Troop Push Is Personal For McCain

"No one who goes to war believes once he is there that it is worth the terrible cost of war to fight it by half measures," they wrote. "War is too horrible a thing to drag out unnecessarily. It was a shameful waste to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere through awful afflictions and heartaches, for a cause that half the country didn't believe in and our leaders weren't committed to winning."

Those who know McCain say they are not surprised that his children would feel a call to duty -- his son Jack is a Naval Academy midshipmen -- and that the senator would not allow his paternal concerns to influence his thinking about how the war should be conducted.

"I get a feeling that he sometimes must think he's seeing an old movie being played back," said George "Bud" Day, who was McCain's cellmate in Hanoi and remains close to him now. "There's no doubt his kids have the McCain genes. That means they're going to war."

McCain's view of the war and his family history is born of "his sense of duty, that is so deeply ingrained . . . there were probably times that he felt a prisoner of it," said Robert Timberg, who has written a book about McCain and who, the senator has said, "knows more about me than I do."

McCain has spoken publicly about Jimmy only once. In response to questions from Time magazine in June, as his son prepared for boot camp, he said, "I'm obviously very proud of my son, but also understandably a little nervous." After the interview, the magazine reported, McCain tried to get the story killed.

His reluctance to publicly discuss his thoughts about his son going to Iraq is a sign of decency, said Timberg, a fellow Annapolis graduate and Vietnam veteran. But there is another reason, common to fathers with sons in war.

"The last thing in the world he'd want to do," Timberg said, "is to anger the gods."

Jimmy McCain is an outgoing young man who told his fellow recruits that he had no ambition for politics, recalled Lance Cpl. Dominic Stam, 17, who served in a platoon with him for a time.

"On the very first day, I felt sorry for him because all the drill instructors already knew who he was," Stam said. Over three months of rigorous training, 80 of the 500 recruits quit. McCain "did really well" and "was a squad leader for a while," he said. "He started out as John McCain's son . . . and became Private McCain, just another Marine."

Stam said McCain signed up for the infantry. He reports to Camp Pendleton for more training in early January and could deploy by mid-2007. "He decided to choose one of the most dangerous jobs in the Marine Corps, and I respected him for it," Stam said. "He could have chosen something where he would be safe."

On graduation day, Stam scanned the military officers and family on the reviewing stand. There was John McCain, in suit and sunglasses.

"He sat there like a normal parent," Stam said. "He looked proud to me. I can't imagine a parent not being proud."

Staff researcher Madonna Lebling and research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.