McCain retired from the Navy as a captain in 1981 and moved to Arizona. During the war, he sustained wounds that left him with lifelong physical disabilities. McCain experienced episodes of torture and refused an out-of-sequence early release.
While on a bombing mission during Operation Rolling Thunder over Hanoi in October 1967, McCain was shot down, seriously injured, and captured by the North Vietnamese. During the Vietnam War, he almost died in the 1967 USS Forrestal fire. McCain became a naval aviator and flew ground-attack aircraft from aircraft carriers. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1958 and received a commission in the United States Navy. He previously served two terms in the United States House of Representatives and was the Republican nominee for president of the United States in the 2008 election, which he lost to Barack Obama. John Sidney McCain III (August 29, 1936 – August 25, 2018) was an American politician and United States Navy officer who served as a United States senator from Arizona from 1987 until his death in 2018.
