Former POW mourned as hero
Hanoi pays tribute to the late US Senator John McCain who helped heal the wounds of the Vietnam War.
HANOI: US Senator John McCain was a “symbol of his generation” who helped “heal the wounds of war” by pushing for diplomatic normalisation of ties with Vietnam, the South-Aast Asian country’s foreign minister said.
McCain, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam who ran for president in 2008 as a self-styled maverick Republican and became a prominent critic of President Donald Trump, died of cancer at 81 on Saturday at his ranch near Sedona.
“For both the government of Vietnam and its people, Senator McCain was a symbol of his generation of senators, and of the veterans of the Vietnam war,” Vietnam’s foreign minister Pham Binh Minh wrote in a condolence book at the US Embassy in Hanoi yesterday.
“It was he who took the lead in significantly healing the wounds of war, and normalising and promoting the comprehensive Vietnam-US partnership,” Minh said.
McCain had been one of the most vocal proponents in Washington in favour of normalising relations with Communist-led Vietnam, a well-known former enemy of the United States.
A monument on the shores of the Hanoi lake where McCain was captured has turned into a de facto shrine to the late senator since news of his death reached Vietnam early on Sunday morning. — Reuters