A Nostalgic McCain Goes Back to Hanoi

Shaking hands with crowds of Vietnamese, a nostalgic Sen. John McCain returned Tuesday to the Hanoi lake where in 1967 he was dragged ashore and beaten after parachuting from his downed warplane.

The bitter war in Vietnam has yielded to reconciliation, and the Arizona Republican strolled with his family around the busy shorefront of the capital’s Truc Bach lake, stopping at a sidewalk memorial marking his rescue.

“I put the Vietnam War behind me a long time ago,” McCain said upon arriving in Vietnam on Tuesday. “I harbor no anger, no rancor.”

People on the street seemed to feel the same. A crowd of Vietnamese gathered around McCain as he walked, greeting him as a friend and shaking his hand.

McCain, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of war here, is now a leading proponent of rebuilding relations with the impoverished Communist nation.

Vietnam will celebrate the 25th anniversary of the end of the war Sunday, and the former presidential candidate is the most prominent of numerous returning U.S. veterans.

Shortly after he arrived for his seventh postwar visit, McCain attended an airport repatriation ceremony in which an 11-person military honor guard placed six boxes of remains, believed to be from U.S. servicemen, into silver metal coffins.

About 50 U.S. civilians and military personnel watched as the containers were draped with American flags and carried into the hold of a C-17 cargo plane heading to Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii for forensic analysis.