Doing Time in Vietnam

I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I don't pay a lot of attention to history. If it happened longer than 10 minutes ago and wasn't reported in People magazine, chances are I'm not going to win that round of Trivial Pursuit. But when I go to a place where there is an important story about the people and culture, I like to know about that story.

I obviously knew a war took place involving America and Vietnam, but I couldn't have told you who we were fighting for or against and why. (I guarantee my dad and my Uncle Bill just let out simultaneous groans of disappointment as they were reading this). By the time we touched down in Hanoi after a 2 hour flight and a thorough Lonely Planet history lesson, I was feeling pretty dejected about what went down at the hands of America and a little bit nervous about how the people of Vietnam were feeling about that now. While I didn't have a chance to really dig into the national psyche with the locals, nobody egged us or called us names that we understood, so I took that as a good sign. What is clear from conversation, artwork and history itself is that the Vietnamese are incredibly resilient and proud of how hard they've fought centuries of invaders to finally claim their own land and government.

Hoa Lo Prison, aka "The Hanoi Hilton"

Given my aforementioned historical ignorance, I also didn't know much about the Hoa Lo Prison before we strolled in there. The prison was built by the French during their occupation in the late 1800s to show the Vietnamese revolutionaries who's boss. It was later used to imprison captured POWs, including John McCain, who spent more than 5 years there. It's the kind of place where you can feel the energy of torture and pain in the walls, similar to what I remember feeling when visiting concentration camps in Europe.

A prison cell at Hoa . Photo cred: Dylan

As we were looking at the photo of McCain's capture, an American man nearby started chatting with us. It turns out that his father was also a POW and spent 6 years at Hoa Lo. His first 22 months there were spent in isolation. 22 months in isolation. In a cell with no natural light with his feet shackled at one end, where the floor sloped downward so that his head was always filled with blood, an added layer of torture. These are things you can read about, I'm sure, but hearing it from the son of this man, while standing in the very place it happened, made the story of this prison and the war particularly vivid. He remembers being a 12-year old boy and finding out that his dad's plane had been shot down over a rice field. 6 years later, he found out his father was alive when he was released. He's spent a considerable part of his life researching and documenting the stories of the POWs at Hoa Lo. I don't know this man's name, but he left a deeper impression on my historical knowledge than any middle school history teacher I had.

The photo of McCain's capture

I have a feeling when my kids get to the lesson on the Vietnam War in school at some point, they're going to retain a lot more than I did, purely for having the sensory context of standing in the places that these events took place. They might even have the good sense to raise their hands and say something like "...actually, in Vietnam, they call it the American War".

What the Kids Noticed...
(Tyler) I was scared to look in the doors because I didn't know if there was a real skeleton or plastic. Any type of skeleton scares me except paper ones or fake ones. I was about to take a picture through the hole in a door and then I saw a head in the phone. It was so creepy. The prison is impossible to escape except some people did but they didn't tell us how. How did they get out of the door and into the sewer? I think they went into the sewer under their bed. Only really skinny guys could do it. I feel like the prisoners must have been bored and painful. Bored because there was nothing to do except talk and painful because their feet were trapped in a cuff most of the day.

The sewer that a handful of prisoners escaped through

(Dylan) We went to a prison. We saw statues of people in the prison. It looked painful. Some of the women had babies when they were in prison. They stayed in cuffs all day. They didn't get to eat a lot. They were very hungry. The prison guards did not treat them well. They had to dress in certain clothes and there were different types of clothes. They looked bored because they didn't have anything to do except talk to each other and lay down. It looked scary.

(Max) I saw the thing where they cut off your head (the guillotine). And on TV I saw a house that can explode (a display on Americans bombing Hanoi during the war). And we saw beds (where prisoners slept). There were people who escaped through an underground thing (a sewer). So basically people broke the bars and they escaped. The bars were kind of like fences.

Guillotine