What is now Vietnam was once known as French Indochina. It was during French rule that in 1896, Hoa Lo prison was built to hold Vietnamese who opposed French rule.

Some of those held were, no doubt, violent. Regardless, the guillotine in what is now the prison museum shows that the French Revolution’s legacy cast a long and bloody shadow.

After the French withdrew, the North Vietnamese communists turned Hoa Lo into a prison for Americans captured during our war with them. One of those Americans was named John McCain.

John McCain, Captive

It was on his 23^rd combat mission that McCain was shot down. When he was dragged from the Hanoi lake into which he plummeted, he was beaten by his captors. As reported by Daniel Levy, “As he ejected from the plane, his right knee slammed into something and broke, and the force of shooting from the craft and hitting the air snapped his arms … 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.”

The record of McCain’s suffering goes on and on. And it gets worse and worse.

McCain spent five and one-half years at Hoa Lo, dubbed by appropriately caustic American flyers “the Hanoi Hilton.”

It could have been less. Finding out that his father was the admiral in charge of the U.S. Pacific Command, the Vietnamese offered McCain early release.

He refused. He didn’t want special treatment. And he didn’t want to demoralize those left behind.

His refusal enraged the Vietnamese, who accelerated McCain’s regimen of torture.

Eventually, in unbearable agony, McCain signed a fake “confession” of war crimes. He grieved for giving in to his torturers, saying it humiliated him to the point that he physically shook.

Confined to two years of solitary confinement in a tiny cell, McCain walked with an uneven gait for the rest of his life, unable to raise his arms above his shoulders. I recall when, as a young man working in the Senate, I watched him stride with energy but an unnatural stiffness.

When traitors like Jane Fonda and her then-husband, the radical Tom Hayden, came to the Hanoi Hilton, McCain rightly refused to meet with them. There is a scene in the 1987 film Hanoi Hilton where a character based on Fonda tries to get starving American flyers to admit their wrongdoing; instead, they ravenously eat the fruit on the table in front of them. I wonder if a film like this, one that shows Hollywood personalities for the superficial liberal reactionaries so many of them are, could be made today.

Heroism is Rare

Talk of heroism comes cheap these days. We call people “heroes” when they rescue trapped animals or give the elderly rides to the grocery store.

These are good things to do. But inconvenience is not bravery, and courtesy is not courage. This kind of “everyone is special” nonsense debases the very concept of heroism.

Heroism is lauded because it is rare. To do faithfully the sometimes difficult and even trying tasks of life isn’t heroic. It’s honorable, but tasks which demand sacrifice but no real risk are part of basic decency, not heroism.

The issue before our country now is not about John McCain’s political life. He often drove me as crazy as the next conservative.

Senator McCain

There were times when he could be noble. When Barack Obama decided to do an end-run around Congress and repeal the ban on open homosexuality in the military, McCain worked closely with my colleagues at the Family Research Council to stop the then-president’s plan.

We failed. But we had an ally in John McCain.

When my former boss, then-Senator Dan Coats, received an award from a major enlisted person’s organization for his advocacy for the ordinary soldier, McCain stood on the podium with Senator Coats to join in honoring his friend. He didn’t have to do this — senators’ lives are packed with activity and demands. But realizing how important remembering the “forgotten soldiers” is, McCain made the time to stand with Senator Coats.

What we’re considering is not the sum of Senator McCain’s political judgments or his personality or whatever else. It’s about what it means to be a hero, an American hero, someone whose patriotism has been tested in a fire hardly any of us will ever know.

Patriot and Hero

Patriotism is not just getting emotional at the singing of the national anthem (although I plead guilty to that habit). It’s about what one is willing to do, in moments of crisis, for his nation. It’s about love combined with bravery.

“Courage is not simply one of the virtues,” wrote C.S. Lewis, “but the form of every virtue at the testing point.”

John McCain passed the test. He was a patriot-hero. He should be honored and remembered as such by all of us.