NEW ORLEANS -- In 1970, 5 million bracelets were made, each with the name of one of the 726 prisoners of war in Vietnam.
A bracelet cost around $3 and was to be worn until that captive was released and came home to the United States. A New Orleans grandmother who wore one of those bracelets, discovered it has special meaning.
It was back in 2008, when Senator John McCain won the Republican nomination for president, that Ginger Pluta had a strange feeling. Something told her to go to a top closet shelf and open that box of memorabilia that she hadn't touched since graduating from high school in Buffalo, New York back in 1974.
"I don't even know what made me and I was looking through the stuff and I was like, 'Oh my God, it's John McCain,'" said Pluta, now 62.
There it was, her Vietnam Prisoner of War bracelet her boyfriend gave her in high school in 1970. The prisoner: John McCain, III, captured October 26, 1967.
"I wore it 'til it broke. It just broke cleanly in half. I know it doesn't look like that, but it broke cleanly in half," Pluta said.
Ginger remembers the era. She and her friends were against the war, but supported the troops.
"It just broke my heart what our military was suffering through, through Vietnam," she remembers.
Ginger is a retired teacher of special needs and at-risk students. She now teaches yoga at the People Program, a non-profit for seniors, teaching a variety of arts, exercise and scholastic learning. She says she loves giving back because the program saved her soul. That was after she was gravely injured, run over on her bicycle, spending three months in a hospital bed.
As we talked, she learned that the injured John McCain had the chance to be released years early from his captors, but would not leave the other men.
"It really takes one hell of a man to do that. I mean, really, when you think about what really happened to the POWs. Wow," Pluta said with tears in her eyes, thinking about the torture they endured.
Ginger remembers writing to the McCain campaign 10 years ago asking if they wanted the bracelet. She got an answer back to send it in the mail, but she decided to keep it. With all the memories and emotions attached to the bracelet, that was too impersonal for her.
"I mean, I wouldn't mind giving it to him if I could have met him," she laughed, hoping, at the time, for a few minutes of fame if she had gotten to meet him and hand it over to him.
But it wasn't meant to be, and for now the bracelet remains in her desk drawer and memories.
Of the 726 P.O.W.s in Vietnam, 661 eventually returned home.
For more on the People Program, call 504-284-7678 or visit their website: http://www.peopleprogram.org/