"I felt those things once before," he says of his years in Vietnam. "I will never let them in again."
And so it is that John McCain, at 72, fights on, a battle-scarred warrior.
His refusal to quit, his willingness to stand up against the tide, his ability to come back against seemingly insurmountable odds, are the hallmarks of a lifetime in war and politics.
But McCain knows all too well that a fighting spirit may not be enough this time.
Two weeks out from the election, his back against the wall, McCain allowed a moment of reflection about "a life that's been blessed" when asked about the possibility that he could lose.
"Look, I've had a wonderful life," he said. "I'm the most fortunate man on earth."
---
BEFORE
So much of John McCain's identity revolves around his history as a prisoner of war that it is easy to overlook all that came before.
And there was a lot - "a whole life," in McCain's own words.
By the time McCain was shot out of the sky over Vietnam at age 31, he'd already crashed a plane into Corpus Christi Bay, ejected from another jet that flamed out as he was flying solo, survived an explosion aboard the carrier Forrestal that left 134 dead, and generally lived large, as he once said of his grandfather.
He'd toyed with the idea of joining the French Foreign Legion. (That idea fizzled when he found out the legion required nine years of service.)
He'd been poised to fly into combat from the deck of the USS Enterprise during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
He'd knocked down power lines flying too low over southern Spain.
He'd romanced a Brazilian fashion model in Rio.
He'd married a beautiful divorcee, adopted the former model's two boys and had a daughter with her.
A predilection for what McCain describes as "quick tempers, adventurous spirits, and love for the country's uniform" was encoded in the family DNA.
His father and grandfather, the Navy's first father-and-son set of four-star admirals, had set such a low standard for good behavior at the Naval Academy that John Sidney McCain III's self-described "four-year course of insubordination and rebellion" got little more than a yawn from his family.
Speaking of his father, McCain once pronounced himself "little short of astonished by the old man's reckless disregard for the rules."
And yet, for all the raucous tales of misconduct, the midshipmen of the McCain family abided by the school's honor code not to lie, cheat or steal.
McCain now pronounces his son Jack an exception to the family pattern of misbehavior at Annapolis, and jokes, "I'm astonished."
---
DURING
Tucked away in a corner of McCain's Senate office, there is a yellowed, three-page telegram hanging in a simple black frame.
The once-secret cable recounts a conversation at the Paris Peace Talks between the top negotiators for the United States and North Vietnam.
In it, Averell Harriman, the U.S. negotiator, reports: "At tea break Le Duc Tho mentioned that DRV had intended to release Admiral McCain's son as one of the three pilots freed recently, but he had refused."
The cable was written in September 1968. It would be four and half more years before "Admiral McCain's son" came home.
His captors had hoped to use early release of McCain - whose father was soon to become commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific
- as a propaganda ploy.
When McCain refused to play along, they told him: "Now it will be very bad for you, Mac Kane." And they were true to their word.
McCain returned home from his five and half years as a POW on crutches and unable to lift his arms. He still can't raise them above his head.
He says he's "never known a prisoner of war who felt he could fully explain the experience to anyone who had not shared it."
He seems more at ease joking about his incarceration than analyzing it.
More than once he's quipped after a distasteful chore: "That's the most fun I've had since my last interrogation."
When a Senate aide's child got into hot water at school, McCain once advised, "Tell him to confess. Say,
'I am a black air pirate and I have committed crimes against the peace-loving people at my school.' It always worked for me.'"
The advice evoked his darkest hour in Vietnam, when McCain's will was broken and he signed a confession that said, "I am a black criminal and I have performed deeds of an air pirate."
For all of that, though, McCain defied his guards. To his captors, just as to his superiors back at Annapolis, he was exasperating.
"He had to carry a different burden than most of us and he handled it beautifully," says Orson Swindle, a former POW cellmate who remains a close friend. "He didn't need any coping mechanism; that's just built into him."
Even in prison, McCain played to the bleachers, shouting obscenities at his captors loudly enough to bolster the spirits of fellow captives. Appointed by the POWs to act as camp "entertainment officer," a "room chaplain" and a "communications officer," McCain imparted comic relief, literary tutorials, news of the day, even religious sustenance.
It started with "Saturday night at the movies," Swindle says. That is, McCain rendering play-by-play action and line-by-line dialogue from famous films.
Soon enough, Swindle recalls, "Hells bells, we were having Monday night at the movies, Tuesday night at the movies, Wednesday night at the movies, featuring John McCain."
McCain expounded on the history of the American novel, too. "We only had the facts half right, but John said nobody knew the difference," Swindle says.
He also led Sunday church services, sounding "as good as any preacher that ever stood at a pulpit," remembers another former cellmate, Medal of Honor winner Bud Day.
McCain's POW experience, says Day, "took some great iron and turned him into steel."
McCain tells AP that Vietnam "wasn't a turning point in me as to what type of person I am, but it was a bit of a turning point in me appreciating the value of serving a cause greater than your self-interest."
It taught him, he says, "that if you put your country first, that everything will be OK."
---
AFTER
The choices in life, the friends and the enemies, would rarely be as black-and-white again as they had been for McCain in prison.
McCain's experience there gave him new confidence in himself and his judgment. But it did not tame his wild side, and his marriage was a casualty. McCain blames the failure of the marriage on "my own selfishness and immaturity" and has called it "my greatest moral failing."
One month after divorcing his first wife, Carol, McCain married Cindy Hensley, 17 years his junior.
(He'd lied about his age, telling her he was four years younger. She did too, telling him she was four years older.)
"He was everything I was looking for," Cindy McCain recalls of their first meeting, "and I wasn't looking."
McCain was lucky: Carol McCain, who had been in a crippling car accident while her husband was imprisoned in Vietnam, let him out of the marriage without theatrics or recriminations.
McCain's war story had made him a celebrity in Washington. And when he became the Navy's liaison to the Senate, he quickly established friendships with some of the younger senators, who would stop by his office, put their feet up, and chew over the events of the day. The experience opened McCain's eyes to the impact that politicians could have, and to the notion that he could be one of them.
His 1981 marriage to Cindy, the daughter of a wealthy beer distributor in Arizona, helped clear the path forward. In one day, McCain signed his Navy discharge papers and flew West with his new wife to his new life. By 1982, he'd been elected to the House and four years later to an open Senate seat. He and Cindy would have four children, to add to the three from his first marriage. Their youngest child was adopted from Mother Teresa's orphanage in Bangladesh.
