Faith of My Fathers (41 page)

         
CHAPTER
28
         

Free Men

We cheered loudly when the pilot announced that we were “feet wet,” which meant that we were now flying over the Tonkin Gulf and in international airspace. A holiday atmosphere prevailed for the rest of the flight. We were served sandwiches and soft drinks, which we hungrily consumed. We clowned around with each other and with the military escorts and nurses who accompanied us and seemed as happy to see us as we were to see them. Our animated conversations rose above the droning of the aircraft's engines.

Although I am sure I celebrated my liberation with as much exuberance as the next man, I recall feeling that the short flight to Clark lacked the magnitude of drama I had expected it to have. I had envisioned the moment for many years. The event itself seemed somewhat anticlimactic. I enjoyed it, but before we arrived at our destination I was thinking ahead to the next flight, the flight home. The flight to Clark resides in my memory as an exceptionally pleasant ride to the airport.

I felt a little different when we left Clark for home and I bade farewell to men with whom I had formed such strong bonds of affection and respect. We sent one another off with best wishes and promises to reunite soon. But the sudden separation hurt a little, and on the flight home a strange sense of loneliness nagged me even as my excitement to see my family became more intense as every passing hour brought me closer to them.

Bud Day and Bob Craner were on my flight to Clark. They and Orson Swindle had become the closest friends I had ever had. We were brothers now, as surely as if we had been born to the same parents. Even after we resumed our crowded, busy lives as free men, we remained close. I still see Bud and Orson often, and I am most at ease in their company. Bob Craner died of a heart attack in 1981, too young and too good to have left this earth so long before the rest of us. I have never stopped missing him.

In an interview he gave not long after our homecoming, Bob explained, as well as anyone could explain, how regret mixed with happiness on the day when our dreams came true. “It was with just a little melancholia that I finally said good-bye to John McCain,” he remembered. “Even at Clark, we were still a group…and the outsiders were trying to butt in, but we weren't having too much of that…. On the night before I was to get on an airplane at eight o'clock the following morning, I could sense that here was the end. Now this group is going to be busted wide open and spread all over the United States. It may be a long time, years, before we rejoin, and when we do, it won't be the same.”

I flew to freedom in the company of many men who had suffered valiantly for their country's cause. Many of them had known greater terror than I had; resisted torture longer than I had held out, faced down more daunting challenges than I had confronted, and sacrificed more than had been asked of me. They are the part of my time in Vietnam I won't forget.

Bob was right—it was an end, and it would never again be quite the same. But the years that followed have had meaning and value, and I am happy to live in the present.

Prior to the pilot's announcement that we had left Vietnamese airspace, most of us were restrained, having not quite shaken off the solemn formality with which our departure ceremony was conducted.

Of course, we expected it would take much longer to shake off entirely the effects of our experiences in prison. Many of us were returning with injuries, and at best it would take some time for our physical rehabilitation to make satisfactory progress. I worried that my injuries might never heal properly, having been left untreated for so many years, and that I might never be allowed to fly again or perhaps even remain in the Navy. I faced a difficult period of rehabilitation, and I was for a long time uncertain that I would ever recover enough to regain flight status. Although I never regained full mobility in my arms and leg, I did recover, thanks to my patient family and a remarkably determined physical therapist, and I eventually flew again.

Neither did we expect to soon forget the long years of anguish we had suffered under our captors' “humane and lenient” treatment. A few men never recovered. They were the last, tragic casualties in a long, bitter war. But most of us healed from our wounds, the physical and spiritual ones, and have lived happy and productive lives since.

We were all astonished at the reception we received first at Clark and later when we stopped at Hickham Air Force Base in Hawaii en route to our homes. Thousands of people turned out, many of them wearing bracelets that bore our names, to cheer us as we disembarked the plane. During our captivity, the Vietnamese had inundated us with information about how unpopular the war and the men who fought it had become with the American public. We were stunned and relieved to discover that most Americans were as happy to see us as we were to see them. A lot of us were overcome by our reception, and the affection we were shown helped us to begin putting the war behind us.

I once heard the Vietnam War described as “America's fall from grace.” Disagreements about the purpose and conduct of the war as well as its distinction of being the first lost war in American history left some Americans bereft of confidence in American exceptionalism—the belief that our history is unique and exalted and a blessing to all humanity. Not all Americans lost this faith. Not all Americans who once believed it to be lost believe it still. But many did, and many still do.

Surely, for a time, our loss in Vietnam afflicted America with a kind of identity crisis. For a while we made our way in the world less sure of ourselves than we had been before Vietnam. That was a pity, and I am relieved today that America's period of self-doubt has ended. America has a long, accomplished, and honorable history. We should never have let this one mistake, terrible though it was, color our perceptions forever of our country's purpose. We were a good country before Vietnam, and we are a good country after Vietnam. In all of history, you cannot find a better one.

I have often maintained that I left Vietnam behind me when I arrived at Clark. That is an exaggeration. But I did not want my experiences in Vietnam to be the leitmotif of the rest of my life. I am a public figure now, and my public profile is inextricably linked to my POW experiences. Whenever I am introduced at an appearance, the speaker always refers to my war record first. Obviously, such recognition has benefited my political career, and I am grateful for that. Many men who came home from Vietnam, physically and spiritually damaged, to what appeared to be a country that did not understand or appreciate their sacrifice carried the war as a great weight upon their subsequent search for happiness. But I have tried hard to make what use I can of Vietnam and not let the memories of war encumber the rest of my life's progress.

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.