John McCain: Prisoner of War | Interview with Doug McCain and Everett Alvarez | 5
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From Wondery, I'm Mike Corey, and this is Against the Odds. Today, we wrap up our four-part series, John McCain, Prisoner of War.

Most people think of John McCain as a senator and a presidential candidate. But John was also a Navy man who survived six years as a prisoner of war at a camp called the Hanoi Hilton in Vietnam. He experienced torture and prolonged periods of isolation. He was denied access to medical care and survived the unthinkable. Many say his experience as a POW is a big part of what shaped him and contributed to the devoted public servant that he was.

I have two guests here today. First, I have Doug McCain. Doug is John McCain's oldest son. He is both a Navy and commercial airline pilot. Doug, thank you for being here. My pleasure. And our second guest is Everett Alvarez. Everett is a former U.S. Navy officer who spent 3,113 days in captivity.

in Vietnam as a prisoner of war, one of the longest stretches of any POW. Since then, he has co-written two books about his experience and later spent time as the director of the Peace Corps under President Ronald Reagan. Thank you for being here, Everett.

It's my pleasure. I am truly honored to have you both on here today. I guess I should start by asking, guys, have you two met each other? Yes, definitely. Gosh, Doug was a really young guy when I first met him. How old were you, Doug, when your dad came home? I was probably 13. I've known Commander Alvarez a long time.

Yeah. I got to know John better after we got home. And I was in Washington. I was in the Reagan administration. John was in Congress at the time. So we got to get together quite often and got to know his mom and his brother, Andy, and his sister. We're going to start with Everett. And I know you didn't meet John McCain until after you were released. Is that right? No.

No, no. I met John in Hennepin Hilton, but not until near the end of the war. I met him when the captors started to let us mingle more. People started going out in the courtyard and having that access. That's when I met John. And

Of course, for a lot of it, like you just said, you weren't kept together. You were kept in isolation. But one of the many things I found super fascinating and moving in this story of surviving against the odds is that you didn't have anyone to talk to, but there was...

a way that American POWs in adjacent cells could speak to each other, right? And the Hanoi Hilton. Can you tell me a bit about that? Well, we were able to early, early on, I was the first one that was shot down in the Hanoi Hilton. And one of the early shoot downs that came along about nine months later had this knowledge that we call it the tap code. And it was, uh,

utilized by tapping on the wall of the cell so the sound could be heard on the other side of the wall in other cells. And it was similar to a Morse code, but we were able to use this to develop a very good communication system because one of the rules of the camp commander was there would be no communicating between cells.

But that was not going to work for us. So we were able to use this extensively throughout the camps. And that's really the lifeline that we had. It kept us united in the sense that it kept our hopes up and we were able to not give up, just keep on going. Yeah, and no doubt that kept morale quite high, right?

Oh, absolutely. We passed everything that we had. We passed biographies. We passed who was in what camp, who was in what cell.

who was in what building or part of the Hanoi Hilton. We had lessons, math lessons, guys passing through the wall. It was just anything we could think of, anything that we could do. It was something that the Vietnamese could not stop, no matter how hard they tried. Yeah. And John McCain wrote that the ability to communicate with other prisoners was, he said, simply a matter of life and death. Exactly. Exactly.

It was our lifeline, right? And particularly important to guys that were isolated, that were in solitary. And so, Doug, your father, John McCain, actually made friends with people using this code. Do you remember John ever talking about this? He talked about it some, and then a few of these people came to visit us. I think probably the most noteworthy individual who was in a cell next to him for a long time was Bob Cranor, Colonel Cranor.

