How long was john mccain captured

Tension and stiffness gave way to relaxation. It has been such a long trip. None of the prisoners talked to the large crowd of Hanoi-based and visiting newsmen away from the three evacuation planes. As the POWs were transported from their last detention camp in downtown Hanoi to Gia Lam Airport, they drove by scenes of the damage inflicted by heavy B52 raids late last year.

The downtown area was clogged Wednesday morning with a traffic jam of thousands of trucks, carts and bicycles. Almost all the vehicles appeared to be involved in round-the-clock reconstruction work. He landed in Truc Bach Lake in the center of Hanoi and, weighed down with 50 pounds of gear, quickly sank. McCain went down again and, with his teeth, pulled the toggle and inflated his vest.

Twenty angry North Vietnamese yanked him ashore, stripped him to his underwear, kicked him and spat on him. Someone smashed his shoulder with a rifle butt, and a bayonet was jabbed into his groin and ankle. Soldiers then heaved his body onto a truck. Hubbell in his book P. Guards gave him minimal food and water.

For days, the year-old pilot drifted in and out of consciousness. When questioned, he just told his captors his name, rank and serial number. In return, jailers beat him. For months on end, he was fed only bread and pumpkin soup. He communicated with fellow inmates by tapping codes on the thick concrete walls.

In his memoirs, McCain wrote that solitary "put me in a pretty surly mood" and that he would ward off depression by hollering insults at guards.

My left arm was broken again and my ribs were cracked. Duyet denies McCain or others were mistreated and says he punished any fellow guards who stepped out of line. In his post-prison writings, McCain said things got easier for him in the early s, which he called the "coasting period".

He read propaganda texts about Vietnam communist revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh, and was allowed to roam the prison yard with fellow Americans, who named different sections of the compound after Vegas hotels. Naval Academy graduates including McCain. On Oct. The sheer force of the ejection broke his right leg and both arms, briefly knocking him unconscious before he landed in a small lake.

Burdened with heavy equipment, he sank to the bottom and had to kick to the surface for gulps of air. Eventually, McCain used his teeth to activate his life preserver.

But once on the surface, he was pulled ashore by a group of North Vietnamese who proceeded to attack him, tearing at his clothes and slamming a rifle butt into his right shoulder, shattering it. The group also bayoneted McCain in the abdomen and foot. News reporter. His captors initially refused to provide McCain any medical treatment, but that all changed after they discovered that his father was a U.