The POW church riot

Chicago Tribune reports on a church riot in a Vietnamese prison camp. John McCain participated:

In Vietnam, McCain's fellow prisoners say their faith was a matter of life and death. "We knew we had to have some belief greater than ourselves," said Orson Swindle, a Marine captain who spent six years in captivity.

The prisoners had developed a tap code system for communicating through the walls. Through that tapping, "we decided we needed to be all on the same sheet of music at least one time during the week," Swindle said.

The prisoners decided that every Sunday, after they had eaten their rice, the highest-ranking officer would cough loudly and say the letter 'c' for church. The prisoners would then say the Pledge of Allegiance, the Lord's Prayer and the 23rd Psalm. The psalm was said in plural: "Yea, though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death we will fear no evil."

Prisoners used diarrhea pills mixed with cigarette ash--or charcoal or dirt--to write lines of Scripture and surreptitiously share them.

The church riot erupted after U.S. Special Forces raided a site about 40 miles from Hanoi trying to rescue prisoners who, it turned out, were no longer there. The Vietnamese, fearing more such raids, rounded up American POWs and moved them from other outlying camps into Hanoi. That meant an end to isolation, as dozens of prisoners were packed together.

"We agreed that we were going to have a church service and told the Vietnamese, and they said no," recalled fellow prisoner Bud Day. But on Feb. 12, 1970, the prisoners went ahead anyway, holding a service and singing songs.

"The Vietnamese broke in and seized the people who were standing against the wall doing the service," Day said. "They marched them out of the room at gunpoint. So I stood up and started singing 'The Star-Spangled Banner,' 'God Bless America,' 'My Country 'Tis of Thee' and every song we could think of."

The Vietnamese stormed back in, putting a definitive end to the service.

"We wanted to actually just have a chance to do what we felt was a fundamental human right ... and we got spiritual comfort from being able to worship together," McCain said. "We thought, look, if we're going to be together, then we're going to stand up. ... They'd done so many bad things that we weren't nearly as afraid of them as maybe we would have been if a lot of us hadn't gone through what we'd gone through."