‘John McCain was never tortured in my jail’, says Tran Trong Duyet - Times Online

‘John McCain was never tortured in my jail’, says Tran Trong Duyet
Tran Trong Duyet, a former jail director, says that John McCain received good medical care

Tran Trong Duyet, a former jail director, says that John McCain received good medical care
Leo Lewis in Hanoi
Image from Swedish broadcaster SVT of John McCain as a former POW during a prisoner exchange in Hanoi on March 14, 1973.

..................

For even if the cold, barely conscious US Navy officer did not know it at the time, says Le Van Lua and the other Vietnamese whose lives entwined with Mr McCain’s that day, this little spot of Hanoi is undoubtedly where pilot turned politician. If fury had prevailed, it is a transformation that might never have happened, says Mr Lua, 61, a factory worker who was the first on the scene after the crash and swam out to retrieve the battered, politically valuable prize.

...........

Mr Lua’s account of that day – along with Vietnamese accounts of the five and a half years that Mr McCain spent as a prisoner of war – differ significantly from the presidential candidate’s own record. Mr Lua speaks of quickly getting Mr McCain to the safety of a police station (now the aerobics studio) before any harm was done. Mr McCain writes of mob attacks on his shoulder, ankle and groin with rifle-butt and bayonet.

Where the accounts differ most starkly is in the period of Mr McCain’s long incarceration as a PoW – first at the prison known as the Hanoi Hilton, then at The Plantation.

Tran Trong Duyet, the former prison director who now surrounds himself with caged birds in a house in Hai Phong, first met Mr McCain a year after he had been shot down. He recalls a defiant rule-breaker, the patriotic son of an admiral and a fervent believer in the war. What he does not recall, however, is a victim of torture or violence.

..................

Nguyen Thi Thanh, now a chirpy 81-year-old who is following the US election closely, also briefly had power of life and death over the brash young pilot. As the nurse who first attended to him after he was dragged from the lake, Ms Thanh describes the agonising choice of whether or not simply to kill him in revenge for the destruction that his bombs had rained on her city.

“As a nurse I had to help him. As a Vietnamese I just wanted to kill him. Everyone around me wanted him dead too but we had to follow the Ho Chi Minh ideology. As I walked home from the nurse station, people were furious — screaming at me for saving his life.”