I know that they had a lot of communications. I heard a really touching and beautiful story of you tapping on your father's casket as well at his funeral. Yeah. What prompted you to do that? I just thought it was the appropriate thing. I had spent some time on the campaign with a gentleman named Jerry Coffey, who became a pretty good inspirational speaker. And he would make these speeches on the campaign stump.

where he would include the tapping to close his remarks or to begin his remarks and close his remarks. And I just thought it was an appropriate way to say goodbye. So your father was one of the most influential people in American history. And I think like a lot of us, we think of him in terms of his public persona. But what I loved about reading this story over the weeks was getting the whole picture and getting a sense of his personality when he was younger as well. And what do you remember exactly about him before he left for Vietnam? Oh,

I just remember him as always being kind of the center of attention. I mean, one of the most noteworthy memories, I still remember watching on a black and white TV in Meridian, Mississippi, when he was on Jeopardy! And Art Fleming was the host. From five years old, six years old, whatever it was, he won one episode. And then the next episode, he blew it in the final Jeopardy! missed the question on Wuthering Heights, which

which I think till the day he died, it bothered him because he was an American literature fanatic and he misunderstood the question. He gave the wrong answer. But, you know, dad was just always...

He was a charismatic guy from a very young age. Do you remember the day when he left for Vietnam? I don't remember the exact day he left. But what I remember more is he had already been over there once on the forest stall. And we were actually in New York. But while we were in New York, they had this horrific fire on the forest stall off the coast of Vietnam. And I mean, hundreds of people died.

They had to bring the ship, obviously, back in the port. And so then he eventually made his way back to where his father was stationed in London and then eventually went back to the States. And then a short while later after that, he volunteered to go back to Vietnam. And then he wasn't there that long on that deployment, which was on the Oriskany. I think he was only deployed a month or two and he was shot down.

But I don't remember the day he left on that deployment. But he didn't come back for a long time. What did your mom say about that? Well, the day we found out he was shot down, I walked into the kitchen from outside and she was at the kitchen table in tears. I said, what's the matter? And she said, well, your father was shot down today. And I said, what does that mean? She says, I don't know. And I mean, I remember that day because it was the day I was starting my

short-lived career in Cub Scouts. And a neighbor down the street took me to that event because she didn't feel up to going. But we were much luckier than a lot of people because of who his father was. By then, his father was Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific and charged all forces, Air Force, Army, Navy, et cetera, in the Pacific.

So the Vietnamese figured out pretty quick who he was. So we learned that he was alive within a matter of days, which, as I mentioned before, a lot of families didn't learn that for years.

Yeah, well, I can't imagine the conflicting emotions just spinning inside you when you find out that he is alive, but no one knows what's going to happen next. No one knows really anything about what's going on, right? That must have been its own form of torture. Yeah, there was a lack of information. We got an occasional letter.

But there was not a lot of communications. I mean, we all sent letters, packages with candy, tobacco, things of that nature through the Red Cross, hoping they would get there. And I don't think any of the packages ever got through. Did you know about the Hanoi Hilton? Did you hear any details about where he was being held in Vietnam? We didn't hear a lot. I mean, I knew at one point there had been a rescue attempt, but a lot of what I know

I learned after the fact. And going over to Commander Alvarez for a second. So John was shot down, but you were already, you said you were the first one at the Hanoi Hilton, right? August 5th, 1964. I was involved the day before I was shot down in what was now called the Tonkin Gulf incident. And that was when two of our destroyers were shot.

attacked at night by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. As a result of that, Congress passed the

Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which actually started to involve our military troops. And then in retaliation for that, the next day I was in our first raid into North Vietnam, I was shot down. So I was kept in the local area there north of Haiphong for a week and then brought into Hanoi, into this old

prison that was built around the 1870s. It was their main prison for their criminals in Hanoi. It was bleak. Yeah, there were lots of rats. They had the run of the place.

There were several sections later on that we named when the people were first captured and brought into Hanoi and into the prison. They would be put into a section that we named these places, but this one was named the Heartbreak Hotel because that's when the torture began.

And interrogation began for these people, all the ones that followed me. There was another section that we named Las Vegas. We gave different names of the hotel in Vegas, like the Stardust, Caesars, names like that. These were cells that were seven foot by seven foot square,

two concrete beds. You could turn around and walk three paces and you'd be at the other end. Tight little cells and sometimes they would cram two, maybe three people into these cells.

