Oct 26, 1967: Navy Lt. Cmdr. John McCain was shot down over Hanoi. He would spend the next five and a half years as a prisoner of war and turn down an offer to go home early. McCain came from a Navy family like few others. His grandfather was an admiral who commanded a carrier task force in World War II and stood on the deck of the USS Missouri for the Japanese surrender. His father was a submarine commander in the war who was on his way to becoming an admiral too. John was a rebel. At the Naval Academy he piled up demerits and graduated near the very bottom of his class. He became a pilot and crashed more than one plane in training. In July 1967 he was on the flight deck of the carrier USS Forrestal off Vietnam when a rocket accidentally fired from another plane and hit near his A-4 Skyhawk. Fuel spilled and caught fire, and bombs began to explode. McCain climbed out over the nose of his burning plane and got away with shrapnel wounds. The fire killed 134 sailors. Instead of going home, McCain volunteered for another carrier, the USS Oriskany, which had lost a lot of pilots. On Oct 26 he was on his 23rd combat mission, part of a raid on a power plant in the middle of Hanoi. As he dove toward the target, a surface-to-air missile blew off his right wing. He ejected. The force broke both his arms and his right knee. He landed in a small lake in the middle of the city, and the weight of his gear pulled him under. Vietnamese men dragged him out. A crowd surrounded him. Someone smashed his shoulder with a rifle butt. He was stabbed with a bayonet. Then he was taken to Hoa Lo prison, the place American prisoners called the Hanoi Hilton. For days he got almost no medical care. His captors only got serious about treating him when they figured out who his father was. They started calling him the crown prince. Even then the care was crude, and his arm and leg healed badly. He was put in a cell with two other American prisoners, including Air Force Maj. George "Bud" Day, who was in bad shape himself. They cleaned him, fed him, and kept him alive. McCain's weight dropped to around 100 pounds. In 1968 he was put in solitary confinement. He spent about two years alone. That summer his father was named commander of all American forces in the Pacific, including the war in Vietnam. The North Vietnamese saw an opportunity. They offered to let McCain go home early. Releasing the admiral's son would make a great propaganda story about their humane treatment of prisoners. McCain said no. Under the military's code of conduct, prisoners were supposed to be released in the order they were captured. Men who had been there longer would go first. He wouldn't leave them behind. His captors were furious. For days they beat him repeatedly, rebroke his arm, and cracked his ribs. He finally signed a forced confession. He later wrote that every man has a breaking point, and that he had reached his. He carried the shame of it for the rest of his life, even though nearly every POW who was tortured long enough was forced to do the same. Conditions improved somewhat after 1969, and prisoners were finally allowed to live together. McCain was chosen by his fellow prisoners to lead their Christmas services. His father, the admiral, ran the war that was being fought over his son's head. In December 1972 he oversaw the massive B-52 bombing of Hanoi, knowing his son was in a prison there. At Christmas, he reportedly went up to the edge of the demilitarized zone to be as close to his son as he could get. On March 14, 1973, after the peace agreement, McCain was released with other POWs. He came off the plane on crutches. For the rest of his life he couldn't raise his arms above his shoulders. He couldn't comb his own hair. He went through months of painful physical therapy, got his flight status back, and commanded a training squadron before retiring from the Navy as a captain in 1981. He went on to serve in Congress and the Senate for Arizona for over 35 years and ran for president twice. In the 1990s he worked with fellow Vietnam veteran John Kerry to account for missing Americans and restore relations with Vietnam. Today there's a small stone monument beside the lake in Hanoi where he was pulled from the water. When he died in 2018, Vietnamese people came and laid flowers there.