VAIL — At last month's Colorado GOP convention, 380 delegate-wannabes each had exactly 15 seconds to make a pitch for enough votes to win a seat at the national convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

For one man, that fraction of a minute was plenty.

"My name is Tom Kirk," he told conventioneers at the Broomfield Event Center in May. "I'm a retired Air Force colonel, and I was shot down over Hanoi during the Vietnam War. I spent 51/2 years as a POW. John McCain was one of my cellmates."

Enough said.

With his McCain connection, Kirk easily landed one of Colorado's 22 elected delegate spots to September's Republican National Convention, where he plans to cast an enthusiastic vote for the man he lived with for four months at the Hoa Lo Prison — the infamous "Hanoi Hilton."

"I feel very strongly about John," said Kirk, 79, a Vail resident for 16 years. "It's such a shame that more Americans can't get to know him better."

Very few people know Sen. John McCain the way Ret. Air Force Col. Thomas Kirk Jr. does.

A native of Portsmouth, Va., Kirk graduated from Virginia Military Institute in 1950, earned his wings from the U.S. Air Force a year later and flew 50 missions during the Korean War. He had completed 166 combat missions in Vietnam and was a squadron commander leading a raid when his F-105 fighter was shot down on Oct. 28, 1967 — two days after McCain's plane was shot down.

Kirk hit the ground unconscious and was captured immediately. From that time until his release on March 14, 1973, he was routinely tortured, beaten and kept in mind- numbing isolation, fed a single bowl of soup a day and forced to use a 5-gallon paint can for a toilet.

"There was nothing to do, nothing to read, nothing to write. You had to just sit there in absolute boredom, loneliness, frustration and fear," Kirk said. "You had to live one day at a time, because you had no idea how long you were going to be there."

During his imprisonment, Kirk lost half of his 185 pounds but managed to keep mind and body together with mental and physical exercise. He would walk in his cell — three and a half steps across, three and a half steps back — until he had covered four miles each day, followed by situps, pushups and knee bends.

A musician, Kirk kept sharp by using a stick as a faux flute to practice up to five hours a day. Always fascinated by numbers, he figured mortgage amortization tables in his head and created a complete business plan for a cattle ranch he hoped to start when he got home. And although they never saw each other, Kirk and other POWs managed to communicate by using a code tapped out on the wall.

On Christmas night 1970, the North Vietnamese moved Kirk into a 45-man cell at the prison Americans POWs dubbed the Hanoi Hilton, where he met McCain. They spent the next four months becoming close friends, talking politics and sharing memories of their college days, and Kirk remembers how McCain's quick wit often lifted the spirits of his fellow POWs.

"He's extremely intelligent and tells the greatest stories in the world," Kirk said. "He could almost be a stand-up comic. He's very funny, the life of the party. He has a wonderful personality."

Even more important, Kirk said: "He's a man of absolute integrity and honor."

Despite devastating injuries, McCain rejected the possibility of early release offered by the North Vietnamese because of his father's status as an admiral.

"He said, 'I will not go unless we all go,'" Kirk said. "I will always admire him for that."

After their release, Kirk and McCain lost touch, seeing each other at POW reunions held every two years. Kirk continued to serve in the Air Force but never bought the cattle ranch he had so meticulously planned in prison. He and wife Ann have two sons, Thomas and Robert, and now live in Vail, where Kirk works as a financial consultant.

Kirk spent 15 years as a ski instructor, still plays saxophone with the Tony Gulizia Trio and is working on his memoirs, but for his family's eyes only. Unlike McCain, who describes his time as a POW in Faith of My Fathers, Kirk has no intention of writing a book.

"Every book about prisoners of war seems to make us into heroes," Kirk said. "I don't think we were heroes. We had the misfortune to be shot down, and the good fortune to survive.

"We were doing what we believed in," he said. "And we were blessed to come home."