What happened next, in that August of 1968, nearly a year after he was captured, is chronicled in The Nightingale's Song by Robert Timberg:

&quot McCain) looked at the louvered cell window high above his head, then at the small stool in the room. He took off his dark blue prison shirt, rolled it like a rope, draped one end over his shoulder near his neck, began feeding the other end through the louvers."

A guard burst into the cell and pulled McCain away from the window. For the next few days, he was on suicide watch.

McCain's will had finally wilted under the beatings. Unable to endure any more, he agreed to sign a confession.

McCain slowly wrote, "I am a black criminal and I have performed the deeds of an air pirate. I almost died and the Vietnamese people saved my life, thanks to the doctors."

He would never forgive himself.

"I had learned what we all learned over there," he would write later. "Every man has a breaking point. I had reached mine."

The Forrestal Disaster


Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/news/election/mccain/articles/2007/03/01/20070301mccainbio-chapter3.html#ixzz33X6VMtux

He was released in 1973, along with other POWs.

http://www.nampows.org/nampowslist.html

They were always offering the grunts a chance to get out of the field if they signed up for Huey door gunner, so that's what Danny did. He was captured when his chopper was shot down, but I was wounded and evac'd less than 2 days later and didn't even hear about it until 2 decades later, when I learned what happened from another man in the platoon.

I finally saw Danny at a reunion of our company a couple of years ago and was very happy to find that he's doing great.

and you, too.

they thought getting rid of McCain was reward enough.

The whole story also evokes Tim O'Brien's Vietnam War novel, Going After Cacciato.