Dramesi said he was going to travel through the Middle East — “It’s a place we’re probably going to have some problems.” McCain said he was going to Rio. Why? Dramesi asked. Dickinson, who obviously got the story from Dramesi, continues, “McCain, a married father of three, shrugs. ‘I got a better chance of getting laid.’”

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »

I met John Dramesi 35 years ago when I was writing a series of articles on the returned POWs for the Sun-Times. I called him at home in Pennsylvania on Thursday to ask if he’d really said those things about McCain, but I was sure he had. They sounded just like him. To establish Dramesi’s bona fides, Dickinson even has McCain hailing him as “one of the toughest guys I’ve ever met,” but hailing — that’s Dickinson’s verb — is deceptive. Dramesi was one of the most unpopular prisoners in the camps. He was so tough he was viewed as a danger to the health, and even the lives, of the other POWs. 

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.”

I mentioned one of his prison’s senior officers, James Bond Stockdale. A navy pilot, Stockdale attempted suicide to show his captors he’d rather die than talk. He feared that under unremitting torture he would talk, and there was no way he could let the North Vietnamese find out what he knew: that the attack in the Tonkin Gulf in August 1964, which plunged the U.S. into the war, was bogus — the radar on the destroyer Turner Joy had mistaken bad weather for enemy boats. Later he wrote, “I was in possession of the most damaging information a North Vietnamese torturer could possibly extract from an American prisoner of war.” 

As a senior officer in the prison, Stockdale established a policy that Dramesi — but few other POWs — profoundly disagreed with. Dramesi calls it “Bounce Back,” the idea being that no matter what they make you say or do under duress, tomorrow’s another day and you can begin the fight all over again. 

“Pornography and entertainment. When we all got together we had this toastmasters club, I was chastised for talking about resisting.”