How McCain Turned His Back on the Vietnamese Man Who Saved His Life

Sunday, Oct. 26 marked the 41st anniversary of John McCain's plane being shot down over Hanoi. It's a narrative that has become a central theme of McCain's presidential campaign -- but in the four decades since his capture, the story has become revisionist history.

In March of 2008, I traveled to Vietnam for the 40th anniversary of the incidents in Son My village that have come to be known to the world as the My Lai Massacre. During my visit, I spent some time in Hanoi visiting the museums and relics of what the Vietnamese call "the American war." One of these trips took me to the notorious Hoa Lo prison, or "Hanoi Hilton" -- formerly a French prison where independence fighters were jailed during the decades of French colonial rule, but which had later been turned into a stockade for U.S. pilots shot down over Hanoi from the mid-1960s to early 1970s. It was here that John McCain spent most of his 5½ years in captivity as a prisoner of war. Today, the prison museum features photos of McCain, both as a prisoner between 1967 and 1973 and on a return visit as a U.S. senator.

McCain was a hot commodity in Vietnam during my visit. According to my official translator from the Foreign Press Center, many other translators had been assigned to various foreign news crews around Hanoi that were all gathering material on McCain's time in Vietnam. McCain is well known to the Vietnamese; they all seemed familiar with his Senate career and his runs for the White House. The Vietnamese press was writing about McCain too; one article from a local paper particularly caught my eye. It was the story of McCain's rescue from Truc Bach Lake, accompanied by a grainy photo of a battered John McCain being dragged to the shore on a long bamboo pole. McCain had been reunited with his rescuer, Mai Van On, in 1996.

Upon returning to the United States, I looked for the story of McCain's rescuer but found little mention in the English language press. But in late March, Britain's Daily Mail published a story that made me realize that I knew the U.S. veteran who had helped reunite McCain with On. His name was Chuck Searcy, and he is now the country representative for the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial Fund. So in early August, I called Searcy in Hanoi and interviewed him for WORT radio in Madison, Wis.

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Norm Stockwell: Let me start by asking how you first came to meet Mr. Mai Van On and your connection with getting him in touch with Senator McCain.

Chuck Searcy: In 1995 I rented an apartment on the Truc Bach Lake, which is the lake where John McCain parachuted in when he was shot down. Some time during that year, an old man who was my neighbor sought me out (along with) another veteran who was living on the other side of the lake.

And he found us and wanted to tell us this story, that he was the guy who pulled McCain out of the lake. Of course, we didn't know whether to believe him or not. But he had a letter that he asked me to deliver to McCain. And I asked my landlord and my landlady and neighbors and others who were living around the lake if what he had said was true, and they said yeah -- the ones who remembered that day back in 1967 when McCain was shot down -- they said yes, that's the way it happened.

So I had the letter translated and sent it off to McCain. … And I got a reply from a staff person who sort of discounted the letter and the suggestion that this may have been the man who pulled McCain out of the lake, because apparently they had heard some such allegation before. So I just sort of let it ride -- until I saw McCain in Washington, I guess that same year, at a Veterans' breakfast and I mentioned it to him. And he said, "Oh, let's see if we can, I'd like to meet the guy, next time I come to Vietnam." And so that's how it happened.