US Senator McCain returns to wartime Vietnam jail

US Senator John McCain leaned over a miniature mock-up on of the Vietnamese prison where he was held for years as a wartime prisoner.

"I'm trying to figure it out," he said, studying the scale model on a return visit to the prison site that is now a museum.

Then he found the spot.

"I was in this block here... which we called the 'Thunderbird'," he told fellow Senator Amy Klobuchar. "And I lived in this block, which we called 'Desert Inn'."

McCain, who lost his bid for the White House to Democrat Barack Obama in November, made the museum his last stop before flying to Beijing, his next destination on an official Asian tour.

A navy pilot in the Vietnamese-American war, McCain was shot down over Hanoi in 1967 and jailed for five and a half years, mostly in the former French prison renamed Hoa Lo.

McCain and other captured airmen knew the prison ironically as the "Hanoi Hilton", and on his return Wednesday he said prisoners named the cell blocks after Las Vegas casinos.

A young Vietnamese woman in a traditional pink slit skirt, known as an ao dai, was McCain's official guide for the tour but her limited commentary was no match for the memories which McCain brought with him.

"Did you eat in the cell?" asked Klobuchar, a Democrat who, along with Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, is on the Asian tour with McCain.

"They would bring a bowl of soup around," said the white-haired McCain, now 72.

The prison has not been used since the early 1990s, and most of the site has been turned into a highrise building.

What remains is a museum mainly devoted to alleged maltreatment of Vietnamese held in dingy cells by French colonialists, long before the first American airman, Everett Alvarez, arrived in 1964.

"That's a long time, from August '64 to January '73," McCain said, looking at a picture of Alverez in one of two rooms devoted to the "crimes" inflicted on North Vietnam by bomber pilots like McCain.

There is also a picture of Douglas Peterson, which McCain insisted on seeing. Peterson, another imprisoned airman, became the first United States ambassador to Hanoi following normalisation of diplomatic relations 20 years after the war ended in 1975.

A display case shows a green flight suit and helmet described as those worn by McCain when he was shot down.

"They used to have one with a name tag they had made," McCain told Klobuchar.

He previously visited the museum in 2000, an event chronicled by another photograph.

"Best wishes," he wrote in black felt pen. "John McCain US Senate Arizona".



AP/Ron Edmonds

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