He was an ordinary soldier who got captured and handled his predicament the way most people would. By his own account, he got frightened by his injury and volunteered to give military secrets if the Vietnamese would take him to a hospital. After they finally took him to a dirty, unsanitary hospital he made a quick recovery, so one has to wonder how accurate his self-diagnosis was. I'm not faulting McCain for acting like most people would, but he certainly does not deserve hero status because he got caught, got scared, and gave up secret military information in order to get help.
http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/2008/01/28/john-mccain-prisoner-of-war-a-first-person-account.html?PageNr=3I think it was on the fourth day that two guards came in, instead of one. One of them pulled back the blanket to show the other guard my injury. I looked at my knee. It was about the size, shape and color of a football....
When I saw it, I said to the guard, "O.K., get the officer." An officer came in after a few minutes. It was the man that we came to know very well as "The Bug." He was a psychotic torturer, one of the worst fiends that we had to deal with. I said, "O.K., I'll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital."
...
I woke up a couple of times in the next three or four days. Plasma and blood were being put into me. I became fairly lucid. I was in a room which was not particularly small—about 15 by 15 feet—but it was filthy dirty and at a lower level, so that every time it rained, there'd be about a half inch to an inch of water on the floor. I was not washed once while I was in the hospital. I almost never saw a doctor or a nurse. Doctors came in a couple of times to look at me. They spoke French, not English.