The little girl across the table at Gwynn Valley camp in the early 1970s was half her age and quite shy, but 12-year-old Gigi Robinson was attracted to the little metal bracelet she wore.
It was, a camp counselor told her, a POW-MIA bracelet that was inscribed with the girl’s father’s name. Her father, the counselor said, was a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
When Robinson returned to her home in Chapel Hill, N.C., from the Brevard, N.C., camp, she wrote and requested a bracelet for the same man.
“I prayed for him,” she said. “He was a prisoner. I wanted to pray for him to come back.”
Lt. Cmdr. John S. McCain III, a prisoner of war since 1967 who was repeatedly tortured and left with permanent injuries from his beatings, did come back.
He was released in 1973 and went on to become a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate and the Republican candidate for president against now-President Barack Obama in 2008.
Robinson, now a Chattanooga resident, said she never saw McCain’s daughter, Sidney, again but kept up with the girl’s father. She said she cut out newspaper articles and photos of his release and believes she broke the POW-MIA bracelet — as then was the custom for those wearing the metal bands of released prisoners — and sent him the pieces.
“When you pray for
somebody,” she said, “you feel like you get to know this person. He (McCain) looks the same all these years later, although his hair is white and his face is a little puffier. But I still remember a picture of him on a bus [after his release] with his face wrapped in bandages.”
Fast-forward nearly 40 years.
Robinson, 52, is wearing an inscribed military bracelet again. Her son, 1st Lt. Will Robinson, 25, is a platoon leader in an Army infantry regiment known as the Wolfhounds.
Her son, an Eagle Scout and graduate of McCallie School and the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, is deployed in the Kunar Valley of Afghanistan near its border with Pakistan.
“It’s active where they are,” Robinson said. “We try to cover him in prayer.”
Now, other people around the country are wearing bracelets for her son — the oldest of four children — just as she did for McCain.
“They send me email [telling of their support],” Robinson said. “They send him letters. They send him boxes. It’s so beautiful. I really think people are touched by knowing someone who has someone over there fighting. If they don’t know somebody, they don’t feel a part of the war.”
She’s heard from friends and strangers from as far away as Alaska and Nebraska and even from “a sweet 80-year-old couple” from Destin, Fla., with whom she’s become Facebook friends.
“When people know they make a difference by writing and praying,” Robinson said, “they’ll do that. America is awesome.”
She’s even taken it a step further, starting a local Moms of Military prayer and support group. The nonpolitical group (momsofmilitary.com), which welcomes moms, wives and relatives, meets from 9 to 11 a.m. on the first and third Thursdays of every month at her husband’s CPA firm at 3411 Dayton Blvd.
Robinson, who met McCain once at a book-signing in Atlanta, recently sent him a bracelet with her son’s name. She doesn’t know if he’ll get it or wear it, but she feels it completes a circle started some 40 years ago.
“It moves me when I meet some of my friends and they’re wearing [Will’s] bracelet,” she said. “Most people feel honored to be able to do this.”
Contact Clint Cooper at ccooper@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6497.