An unusual charge appeared today, and it seems to hold together rather well: John McCain's story of the Vietnamese guard who drew a cross in the sand may possibly have come from The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
However, before we make and repeat the charge that McCain has been intentionally lying about this story for many years, there are a few things to take into account. We must be careful about this, because McCain's sacrifice during this period was real and cannot be denied him. No matter what his politics today, attacking him for this story could unleash a terrible backlash, and from what I can tell, there's just not enough here to convict McCain of lying, even if the story never happened.
McCain's own 1973 account of his imprisonment, written soon after his release, makes no mention of this event. That is true.
However, this passage does appear there:
I had the singular misfortune to get caught communicating four times in the month of May of 1969. They had a punishment room right across the courtyard from my cell, and I ended up spending a lot of time over there.
It was also in May, 1969, that they wanted me to write—as I remember—a letter to U. S. pilots who were flying over North Vietnam asking them not to do it. I was being forced to stand up continuously—sometimes they'd make you stand up or sit on a stool for a long period of time. I'd stood up for a couple of days, with a respite only because one of the guards — the only real human being that I ever met over there — let me lie down for a couple of hours while he was on watch the middle of one night.
This is the only mention of this guard here, and this is the only thing McCain reveals about him. So there has always been a merciful guard in John McCain's account of his POW years, and this cannot be the only evidence of the guard's humanity to John McCain. Knowing this, it's quite reasonable to say that this event could have happened.
It's also quite reasonable to have expected that McCain tell this story at this point in his account, however.
Furthermore, the details in the McCain account and the Solzhenitsyn account, while similar, do differ from each other. As McCain told the story last night, the merciful guard first released him from a torturous position for a few hours. It was only later, when McCain stood outside for a few moments, that the guard approached him and drew the cross on the ground.
Solzhenitsyn, too, is bowed down, but only with the weight of his thought. And here, there is only a fellow prisoner who demonstrates a moment of solidarity.
So for McCain to be making this up, he had added to the story quite elaborately, and in a way that still easily meshes with his original POW account.
It's because of this that I don't think McCain is lying. At best, we have a classic example of false memory.
A false memory is a memory which is a distortion of an actual experience, or a confabulation of an imagined one. Many false memories involve confusing or mixing fragments of memory events, some of which may have happened at different times but which are remembered as occurring together. Many false memories involve an error in source memory. Some involve treating dreams as if they were playbacks of real experiences. Still other false memories are believed to be the result of the prodding, leading, and suggestions of therapists and counselors. Finally, Dr. Elizabeth Loftus has shown not only that it is possible to implant false memories, but that it is relatively easy to do so (Loftus, 1994).
...Jean Piaget, the great child psychologist, claimed that his earliest memory was of nearly being kidnapped at the age of 2. He remembered details such as sitting in his baby carriage, watching the nurse defend herself against the kidnapper, scratches on the nurse's face, and a police officer with a short cloak and a white baton chasing the kidnapper away. The story was reinforced by the nurse and the family and others who had heard the story. Piaget was convinced that he remembered the event. However, it never happened. Thirteen years after the alleged kidnapping attempt, Piaget's former nurse wrote to his parents to confess that she had made up the entire story. Piaget later wrote: "I therefore must have heard, as a child, the account of this story...and projected it into the past in the form of a visual memory, which was a memory of a memory, but false" (Tavris).
Memory is a plastic thing, easily influenced by trauma, wishful thinking, vivid impressions, and trickery. It could very well be that McCain read the Solzhenitsyn book, remembered that merciful guard during the lying down incident, and has now over time confabulated the false memory of this particular story.
And truth be told, the action of a cross in the dirt under watchful eyes is a simple gesture, easily thought of by anyone under the same circumstances. There's no reason to deny that the event could have happened just as McCain said.
Could McCain be this cynical? Lying in church to Rick Warren and a national audience, fabricating a story about his captivity and daring, DARING, Obama and his supporters to come after him about it? How can we disprove it? Are there videos of McCain's imprisonment in which no such thing can be positively demonstrated to happen? If this is a lie, it is brazen and there may be little we can actually do about it.
Even though we all know, if this had been John Kerry's Christmas story...