During our recent trip to Vietnam, we visited the Hỏa Lò Prison in Hanoi. Of all the wonderful things and experiences during this trip I could, and eventually will, report about, why am I picking the visit to a prison as the first topic?

Hỏa Lò was a prison in Hanoi originally used by the French colonists for political prisoners, and later by North Vietnam for U.S. prisoners of war during the Vietnam War. In America we know it as the Hanoi Hilton. The prison is a museum today, run by the Vietnamese government. Here is my entry ticket:

The exhibits spend much time and effort on the period of the French colonial suppression of the Vietnamese people and the brutality of the colonists against dissidents. The French behaved like dictators do: they built prison camps and sent those that didn’t think like them to those camps and subjected them to terrible atrocities, including starvation, torture and eventual death. The prison also has a section about the American POWs during the Vietnam war, but it is somewhat smaller and less focused. This is not surprising. The prison was used by French against the Vietnamese, but later by the Vietnamese against the Americans. You want to focus on what they did to you, not what you did to them.

One of our first guides was a young woman in her thirties who took us past the prison on a city tour and mentioned that the prison was used to detain American pilots. She actually said that “Vietnam took good care of those prisoners during the war.” This happened early during our trip, before it had sunk in that I was in a communist country where the people could definitely not speak freely, and in particular tour guides were likely briefed on what they should say about controversial topics. I quickly realized that I needed to remember that our guides were young people, born decades after the war, in a controlled society. It was not their fault that the opinions they needed parrot didn’t always align with the reality as I knew it. Arguing or debating points of view would not make sense in that context, so I learned how to listen carefully and digest the information later.

To illustrate my point, here is a sign in the exhibit about female prisoners. Pay attention to the tone of the message:

A visit to the prison was not part of the agenda of our trip. When we learned how close we were, we asked our guide to make room on the schedule, and we squeezed in a 90-minute visit to the museum. For me it was one of the highlights of a two-week visit in Vietnam, albeit a depressing one.

This is because I was always very interested in the lore of the Hanoi Hilton. Many books have been written about it, and one that stands out for me is John McCain’s autobiography Faith of my Fathers, which he wrote in 1999 when he first ran for president. I read it in 2008 when McCain ran for president (again) against Obama. Here is my review. I gave it four stars.

There is a lake in the heart of Hanoi, known as Hoan Kiem Lake. It’s also known as Sword Lake, Lake of the Returned Sword, or Tả Vọng Lake. In the book, McCain describes how he got shot down over Hanoi and as his bad luck would have it, that’s where he crashed. He almost drowned before some fishermen rescued him.

When we arrived in Hanoi, we stayed at the Pan Pacific Hotel, which you can see in the photo below,  and it happens to be right on the shores of that lake.

It was eerie for me to walk along this lake in the morning after breakfast, remembering the story of McCain’s capture.

Here is an excerpt of my book review:

With two broken arms and one broken leg, he was beaten and tortured during the first few months, without any adequate medical care and only minimal and eventually botched operations on his leg. His arms were never set properly. Several times his arms and legs were refractured when he was beaten. He spent most of his years in captivity on crutches, due to his bad right leg. Medical care was withheld as a torture method. The prisoners were tortured initially to obtain military information about the initiatives of the war, from the newly captured prisoners that would have such information. Later they were tortured to extract video taped footage to be used for propaganda. The Vietnamese wanted to show the world how injust the war was by turning public opinion globally and in the US against the war. This could be done by having American officers make anti-war and unpatriotic statements, supposedly by their own volition. This hardly ever happened. The code of honor required that the prisoners endured terrible torture without ever breaking.

Prisoners were not allowed to communicate. They were kept in solitary confinement for months and sometimes years on end. When caught communicating, they were beaten for days and punished by being thown into squalid cells of 6 foot by 3 foot and no ventilation or sanitary measures for months. Health care and nutrition was completely inadequate, and some prisoners died from disease. At one time McCain describes being punished by standing, facing a corner, for more than two days. When he finally collapsed, he was beaten again for not following the rules.

I highly recommend reading Faith of my Fathers to anyone wanting to understand the man John McCain and the experiences of a prisoner of war. If you only read one chapter, read the one about “John McCain’s Towel.” I will do that myself, now that I have been in the Hanoi Hilton, where the ghosts of the American prisoners from over 50 years ago still haunt the walls, and where I saw the infamous towel, as part of the gear issued to the prisoners, in this exhibit:

Above you see some of the gear given to the prisoners. On the right side you can see the towel. Since I knew its significance when I was there, I took a close up of that exhibit:

Here are some additional exhibits about individual prisoners. The one about McCain is a larger one, of course, due to his notoriety as a presidential candidate later in his life.

Here is a picture of McCain when we visited Vietnam in 2000 and toured the prison where he was captive and tortured for almost seven years.

Here is a picture of the beds of the American prisoners.

In contrast, the image below shows how Vietnamese prisoners were shackled in endless rows during the colonial period. Remember, the crime of these men was that they didn’t think the Vietnamese people should be ruled by the French.

Here is a typical cell in the Hanoi Hilton.

Below is a section of the prison wall from the inside. On top there is barbed wire, sometimes electric wire, but the wall is also covered with shards of glass cemented along the top.

This is the same wall from the outside.

The prison is in the middle of the city, surrounded by the hustle and bustle of Hanoi. If you didn’t know what you are looking at, you would walk right past.

On the other side of the wall you find hotels, little shops, cafes and restaurants.

I wonder what it must have been like to be imprisoned for years behind these walls hearing and feeling the pulsating heart of the city all around you?