There is the serious question raised by fellow inmates at Hanoi Hilton that he ever was tortured at all. According to some soldiers, he turned as soon as he arrived and began broadcasting for the communists. By theirs and other accounts he is a coward on the order of Kerry.
Well could be or not. That’s all speculation.
There is however, solid evidence he lied when he said let through that he volunteered to turn down an offer of freedom. The evidence comes from Admiral Stockdale’s own book that as CO of the Hanoi Hilton he gave the order to every POW that no one was to leave unless they all did.
So McCain was just following orders but instead he let the lie be created that he was some kind of hero.
As for his heroism, I reviewed each of his commendations, ribbons, medals and not one of them detailed what heroic acts he made in the line of duty other than to get shot down. And such a description is required by military manuals. I linked to the manuals, pages and paragraphs and they were not follwed. I then examined other heros in the Hanoi Hilton and their acts were indeed detailed.
As I wrote last summer, there were wounded men rotting away in the jungles that had given far more than McCain ever did. Yet they received not even one-tenth of the commendations that McCain received.
McCain was the grandson and son of Admirals. He was an ‘Admiral’s boy’ and earned for his 19 hours of combat duty about one medal per hour with no heroism ever described.
He merely did his duty and survived as a POW. He was no hero.
Then when he came home to his loyal steadfast wife who had been stressed out for years over his imprisonment, he dumped her because she had gained a little weight and he married a younger wealthier woman and proceeded to use her Arizona connections and money to run for Goldwater’s Senate Seat.
He is a despicable human being through and through.
Because all of us are now living in an ‘Age of Awareness’, an ‘Age of Connectivity’, with social media and an ability to cross-connect and bypass the national news media, we saw through McCain immediately after he attacked Donald Trump in the summer of 2015. I did my homework and was sickened to see what I found on McCain, and I happened to be trained as a very unbiased objective researcher.
In fact, last summer when I did research on Donald Trump, I went in thinking he was a no-good lying scumbag but came up finding he was the exact opposite. It shocked the hell out of me to find that Donald Trump is one of the kindest men on the planet with an even bigger heart. It really shocked me.