There was another section, this one we call Camp Unity, because it was after the raid in Sante in 1970 that they brought everybody in, all the prisoners, and put us into the Henel Hilton. And so we called it Camp Unity because that's the first time we ever really got together and solidified the organization. Lived in large groups. Like I said, it was sort of a bleak place from 1965 until now.

1969, that's when all of the bad treatment was really taking place. When it started to get crowded in '65, the Vietnamese were still using the prison as for their civilian prisoners. So they started opening up other POW camps in different areas.

But generally speaking, the treatment at each of the camps was consistent with the times. Everybody in the camps were being tortured for propaganda mainly. And then these torture sessions would go through individually and then they would leave us alone for a couple of months.

And then we come through with another purge and on again. And our strategy was to resist as much as possible, but not to the point where we were physically broken. Once the Paris peace talks started, the Vietnamese realized that we were a valuable commodity, you might say. And we were going to be an important asset in whatever the outcome was of the negotiations. So our treatment started to improve gradually.

until the end. There were 500 of us that came out at the end of the war from North Vietnam and Laos. And then there were about 90 that came out of the South, those that survived the BNPOWs in the South Vietnam. Most of us that came out of the North were all aviators shot down.

And so you can basically say that those who were in the Hanoi Hilton were all aviators, pilots, and air crew. Can I ask Commander Alvarez about Operation Linebacker? I'll tell you, that started in 1972. And actually, Operation Linebacker started, I think, in the summer of

But it intensified. What President Nixon did was launch the weapons that he had because his objective was to end this thing. The only way we were going to end this thing was to force the North Vietnamese government to capitulate.

In 1968, when the Paris peace talks started, our hopes really went high. We gradually realized that it was going to take a long time. The only way we were going to ever force these people to negotiate seriously and end the war was to bomb the heck out of them. And so in the summer of 1972,

President Nixon resumed the bombing of North Vietnam, which was a great day. We were in a camp called the zoo. For the first time in years, we heard the air raid sirens going off. Aircraft started firing all around us. Then he started bombing military targets around Hanoi, and we finally said, "It's about time."

When the elections in 1972, they were Vietnamese propaganda for the speakers would be talking about this and we would listen closely because it was good information. Right after that election, they started bombing really seriously. I mean, every day and then night here comes the B-52s and the roof of the building that we were in, the big cell blocks, they would, dust would come floating down, little particles.

If they came down, I mean, they would cause serious damage. So we were trying to help protect ourselves. And then the night after Christmas 1972, everything stopped.

And then about two weeks later, the Vietnamese called us out in the yard and they read the results of the Paris peace talks and the end of the war. For the first time, we had wagon loads of potatoes and food. I personally was about 110 pounds a long, long period of time. But then when we came out of there, I weighed 140 and my normal weight was 60 pounds.

Wow, that's a lot of weight lost. Everett, I have to say, I've been sitting here with my eyes closed just vividly picturing everything you've been explaining. You're an amazing storyteller. I can't say that enough. I want to go back up to one thing you said that I can't shake and it's about the seven foot by seven foot cell that is basically just the size of being able to lay down in.

Can you talk about how you cope with that against the odds? Again, that's the point of the podcast is people can do incredible things when they have to. I never gave it a thought prior to captivity. And all of a sudden I found myself there in captivity in this strange foreign land called Vietnam.

Hanoi in a prison surrounded by guards and interrogators and what have you, and all by myself. And so the realization that, my God, here I am all by myself, the country, half of the world around, my colleagues and peers were somewhere at sea on board ship. And it was a battle. It was just a battle to maintain

my straight thinking in a way. I was being barraged by propaganda and their history and what have you. That was very difficult. And so I had to keep my thoughts and I prayed a lot. The other important was realizing how to keep my mental well-being and my physical well-being as hard as it was. So having

been in solitary the whole time. And then afterwards when other prisoners started coming into the cells, but I was still alone in one of these seven foot by seven foot cells for about six months before I joined the others.

was also very difficult. And you realize that you have to do something to survive the best you can. I started doing things that were mentally challenging to keep my mind going because I knew that was important. And then do whatever I could to maintain the physical well-being, even though you're confined to a seven foot by seven foot cell.

