John McCain's Masters Thesis is Online

Consider this in the top percentile of all masters theses ever written, in terms of both being genuinely interesting and readability. In it, McCain discusses how the Vietnamese experience should inform military policies. The Chronicle of Higher Education" summarizes the thesis:

In the thesis, McCain concluded that during training, troops needed to be educated extensively in the foreign policy of their country and in tactics like those employed by the North Vietnamese, who sometimes released prisoners to benefit their own propaganda. In clear, matter-of-fact prose, McCain wrote of the necessity for troops to have realistic expectations of the possibilities for escape and of their own limitations. Ten months into his five-and-a-half-year imprisonment, McCain broke under torture and recorded a confession of war crimes.

“The American people have been inoculated with too many John Wayne movies and other examples of unbreakable will and superhuman strength. It has been amply proved that every man has a breaking point,” he wrote. “Yet, the fact that a man has reached this point does not mean that he can’t minimize the enemy gains and counteract them. The prisoners of war in North Vietnam may have lost some skirmishes but they won the propaganda and psychological battle.”