Submitted by John Doe, Aug 20, 2008 19:32

The Cross in the Dirt issue is complex. McCain told a story in 1999 about how when he was in capitivity in Vietnam on Christmas day, a soldier loosened his restraining ropes and drew a cross on the dirt floor of his cell with his boot, then erased it. McCain said this was a defining moment in his faith, as it showed him that two Christians could connect no matter their circumstances. This is near identical to a story accredited to a Russian author named Solzhenitsyn in which he's serving in a gulag in Siberia I think. He decides life isn't worth living, so he leaves his labor line and walks over to a beach and sits down in the sand. He knows a guard will come over and shoot him in a head, and he's fine with it. He hears the footsteps and braces himself. But its another prisoner, who draws a cross in the sand and walks away without saying a word. This renewed his faith in God and he found the willpower to survive through the rest of his imprisonment. McCain is a huge fan of Solzhenitsyn: "In McCain's 2007 book Hard Call: Great Decisions and the Extraordinary People Who Made Them McCain devotes an entire chapter to Solzhenitsyn and his experiences as recounted in The Gulag Archipelago." Remember where I said McCain hadn't talked about it until 1999? This is important, because he gave detailed accounts of his capitivity in both 1973 and 1995. In fact, the 1995 interview was about being a POW during Christmas. So it's a little weird that he would leave such an important detail out. Especially one that would mirror an experience had by an author he admired.

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