With a metallic clank, the bolts on the black wooden doors of Hoa Lo prison pull back at 1:30 p.m., ushering visitors inside the place known to a generation of Vietnam veterans as the “Hanoi Hilton.”
The prison earned its darkly comic name for the equally dark hospitality shown to its American occupants during the Vietnam War. Today, the remnants of Hoa Lo are part of a museum in Hanoi, and a glimpse into the grisly past is available for a 35-cent entrance fee. Group discounts available.
Among those to enter on this day is Marcie Rubin, a college student from Long Island, for whom the Vietnam War was a brief chapter in high school history class. She has come with her brother Craig to peer into the dank recesses of Hoa Lo – or “fiery furnace” in Vietnamese. At a cordoned-off torture dungeon, she stops and stares stoically.
“I guess I wanted to see this place to get a better understanding of what American soldiers have gone through, are still going through in Iraq. I feel I need to understand it,” she says, fixing on the iron doors of the dungeon, described on a sign as “the hell of hells.”
“But it’s not something that’s easy to understand.”
A place of torture and suffering for almost a century – first for Vietnamese political prisoners and thieves during French colonial times, then for American troops during the Vietnam War – Hoa Lo has become a hot tourist attraction in a profoundly changed Vietnam. It draws not only overseas tourists but curious locals as well.
Giang Phu and Nhung Thi Tian, 23-year-old college students in Hanoi, are in front of its in-house guillotine, used to dispatch death row inmates during French rule.
“The French, like the Americans, invaded Vietnam,” Giang says, in a room filled with the smell of wood and cold, rusting metal. She rubs the goose bumps forming on her slender arms.
“I am not proud of what may have happened to Americans here,” she says, “but it is certainly no worse than what Vietnamese prisoners suffered at the hands of the French. After all, this is our country. We did not ask to be attacked by foreign powers.”
Nearby, Rebecca Hess, 28, the daughter of a Vietnam veteran who served one year in the war, could not tear her gaze from the rows of tiny cells where prisoners were shackled on wooden bunks for days at a time. She came to Vietnam from her home in New Jersey to adopt a 6-month-old Vietnamese girl, she says. But she came to the prison for her father.
“People ask me how he feels about the adoption, and I’m happy to say he is as excited as everyone else in our family,” she says. “The war is over for him. But of course, being in this place, I think of him and what his situation might have been like if he had become a POW. But it’s the past. With my daughter, my family has a new future with Vietnam.”
Most of the prison was knocked down in 1993, when investors from Singapore wanted to make way for luxury apartments, shops and office space. The rest was polished, buffed and opened to the public. The quarters where American prisoners were housed, officials here say, were part of the sold-off parcels.
Today, most of the museum is dedicated to the memory of Vietnamese freedom fighters who resisted the French in the early 20th century. Oil paintings depict Vietnamese national heroes being tortured to death for their alleged crimes.
The legacy of the several hundred American POWs housed here from 1964 to 1973 is contained in two small rooms toward the outer edge of the prison museum. Propaganda photos underscore Vietnamese claims that U.S. prisoners were treated with utmost dignity. American soldiers are depicted receiving gifts from guards and attending Christian religious services.
Encased in glass is the flight suit of Hoa Lo’s most famous former resident: Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who has written of his horrific years of daily interrogations and torture here. Captured after being shot down in his A-4 Skyhawk while on a bombing run of Hanoi on Oct. 26, 1967, McCain spent two years in solitary confinement. Like other former POWs who have revisited this place in search of closure or catharsis, he came back here in 2000, the 25th anniversary of the war’s end.
Lingering in front of McCain’s flight suit is Rep. Ed Case, D-Hawaii, who says he is on a family trip. Case lost last month’s primary for a Senate seat, based in part on his general support for the Iraq war.
“I needed to see this,” he says, “especially now, when American leaders are all thinking about the decisions made in Iraq.”
“I know Senator McCain and others who became POWs,” he continues. “My generation in particular still has a hard time coming to grips with that era. It sometimes seems that the Vietnamese have managed to move on better than we have. They show us no bitterness anymore.
“Will that be true in Iraq?” he asks. “It is hard to even venture a guess. You have to hope so, but it’s hard to see that answer right now.”
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