POWs Talk to Maryland's Delegation at the Republican Convention ST. PAUL, MN (wypr) - The Maryland delegation to the Republican National Convention met with former prisoners of war in St. Paul on Tuesday. The campaign of Republican presidential candidate John McCain has emphasized his own service record and POW experience during the Vietnam War.

The former POWs emphasized service and a "country first" attitude in their comments.

The speakers included Everett Alverez, a former Navy pilot shot down in Vietnam. Alverez spent eight-and-a-half years at the Hanoi Hilton. Over three of those years were spent with fellow POW John McCain.

"The whole experience was a bonding, in the sense that it was total interdependence for survival purposes to exist from day to day. And it was in that manner that we placed the group first," Alverez said.

That enabled individuals to survive, he said.

"That's a commitment to service over self. That's what John [McCain] describes. It didn't maybe originate there, but that's when it was really displayed," he said.

Alvarez, who lives in Potomac, Maryland, is the honorary chair of the Maryland delegation. His speech to a breakfast meeting was relatively short, but he was more expansive with reporters afterward.

He said McCain has maintained that principle of service in his political career.

"In terms of being branded a maverick, it's always because he always maintains an attitude of service to country over self and over party, at times," Alvarez said.

The other speaker was Ron Young, a Army helicopter pilot shot down during a mission over Karbala, Iraq in 2003.

Young told the delegates the Iraqis pulled him and his co-pilot from an irrigation canal as they tried to flee and beat him until he was unconscious.

"When I came back to, I wake up and staring into my buddy's face, my co-pilot, and they had his head with his hair up, you know, holding the front of his hair with a knife to his throat threatening to cut his head off," Young recounted.

Fortunately, the captors didn't cut off the co-pilot's head, but they marched Young and the co-pilot to a prison on the Iraqi base. In an interview, Young, 31, said he joined the Army not for any altruistic reasons, but because he wanted to be a pilot.

"I wanted to find something I truly would do for free, and then find a way to find someone to pay me for it. That was flying in the military," Young said.

After Young was beaten and captured, and not knowing whether he would survive, he began to reflect more deeply.

"It's truly where I learned what it meant to truly selflessly serve my country, to be willing to give my life for my country and for the decisions that people make over here, so that they have the opportunities to live the life that they want," Young said.

He said McCain took the same lessons from his captivity in Vietnam.

Snaring such high-powered surrogates could not have been easy for a delegation from as blue a state as Maryland, but Jim Pelura, the state party chair, said it's an indication that McCain won't ignore states he has little chance of winning.

"He has said a number of times that he values the Republicans in blue state Maryland as much as he does the Republicans in a red state. He's made that comment several times. He wants all of our support and he's willing to come and ask for it, and that's exactly what he's done," Pelura said.

"The better we can fight the battle in every single state, the more pressure it's going put on them and somewhere along the line they're going to crack. We're going to win a state that they didn't expect and we're going to win the election for John McCain," said Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, who was present at the event. © Copyright 2009, wypr