"Nothing in life is more liberating than to fight for a cause larger than yourself."
— John McCain
John McCain (1936-2018) was a U.S. Navy aviator, Vietnam War prisoner of war, and longtime U.S. Senator from Arizona. Shot down over Hanoi in 1967, he was held captive and tortured for five and a half years. When the North Vietnamese offered him early release because of his father's rank, he refused, unwilling to leave before the men captured before him. He was released in 1973 with permanent injuries he carried for the rest of his life. He went on to serve 35 years in the U.S. Senate and was the Republican presidential nominee in 2008. He died of brain cancer in 2018, widely mourned across party lines as a man who placed honor above comfort and country above self.
LOVE AND RELATIONSHIPS
SERVICE
COURAGE
Context
McCain wrote these words in his 1999 memoir Faith of My Fathers, reflecting on what his years as a prisoner of war taught him about the nature of freedom and purpose. The lesson he drew was unexpected: it was not his captivity that broke him, but the years before it when he was focused primarily on himself. The experience of suffering for something larger than his own survival, he wrote, gave him a clarity and a peace he had never found in self-interest. On Memorial Day, the quote lands differently. The men and women we honor today did not give their lives reluctantly. Most of them chose to serve, knowing the risk. That choice, McCain suggests, was not a sacrifice that diminished them. It was the thing that made them most fully alive.
