THIS Is A War Hero?

The idiot son and grandson of admirals who, despite their diminutive statures, stood tall above John Sidney McCain III.Exhibit A: From Carl Bernstein in 1999: http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_mccain.php

When John Sidney McCain III was born. in 1936, there was little question that this grandson of an admiral and son of an admiral would attend the Naval Academy. At Episcopal High, the prep school across the Potomac from Washington, he seemed like anything but a clean-cut prospect for the academy. Fixated on women, as he would be for much of his life, McCain once managed to get arrested for shouting "Shove it up your ass!" at two older girls who judged his attempt to pick them up somewhat crude. McCain was "a hard-rock kind of guy, a tough, mean little fucker," according to an Episcopal classmate quoted in The Nightingale's Song, a book written by fellow Annapolis graduate and Vietnam veteran Robert Timberg. The book, about five graduates of the Naval Academy—McCain, Oliver North, John Poindexter, James Webb, and Robert McFarlane —is a generational classic and an indispensable source of material on McCain's life.

As for John McCain III's years at Annapolis, "I hated the place, and in fairness the place wasn't all that fond of me either," he has written m his memoir, Faith of My Fathers, published in September. As Timberg notes in his book, McCain was a mess—"shoes unshined. late for formation, talking in ranks, room in disorder, gear improperly stowed." He devoured literature which had nothing to do with his course-work, but "I was adept at cramming for exams, and blessed with friends who did not seem to mind too much my requests for urgent tutorials." He was a jock and—as he acknowledges today—"a wild one" who developed a reputation for escorting one beautiful woman after another off campus. He and his fellow Annapolis revelers were known as "the Bad Bunch."Always on the edge of flunking out, McCain finished fifth from last in his class. Poindexter—the future national-security adviser—finished first. After graduation, McCain went out of his way to choose a naval career that was as different from his father's as imaginable.

"Actually," he says, "I wanted to be a navy pilot, because I thought it was a pretty exciting life. I wasn't interested in being on a destroyer or a battleship or a submarine. I thought being a navy pilot would be a lot of fun. But that was the extent of my ambitions. It was not to reach higher rank or to advance up the ladder. I just thought it would be a great life, and it turned out indeed it was."But it was also extremely hazardous. Flight school at Pensacola was a riot of hard playing for the young flier, whose Corvette was most likely to be found parked by a beach or at Trader John's, a strip bar. He dated a dancer nicknamed "Marie, the Flame of Florida" before moving on to advanced flight training in Corpus Christi, where his carousing and womanizing evidently took a toll on his flying. He found himself literally underwater after his training jet stalled and he couldn't make land. Knocked out as his plane smacked into Corpus Christi Bay, he regained consciousness on the bottom and struggled to the surface. While deployed in the Mediterranean in the early 1960s, he hit some power lines while flying too low over Spain.

"I liked the squadron life," he recalls. "We'd be in port for a week, 10 days. I was single. I mean, it was wonderful. I was embarrassed to take my paycheck."McCain also renewed a friendship with Carol Shepp, a divorced mother of two who had been married to one of his Annapolis classmates. A tall, attractive former model, she was exactly what Mc-Cain's friends agreed he needed—someone smoother around the edges than he but full of life. In July 1965 they were married.

That fall he was flying back to Norfolk solo when the engine of his plane failed and he had to bail out just before it plowed into a tidal stand of trees. It was his third accident, but, miraculously, he floated onto a deserted beach with only minor injuries.Undeterred, he took his work more seriously and began steeling himself for Vietnam. In 1966, McCain was sent to Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin at a moment when the air war against North Vietnam was intensifying. His first combat missions were flown solo in an A-4 Skyhawk carrying 500- and 1,000-pound bombs. Each flight off the deck of the U.S.S. Forrestal was an hour of sheer excitement and unspeakable terror.

"The trick is to control fear," he explains. "You know, you should be afraid. You'd be crazy not to be. But the fear can help you because it heightens your awareness, it heightens your senses. But it's also exhilarating. When a surface-to-air missile misses you, you know, you're afraid. When you drop your bombs on the target and get back, you feel great."