There are things like push-ups, like setups, and like running in place. I didn't do as much of that myself, but when we were with others and confined in those tight, tight spaces, we would have contests.

What are some of the mental exercises you did? I was an electrical engineer. It was things like designing circuits, designing homes, metal games like remembering all the class, all the schools I had gone to and who was in what class and names and their families. And then later on, when you were lucky to have somebody on the other side of the wall to tap to, you kept each other going by communicating and keeping that lifeline going, like Doug was saying.

You know, you'd call him up and say, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, and he'd come back, dot, dot. And yeah, by the way, the Vietnamese could never catch on to how to do that. So keeping your hope up, you did everything that you could do to keep his morale up. And a little bit of sense of humor, it seems, too, naming these places the Hilton. In the bleakest of times and worst of times, you had to have your humor.

I mean, I remember one time we were being punished. My two roommates and myself, we were put into leg irons and then they were handcuffed behind our back.

It was tough, and they would let us out 10 minutes a day. And there was one night we were struggling and doing what we could. And for some reason, we just started laughing. We couldn't stop laughing. We would just say, you know, people at home are never going to believe this. The bonds you'd make with these people in this shared experience would be almost unbreakable, I would imagine.

Doug, when you hear these incredible stories from these legends of men, how does it make you feel? Grateful.

Human. Proud. Mostly proud. And Everett, refresh our minds again. You were the longest POW ever in the camp. And how many days was that exactly? It was eight and a half years. 3,100 and something, but who's counting? I was not the longest held in history. There was a fellow that was captured in South Vietnam, Vietnam.

Six months before I was shot down, who actually survived and came home in 1973. But I was the first one in the Hanoi Hilton. Do you remember the first time you met John McCain over there? Yeah.

It was when they were, you know, letting us out of our cells and we were mingling and people had the freedom to go back and forth from one place to one cell to another. I remember standing in front of my cell and I looked across the courtyard and here's this one cell and here's this fellow. He's got shocking white hair at that time and his arms are, you know, funny. They're

It turns out they were broken. He's standing in his doorway of the cell and everybody that walks out, he's patting them on the back, talking to them, shaking their hand. And everybody, you know, passing in and out. And I said to somebody next to me and I said, who's that fellow?

you know, standing there talking. He looked, oh, that's John, that's Johnny McCain. And so I remember looking at him and I told this fellow next to me, I says, that guy is going to be a politician someday. You watch. And then if he's not, he's going to be the world's greatest used car salesman. Well, one of those, one of those was pretty close to being right. Yeah.

And so, Doug, when this is all happening over in Vietnam, what did you and your family hear back home about your dad? We did not hear a whole lot. We got, I think, maybe two letters the entire time. The only other communication or one really communication we had was very early in his captivity.

Shortly after the Vietnamese had figured out who he was, they kind of treated him for his injuries and put him in this little makeshift hospital bed in Hanoi. And there was a French reporter in town who did an interview with him.

that eventually aired on CBS News with Walter Cronkite. But we really didn't know a whole lot. We were just hoping for the best. How did you keep hoping for the best? You know, the only hiccup I had during that time was when I was in the fourth grade. My mother was visiting her parents in a suburb of Philadelphia for Christmas. And Christmas Eve, she was coming back from visiting her friends, Connie and Sam Bookbinder.

who owned a famous restaurant in Philadelphia. She had gone to college with Connie and she had a horrific car accident, was in the Bryn Mawr hospital for six months, which kind of forever altered her life. Your mom's in a horrific car accident. Your father is somewhere, not exactly sure where, but you know it's not good. And both those are two, I mean, the most important support structures in your life. It must have felt like your life was falling apart. No.

