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Vietnam paid tribute to John McCain on Sunday, hailing him as a friend who “fought for peace.”

The six-term senator who died on Saturday evening at 81 was captured in 1967 when his Navy aircraft was shot down over Hanoi’s Truc Bach Lake during a mission.

He spent over five years as a prisoner of war in a jail known as the “Hanoi Hilton,” where he was tortured.

Vietnamese residents remembered the maverick by placing flowers at the McCain Memorial on the shores of the Truc Bach Lake.

The sculpture built in his honor in 1967, and renovated in the 1980s and 90s, depicts an airman with his hands above his head in front of a broken plane wing.

“His contribution to the Vietnam-US relationship will be remembered,” Le Ma Luong, the former director of the Vietnam Military History Museum in Hanoi, who met McCain soon after 2010, told Reuters.

Luong remembered McCain as an articulate and professional man. He said he felt sorry that Vietnam had been unable to find a ring McCain’s wife had given him, that he lost when he was dragged from the lake over 50 years ago.

One resident, Nguyen Van Trung, told the Associated Press McCain “fought for peace in many countries, including Vietnam.”

Another resident, Hoang Thi Trang, said McCain, “was not only a companion in resolving postwar issues, but also a friend.”

The US Embassy in Hanoi announced Sunday it planned to launch a fellowship named the McCain/Kerry Fellowship to support a “young Vietnamese leader committed to public service” to travel to the US on a study tour every year.

With Post wires

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