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McCain's Return to Vietnam - - - - - - - - - - - - DAY 3: HANOI HILTON McCain returns to the past
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April 27, 2000 | These words you are reading may not be precious, but at least they have been smuggled out of Vietnam. The iron curtain is alive and well here, and attempts made this morning to log onto a Web site that provides information about the problems of the Vietnamese economy -- and there are many -- proved futile because of government "firewall" software. And attempts to e-mail photographs for this piece were nearly in vain; a world-weary photographer here for the same reason I am, to follow around former Vietnam POW and Arizona Sen. John McCain on the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, confirms the communist government's constipated supervision.
A decade ago, when McCain was among those working on opening Vietnamese markets, putting aside whatever personal animus he had for the sake of bringing the country into the 20th century (just in time for the 21st), he had reason to hope that things would be different, he says. "In '92, I felt a degree of optimism that I don't feel now," he says. Still, he is determined to make this trip worth more than just a cool episode of "Where in the World Is Matt Lauer?" (NBC's "Today" show is paying for McCain's trip in return for a lengthy Friday morning segment.) In a Tuesday meeting with Foreign Minister Nguyen Dy Nien, a dinner later that night with National Assembly Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Do Van Tai and a Wednesday drop by with National Assembly Speaker Nong Duc Manh, McCain strongly encouraged the Vietnamese government to sign the Vietnam-U.S. Bilateral Trade Agreement, which both countries agreed to "in principle" last July but which the Vietnamese Politburo has since balked at signing because of internal divisions between hard-liners and economic reformers. "It seems to me that it is greatly in the interest of the Vietnamese government to conclude [its ratification of] the trade agreement in a timely fashion," McCain said, somewhat brusquely, to Nong. "I know the chairman is aware that there has been a reduction in the last three years in foreign investment in Vietnam ... As a friend, I urge you to evaluate what are the factors that have declined investments ... I do not mean to be presumptuous when I remind the chairman that a very rapidly growing number of [young Vietnamese] are joining the job market." McCain added that Vietnam's refusal to sign the trade agreement could affect a pending, "very controversial," as he put it, House vote on normalizing trade relations with China. Nong, speaking through an interpreter as reporters listened, thanked McCain for his "frank discussion" but did not sound optimistic, suggesting that "the two sides need further exchange of ideas" because Vietnam "is in a very low development as compared to your country." "Our task is to also overcome the consequences of war, and I also hope the U.S. will help us with that," Nong guilt-tripped. McCain took Nong's remarks to be a reference to the lingering toxic effects of Agent Orange in the country.
Other analyses of the Politburo's concerns conclude that economic reform will inevitably undermine the nation's socialist girdings, weakening the Vietnamese Communist Party's clamp on its people. A September story in the South China Morning Post pointed out that the trade deal would inevitably harm the $600 million in revenues of the Vietnamese military's various commercial enterprises. And even some of the most capitalist consultants see further unemployment -- already at 10 percent -- as a likely immediate consequence. But McCain points to the destitution of the Vietnamese people -- the nation has an estimated per capita income of less than $300 a year and around $1.5 billion in national debt -- and sees free trade as the answer. Indeed, the trade agreement is the only issue McCain seems fired up about, even on Wednesday as he guides his wife, Cindy, and 13-year-old son, Jack, past shadows of his horrors -- a memorial near where his plane was shot down in Truc Bach Lake and through the museum where once stood the Hoa Lo prison camp, commonly known as the "Hanoi Hilton," where he was held captive. He is denied entry to the other prison camp, called the "Plantation," where he was held during his five and a half years as a POW. "That infuriates me," he says softly to an aide after the Vietnamese army bureaucrats brusquely reject him at the gate. But he is smiling as he says it. The senator's chief of staff, Mark Salter, says McCain has rarely come close to losing his temper during his many trips back to Vietnam. There was one time, in the early '90s, when he and fellow Vietnam veteran Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., witnessed a guard using a bit of force on a prisoner at the Hanoi Hilton, when it was still being used for incarceration. "Hey!" McCain yelled then. "Remember: 'Humane and lenient'" -- the protocols for treatment of prisoners under the Geneva Convention. The other time was in '91, Salter recalls, when McCain and Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, stopped by the Hanoi Hilton and wandered around outside. A prison guard ran over and started brutally hassling their driver, even getting physical. "McCain drops his shoulder, storms over and gives him a shove," Salter says. "He says, 'What's your problem, pal?' And the guard rushed off. He's spoken angrily in the past, giving one of the ministers a little straight talk about human rights, sure. But those were the only two instances I've ever seen when he's shown a little irritation with anyone in Vietnam. And both of them were specifically when he saw prison guards giving someone a hard time." As McCain stands by the memorial of his capture at Truc Bach Lake with Jack and Cindy, he is laughing and smiling, just like any other dad checking out, say, the Liberty Bell. He reads the Vietnamese inscription to "the people's defense forces" shooting down the "air pirate" named "John Sney Ma Can," misidentifying the former naval aviator as a member of the U.S. Air Force. "That's the greatest insult of all," he announces. The statue, which includes a figure of "Ma Can" being dragged out of the water, wasn't as well tended to the first time he saw it, during his 1985 return with CBS' Walter Cronkite. "There was grass running up all over it and bird crap everywhere," McCain notes. Back in the States, a joking reference to its condition to a visiting Vietnamese dignitary later prompted the official to worriedly tell Salter, "I live near there; I can go and clean it up." "How far away is the Hanoi Hilton?" McCain is asked. Just five minutes up the road, McCain says. He points out that, prior to his capture, he attended the military's "Escape and Evasion" school five different times. "And after all that, they threw me in the back of a truck to a prison five minutes away. A classic waste of the taxpayers' dollar," he says.
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