Did McCain Make Up the 'Cross in the Dirt'?

As both Dave and I mentioned earlier, there's a controversy brewing as to whether John McCain invented, or embellished, a story about his time as a POW in Viet Nam. Some new wrinkles have come in from Hilzoy, who notes that in a 1995 book that details the three Christmases McCain spent with 5 other captives, titled The Nightingale's Song, there's no mention of McCain's story.

Andrew Sullivan does further digging, and finds that there's no mention of the guard who drew a cross in the dirt before 1999. In fact, though McCain wrote 12,000 words on his captivity back in 1973, he didn't say word one about the episode in question.

Lastly, Michael Crowley profiles John McCain speech-writer and co-author, Mark Salter, who almost certainly had a hand in crafting the "cross in the dirt" story.

On top of all this we have the overlap with Solzhenitsyn. Connect all of these dots, and there's reason to wonder whether the incident with the guard really happened, or was something imagined after the fact.

Again, why does this matter? Because McCain made an ad about the incident, and often repeats it on the campaign trail, like he did at Saddleback.

UPDATE: Now Sullivan wonders whether the cross in the dirt story might have happened to another vet. He cites a McCain speech from 2000.

And here's Mark Nickolas with more on McCain's admiration of Solzhenitsyn, and a further dissection of the time-line.

UPDATE II: The McCain camp responds, and produces a fellow POW, Orson Swindle, who says McCain told him the story. Via Byron York, here's swindle:

"I vaguely recall that story being told, among other stories. I remember it from prison," Swindle continued. "There were several stories similar to that in which guards--a very few, I might add--showed compassion to the prisoners. It was rare, and I never met one, but some of the guys did."

Dave thinks it's case-closed, but Ben Smith senses that the door may still be open a bit:

In general, the assertion that information from the pre-Internet age is mysteriously absent is something to be handled with care. There's a lot less to search through from the far-off 1980's and 1990's. Granting the difference between absence of evidence and evidence of absence, though, the easiest way to knock this down would be with an instance of McCain mentioning it between his captivity and 1999.

In other words, if this was such an important experience in McCain's captivity, as he portrays it today, and he promptly told a fellow captive the story, why the apparent gap of 28 years until it surfaced again in McCain's description of his time as a POW?

UPDATE III: This story has more twists and turns than a waterslide. Swindle recalled his exchanges with McCain earlier this year. As Politico reported in April.