“John F. Kennedy [Jr.] crashed in July of 1999 and we were at my commanding officer’s house that night. People had been searching for days,” Republican congressional candidate Hung Cao told National Review.
“We were able to recover the body of, really, America’s son, and lay him to rest,” Cao said, describing the salvage operation that recovered the former president’s son.
Prior to running for Congress in Virginia, Cao salvaged planes and ships around the world, including that of Kennedy’s, as part the Navy’s Special Operations unit.
“I’ve done many salvages in my lifetime, bringing up planes, tanks, just things at the bottom of the ocean,” Cao said. “The first part of anything that happens in the United States starts with salvage, so we can bring back the American spirit.”
Cao mentioned the salvage operations after Pearl Harbor and 9/11, when the materials from the damaged ships and the World Trade Center were refurbished, saying, “We start with salvage so we can bring back the American spirit, to show that we can’t be held down.”
Cao was the operations officer in the mission to recover Kennedy’s plane, meaning he was in “charge of really running the entire operation” at Martha’s Vineyard to recover Kennedy; his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and her sister Lauren Bessette.
“Within twelve hours of the operation, we found the plane,” Cao said, adding that divers began diving the morning after the plane was found.
Once all the divers were “dirty,” meaning they had been diving for an extended amount of time with “surface decompression,” they weren’t allowed to dive for another 24 hours, he said. That’s when Cao, along with another diver, was summoned to retrieve the plane himself.
“We go down there, we rig up the plane, and the ship has its own crane that will pull it up from there,” he said, describing the operation as “sad.”
“It was just a family that was mourning so many losses, and we were able to put away an American icon. The iconic picture of John F. Kennedy saluting his saluting his father’s coffin as it came by — every American remembers that.”
Cao escaped Vietnam shortly before the fall of Saigon and served as a captain in the U.S. Navy in Special Operations for 25 years. He “deployed in combat to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia serving alongside Special Forces and SEAL Teams,” according to his website.
Cao won the Republican nomination in the primaries and is now set to battle Democrat incumbent Jennifer Wexton in Virginia’s tenth district, which gave 49 percent of the vote to Glenn Youngkin in last year’s gubernatorial election.