"...the old fighter jock may be frightened that he's about to ditch another plane" - Joe Klein, Time-blog. On Oct. 26, 1967, John McCain was flying his 23rd bombing mission over North Vietnam, when his A-4E Skyhawk dive bomber was shot down and he was forced to bail out. Badly injured, he was subsequently captured as a prisoner of war by the North Vietnamese. He was held in horrific conditions from 1967 to 1973, experiencing episodes of torture and refusing an out-of-sequence early repatriation offer; his war wounds would leave him with lifelong physical limitations. Or, perhaps you'd prefer this...