No. I mean, you still have friends and other family around and a community. We went about things and prayed for the best. That's all you can do, really, right? I can't affect the outcome over there. But I still count myself as very fortunate. And I want to emphasize this. Very fortunate. Very, very fortunate in two ways. One, we knew he was...

alive nearly immediately because of who his father was and he came back. I had friends in that circle of people which Orange Park, the area we lived was a lot of you know aviator families both Navy and Air Force for whatever reason and I have friends from that group whose dad never came home and in some instances they don't know what happened

I mean, you know, my dad will tell you, or he did tell you, shortly after he was diagnosed with glioblastoma, he still felt like he was the luckiest man alive. And in some ways he was. I mean, he survived dumping a plane in Corpus Christi Bay, he survived the horrific fire on the forest hall, and he survived to morning. So, you know, I'm very fortunate.

Aviators are funny people, Mike. We're a funny breed. There's an old saying that says, contrary to popular belief, a naval aviator is capable of sensitivity, nurturing, and caring. But unfortunately, the only person they're able to do that with is themselves. And we will joke, Commander...

Alvarez will tell you this, we will joke about anything. I mean, he talked about the night they all started laughing. There is nothing out of bounds with us. Nothing.

So I want to ask both of you guys a question about coming home and life after the war. But first, one of the things that really stood out to me in this story as surprising was how being held in captivity formed incredible bonds of friendship with other POWs. So, Doug, I know you said your father didn't say much, but did he talk about specific friends from the war ever?

He wouldn't talk about them specifically until after they came and visited. I think probably his closest friend from during that time was Bob Cranor. But there were many others who came to visit. I've got to bounce the question over to you for a second. Did you keep in regular contact with any of the other POWs after you were released?

Oh, absolutely. We're always in touch with one or the other. I mean, a week doesn't go by when I haven't touched base with at least a couple of them. And we get together a lot. I think an experience like that would bond you guys together with something stronger than super glue. The biggest adhesive in the world would be some experience like that, sharing that together and ultimately being able to fortunately leave.

Let's talk a bit about coming home, guys. We've touched on it briefly, but Doug, can you tell us about the day your father, John McCame, came home? Do you remember that exact day? Oh, I can remember the day. I cannot remember the date. Interestingly, I had broken my leg playing soccer yesterday.

And the day I broke my leg was the night they announced an agreement for, you know, and the POWs were going to come home. And so then a couple months later, they released everybody. And I remember watching on TV, Everett was obviously on the very first plane to leave to go to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, you know, and then the next day or two, suddenly over a day, two or three,

They flew them all to the Philippines. They kept everybody there to evaluate them physically, mentally, kind of catch them up on things.

what was going on with their lives back in the States. For instance, you know, my dad did not know that his wife had been in an awful car accident. Some of the gents who'd been over there, their wives divorced them. But so eventually a few weeks later, there were a group of POWs that were from the Jacksonville area that included my dad and all got off the plane and

Pete Schoepfel, who was the senior ranking officer, spoke, you know, and the spouses went up on the plane first for hugs and kisses. And then everybody came down and, you know, arrangements had been made for somebody to watch me and my siblings. Same with all the other families so that, you know, the various moms and dads, husbands and wife could reconnect, right?

And then life started to begin anew. And what was that new life like, finally having a father back in your life again? It was good. It came to a lot of our sporting events and things like that. But at the same time, he was also trying to...

you know, figure out where he was going to go with his career. A lot of these individuals, especially somebody like Everett, who was over there eight years from a career standpoint, the Navy, they were quite handicapped because they had never had command. So they're trying to sort that out. I haven't seen these people in five plus years, six plus years, seven plus years, you know,

It's a difficult dynamic because I'm now 13 and he's my dad. But I'm like, well, OK, I'm not sure you're going to tell me what to do. I mean, you haven't been around for you don't know what's going on. Yeah. I mean, I'm not saying that smugly. It's just I mean, I always we always respected him and he was the boss. But it's there was quite, quite an adjustment period.

