Hanoi, Vietnam – 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, 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 – “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 a guillotine used to dispatch death-row inmates during French rule.
“The French, like the Americans, invaded Vietnam,” Giang says. “I am not proud of what may have happened to Americans here, but it is certainly no worse than what Vietnamese prisoners suffered at the hands of the French.”
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. 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. “…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.”
Encased in glass is the flight suit of Hoa Lo’s most famous former resident: Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who was 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.
