For hours in a dark Hanoi prison, John McCain pushed through the pain of his own wounds to stretch the fingers of fellow prisoner Bud Day along the cell wall, a makeshift attempt at physical therapy to restore movement to Day's torture-damaged tendons.

Nearly 30 years later, in Washington D.C., another aviator named Bob Stumpf was being grilled by a congressional committee for his minor role in the Navy's Tailhook scandal when McCain realized that the decorated pilot had been a student in his attack jet squadron at Cecil Field in Jacksonville.

McCain called the secretary of the Navy, John Dalton, and screamed, ''You're finished,'' according to news reports. The Arizona senator then worked on congressional leaders until Stumpf and other officers were cleared and Stumpf was retroactively promoted to commander of the prestigious Blue Angels aviation crew in 2002, six years after he had left the Navy.

PRO-McCAIN VETERANS

Today, Day and Stumpf are working for McCain.

They are chairmen of Florida Veterans for McCain, an organization of 125 retired military officers from across the state whose loyalty to the war hero brought many of them into politics as they fight for the coveted veterans' vote.

They'll be out in force Monday in Jacksonville -- where McCain's family lived when he was a prisoner of war -- when the candidate returns to the Veterans Memorial Arena in his first trip through this battleground state since the Republican convention.

By contrast, Democrat Barack Obama did not serve in the military, but he spent four years on the Senate Veterans Committee and is not ceding any ground to McCain for the veterans' vote.

His network of military supporters is not nearly as deep as McCain's, but the grandson of a World War II veteran has amassed his own contingent of war heroes, most of them recently out of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Obama has collected six times as much money in political contributions from U.S. troops serving abroad as McCain, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Obama supporters, including former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, began a three-day tour of Florida on Friday to call attention to veterans issues and the differences between the candidates. They cite McCain's opposition to increased funding for the Veterans Administration, improved healthcare benefits, and additional mental health and brain injury services -- all things that Obama supports.

Veterans form one of the strongest and most reliable voting blocs in the United States and are considered one of the most influential in Florida. In the 2000 election, 202 overseas ballots, most of which were from active-duty military personnel, made the difference in the race in favor of Bush.

The U.S. Census Bureau lists at least two million current or former active-duty military people in Florida. In Escambia County alone, veterans constitute 20 percent of all voters.

Obama supporters criticize McCain for voting against the new GI bill, which gives veterans expanded education and healthcare benefits, and while McCain supported the final version in concept, he didn't show up for the final vote.

''Sen. Obama gets it,'' Graham told reporters Friday. Veterans in the United States are moving to the South and the West, and services need to travel with them, he said. Obama is willing to recognize that ``there a fundamental difference in what we have had in the past and what we need to transition into.''

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