And I think that can be said for pretty much everybody. And Everett, what was it like for you coming home after being gone for so long? Did you struggle at all? Was there some differences? When I came home or when we were coming home, I was very apprehensive about everything.

what I was going to find at home. I really didn't know what to expect. Prior to my release, I had already received the news of my marriage, which was, it was gone. And so when I stepped off the airplane, I was taken aback by the reception we got at Clark Air Force Base. I guess it's because we've been listening to this propaganda for so many years drummed into our heads about the anti-war movement.

activities at home and the people were against the war and everybody in the world was against the American and the American soldiers. I was not prepared for instant celebrity status. I mean, when we got off the planes, the cameras were there and people were there, the adulation was there. And it took me a while how to deal with that.

And especially when we got home, it was just a roller coaster ride. I mean, I was invited to activities, receptions, parties, the Academy Award. It took me a good month to figure out that I didn't have to say yes to everything. It was just physically impossible. Here I was trying to please people. And so, number one, I learned how to say no.

Number two, I learned that if I kept that pace up, I was going to probably kill myself. The POW experience hadn't done that. I really wish I had had more time to spend with my parents, my family, to hear their side of the story. We never really got a chance to sit down and talk about it. I was too busy going here and there and

And then, of course, coming back on active duty and then meeting my wife. And we got married and off we went to Texas. I was in a hurry to catch up and do things. I decided to retire at 20 years old.

Like Doug said, I never had command. I retired and left the Navy and immediately drawn into the Reagan administration. And like you mentioned earlier, I was deputy of the Peace Corps for about a year and a half. And then I went over as the number two at the VA. I got to know John a lot better there. And then after that, starting my own business. And finally, with the pandemic, I was forced to stay home.

Life has just been, just passed by too fast and there were a lot of good things that happened to me. A lot of doors were opened and a lot of opportunities. Well, that transition from Vietnam to USA sounds about as gentle as a punch to the face. I mean, there literally would have been completely different worlds.

It was a very different country that Everett and all these gentlemen came back to from when they were shot down and when they came back to the United States. I mean, you know, people were smoking marijuana and dropping LSD. And, you know, it was a very, very different thing.

John wrote a memoir called Faith of My Fathers. And obviously his relationship with your grandfather, his father, Jack, was a big influence on his life. I'd love to hear about your father's relationship with your grandfather, Jack McCann. What was your grandfather like? He was a salty old soul that would wake up very early in the day. I mean, you know, he was a submarine captain in the Pacific in World War II.

which was not for the faint of heart. He obviously rose to a very high rank in the Navy. And I think first and foremost, my dad, the respect he had for what his father had done and what his grandfather had done before him. I think the relationship that they had because of his dad's Navy career was one of respect and admiration, mutual respect.

But I do think to a certain extent, you know, once he became a naval officer, the fact, the success that his father and grandfather had, it drove him to not fail. So, and, you know, Jack McKenna, I remember sitting around with my dad asking questions and stuff about, you know, things that happened in the Pacific Ocean.

It was always interesting. And what I probably learned most from that was how important the enlisted man is in the Navy or any of our services. You know, it's the enlisted people who do the grunt work, the hard work that wins wars, keep us safe. I mean, there's officers that do leadership things and everything.

kind of keep people in line. But at the end of the day, the majority of the sacrifices is done by the enlisted servicemen and women in our military. And they do an amazing job. When you ask Commander Alvarez and these other people that went through this hell in Vietnam, you know, at certain points in time, ordinary people do extraordinary things.

And the U.S. has had the benefit of being on the right side of that throughout our history. You know, the McCain family name and their participation in the U.S. military, it goes further back than my great grandfather. It goes back to the Civil War. Well, no, it goes all the way back to George Washington. But...

