He’s rallying the veterans for his fight

Locked in the North Vietnamese prison camp they called the Hanoi Hilton, John McCain and fellow prisoners craved any scrap of information that might stoke their morale and help them persevere.

The compact Navy pilot would climb on the shoulders of a big Marine flier named Orson Swindle to reach the high grate where he would trade hand signals with other imprisoned Americans.

“Anything we could get, any tidbit, helped us keep going,” McCain said as he rode on a campaign bus through Iowa.

Nearly four decades later and half a world away, McCain is again hoping to rise on the shoulders of his fellow veterans. At 10 stops in Iowa and New Hampshire last week, McCain, Swindle and other comrades who once shared Vietnamese prison cells basked in the warm affection of fellow veterans. They rallied support for the war in Iraq, occasionally relived their daunting captivity and pushed hard to jump-start McCain’s now underdog bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

As he prepared to complete the tour over the next two days in South Carolina, the Arizona senator insisted that his political aspirations took a back seat to the “seminal” issue of the moment: whether America would stay the course in Iraq.

Yet the double meaning in the name of his No Surrender Tour could hardly be ignored, as the onetime Republican front-runner said he still would overcome the poor fundraising, staff defections and lackluster poll results that earlier this year appeared to derail his candidacy.

“I can out-campaign anyone,” McCain told reporters as his green No Surrender Tour bus rolled past cornfields outside Council Bluffs, Iowa, on Wednesday. “It won’t be easy. But it’s not supposed to be easy. This is the most important job in the world.”

McCain’s hopes were buoyed by strong reviews of his performance in the Sept. 5 Republican debate in New Hampshire (one focus group and several commentators declared him the winner) and by newspaper accounts of a resurgence. The Manchester Union Leader said in an editorial that “the spirited, commanding character New Hampshire fell in love with eight years ago” had reappeared.

A couple of recent national polls measured some improvement for McCain, but he remains third or even fourth in a Republican field that he had been expected to lead.

In a potentially worrisome finding for the candidate, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll of Republican voters in the early-voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina last week showed that many voters had not chosen McCain. But when asked which GOP candidate was best qualified to lead the war in Iraq, McCain was the top choice.

“This is a guy who has credibility on that kind of issue because of his background. He is playing to his strengths,” said Washington-based pollster Hans Kaiser.

Of McCain’s prospects for a comeback, he added: “There’s a hill for him to climb, but it’s not impossible.”

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Warm receptions

McCain’s week began with a rally at the Sioux City, Iowa, airport, whose field was named for retired Air Force Col. George E. “Bud” Day, a fellow denizen of the infamous prison where McCain was taken after his plane was shot down in October 1967.

Day, 82, told 200 people gathered in a hangar how McCain turned down an opportunity for early release and spent 4 1/2 more years in captivity, because other prisoners of war had served more time or suffered more grievous injuries.

Wearing his Medal of Honor around his neck, Day called McCain “a man of personal character, a man of experience, a man who understands how to lead. . . a man who knows how to stand fast.”

Warm applause followed. It would be repeated at each of McCain’s subsequent stops, most of them at Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion halls awash in symbolism. “Anchors Aweigh” buzzed over public-address systems. Veterans in narrow fore-and-aft service hats snapped off salutes. Nearly every wall -- and even the fluorescent lights at the Council Bluffs VFW post -- was bathed in red, white and blue.

McCain shared an easy camaraderie with his audiences. They laughed when he described how Swindle, standing nearby, could be easily identified as a Marine because “he is so darned ugly.” They roared when he told an old joke about a monkey who commandeers a fighter jet at Guadalcanal -- and gets promoted to admiral.

They nodded and smiled in approval when McCain -- showing the proper restraint of a combat veteran -- dismissed those who called him a hero. “I just caught a surface-to-air missile with my plane,” he told more than one audience. “That doesn’t take much skill.”

At the end of the sessions, many of the veterans lined up to swap a quick war story, or to get McCain’s signature on his 1999 autobiography “Faith of My Fathers,” which describes his family’s long military tradition. “Thank you for your service,” McCain repeated, like a mantra, to nearly all who greeted him.

