Three important and good things that John McCain did that I can attest to.

1) POW

In 1980 I had been through the nightmare years of the refugee crisis in SE Asia after the war and we begun to have time to actually meet and converse with others. At a lunch with JVA (they did the second tier interviews in the camps after they had received refugee status by UNHCR). There were a lot of characters in the group but one of the fellows at my table was both impressive and strange by turns. He obviously had advanced studies (Harvard), was fluent in Vietnamese, had a gentle spirit but had odd behaviors like giggling at odd times or just spacing out.

Turns out he was an AID official who worked with internal refugees in Vietnam and was captured by the Viet Cong where he was kept in jungle prisons and on the run from 1966 to 1973. At a later date we were in a camp together and got to talking. He was a very open person and I told him that I was interested in anything he felt comfortable telling me about during his captivity. He told me that he literally had lost his mind in captivity and was slowly rebuilding his mind but sometimes he would just lose it. Not violent but just unable to sustain touch with reality.

I began to hear more first person stories about captivity in Vietnam. The Hanoi Hilton was a real American village, meaning that there were strongly held opinions that both overlapped and conflicted with each other. the officers there included everyone on the American spectrum on the war from those that thought it was America's greatest mistake to those who were hoping to return to fight again.

John McCain's 23 mission in resulted in being shot down and he landed hard with two broken arms and a broken leg and almost drowned landing in a lake. When he arrived in Hanoi he was not given medical attention and was given the painful rope torture until his captors realized that his father was Supreme Commander of Naval forces in Europe. Now he was sent to a hospital where he lost 50 pounds. He was sent to another camp where his cellmates thought he was going to die. From 1968 he spent two years in solitary confinement.

McCain's father was named commander of Naval forces in Vietnam. The Vietnamese both tortured McCain and offered him immediate release. There were lots of prisoner exchanges at the time.

The only thing that united ALL of the Americans was the first in and first out principle. No jumping the line. People familiar with McCain's treatment at the time did not expect him to survive, but he turned down the opportunity to leave early. In doing so he risked his life for other Americans who were living on the edge of sanity. Although my new friend in Malaysia didn't know McCain he marvelled at the sacrifice and was sure that it was instrumental in giving others enough will to survive.

2) Adoption

In 1991 Cindy McCain visited a hospital sponsored by Mother Teresa in Bangladesh. It was during a terrible time in Bangladesh where the facilities were overwhelmed. Mrs. McCain came to a room where an infant lay in obvious distressed. She was told that the infant would not last more than a couple of weeks. She turned to the ambassador and told him to make all of the necessary paperwork to finalize the adoption for her daughter and arrange immediate transport to the United States. Senator McCain met the plane where Mrs. McCain introduced him to his daughter whom he had not yet heard about.

By all reports Senator McCain has been a great father to Bridget. Carl Rove would use Bridget's dark complexion to serve as the basis of rumors that he flooded South Carolina with to imply that Senator McCain had a love child with a black American and it was enough to cause him to lose SC after he had won NH.

As I had adopted a daughter in Thailand the year before I was impressed by McCain's personal involvement in saving this girl's life.

3) Relations with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam

In 1978 refugee movements in South East Asia had reached crisis proportions with hundreds of thousands on the move. After Vietnam invaded Cambodia on Christmas day hundreds of thousands of Cambodians were on the march to Thailand, SRV was loading hundreds of thousands of boat people and, this is key, China invaded
Vietnam in February.

In Nov 1978 all of the resettlement countries signed an agreement with Vietnam to stop government sponsored boat people expeditions and establish an orderly departure program. Having only started a week before and contributing nothing to the refugee movements I was assigned the orderly departure program. US and SRV was having a terrible time matching lists so I went to Ho Chi Minh Ville. There I met with the Northern Generals and within a few hours found a solution to the list problems. AF only travelled to HCM once a week so I had lots of free time.

The North Vietnamese arranged several meetings to discuss their most pressing interest: normalization of relations with the US until they realized I wasn't the one they should be talking to, but I would pass on their comments. I was surprised at their lack of antipathy towards America and Americans in general and was surprised by their reply, "American made a promise to their friends. America sacrificed their sons to keep their promise to their friends. We would like to have friends like that".

The PRV did everything they could to rebuild relations with the US. On the first flight out of HMV we had the dependents of CIA agents that missed the emergency flights. The SRV told the US that they could literally go anywhere in the Vietnam with 24 hours notice and they gave them full access to all of the files related to MIA.

President Clinton was ready to re establish relations with Vietnam in 1995 but in doing so he would be torn to shreds by the reactionary right. It would have been very easy for McCain to react emotionally against the people who had almost killed him, instead he stood up, told the truth and made it possible for two enemies to start on the road to mutual respect with the goal of friendship.

Here is Senator McCain's statement