Four decades ago a young Vietnamese army sergeant, Nguyen Van Dai, launched the surface-to-air missile that downed US Senator John McCain’s bomber jet from the skies above Hanoi.
The surface-to-air missile (SAM) blew off the right wing of the A-4 Skyhawk and sent the wounded McCain parachuting into a lake, starting his five-and-a-half-year ordeal as a prisoner of war, much of it in the infamous “Hanoi Hilton.”
As the Republican senator now makes a run for the White House — with his war heroism a central theme of his campaign — Dai and other Vietnamese veterans said they held no rancor and even backed his presidential bid, citing his post-war efforts to restore diplomatic ties.
Others, however, bemoaned his apparent lack of remorse for bombing their country.
Dai recounted how on Oct. 26, 1967 his Missile Battalion 61 spotted McCain’s plane, launched from an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin to hit the capital’s Yen Phu power plant.
“We followed the plane on our control screen and I pushed the launch button,” the 68-year-old retired army colonel said.
“There was a loud blast and a huge cloud of smoke at the missile site. The aircraft was hit, quickly lost altitude and disappeared off the screen,” Dai said.
“We were extremely happy,” Dai said. “We left the control cabin and shook hands. We congratulated and hugged each other.”
McCain — who in his memoir Faith Of My Fathers likened the missile to a “flying telephone pole” — broke both arms and a leg as he ejected and parachuted unconscious into Hanoi’s Truc Bach or Bamboo Island Lake.
Watching from the shore was Mai Van On, who died two years ago aged 88, having been credited by Vietnam with saving McCain’s life.
“As Mr. On described it, he jumped into the water with a friend to swim out to the parachute,” former US army intelligence specialist Chuck Searcy said.
“Mr. On later told me that it was not something he thought about. It was just a humanitarian instinct. Somebody was in serious trouble out there, and he grabbed this bamboo pole and just jumped in,” Searcy said.
Onshore a furious crowd beat McCain — someone smashed his shoulder with a rifle butt and another bayoneted his ankle and groin.
“[On] said that when the crowd attacked McCain, he persuaded them to stop by saying that when McCain was in the air bombing Hanoi he was the enemy but that on the ground he was a helpless human being,” the 63-year-old Searcy said.
On watched as officials took the American pilot away to a hospital — the last time he would see him for nearly three decades.
Searcy, the Hanoi representative of the Vietnam Veteran Memorial Fund, told McCain about On at a 1995 Washington event, paving the way for a meeting between the two men when McCain visited Hanoi the following year.
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