An NBC News correspondent reports from Hanoi that John McCain will carry Vietnam in the upcoming American presidential election. Unfortunately for Senator McCain, the Vietnamese can't vote in our elections.
Ian Williams interviewed Hanoi residents and found the younger generation too busy with their own affairs to care about the American elections, but that the older "Vietnam War generation" remembered John McCain for his efforts to normalize relations between the U.S. and Vietnam after the war. Here is an excerpt from the article:
"During our visit we sought out Vietnamese who’d met McCain. We found 81-year-old former nurse, Nguyen Thi Thanh. In his memoir, McCain says she saved his life, fending off a baying mob at the edge of Hanoi’s West Lake, and treating his wounds, putting splints on his arms and leg, and giving him antibiotics.
"Some people were very angry," she recalled, "but I was a nurse, it was my responsibility."
She doesn’t move so fast these days, but has been closely watching the progress of the man she treated.
"Sometimes I watch him on television, and he’s got really big. He used to be so young, thin and handsome," she told me. "He used to be part of the war, but now he’s running for president, which is a good thing. I hope he is elected."
We also met one the men who had dragged a badly injured McCain out of the West Lake. He too recalls the anger, and the chants of "beat him, beat him," but forty-one years have mellowed Le Van Lua.
"I feel that he could be the winner," he now says of McCain. "If he wins, it’s good. Already through his dealings with the Vietnamese government, John McCain has really helped Vietnam.""
The article included two short video reports from Vietnam:
An Interview with McCain's Wartime Captors: