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August 30, 2008

McCain POW bracelet offers bridge to past

By Derek Spellman

dspellman@joplinglobe.com

ANDERSON, Mo. — As she fingers the bracelet, Dee Wood is transported back almost 40 years and into the Kansas hinterland.

She’s a teenager again living in a small town. It’s the late 1960s. There is war going on in a place called Vietnam. Wood has friends serving overseas.

And people at school have been talking about these new bracelets they can buy with the names of American prisoners of war or servicemen who are missing in action. The bracelets were worn in a gesture of solidarity with the troops.

Wood is about to buy her bracelet in a town called Council Grove, about 66 miles southwest of Topeka. She is looking into a box of them. Her friend has just plucked hers from the top, so Wood decides to plunge her hand into the bottom.

The one she draws is etched with the words “LCDR John McCain III.” The name is underscored by a date: Oct. 26, 1967.

“Back then, who would have thought,” she recalled during a Friday interview at the Golden Living Center in Anderson, where she works.

Wood said she didn’t know McCain or his specific story when she first purchased the bracelet, let alone predict that he would be the Republican Party’s nominee for president.

Almost 40 years later, the bracelet has become not just a piece of historical memorabilia but also a conduit into “a whole other era,” Wood said.

When she shows the bracelet to those who, like her, lived through that time period, the bracelet triggers memories, she said. When she shows it to young people like her son or her students in her teakwood class, it triggers questions.

“It’s really been a great learning experience for him,” she said, referring to her son’s interest in the bracelet and the history surrounding it.

Wood is still undecided about whether she will vote for McCain or his Democratic rival Sen. Barack Obama.

“I am actually not a political person at all,” she said. “I like things about both candidates.”

But Wood remembers and was glad to have worn the bracelet.

“I had a lot of friends that went to Vietnam,” she said. “Some did (return home). Some did not. I guess that is why we wanted to wear the bracelets.”

And Wood wore hers: to school, in the bath and to bed.

Every week the newspaper from Council Grove would publish a list of those POWs who had been released, and every week Wood said she looked for McCain’s name.

When she finally saw that he had been released in March 1973, she took the bracelet off. After wearing it for several years, it was “almost like losing a part of you,” she said.

Through the years Wood kept the bracelet, usually in jewelry boxes, saying that for some reason she could not throw it away. It was not until the 1990s, when she saw McCain introducing former senator and Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole, that she connected the John McCain on her bracelet with John McCain the statesman.

But Wood said the bracelet has piqued the interest of her son, friends, co-workers and others in the wake of McCain’s presidential bid. Wood said she only brought it up in passing while talking with co-workers once.

“Everybody wanted to see it,” she said. “I didn’t think much about it.”

Last week, she was invited by Rep. Kevin Wilson, R-Neosho, to a meeting of the McDonald County Republican Club. After the meeting, everyone crowded around to see, touch and talk about the bracelet.

“It’s a tangible piece of history,” Wilson said in a phone interview.

Although she does not wear the bracelet on her arm nowadays, Wood said she carries it around and plans to keep it.

“Right now it stays in my pocket a lot,” she said. “I imagine it will end up with my son.”







A look into history

John McCain was flying a bombing mission over North Vietnam when his plane was shot down over Hanoi on Oct. 26, 1967. He parachuted into Truc Bach Lake near Hanoi, where he was captured and subsequently imprisoned by the North Vietnamese. He was released March 14, 1973.

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