoi, but for the next five and a half years, the price of rebellion was not demerits but shattered bones.
By the time he arrived at the Hanoi Hilton, the plane crash had left his body wrecked — arms broken, right knee crushed, and his shoulder torn apart. The winter air gnawed at his malnourished frame, his untreated wounds festering, and his dysentery-ravaged body barely able to walk. But then came the guards, and they were very persuasive.
The Vietnam War was the longest in American history. It was also among the most brutal. Torture was routine. Bound in excruciating positions, beaten until consciousness slipped away, McCain could sense the condition of his fellow Americans the moment he arrived at the prison. From the first moment, he too refused to cooperate. When the North Vietnamese realized his father was a four-star admiral, they saw they had bagged a trophy. McCain would make an interesting propaganda tool, one that could demoralize the other POWs. Release him early for a full confession of guilt.
McCain refused.
He earned more demerits.
Reforged in Fire
By the time John McCain was dragged through the gates of Hỏa Lò Prison, more shattered than soldier. His limbs hung lifeless. The right knee was purple and swollen, his ribs screamed at a shallow breath. The mob who made it their business to beat him senseless had done their business well. His flight suit, now stiff with blood and mud, clung to his battered frame. It felt more like a shroud.
And yet, his time in captivity hadn’t only just begun.
McCain was tossed into a filthy cell 3' by 6', barely the size of a coffin, where he lay in his filth for days. They didn’t treat his wounds. They wanted to see if he would die first. Infection set in, his body burning with fever as he drifted in and out of consciousness. But then the Vietnamese learned his name — McCain — and realized he wasn’t just any prisoner. He was the son of Admiral John S. McCain Jr., the Commander of U.S. Pacific Forces. This wasn’t some anonymous airman. This was a bargaining chip, a prize.
McCain was taken to the hospital for some basic treatment — his left arm was left broken, to heal on its own. His captors filmed him there for propaganda purposes and McCain later found out the North Vietnamese had crowed: “We have the crown prince.”
A prison doctor set his broken bones without anesthesia, wrenching his limbs into place with a sickening pop. They forced food down his throat — thin soup and maggot-ridden rice — not to keep him healthy, but to keep him alive for interrogation.
The Ropes Course
The goal of Hỏa Lò wasn’t intelligence. The North Vietnamese knew McCain had no useful secrets. What they wanted was his confession. A statement denouncing America, a propaganda victory to parade before the world. His defiance was met with kicks, fists, and rifle butts to his ribs. But refused to talk.
So they introduced him to the ropes.
It was an ancient method of torture dating back to the Inquisition. They tied his arms behind his back and cinched the ropes tighter and tighter until his shoulders threatened to snap from their sockets. Then they hoisted him off the ground, leaving his own weight to do the work. The pain was indescribable — a slow, creeping agony that burned through his nerves like acid. Blood flow was cut off. His fingers swelled, then turned purple. His entire body convulsed from the shock.
They left him hanging. When they cut him down, he collapsed onto the concrete floor, unable to move. They let him lie there just long enough to believe the worst had passed. Then they did it again.
And again.
“I learned what we all learned over there,” he later admitted. “Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine.”
McCain signed the confession, scrawling his name with hands so mangled he could barely grip the pen. He knew what it meant. He knew they would use it against him. But even in that moment of surrender, his maverick instinct kicked in — he deliberately garbled his wording, making the statement nearly useless. A final act of defiance.
Again, more demerits.
The Transformation
This was the lowest point of John McCain’s life. His body was shattered, his dignity violated, his will crushed. His view of human nature had curdled into something raw and unforgiving — like a surgeon staring at cancer, knowing the only cure was to cut it out. He had nothing left. No strength. No future. No escape. If he had known he had 1,900 more days of suffering ahead, it might have broken him completely. But even that cruel certainty was denied.
The proud naval officer, the stubborn son of an admiral, the relentless fighter pilot — all of it had been stripped away. But somewhere, buried in the wreckage of his body and mind, at the outermost edge of consciousness, something remained. It was faint, but it was there. A flicker. A presence. A refusal.
Yet even in that absolute emptiness, John McCain found something new. His country.
His comrades.
His spirit.
Code of Honor
Tapping through the cell walls, the prisoners of Hỏa Lò held each other up in ways their bodies could not. They passed news. They passed jokes. They passed prayers. Their suffering was shared, and they rediscovered their purpose in that sharing. It was their form of G.I. gossip and it held them together, and they could share stories about their torture, their fears, and then laugh in Morse Code of their silent misery. It connected him as he had never been connected before.
McCain, once an arrogant rule-breaker at Annapolis, learned the true meaning of commitment to a cause — not to authority, but to the men who suffered alongside him. It was why he rejected the offer of early release. McCain knew the Vietnamese were trying to use him as a pawn to demoralize other prisoners.
His refusal was an act of defiance so absolute that his captors couldn’t understand it. But by then, McCain had already won.
“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,” McCain wrote in his 1997 memoir, “Faith of My Fathers.” ’’Nothing in life is more liberating than to fight for a cause larger than yourself.”
They could beat him, but they could not own him.
They could break his body, but not his spirit.
The Skyhawk Rises
When McCain finally stepped onto American soil in March 1973, he was not the man who had fallen into Trúc Bạch Lake five and a half years earlier. He had been reforged in suffering, stripped down to his rawest essence, and then rebuilt in the fire of captivity. Yet, curiously, there was no great resentment. As he said years later, “I didn’t like it, but at the same time when you are in a war and you are captured by the enemy, you can’t expect to have tea.”
He was different now — literally, with a limp from his shattered knee. His right arm, wrenched from its socket by torture, would never lift above his shoulder again, leading to an awkward but unmistakable greeting in the Senate years later. But beyond the physical scars, there was something else — a weight, a gravity, a deep and unshakable sense of purpose.
War had taught him its cruelest lesson. He had seen what men could endure, what they could survive, and what they could sacrifice. He had watched men die in agony, but he had also watched them live in defiance. He had been one of them. And once again, his fight had just begun. It would be a different theater of war this time, but the stakes were even higher and the brutality of words was far greater.
The rebel who had once flouted rules for sport now clung to them as a creed: loyalty over comfort, honor over survival. Theodore Roosevelt once wrote that the credit belongs to “the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood… who errs, who comes short again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcoming.”
McCain had lived those words. He had stood strong in the arena, and he survived. For the rest of his life, McCain would be unable to lift both his arms over his head because of the injuries he suffered during his captivity in Vietnam.
But he gained something, too. “In prison, I fell in love with my country,” he wrote.
“I had loved her before then, but like most young people, my affection was little more than a simple appreciation for the comforts and privileges most Americans took for granted. It wasn’t until I had lost America for a time that I realized how much I loved her.”
McCain may have been an inmate in Hỏa Lò Prison, but he was never a prisoner. His body had been broken, but his will had never surrendered. And as he stepped off that plane in 1973, he knew with absolute certainty: his war wasn’t over.
The next battle wouldn’t be fought in the skies over Hanoi or in the torture rooms of his captors. This war would unfold in a chamber lined with leather-topped desks, where the weapons were words and the wounds were inflicted by votes, not bayonets. His new adversaries wielded power with the same ferocity as his old ones, but the stakes were even higher — but this time, John McCain was trained.
