We were brothers in hell
Mac’s ‘Hanoi Hilton’ cellmate looks back
They tried to keep their conversations light, joking around like kids, trading jibes and tales of their childhoods.
They needed to keep their minds off their surroundings — a rat-infested pit in the notorious North Vietnamese prison facetiously dubbed the Hanoi Hilton — and the torture that nearly killed them, John McCain’s former cellmate told The Post on Sunday.
“In prison, sometime we would talk about the most inane things, about childhood, growing up,” retired Navy Capt. Jerry Coffee recalled of being holed up with the late senator and fellow war hero.
“He and I used to sometime kid back and forth. He would say, ‘You’re not the boss of me, Coffee,’ and I would argue with him about that,” said Coffee, now 84.
“He’d say, ‘Get off my lawn, kid,’ and I’d reply, ‘You’re not the boss of me, McCain,’ that kind of silly repartee.”
McCain spent five and a half years in the prison, including two in solitary confinement, after his Skyhawk warplane was shot down over Hanoi in 1967.
Coffee, whose plane was downed during a reconnaissance mission in 1966 and who spent seven years imprisoned, met McCain sometime in late 1970 or early 1971, when they became cellmates. But he had heard about the famous son and grandson of Navy admirals before then.
“He was a very patriotic young man,” Coffee said. “I was impressed by his background, with his father and grandfather.’’
In the jail, McCain’s captors beat and interrogated him, and his injuries later left him incapable of raising his arms over his head.
“He was badly injured, as were most of us,” Coffee recalled. “And his injuries were compounded by the brutalness of the enemy. We had problems with bones and joints and getting around from place to place, not that we really had any place to go.”
But the former pilot said McCain somehow managed to stay “very positive during his stay.’’
Coffee remembered McCain’s “upbeat” spirit and use of humor “to counteract the difficulties that we were all suffering.”
Paul Galanti, another fellow POW, recalled how he and McCain used to communicate by tapping on the walls of their adjacent cells.
“We felt like we knew each other,” Galanti, now 79, told The Post. “We got closer that way than most brothers I know.”
Galanti praised McCain as a strong leader.
“He could be funny-funny or ironic-funny, no matter how bad things got,” Galanti said. “He could motivate anybody under any circumstances.”
Meanwhile, one of McCain’s former jailers at the Hoa Lo prison, Tran Trong Duyet, denied to Agence France-Presse on Sunday that he ever tortured McCain.
Duyet claimed that by the end of McCain’s imprisonment, the guard and prisoner’s relationship had warmed.
“Out of working hours, we considered each other friends,” Duyet said. “He taught me Eng- lish . . . He had good teaching skills.”
Years after McCain’s imprisonment, when the dirty politics of Washington would get him down, he would call special meetings with his ex-POW pals.
Galanti, the Virginia campaign director for McCain’s 2000 presidential bid, said the candidate’s aides would call him and others to arrange a get-together in a private part of DC’s Union Station.
“We could yell and scream and wouldn’t have to worry about reading it in the Washington Post the next day,” Galanti said.
“We would tell the kind of jokes you can’t tell in front of a political group.”
But there were two subjects McCain rarely brought up during the meetups: Hanoi and politics.
For Coffee, McCain’s death on Saturday night came as a shock; he said he didn’t know how far the illness had progressed.
“That’s probably the way he would have wanted it,” Coffee said of his old friend. “I miss him terribly.”