FAITH OF MY FATHERS
John McCain

It's an awful thing, solitary. It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment. Having no one else to rely on, to share confidences with, to seek counsel from, you begin to doubt your judgment and your courage. But you eventually adjust to solitary, as you can to almost any hardship, by devising various methods to keep your mind off your troubles and greedily grasping any opportunity for human contact.

We had a saying in prison: "Steady strain." The point of the remark was to remind us to keep a close watch on our emotions, not to let them rise and fall with circumstances that were out of our control.

Ironically for someone who had so long asserted his own individuality as his first and best defense against insults of any kind, I discovered that faith in myself proved to be the least formidable strength I possessed when confronting alone organized inhumanity on a greater scale than I had conceived possible. Faith in myself was important, and remains important to my self-esteem. But I discovered in prison that faith in myself alone, separate from other, more important allegiances, was ultimately no match for the cruelty that human beings could devise when they were entirely unencumbered by respect for the God-given dignity of man. This is the lesson I learned in prison. It is, perhaps, the most important lesson I have ever learned.

It's not hard to understand now that, given the prevailing political judgments of the time, the Vietnam War was better left unfought... If the government and the nation lack the resolve, it is criminal to expect men in the field to carry it alone. We were accountable to the country, and no one was accountable to us.

I...learned that you can fill the moment, [time], with purpose and experiences that will make your life greater than the sum of its days.

It is a surpassing irony that war, for all its horror, provides the combatant with every conceivable human experience. Experiences that usually take a lifetime to know are all felt, and felt intensely, in one brief passage of life.

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