Col. Trần Trọng Duyệt, the man who was in charge of the North Vietnamese prison where John McCain was held as a POW for six years during the Vietnam War, offered his condolences to Việt Nam News upon learning of the senator’s passing.

Said Duyệt:  “At that time I liked him personally for his toughness and strong stance. Later on, when he became a U.S. Senator, he and Senator John Kerry greatly contributed to promote Việtnam-U.S. relations so I was very fond of him.”

“The United States is rescinding a decades-old ban on sales of lethal military equipment to Vietnam, President Obama announced at a news conference in Hanoi on Monday, ending one of the last legal vestiges of the Vietnam War,” the New York Times reports.

“The United States has long made lifting the embargo contingent on Vietnam’s improving its human rights record, and recently administration officials had hinted that the ban could be removed partly in response to China’s buildup in the South China Sea. But Mr. Obama portrayed the decision as part of the long process of normalizing relations between the two countries after the Vietnam War.”