TWO summers into the fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese communists and the Viet Cong in 1975, 108 rawboned but bubbly American prisoners of war, including John McCain, regained their freedom after being released by their captors.
At Clark Air Base, where the 108 underwent debriefing before flying on to the continental United States, the senior-ranking prisoner, 50-year-old Air Force Col. John Flynn, declared the US POWs “performed magnificently…they were first class soldiers, they were first class citizens.”
What makes the Clark stopover kind of poignant at this point, 45 years later, is the death of McCain—who eventually became a member of the US House of Representatives when he was only 46 and a senator when he was 51 until his death, four days short of his 82nd birthday.
The spindly 108 were flown from Hanoi to Clark Air Base in three planeloads of C-141 Starlifters.
Following the Paris Peace Accords of January 1973, US prisoners of war were returned during Operation Homecoming from February through April 1973.
During this period, 591 POWs were released to US authorities, including a few captured in Laos and released in North Vietnam.
The release in March 1973 left 147 known US POWs still in Indochina, including 10 in Laos. Another 32 were released shortly by the Viet Cong and the rest were all supposed to be freed by March 28 according to the Vietnam ceasefire.
Under airport lights, Flynn was followed off the plane by Navy Lt. Cmdr. John S. McCain III, the son of retired Adm. John S. McCain, who was commander-in-chief of the Pacific forces at the height of the Vietnam war.
The younger McCain, 36, walked from the plane with a noticeable limp and graying hair, paused for a dozen seconds to chat with his father’s successor, Adm. Noel Gayler, and then limped to the bus, where he climbed on unassisted straight away to the military hospital less than three kilometers away from the flight line.
Most of the men appeared to be in good physical condition although visibly thin and sallow.
The two exceptions were McCain, shot down on Oct. 26, 1967 while on a bombing mission during Operation Rolling Thunder over the North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi, and Air Force Capt. Hubert C. Walker, 31, of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Walker, moving very slowly under his own power, was escorted off the plane by a medic.
McCain was seriously injured when he was shot down and captured, and failed to escape episodes of torture and refused, according to sources who spoke on condition of anonymity, an out-of-sequence early repatriation offer.
The wounds McCain, who eventually became a presidential bet of the Republican Party in 2008 against Barack Obama of the Democratic Party, sustained during the Vietnam War left him with lifelong disabilities.
The senior man on board the third C141, Air Force Col. David W. Winn, chose to step off his C-141 Starlifter medical plane in flight coveralls worn by American pilots instead of the blue outfits given the other POWs by the North Vietnamese.
“You brought us home with honor and we hope to serve you well,” Winn said.
“To borrow from Keats, freedom is happiness and happiness is freedom. That is all we need to know and it’s all we know today.”
In an interview later with McCain, the man told us he never lost his faith in the goals his government wanted to achieve: freedom and peace worldwide.
Washington had viewed its involvement in Vietnam as a way to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam —part of the domino theory of a wider containment policy, with the stated aim of stopping the spread of communism.
We would meet McCain again 44 years later, while we were in Colorado Springs and he was in Washington, D.C., not face to face but through the television screen where the Senate Armed Services Committee was having a hearing on the Russian government using hacking and leaks to try to influence the presidential election where Donald Trump of the Republican Party defeated Hillary Clinton of the Democrats.
It was in those hearings where Republican and Democratic senators as well as intelligence officers, including James Clapper Jr., the director of National Intelligence, Michael Rogers, the head of the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command presented a “united front” that “forcefully reaffirmed the conclusion that the Russian government influenced the US elections.
While many had seen McCain as a non-conformist and a maverick, and while he was often at odds with Trump, the man he did not want to attend his funeral except George Bush and Barack Obama, he voted in June 2017 to support Trump’s controversial arms deal with Saudia Arabia.
McCain returned to the Senate for the first time following his cancer diagnosis and delivered remarks on July 25, 2017 after casting a crucial vote on the American Health Care Act.
McCain, the naval officer we interviewed two score and five years back, is being brought this week to Washington to lie in state in the rotunda of the US Capitol on Aug. 31 before a service at the Washington National Cathedral on Sept. 1 (Sunday, Sept. 2 in Manila).
He will then be buried at the US Naval Academy Cemetery in Annapolis, Maryland, next to his Naval Academy classmate Admiral Charles Larson.
McCain’s passing on closes a chapter dotted by indomitability of spirit, love for freedom and global peace, as well as thumbs down to communism, and unqualified commitment to family.
HBC, a former international news agency journalist, covered the return of the Prisoners of War from Indochina in the first quarter of 1973, and was able to interview, among other POWs, John McCain, who was returning home from Hanoi, Vietnam through the US Clark Air Base in Pampanga in 1973 after spending almost six years at what was called the “Hanoi Hilton,” a euphemism for Vietnamese jail.