There's a lineage there, which I think is part of what prompted my dad to look at public services as opposed to the business world. Your father spent much of his life as a politician and a public figure. But was there something you think that most people wouldn't know about him personally that he could share with us? Well, one, he has a phenomenal sense of humor.

I told him for years, and there's a couple of people who were real involved with the campaign who told him, you know, said, you know, John, why don't you quit politics and go start a radio show? You know, you'll have way more influence. But that that was not the arena he wanted to be in. I mean, he's exceedingly smart. And he was, in my opinion, was never given enough credit for that by the press.

I do think that one of the things that he learned coming out of the war was, one, that America was an exceptional country and that he, until the day he died, felt the greatest hope for the planet was democracy.

And he spent his, I think that's part of why he wanted to stay in the Senate. His true belief was that the more democracy and the more commerce in the world, the more hope there is for oppressed people.

And the less conflict ultimately there would be. I think that's what drove him. Speaking about John's feelings after the war, there was a bit of controversy, of course, about the Vietnam War. What were his feelings about all of this? I know that his biggest feeling about it is whether or not there is controversy about a war or a conflict, you do not want to make

military decisions based on politics. You either devote the resources you have to defeat the enemy as swiftly

and is with fewest casualties as possible, or you don't engage. It's a lesson that in some instances we have learned, Desert Storm One, for instance, we devoted overwhelming resources and it was essentially over immediately with minimal casualties. His attitude is, look, I would rather win a war

than win an election. So I think what he learned in Vietnam is when we send our young men and women overseas and put them in harm's way, we need to put them there with the full resources behind them, not in some ill thought out mechanism that looks good to the media and the public, but endangers them.

So it sounds like his experiences in captivity in the Hanoi Hilton informed his politics or just his general sense of fairness. I think it did make him aware that, you know, there are other points of view around the world and there are going to be people who disagree with me in the way we do things. But that said, that doesn't mean there isn't a reason why we can't engage each other in

peacefully through solution or business or whatever it might be. There needs to be a way to find that common ground. I think he may have thought that way all along. I think he, you know, quite possibly thought from day one that America is an exceptional country and as such has an obligation around the world. And, you know,

We sent all these young men in World War II to Europe. They weren't going there to save America. America was just fine.

They're going there to save Europe and humanity and the rest of the world. And they did it selflessly. And I think that's the way my dad viewed his role in the world, post-Vietnam and the U.S.'s role. And I think that's what drove him. I really do. Thanks, Doug. That was a fantastic answer. And wrapping this up, over to Everett. So a few people can really understand what it was like to have an experience like the one you had.

What would you say is something about the experience of being a POW that most people don't really understand?

I don't think that a lot of the population has a sense of what we have. And so I used to say that we don't really know what we have until we've lost it. One of the things that the Vietnam War taught us, don't blame the war on the warrior. And I had the opportunity to work at the Veterans Administration. I worked with a lot of Vietnam vets and their programs.

And one of the biggest wrongs that we did to the veterans was that they shouldered the blame. The public cast the blame on them, and that was wrong. They cast the war on them and not the politicians where it all started.

Well, guys, that's a wrap. It's an absolute honor to speak with both of you. It was a conversation that I won't soon forget. I just want to say thank you so much for being here, for both of you. Thank you. Thank you.

This is the final episode of our series, John McCain, Prisoner of War. If you'd like to learn more about this event, we highly recommend John McCain's autobiography, Faith of My Fathers, co-written with Mark Salter, the book John McCain, An American Odyssey by Robert Timberg, and the HBO Max documentary, John McCain, For Whom the Bell Tolls. We also recommend Lessons from the Hanoi Hilton, Six Characteristics of High-Performance Teams by Taylor Baldwin Keelanth,

I'm your host, Mike Corey. Davey Gardner is our producer. Taylor Keelan is our consultant. Brian White is our associate producer. Our audio engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Our executive producers are Stephanie Jens and Marshall Louis for Wondery.