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Making his case on Iraq

McCain told reporters he had planned the tour to bridge the gap between Gen. David H. Petraeus’ testimony about the Iraq war and formal congressional debate on the funding the war, which could begin as early as this week.

“It’s important for us to make our case,” McCain said. “This conflict was badly mismanaged and Americans are frustrated and angry and saddened by the tremendous sacrifices that have been made. But we do have a new strategy and a new general and it’s succeeding. And we ought to give it a chance to succeed.”

Binding himself even more closely to current policy in Iraq, McCain used virtually every stop to condemn a full-page New York Times advertisement by the liberal political group MoveOn.org that referred to Petraeus as “General Betray Us.” The ad accused America’s top military commander in Iraq of painting an overly rosy picture of the war.

“Every one of us. . . should be insulted and outraged by this attack on a man of honor and dignity,” McCain said to loud applause at a VFW post in East Rochester, N.H. He demanded that the Democratic presidential candidates call on MoveOn.org to retract it.

Recent Iraq war veterans and Republican national security luminaries such as former CIA Director R. James Woolsey joined the gray-haired Vietnam War veterans in McCain’s caravan. At most of the rallies, they rose to second McCain’s stance.

Swindle told the audience in East Rochester that he had heard one thing “over and over again” from troops returning from Iraq.

“They say, ‘Please, let us win. Please, let us win,’ ” Swindle said. “So when people tell you they support the troops, tell them also to support their mission too. And to send that message to Washington.”

When he stopped to take questions, McCain heard mostly from veterans like Dennis Devine Sr., a third-generation infantryman who served in South Korea.

“If you are not going to vote for this man,” Devine told the room of veterans in Council Bluffs, “you had better come and talk to me.” Devine hugged McCain afterward and told a reporter: “This man went through the fire, and he didn’t bend one little bit.”

Tom McGall, a former Army paratrooper who fought in the battle of “Hamburger Hill” in Vietnam said veterans still saw McCain as the truth-teller who rode around New Hampshire during the 2000 presidential campaign in another bus, the Straight Talk Express.

“Right now, in this time and place, he is the very best that we have in America,” said McGall of Fremont, N. H.

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Some are doubtful

But even the cozy veterans halls could not completely insulate the 71-year-old, four-term senator from doubts about his candidacy.

A couple of veterans’ advocates who shared the stage with McCain said quietly in interviews that they admired the candidate but weren’t sure they would vote for him, in part because of concerns about whether he could win the nomination.

At the Council Bluffs rally, Iraq war veteran Joshua Van Houten rose gingerly to his feet and, in a voice choked with emotion, described how he and many of his Army comrades were injured or killed by bombs fashioned from purloined American armaments.

Van Houten, whose back was injured when his armored vehicle was bombed, told McCain that his military record gave him “more of a right to be up there than any of the other candidates.”

But Van Houten later said in an interview that the candidate “needs to be more skeptical about what is happening over there” in Iraq and to “stand up to” President Bush. Van Houten still might consider McCain but is leaning toward Democrat Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois.

McCain’s campaign hopes to draw on veterans groups to boost his standing, much as Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts did in the 2004 Democratic campaign. Kerry surrounded himself with crewmen from the Navy swift boat he commanded in Vietnam who testified to his leadership and courage. But his operatives also built a far-reaching organization to mobilize veterans to campaign and vote for Kerry.

Those efforts increased the turnout of veterans in the Iowa caucuses -- one of the many factors that helped Kerry win that state, providing momentum that pushed him to the Democratic nomination.

In the fourth day of the tour, at another New Hampshire American Legion post, McCain continued his own whirlwind veterans’ appeal. Another fellow inmate from the Vietnam days, retired Air Force Maj. Gen. John L. Borling, explained why he had left home to travel the country with McCain.

“When you think about one word, ‘truth,’ about shooting straight from the shoulder, you think about John McCain,” Borling told veterans filling a grassy picnic ground. “That’s why we continue to fly wing for this guy.”

McCain acknowledged how good it felt to have the men who once carried him through a dark time at his side again.

“I think people will respect them and listen to their views,” McCain said. “It’s very nostalgic. They’re my dearest friends and the guys that I know best and love most.”

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james.rainey@latimes.com