McCain's brother, fellow POW hail candidate's character

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ST. PAUL, Minn. -- John McCain's brother, Joe, and his Hanoi Hilton cell mate, Tom Moe, sketched a portrait of a heroic man of character running for president at the Republican National Convention.At a joint breakfast Tuesday of the Tennessee and Alaska delegations, Joe McCain, a Vietnam veteran himself, told of the bombing raid in 1967 over Hanoi in which his brother was shot down, ejecting upside down at 800 feet and surviving broken limbs only because he landed in a lake.Years of torture left McCain unable to comb his hair because he can't lift one of his arms above his shoulder. But, "when that proverbial phone rings at 3 a.m., it's that hand you want picking up and answering," Joe McCain said."When that proverbial phone rings at 3 a.m., it's that hand you want picking up and answering," the brother said, referring to the candidate a "a great man."Joe McCain also repeated the often-told story of how the Viet Cong offered to grant his brother an early release after they found out that his father was a four-star admiral in the Navy. But John McCain refused to leave until all of his fellow POWs were freed."That is the definition and connotation of character," Joe McCain said. The United States may be heading toward "darker times," he warned. But as president, John McCain will face the country's problems "without guile and without pretense," he said.Retired Air Force Col. Moe, who was a POW with McCain in Vietnam, recounted how he used to communicate with McCain by sticking his fingers into a hole that he had punched through the door of his cell.He recalled how one particularly brutal torture session had left McCain so battered that he resembled Rumpelstiltskin. Moe said he put his fingers through the door hole so that McCain would know he was watching him.Though McCain could barely stand, "he gave me the biggest thumbs up you've ever seen," Moe said. "And that said it all. We're not going to give up."The full narrative of McCain's Vietnam ordeal, from when he hung up his leather flight jacket to board his A4 Skyhawk on the aircraft carrier USS Oriskany, to his release more than five years later, was overwhelming to many delegates who'd never heard it from McCain's intimates."The story of their experiences was so compelling that you hang on every word," said Memphis delegate John Ryder, of who becomes a national committeeman again when the convention ends on Thursday.Delegate John Elkington just shook his head. "Unbelievable," he said.(E-mail Scripps Howard News Service correspondents Michael Collins at collinsm(at)shns.com and Bartholomew Sullivan at sullivanb(at)shns.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)