At Fort McNair, an army base located along the Potomac River in the nation's capital, a chance reunion takes place one day between two former POWs. It's the spring of 1974, and Navy commander John Sidney McCain III has returned home from the experience in Hanoi that, according to legend, transformed him from a callow and reckless youth into a serious man of patriotism and purpose. Walking along the grounds at Fort McNair, McCain runs into John Dramesi, an Air Force lieutenant colonel who was also imprisoned and tortured in Vietnam.
McCain is studying at the National War College, a prestigious graduate program he had to pull strings with the Secretary of the Navy to get into. Dramesi is enrolled, on his own merit, at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces in the building next door.
There's a distance between the two men that belies their shared experience in North Vietnam — call it an honor gap. Like many American POWs, McCain broke down under torture and offered a "confession" to his North Vietnamese captors. Dramesi, in contrast, attempted two daring escapes. For the second he was brutalized for a month with daily torture sessions that nearly killed him. His partner in the escape, Lt. Col. Ed Atterberry, didn't survive the mistreatment. But Dramesi never said a disloyal word, and for his heroism was awarded two Air Force Crosses, one of the service's highest distinctions. McCain would later hail him as "one of the toughest guys I've ever met."
On the grounds between the two brick colleges, the chitchat between the scion of four-star admirals and the son of a prizefighter turns to their academic travels; both colleges sponsor a trip abroad for young officers to network with military and political leaders in a distant corner of the globe.
"I'm going to the Middle East," Dramesi says. "Turkey, Kuwait, Lebanon, Iran."
"Why are you going to the Middle East?" McCain asks, dismissively.
"It's a place we're probably going to have some problems," Dramesi says.
"Why? Where are you going to, John?"
"Oh, I'm going to Rio."
"What the hell are you going to Rio for?"
McCain, a married father of three, shrugs.
"I got a better chance of getting laid."
Dramesi, who went on to serve as chief war planner for U.S. Air Forces in Europe and commander of a wing of the Strategic Air Command, was not surprised. "McCain says his life changed while he was in Vietnam, and he is now a different man," Dramesi says today. "But he's still the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in."
The name John Dramesi seemed slightly familiar, so I Googled it and quickly found he's a controversial figure among former Vietnam POWs. He's as admired for his toughness as he is reviled for his, well, toughness. The Chicago Reader explains
He was so tough he was viewed as a danger to the health, and even the lives, of the other POWs.
Dramesi knows what they thought about him, and still think. He told me, "If you talk to another POW -- and I've been told this -- if you mention my name to another POW, if you meet somebody and you find out they were a POW, and they'll be telling you stories, and you say 'I know a POW.' 'Who do you know?' 'I know John Dramesi.' All of a sudden the conversation will come to a complete standstill and they’ll probably walk away."
As Dickinson noted, Dramesi escaped and was recaptured twice. The second time, the North Vietnamese made vicious reprisals against the rest of their prisoners, and Dramesi and Ed Atterberry, the POW he escaped with, were beaten so badly that Atterberry died. Dramesi planned a third escape, but the senior POWs at his camp ordered him not to try it. Nobody wanted to be tortured again. Dramesi says he once got a letter from McCain that called the escape with Atterberry "infamous."
This is how the Reader article concludes
In my experience the mind of John Dramesi has never betrayed the slightest confusion. I asked him for his thoughts on the present war. "The Iraqi war never should have happened," he said. "I'm convinced and I think Congress is convinced -- but Congress never had guts enough to impeach Bush."
And who will he vote for next month? "Knowing John, and what I know of Barack Obama, I would say I would vote for an individual who is certainly more intelligent and who has discipline, which is the key factor I'm concerned with. A president without discipline. . . . Again, the old adage 'Country first' with John McCain really doesn’t apply."
And here's a review of Dramesi's book by another Air Force officer.
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