McCain's been getting a lot of mileage out of his "Christianity-in-captivity" story. It's been in ads, and speeches, and his talks from the pulpit. And for good reason: It's extraordinarily affecting. In it, McCain is spending another Christmas Day locked in a Vietnamese prison. A guard walks up to him and, with his foot, etches a cross in the dirt. McCain and his captor stare at the symbol for a moment, before the guard scratches it away and leaves McCain to his thoughts. "To me, that was faith," says McCain. "A faith that unites and never divides, a faith that bridges unbridgeable gaps in humanity."What's peculiar about this story is that, as a DailyKos commentor noticed, it precisely echoes a tale from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago:Slowly he looked up and saw a skinny old prisoner squat down beside him. The man said nothing. Instead, he used a stick to trace in the dirt the sign of the Cross. The man then got back up and returned to his work.It's quite a coincidence. A couple bloggers have started looking for some further evidence that this story actually happened to McCain. When he returned from captivity, McCain wrote a 12,000 word memoir for US News and World Report. The role of religion is emphasized, and the rare glimpses of humanity in his captors is detailed. The story of the guard and the cross is notably absent. In 1974, McCain is invited by Ronald Reagan to a prayer breakfast. He tells a powerful story about the sustenance he found when spirituality crept in the cracks of his captivity. He does not tell the story of the guard.
