The Hanoi Hilton is a former colonial prison built and run by the French.
It mainly housed political prisoners. It is a gruesome place with a terrible history of what men can do to one another. The French were brutal. The Vietnamese continued this brutal tradition during the war.The first time I really heard about the Hanoi Hilton was on the radio in Alaska. While I worked as a tool repairman for Frontier Drywall Supply, I would listen to “Radio Reader with Dick Estelle.” One of the books he read in 1986 or 87 was “In Love and War” by James and Sybil Stockdale. James Stockdale was a pilot who flew off of aircraft carriers before the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. He later was a Vice Presidential Candidate in the late 1990s.
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution authorized LBJ to commit combat troops in South Vietnam without declaring war. Congress passed the resolution in answer to North Vietnamese attacks on US Navy ships in the Tonkin Gulf. It is no longer disputable that the attack never happened. The ‘reported’ attack was created by the Johnson administration simply so LBJ could have the political support to increase American military commitments to the South Vietnamese.
In American History there are many wars based on lies, events that never happened. This probably began with the Indian Wars, continued in the Spanish American War, Pearl Harbor, Vietnam, and now Iraq. There have been wars to create dictators friendly to American policy and then wars to remove once friendly dictators from the positions we put them in. It is neither a Republican nor Democrat thing. It is something that Americans have done for generations. It is also an American thing not to be too concerned about history, to forget how we have acted in warring with other nations, and to be shocked that others don’t see us as a peaceful country.
James Stockdale was shot down early in the war and taken to the Hanoi Hilton. His book documents his activities in the prison. The parts of the book that I heard were amazing. He describes how Vietnamese prison guards treated by the prisoners and how American prisoners worked to identify whom was in prison and the conditions in which they lived. He describes how prisoners would learn to play piano with the keys drawn in the dirt.
He also describes how prisoners would communicate with their own form of code. Prisoners would sweep in code and they would tap on the walls and pipes in constant contact with each other even though they rarely saw one another. Stockdale actually was able to sneak information to the CIA in the letters that he wrote to his wife. Other prisoners were able to get information by blinking in Morse code while they were filmed ‘confessing’ to war crimes. It is one book I would like to read on my own one day. In addition to James Stockdale, the Hanoi Hilton was also home
to John McCain for several years. After he crashed in the lake and was nearly beaten to death by the people who rescued him from the lake, the guards continued to torture him in prison. The reason he can’t raise his arms above his torso is a direct result of the torture he suffered in this prison. The North Vietnamese claimed that the American POWs were mere criminals because the US had never declared war. They further claimed that that lack of a declaration of war freed the North Vietnamese guards to treat the prisoners without regard to the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners.
Its ironic that most of the grounds of the original prison is now covered with a new 5 star hotel. There is a thin slice of the prison that remains.
The front gate, some of the glass-topped stone walls, some of the cells and a courtyard. The prison is now a museum piece commemorating the prisons era in colonial times. It highlights the atrocities committed by the French. There are a couple of rooms dedicated to the American Flyers who were held in the north. They even have a flight suit; reputed to be McCain’s on display along with photos of him with several Vietnamese still in the lake where he crashed.Diep told us that the American prisoners called it, “The Hanoi Hilton because of the good treatment that they received there.” I didn’t correct him. Sarcasm doesn’t translate very well. The Japanese don’t realize that you can make any word mean almost anything just by the way you say it in different contexts. Diep isn’t entirely wrong though. The North Vietnamese provided much more for the prisoners of war than they provided for many of their soldiers in the south. The soldiers in the south were instructed to stay in 1954, to avoid contact with people, provide for themselves, live off of the land and await the next conflict. Those soldiers got nothing from the north, and then in 1968 the north urged them to attack. They were wiped out. In that sense, the American prisoners were treated better than the north’s own soldiers. Diep didn’t tell us about the torture.
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