N ROUTE TO GREENVILLE, S.C. - Senator John McCain was working hard to maintain an upbeat demeanor on the campaign trail yesterday, but he veered off into a defiant riff about his North Vietnamese captors during a bus ride to a Greenville rally.
When told that an e-mail was circulating in California that alleged McCain frequently refers to Asians as ''gooks,'' he said that is the term he reserves for the interrogators and guards who abused him during his five-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war.
''I hated the gooks and I will hate them as long as I live,'' McCain said, adding that his interrogators and prison guards were ''cruel and sadistic people and deserve worse appellations than gook.
''I will continue to refer to them in probably language that might offend some people here because of their beating and torture and killing of my friends,'' he said, adding that the South Vietnamese people in reeducation camps called their guards gooks, too.
