Locked Up Abroad: McCain & Brace

When John McCain ran for president the story of his survival as a POW made headline news. A good angle, an experienced war time president in times of war. The story was so big it was even made into a film. That being said, when I popped in the preview episode of NatGeo’s Locked Up Abroad, titled McCain & Brace, I expected to get a rehashed story of McCain’s survival as a POW that we’d already been introduced to. Not so.

The episode of Locked Up Abroad is really about civilian pilot Ernie Brace, no matter how many times McCain’s photo is plastered throughout the press folder for this episode. Brace, running supplies to CIA operatives in Vietnam at the time, is captured and held for an astonishing 7+ years of his life in horrible conditions and away from any other American POW’s for more then half of that time. Daring escapes, brutal beatings, and a deteriorating mental and physical condition ensue.

The show gives us dramatic re-enactment of Brace’s trials as he keeps hope alive and even sinks into a dark depression and eventually we get around to the part where John McCain comes in, the episode beginning at a formal event where Brace and McCain meet for the first time, as they were never actually face to face as POW’s in Vietnam.

I thought the story was very inspiring but told in a choppy fashion. For example, when we see Brace at the White House formal, he begins to tell is a story about his unease at the event and leads up to telling us it’s where he first met McCain in person. We switch over his earlier life but never really return back to his meeting with McCain. I guess they didn’t really have to show the meeting, but it just seemed like this is what it was all leading up to.

Far be it for me to denounce Brace’s story as a POW in Vietnam, but the show does leave some gapping holes, maybe because Brace didn’t want to tell some of the horrors of his experience as a POW, but I was often wondering why the Vietnamese would keep one man alive and imprisoned all by himself for over 5 years? I can’t even begin to understand those times of war, but watching him being held in his tiny bamboo prison on the outskirts of a nearby river, it just seemed like there was more story to tell and the show wasn’t acknowledging to explaining Brace’s situation.

The episode was pretty good, but just don’t go in expecting to see John McCain’s story. McCain’s name is pretty much used to draw you in so that you watch the story of Ernie Brace unfold. It’s a pretty harsh story, it felt like the outline of something larger, but for what it is it’s informative.