Annapolis is like many towns across the country. It’s near the water, has a nice downtown, a big mall, and, oh yeah, a couple of colleges. One of those colleges happens to be the United States Naval Academy, which is the alma mater of the late Senator John McCain.
I was at a neighborhood bar about two hours ago, normal place to find me on a Saturday night, talking and drinking with some friends, all of us veterans, when the news of McCain’s death hit our cell phones. We stopped and ordered a round of shots, Woodford Reserve, to honor the sailor. As we did that, we were sitting at the bar, a couple of people asked us if we were drinking to McCain. We said yes. When we finally downed the shot, about 10 minutes later, over a dozen people took their shots with us to a shipmate, to a swabo, to McCain.
He had his faults. But to us, especially to those of us who wore the uniform, he was a good man. Though, as I learned in the Army, anybody is a good man after at least twenty years. As a guy whose Dad and son were sailors, I guess that even applies to the Navy.
I’ve heard stories about McCain, mostly at the cigar shop I frequent, when he was a midshipman. You hear them too at the Ramshead, a restaurant up on West Street, a place that hosts USNA reunions. I’ve heard hothead, show pony, Daddy’s boy, and a bunch of other epithets too early in the process to print. But you know, every one was said with a smile, a chuckle, and a fond shaking of the head. The guy might have been an obnoxious hotshot fighter jock, but he sure as hell was liked around here.
Couldn’t have been easy for him, as he proved graduating almost at the bottom of his class. With his dad and granddad both naval heroes and then admirals, the pressure to measure up had to be intense. So, he blew it off and changed the rules of the game. If they made their names by being straight arrow men he would break numerous chickenguano regs and generally hell-raise in ways which would have made those Tailhook sissies swoon with mortification. He was a McCain. But he’d be his own McCain.
He joined Fleet Aviation, trashed jets, and continued to amuse himself. Was somehow involved, depends on who you talk to, in that incident on the Forrestal where a lot of guys were killed. The Navy cleared him. But the guy had a sense of honor. It must have stayed with him.
Fast forward and his A-4 gets nailed by a SAM over Hanoi. And there’s the moment. We all have them, but especially men in uniform in moments of crisis. Young Jack Kennedy had one after his PT-boat was T-boned by a Japanese destroyer, some say while Kennedy was asleep at the wheel. But in getting his men to a nearby island and safety Kennedy was a stand up guy, a hero, a helluva sailor.
McCain gets it bad, really bad, from the North Vietnamese. They string him up, they play mind games, they beat the bejesus out of him, they keep him in solitary for years, they make his life hell. But he guts it out. When they find out about his lineage they offer him an early release. The moment is right here. He says no.
Can you guess what kind of guts that took? He’s tough John McCain but he’s also a human who misses home and family, hates pain, would like to be treated like something more than an insect. But he still says no because something else meant more to him than all of the above: duty. Duty not only to his oath, but more importantly, duty to his comrades. Right there, to me and many, he defines himself.
John Keegan, perhaps the greatest military historian of the 20th century, understood in his The Face of Battle that men do not fight for flag, ideology, or slogans. None of that b.s. Hollywood stuff. They fight for the guy on either side of them. Civilians sometimes don’t get this. Which leads them to make crass, dumb, and nauseating remarks about not liking men who get captured in wartime. There would be thousands of brave POWs from the Revolutionary War to Vietnam who wouldn’t exactly appreciate that remark. But hey, people are human. They occasionally say really dumbass things. Even hyperbole-driven presidential candidates who become good presidents.
He survives Hanoi, with serious injuries, and comes back home. He gets a gig with the Senate as a liaison officer and gets bit with the political bug. Wins a House seat; not long after he’s in the Senate. And that’s when the hotshot reappears.
At first he’s a loyal Reagan Republican. But his brash hot dog aviator persona starts to assert itself and he breaks some rules. He does deals with the other side, some good. Some not so good. He justifiably butts head with fastidious bean-counting GOP players who don’t like or understand his penchant for action and brutal candor. And what’s funny is that moronic civilians in the press gush about how refreshing it is to have a candid politician speak his mind in front of them. What they don’t get is that he’s running game on them by being candid and refreshing only when it benefits him. And, the locker room comradery the press think he gives them? Just Navy chatter. The kind of thing you’d hear in any ready room. But for these precious scribes who wouldn’t dare think about taking a moment out of their nerfy lives to serve their country (better to let the kids from flyover country do that, huh a*****es?) it’s soooo candid! You can almost feel the tingle going up their collective legs.
It comes to a head when he runs for president the first time in 2000. Yeah, he’s glamorous and fun and the press love him. But guess what hotshot? If you win the Press Primary you usually lose the GOP nomination, the aforementioned hacks not being exactly indicative of the typical GOP voter.
He bides his time and, GOP SOP, being the runner-up in 2000, it was his turn to be the main show in 2008. And he had a shot. But the economy goes south, people fall for the Lincoln legacy thing and he loses to a man who would become the first anti-American American president.
Btw, for a guy who took umbrage at what he perceived to be slights of honor, his later throwing Sarah Palin under the bus, she being the only exciting and interesting thing about that lackluster campaign, was damned dishonorable behavior.
He continues to serve in the Senate with general distinction, but then, 2016 comes up and a guy runs who shakes up the DC establishment like nobody since Andrew Jackson. By this time, rebel McCain is gone and establishment McCain, loved a little too much by those who generally loathe Republicans, decides the new guy is unacceptable because he doesn’t play by the rules.
This is hilariously rich coming from a guy whose entire life has been about challenging the rules! So maybe he disliked the president over envy that he could do what McCain couldn’t, possibly win the White House. Maybe it was jealousy that Trump had stolen the rebel mantle. Maybe he had become that much of a creature of the establishment and was just lashing out. Who knows?
Whatever it was the president responded with an already mentioned graceless ignorant retort and the game was on, culminating in McCain’s completely out of personal pique vote against the repeal of Obamacare. In politics, close to the end, the hothead won out over the hero. Damn sad.
But in Annapolis tonight, under a shining full moon over the Severn River, it doesn’t matter. Yeah, he was in politics. But the chords of cherished memory that echo in Bancroft Hall or at City Dock remember another guy.
Here we salute a sailor borne of heroes and, in his own cocky way, when it mattered most in Hanoi, a hero himself, after all.
Godspeed, John McCain, Class of ’58.
