A non-story story. The Vietnam POWs were pilots, kept for their political value. Enlisted men were seldom if ever kept prisoner. The pilots in many cases chose to take the war to N Vietnam even while Congress had prohibited that action. If you flew by the book you were going to make it back to base, but in the Top Gun occupation there are more than a few type A personalities.
The Hollywood studios made films which misdirected public anger at the missing POWs to make it seem like something it was not. The war turned in 1970 from a ground war to an air war. Despite the fact that Russian freighters brought SAM missiles into Haiphong harbor, the US did nothing to block the shipment. This made it doubly difficult when a few rogue pilots made a bombing run on Hanoi.
Congress repeatedly placed N Vietnam off limits, one can criticize them, but they were trying to limit the war, at the direction of their constituents, and to end the war altogether. The end of the war was also secretly negotiated, and more pilots were shot down in the 1972 Christmas raid on Haiphong. POWs deserve America’s support, most of their names on the wall, and they were never in a prison camp of any kind.

McCain’s jet set off ordinance on the deck of the Forrestal, (as the story goes) while he was racing his engine. If he had been culpable in any way I doubt he would have kept flying.

The bombing of North Vietnam was no different than the no-fly zone over Iraq, they were taking out infrastructure, power, roads. It’s widely accepted we killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians before the war ever started. The difference in Nam was that they were shooting back, and after they caught a few of these pilots they made examples of them.

The US was afraid of China, after Korea they realized China might jump into the war unannounced at any time, and North Vietnam has a border with China. It also became obvious to those selling the war that they could market it to the American people only if it was a struggle between good and evil, international communism and democracy. If the US military didn’t actively bring Ho Chi Minh into the war, they were glad, after Tet, that he was in control. It made their job easier.

Early on American pilots were up against MIGS, which is what they wanted (they wanted the Top Gun school and they got it) they wanted to meet the most advanced fighters in air combat. US military policy was in the hands of a few zealots. Pilots were and are still considered our first line of attack, where technology and human skill will make a difference. That much is boilerplate in US military strategy since 1970. McCain and Duke Cunningham were part of that, they are not the most well balanced personalities.