McCain's "cross in the dirt" story is fake
Kickin' Ass and Takin' Names
detailed 12,000 word report of his experiences that was published in
US News and World Report.
Even though McCain goes into a lot of detail in that story and
mentions religion a few times, there is no mention of the cross in the
sand story, even though it would have fitted in well with the whole
narrative. There are numerous mentions of Vietnamese guards in the
reports, mostly bad ones but also good ones, but there is no
indication at all that any of them would have been Christian, although
"[a] lot of them were homosexual".
So even though McCain yesterday said:
It was Christmas day, we were allowed to stand outside of our cell for
a few minutes, and those days we were not allowed to see or
communicate with each other although we certainly did. And I was
stadning outside for my few minutes, outside my cell. He came walking
up. He stood there for a minute and with his handle [sandal?] on the
dirt in the courtyard he drew a cross and he stood there and a minute
later, he rubbed it out and walked away. For a minute there, there as
just two Christians worshiping together. I'll never forget that moment
so every day -
That moment he will never forget wasn't worth spending a few of those
12,000 words on.
Religion seem to have been important for the POWs though:
In March of 1971 the senior officers decided that we would have a
showdown over church. This was an important issue for us. It also was
a good one to fight them on. We went ahead and held church. The men
that were conducting the service were taken out of the room
immediately. We began to sing hymns in loud voices and "The Star-
Spangled Banner."
Which makes you wander even more why seeing a fellow Christian on "the
other side" doesn't get an explicit mention.
There is a story of a humane North Vietnamese guard though:
It was also in May, 1969, that they wanted me to write—as I remember—a
letter to U. S. pilots who were flying over North Vietnam asking them
not to do it. I was being forced to stand up continuously—sometimes
they'd make you stand up or sit on a stool for a long period of time.
I'd stood up for a couple of days, with a respite only because one of
the guards—the only real human being that I ever met over there —let
me lie down for a couple of hours while he was on watch the middle of
one night.
Which sounds strangely familiar to John McCain's statement yesterday,
about the "Cross in the Sand" guard:
One night I was being punished in that fashion. All of a sudden the
door of the cell opened, the guard came in, a guy who was just what we
call a gun guard. He just walked around the camp with a gun on his
shoulder. He went like this and then he loosened the ropes. He came
back about four hours later, he tightened them up again and left.
So is that the same guy? Or is John McCain just making stuff up as he
goes along?
Even so, that was May 1969, so the next Christmas, according to John
McCain above, this guard draws his cross in the sand, right? Except
that:
In December of 1969 I was moved from "The Pentagon" [he means "The
Plantation" camp] over to "Las Vegas." "Las Vegas" was a small area of
Hoala Prison which was built by the French in 1945.
So that Vietnamese guard is following John McCain around from camp to
camp?
McCain told the same story on the 2000 campaign trail, except not
about himself, as reported by the New York Times
Many years ago a scared American prisoner of war in Vietnam was tied
in torture ropes by his tormentors and left alone in an empty room to
suffer through the night. Later in the evening a guard he had never
spoken to entered the room and silently loosened the ropes to relieve
his suffering. Just before morning, that same guard came back and re-
tightened the ropes before his less humanitarian comrades returned. He
never said a word to the grateful prisoner, but some months later, on
a Christmas morning, as the prisoner stood alone in the prison
courtyard, the same good Samaritan walked up to him and stood next to
him for a few moments. Then with his sandal, the guard drew a cross in
the dirt. Both prisoner and guard both stood wordlessly there for a
minute or two, venerating the cross, until the guard rubbed it out and
walked away.
In his 1999 book "Faith of my fathers" John McCain tells this story in
the first person though.
Dai Uy
X-URL: http://www.politico.com/blogs/jonathanmartin/0808/McCain_camp_pushes_back_against_cross_in_dirt_claims.html
or http://tinyurl.com/5qad6q
August 18, 2008
McCain camp pushes back against "cross in dirt" claims
As he has many times on the campaign trail, John McCain Saturday night
used an anecdote when asked about his Christian faith.
Recalling his
time as a POW, McCain spoke of one guard who quietly loosened the
ropes on his hands. Later, McCain shared, that same guard drew the
image of a cross in the dirt.
This story was recounted as part of
McCain's Christmas-season ad and in mailers around the holiday.
But
some on the left, having heard it for the first time at the Saddlback
forum, are now asserting McCain has lifted the story from the recently
deceased Russian dissident, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
No mainstream
media outlet — to my knowledge — has picked up this claim, but the
McCain campaign, seeing both risk and opportunity, has raised it to
denounce it.
Writes campaign blogger Michael Goldfarb:
The only similarity between the two stories is a cross in the dirt,
but it is hardly an unlikely coincidence that there were practicing
Christians in both Russia and Vietnam, or that in the prisons of those
two Communist countries the only crosses to be found were etched in
the dirt, as easily disappeared as the Christians who drew them.
But those desperate to discredit Senator McCain's record will have to
impugn his fellow prisoners as well. Orson Swindle, who was held as a
prisoner of war along with McCain, tells the McCain Report that he
heard this particular story from McCain "when we first moved in
together." That was in the summer of 1971, Swindle said, though "time
blurred" and he couldn't be sure. He said it was some time around then
that the Vietnamese moved all "36 troublemakers" into the same
quarters, where they "talked about everything under the sun."
Why would McCain's campaign legitimize the unsubstantiated attacks of
those on the left by highlighting the issue? They may have been
concerned it was on the verge of getting traction and wanted to pre-
emptively shoot down, with a firsthand account from another
POW. Speaking for myself, I've gotten numerous e-mails from liberal-
leaning readers raising the matter.
But there is also an opportunity
here which explains their decision. At every turn in the primary and
general, McCain's campaign has jumped at the chance to play the role
of victim. To have political opponents question what exactly went on
in the Hanoi Hilton offers McCain's campaign not just the chance to
discuss his Vietnam service but to also score some equivalence in the
victim column at a time when his rival is variously accused as
being un-American, a closet Muslim and a Manchurian Candidate among
other things. By pointing to such allegations as this, McCain can make
the case that Obama isn't the only one being smeared.
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