"Have You Ever Seen the Rain"

Here walking is John McCain being escorted by an unknown U.S. Navy officer. The year is 1973. Judging by the faces of the others in the photograph, McCain still is somewhere in North Vietnam and is on his way to home and to freedom after five and one-half years as a prisoner of war. McCain died on August 25. He was accorded the laurels of a hero of his nation and given the distinction of lying in state in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. I have written a few thoughts about John McCain. Also included is a Vietnam-era song, "Have You Ever Seen the Rain," by Creedence Clearwater Revival. The same photograph which appears with this post is shown beginning around point 156 in the video.

 

Hero? For sure. Good guy? Maybe ....

 

These words are coming a bit late because I had mixed feelings about John Sidney McCain III. He died on August 25, 2018, four days short of his 82nd birthday. I almost did not write them at all, but finally am because McCain had a reputation for saying what he felt and what he thought. If you do not understand that sentence, find some McCain debates with George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama and you will see what I mean and what I remember. I like to think I am that way, too, say what I think, I mean, so I am writing this now ....

 

McCain was third generation United States Navy. His father and his grandfather both were admirals. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1958. He became a naval aviator and flew ground-attack aircraft from aircraft carriers. He asked for duty in Vietnam and was assigned as a bomber pilot on an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin. He was shot down while on a bombing mission during Operation Rolling Thunder over Hanoi in October 1967. It was his 23rd mission over North Vietnam. He was badly beaten by an angry mob when he was pulled, half-drowned from a lake.

 

McCain was a prisoner of war during the next five and one-half years in the notorious Hoa Loa Prison, where he was regularly mistreated and tortured in ways which left him permanently damaged. In 1982, McCain was elected to the United States House of Representatives, where he served two terms. He entered the U.S. Senate in 1987 and easily won reelection five times, the final time in 2016.

 

When McCain returned to America in 1973 to a fanfare of publicity and a handshake from then-President Richard Nixon, he discovered his wife since 1965, Carol, had been disfigured in a car crash three years earlier. Her car had skidded on icy roads into a telegraph pole on Christmas Eve, 1969. Her pelvis and one arm were shattered by the impact and she suffered massive internal injuries.

 

When Carol was discharged from the hospital after six months of life-saving surgery, the prognosis was bleak. In order to save her legs, surgeons had been forced to cut away huge sections of shattered bone, taking with it her tall, willowy figure. She was confined to a wheelchair and was forced to use a catheter.

 

Through sheer hard work, Carol learned to walk again. But when McCain came home from Vietnam, she had gained a lot of weight and bore little resemblance to her old self. She still walks awkwardly, with a pronounced limp. Her body is held together by screws and metal plates and, at age 80, her face is worn by wrinkles that speak of decades of silent suffering.

 

McCain divorced Carol in 1980 and married Cindy, 18 years his junior and the heir to an Arizona brewing fortune, one month later. Carol now lives at Virginia Beach, a seaside resort 200 miles south of Washington, D.C.

 

That is the non-heroic and self-centered side of McCain, who has been lauded and praised as a Vietnam War hero, a dedicated public servant, a devoted husband, father and friend.

 

Carol has said she remains on good terms with her ex-husband, who agreed as part of their divorce settlement to pay her medical costs for life. "I have no bitterness," she said in one interview. "My accident is well recorded. I had 23 operations, I am five inches shorter than I used to be and I was in hospital for six months. It was just awful, but it wasn't the reason for my divorce. My marriage ended because John McCain didn't want to be 40, he wanted to be 25. You know that happens .... it just does."

 

She is right, I think. John McCain was human -- "Human, All Too Human," as the 19th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche titled one of his books. Stuff happens and we all have things in our past which we could keep there if possible and, maybe, even change, if it were possible.

 

This bothers me about McCain, not fatally, but it played a role in why the 2008 presidential election was another in which I could not bring myself to vote for either candidate. I have written many negative things about Obama in the past and will not do so again now, but I did vow to leave the country if he were elected president in 2008. Obama did win. I did leave, in 2009, but I returned a few months later. Such is one of my own weaknesses.

 

What bothered me to the degree of turning into a fatal flaw in my opinion of McCain was what I interpreted to be his attitude of "never seeing a war he did not like." I will not try to explain that further at this point in time. It is possible I have been misinterpreting his "hawkish" stance regarding military interventionism by the United States. But, I do not think so.

 

For a number of years, despite his own experiences as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, my view of McCain is that I have been observing a "war lover," which is not the sort of man I would want to see as president. If that opinion offends anyone, so be it.