Biden pays tribute to “good friend” John McCain at the memorial in Hanoi that marks the site where the late senator’s plane was shot down before he spent 5.5 years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam

President Joe Biden paid tribute to John McCain on Monday with a visit to the memorial in Hanoi that marks the site where the late senator’s plane was shot down before he spent five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

Biden was joined by former Secretary of State and Senator John Kerry, who, like Biden, was one of McCain’s Senate colleagues but, unlike McCain, returned from Vietnam and was one of the faces of the US anti-war movement.

The president spent the morning with Vietnamese officials as the U.S.’s diplomatic status with the country was upgraded before making a final stop at the statue on the shores of Lake Trúc Bạch.

‘I miss him. “He was a good friend,” Biden said, adding, “It was important to me” when a reporter asked him why he made the stop part of his official visit.

A wreath with red, white and blue flowers was already placed in front of the statue, and a naval officer and a naval officer stood next to it.

President Joe Biden paid tribute to John McCain on Monday with a visit to the memorial in Hanoi that marks the site where the late senator’s plane was shot down before he spent five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam

Biden was joined by former Secretary of State and Senator John Kerry (right), who, like Biden, was one of McCain’s Senate colleagues but, unlike McCain, returned from service in Vietnam to be one of the faces of the US anti-war movement

John McCain is photographed on March 14, 1973, the day he was released from a prison camp in Hanoi after spending five and a half years as a prisoner of war at the hands of the North Vietnamese

The president touched the wreath and bowed his head.

He then shook hands with the officers and gave them challenge coins.

Biden also left a command coin there.

Kerry and Secretary of State Antony Blinken stayed nearby.

Vice President Kamala Harris had already visited the site in August 2021.

The president was on his way to the airport to fly to Alaska – to briefly commemorate 9/11 and refuel Air Force One – and then to D.C., where he ended his five-day, globe-trotting trip to Asia .

Biden met McCain in the 1970s as a military adviser to the young senator from Delaware and not long after the Arizona Republican suffered enormously at the hands of the Vietnamese.

McCain described the brutal treatment he endured as a prisoner in North Vietnam for five and a half years to US News & World Report in 1973which was re-released in 2008 during his presidential run.

President Joe Biden presented presidential challenge coins to Navy and Marine officers who stood at the John McCain Memorial in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Monday

A photo from 1967 shows Marine Air Maj. John McCain lying in bed in a Hanoi hospital after his plane was shot down

He recalled Oct. 26, 1967, when a Russian missile “the size of a telephone pole” tore off the wing of his Skyhawk dive bomber.

The force of being thrown out of the plane broke his right leg and both arms.

After nearly drowning from the weight of his equipment, he was kicked and spat at by some townspeople on the lakeshore and also shot in the groin with a bayonet before an ambulance took him to a prison.

There, McCain was interrogated and his medical care was withdrawn.

At one point, McCain agreed to an interview – the officials demanded a “psychotic torture” called “The Bug” – but a “totally incompetent” doctor called “Zorba” said the future senator had gone too far.

The North Vietnamese eventually helped McCain when they realized he was the son of a “grand admiral.”

McCain’s father, John S. McCain Jr., was the commander of the Pacific War.

“They assumed I was royalty or the ruling circle because my father had such a high military rank. “You have no idea how our democracy works,” McCain stated during his hospital stay.

An image of the sculpture depicting the capture of the late Senator John McCain in Hanoi, Vietnam

Still, he was treated horribly.

“They said I needed two surgeries on my leg, but because I had a ‘bad attitude,’ they wouldn’t give me another,” McCain recalls.

After his time in the hospital, McCain was transferred to a camp called The Plantation, where he was held in solitary confinement for more than two years.

He remembered that he could barely bathe and had a bucket with an ill-fitting lid as a toilet.

When McCain did get human interactions, it was the North Vietnamese who pressured him to confess to war crimes or asked him to lie and say openly that the treatment he received was humane.

In 1969, after three Americans were released from prisoner of war camps, President Richard Nixon began publicizing the horrific treatment that McCain said improved his life.

But he was still afflicted by the disease.

Vice President Kamala Harris paid tribute to Senator John McCain at the Hanoi statue on August 25, 2021, the three-year anniversary of his death

He remembered that at the end of 1969 he only weighed 55 or 50 kilos, had boils all over him and suffered from dysentery.

Nixon’s bombing of Saigon in 1972 led to McCain’s eventual release on March 14, 1973.

A few years later, Biden came into McCain’s life and even urged him to pursue a political career, even though they were members of different parties.

This particularly came to a head in 2008, when Biden was selected for the presidency over the Democratic nominee, Senator Barack Obama.

McCain led the Republican presidential nomination with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.

The Democrats would win this race while McCain remained in the Senate and remained in office until his death from brain cancer on August 25, 2018.

Biden gave his eulogy.

When Biden launched his own presidential campaign in the 2020 cycle – against Republican President Donald Trump – he received a key endorsement from Cindy McCain, the widow of John McCain.

Some of Trump’s comments about her late husband hurt and disturbed her.

Early in Trump’s presidential run, Trump mocked McCain over his prisoner-of-war status.

“I like people who haven’t been captured,” Trump said.

McCain, known as a political “outsider,” later retaliated against Trump by refusing to hold a Senate vote that would have allowed the Republican president to announce that he had repealed Obamacare.

Cindy McCain also got her revenge, helping Biden turn Arizona blue in the 2020 election.

She was rewarded with an ambassadorship and served as ambassador to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Agencies for two years.

The late senator’s daughter, Meghan McCain, now a columnist for DailyMail.com, at times voiced her support for Biden.

In April 2019, as Biden was about to announce his presidential campaign, Meghan defended him after a handful of women complained that he was too sensitive towards them.

“Joe Biden is one of the truly decent and compassionate men in all of American politics.” “He helped me through my father’s diagnosis, treatment and death more than all of my father’s other friends combined,” she tweeted. “I wish our politicians had more empathy, not less.”

But Meghan, a Republican like her father, has expressed complete disappointment with Biden’s performance as president.

“The man I once considered a friend and confidant has morphed into a weak and unreliable leader that I no longer recognize,” she wrote in her inaugural DailyMail.com column in September 2021, and has remained consistent since dissuade.