In Vietnam, Mccain’s Hanoi Hilton jailor recalls ‘stubborn’ prisoner-of-war
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In 2014, Mccain was the first senior US politician to call upon Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi, just a month after he was sworn in.
And on the eve of Modi’s 2016 US visit, during which the prime minister addressed a joint session of Congress, Mccain argued for India to be accorded a special defence status equal to that of close US allies and partners.
“Asking India to increasingly take on global responsibilities, yet not providing the associated benefits, is not a sustainable strategy,” he had written in an op-ed.
Mccain also introduced a bill to define India as a “global strategic and defence partner”. The bill failed, but the Congress would go on recognise India as a “major defence partner” later in 2016, codifying a designation announced earlier by Obama during the 2016 visit by Modi. HAIPHONG: A prisoner of war in the “Hanoi Hilton”, navy pilot John Mccain was known as uncompromising, frank and an avid reader who fiercely debated the war with his Vietnamese jailors.
One of them, the former director of the infamous Hoa Lo prison, recalls verbally sparring with the famous inmate and says Mccain’s refusal to budge on his views eventually earned his admiration.
“It was his stubbornness, his strong stance that I loved when arguing with him,” retired Col Tran Trong Duyet told AFP.
In the decades following the Vietnam War, Mccain forgave the enemies who once held him captive, and helped reconcile the two countries that today enjoy strong ties.
His five and a half years in prison began in October 1967 when Mccain was thrown into the French-built jail after his Skyhawk divebomber was shot down over Hanoi’s Truc Bach lake.
Fished out with a broken leg and two broken arms he was shipped to the cold, crowded facility where some 500 prisoners of war were held.
Mccain was held in solitary confinement and suffered from dysentery. For months on end, he was fed only bread and pumpkin soup. He communicated with fellow inmates by tapping codes on the thick concrete walls.
In his memoirs, Mccain wrote that solitary “put me in a pretty surly mood” and that he would ward off depression by hollering insults at guards. And then there were the interrogations and beatings. “Ropes were put on me and I sat that night bound with ropes,” Mccain wrote after his 1973 release.
Duyet denies Mccain or others were mistreated and says he punished any fellow guards who stepped out of line.
“There was no torture, Vietnamese people saved him,” Duyet said in an interview earlier this year at his home in Haiphong, where he displays both photos of American POWS and more recent images of himself in military uniform posing with US officials.
Mccain visited the Southeast Asian country several times after the restoration of diplomatic ties in 1995, even returning to the “Hanoi Hilton”for an emotional meeting with another former jailor.
Duyet never got a chance to reconnect with Mccain, but imagined what he might say if he had. “If he came to Vietnam, I would greet him, not as a former prisoner and a jailer, but as two veterans, from both sides of the battlefield, now meeting again in the spirit of reconciliation,” he said.