US Senator John McCain, on a visit to Vietnam, on April 7 visited the prison site where he was jailed for five and a half years during the Vietnamese-American war. Photo Credit: Sawf News/Video GrabApril 08, 2009, (Sawf News) - US Senator John McCain, on a visit to Vietnam, on April 7 visited the prison site where he was jailed for five and a half years during the Vietnamese-American war.
McCain, a navy pilot during the war, was shot down over Hanoi in 1967 and held POW in the former French prison renamed Hoa Lo.
The prison has not been used since the early 1990s and most of the site has been turned into a high-rise building.
A museum at the site has a miniature mockup of the prison. Studying the scale model, McCain took some time to locate his cell.
"I'm trying to figure it out," he said.
"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'."
Incarcerated American POWs referred to the prison as the Hanoii Hilton and named the cell blocks after Las Vegas casinos.
McCain has visited Vietnam many times since his release as the Republican Party’s senior member on the Senate Armed Services Committee; this was his third visit to the prison.
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