Hanoi Hilton

Nobody noticed I wore my Jane Fonda mug shot t-shirt to Hoa Lo prison, more commonly known as the Hanoi Hilton.  Little of the notorious structure remains other than the front gate.

Thien, our 38-year old guide, emphasized that the French built the prison to torture Vietnamese political prisoners decades before the Americans arrived.  Thien's father, three years older than me, was a veteran of the American war, as was mine who served in Saigon at the age of 50.  I told Thien he was the main reason I had made the trip.  Even though his father had been wounded, he responded "In Viet Nam we look to the future, not the past."

The displays in the museum contrasted the harsh French cruelty to the Vietnamese with the way the latter treated American POWs.  

Vietnamese women weren't exempt from French torture.  I remember my father telling me that he feared nothing more than a woman on motorbike tossing a hand grenade into the street where he was walking, a fairly common tactic of the guerrilla (and non-gender specific)  warfare that eventually forced the US to withdraw in humiliated defeat.

Few prisoners of either sex survived their five-year sentences.

Even for someone now as appalled by America's involvement in Southeast Asia as I, it was hard to separate Communist propaganda from the truth.  Did the North Vietnamese really provide all POWs with cigarette rations and Vick's cough drops?

A Canadian traveller in our G Adventures tour group questioned my eagerness to find any John McCain memorabilia.  "Who cares?" he asked.  "I do," I replied with the long dormant pride of an Army brat.  "He ran for President of the United States after serving his country with distinction."

But a pair of sandals fabricated from a rubber tire made me shiver with embarrassment. My apolitical 15-year-old self refused to wear anything so unfashionable when Dad brought home a pair as a souvenir in 1968.