Let me preface say that I dislike the man and think him a horrible and stupid legislator.
From what I’ve read he was offered a pass to leave and go home because of his admiral father. And he turned it down to stay with his POW peers. I have also read that interviewed POWs spoke in code when making such ‘speeches’, and/or conferred with other POWs first to get approval before feeding the NVA propaganda machine.
I listened to it. Regardless of what it says, implies or signifies, IT along with his imprisonment there has no bearing in my mind on what he’s done to us and this country in the past two decades.
If we can’t hold up the recording as a re-election point, then his side should also stop playing the POW card. His imprisonment got him in Congress; it shouldn’t keep him there forever.
To me, these are two distinctly different people - one a captured warrior, and the second a meddler I consider as clinically insane.
Hackworth also said EVERY fellow POW he interviewed said the same thing.
BTW Hack died of a rare type of cancer a year before the 2008 election.
McCain couldn’t go home early. He would been an outcast in the Navy and his career would have been over. The POW code is “first man in first man out”.