page_title: Early life and military career of John McCain
section_title: Release
hierarchical_section_title: Early life and military career of John McCain / Military career / Prisoner of war / Release
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of John McCain After Being Released as Prisoner of War. National archives data: ARC Identifier 1633553 / Local Identifier 428-N-1155665
context_page_description: The early life and military career of John Sidney McCain III spans the first forty-five years of his life. McCain's father and grandfather were admirals in the United States Navy. McCain was born on August 29, 1936, in the Panama Canal Zone, and attended many schools growing up as his family moved among naval facilities. McCain graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1958. He married the former Carol Shepp in 1965; he adopted two children from her previous marriage and they had another child together.
  As a naval aviator, McCain flew attack aircraft from carriers. During the Vietnam War, he narrowly escaped death in the 1967 Forrestal fire. On his twenty-third bombing mission during Operation Rolling Thunder in October 1967, he was shot down over Hanoi and badly injured. He subsequently endured five and a half years as a prisoner of war, including periods of torture. In 1968, he refused a North Vietnamese offer of early release, because it would have meant leaving before other prisoners who had been held longer. He was released in 1973 after the Paris Peace Accords.
context_section_description: McCain and other prisoners were moved around to different camps at times, but conditions over the next several years were generally more tolerable than they had been before. Unknown to them, during each year that Jack McCain was CINCPAC he paid a Christmastime visit to the American troops in South Vietnam serving closest to the DMZ; he would stand alone and look north, to be as close to his son as he could get. By 1971, some 30–50 percent of the POWs had become disillusioned about the war, both because of the apparent lack of military progress and what they heard of the growing anti-war movement in the U.S., and some of them were less reluctant to make propaganda statements for the North Vietnamese. McCain was not among them: he participated in a defiant church service and led an effort to write letters home that only portrayed the camp in a negative light, and as a result spent much of the year in a camp reserved for "bad attitude" cases.
  Back at the "Hanoi Hilton" from November 1971 onward, McCain and the other POWs cheered the resumed bombing of the north starting in April 1972, whose targets included the Hanoi area and whose daily orders were issued by Jack McCain, knowing his son was in the vicinity. Jack McCain's tour as CINCPAC ended in September 1972, despite his desire to have it extended so he could see the war to its conclusion. The old-time POWs cheered even more during the intense "Christmas Bombing" campaign of December 1972, when Hanoi was subjected for the first time to repeated B-52 Stratofortress raids. Although its explosions lit the night sky and shook the walls of the camp, scaring some of the newer POWs, most saw it as a forceful measure to compel North Vietnam to finally come to terms.
  The Paris Peace Accords were signed on January 27, 1973, ending direct U.S. involvement in the war, but the Operation Homecoming arrangements for the 591 American POWs took longer. McCain was finally released from captivity on March 14, 1973, being taken by bus to Gia Lam Airport, transferred to U.S. custody, and flown by C-141 to Clark Air Base in the Philippines. (After the last of the POWs had been released, McCain's forced "confession", along with similar statements from other POWs, was aired again during a Voice of Vietnam broadcast on April 10, 1973, as the North Vietnamese sought to refute the returning prisoners' tales of having been tortured.)
  Altogether, McCain was held as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam for five and a half years, nearly five of them after his refusal to accept the out-of-sequence repatriation offer. His wartime injuries left him permanently incapable of raising either arm more than 80 degrees. For his actions as a POW, McCain was awarded the Silver Star Medal, the Legion of Merit, three Bronze Star Medals, another instance of the Navy Commendation Medal, and the Purple Heart Medal. He also gained an appreciation, from experiencing the mutual help and organized resistance of the POWs, that his earlier individualism needed to be tempered by a belief in causes greater than self-interest.
caption: John McCain during his release as a POW in March 1973
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