Kamala Harris brought flowers to John McCain monument to honor him | Fact check

Gabrielle Settles, USA TODAY
·3 min read
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Kamala Harris brought flowers to John McCain monument to honor him | Fact check

The claim: Kamala Harris brought flowers to McCain monument in Vietnam to honor his captors

A July 7 Facebook video (direct link, archive link) shows Vice President Kamala Harris laying flowers at a memorial. A narrator claims the memorial celebrates those who shot down a plane piloted by the late Sen. John McCain during the Vietnam War.

“What the know-nothing millennials who set Kamala’s schedule didn’t know, is that the site that she’s laying those flowers at?" says the narrator. "It’s a celebration of those who shot McCain’s plane out of the sky and then captured him, delivering him to the VC for his long stay and torture at the Hanoi Hilton."

The Facebook post's caption asserts this was an intentional decision by Harris: “You think it was a mistake but it wasn’t.”

The post was shared over 2,000 times on Facebook.

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Our rating: False

Harris brought the flowers to the monument to honor McCain, who she referred to as a "hero." While the monument may have initially been built to celebrate McCain's 1967 capture, McCain admirers have laid flowers at the monument for years in a showing of respect to the late senator, and a pejorative reference to McCain was dropped from the monument in 2015.

Harris praised McCain after placing flowers

McCain, then a naval aviator, was flying a bombing mission over North Vietnam in 1967 when he was shot down and taken prisoner. He spent more than five years as a prisoner of war before he was released.

A small monument was later erected on the banks of Truc Bach Lake in Hanoi, Vietnam, to memorialize his capture by the Vietnamese. It is unclear whether the monument was intended to celebrate the downing of McCain's plane or simply mark the spot where it happened.

McCain himself visited the monument during a 2009 trip returning to Hanoi.

“Why they erected it and the significance it has to them, I never quite figured it out,” CBS reported McCain saying.

Despite this, many left flowers at the monument in honor of McCain following his death in 2018, Reuters reported. The footage shared in the Facebook post shows Harris laying flowers at the monument in 2021 during a visit to Vietnam.

Harris's comments make clear her intent was to honor the senator, contrary to the post's claim.

“John McCain was an extraordinary American hero,” Harris said at the monument, according to The Hill. “I was honored and privileged to serve with him for a short time in the United States Senate. John McCain, he loved our country."

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The monument was updated in 2015 to correct the spelling of McCain's name and rank and remove the Vietnamese word "TÊN," which was originally included in reference to McCain on the monument, according to the website of Ted Osius, a former U.S. ambassador to Vietnam.

"TÊN is a classifier for despicable individuals such as enemies, thieves, robbers, cheaters and rapists,” Osius wrote. “The Vietnamese language has a group of classifiers that have built-in positive or negative connotations, which can be added or dropped to express the speaker’s attitude toward the subject modified by the classifier. After TÊN was dropped, the text was no longer marred by the speaker’s bias against the subject.”

USA TODAY reached out to the user who shared the post for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Harris laid flowers at McCain monument in tribute to him | Fact check