HOA LO PRISON—THE ‘HANOI HILTON’

Hanoi is a marvelous, old-world city—quite literally.  Founded in 1010, this year it celebrates one thousand years of existence.

Those thousand years left a rich stylistic heritage among the architecture, and as a cultural center, there are many buildings of beauty and splendor.  The Temple of Literature; site of the oldest university in Vietnam 1070 for example. One Pillar Pagoda and Flag Tower of Hanoi are also standout structures.

Some buildings, however, are not.

Hoa Lo Prison, built by the French in 1896 to house political prisoners, is a stark, crumbling, yellowish building which still has the French name ‘Maison Centrale’—literally, the central house—emblazoned above the doorway.  Perhaps it is because the Vietnamese seem obsessed with memorializing their punishments at French hands rather than owning up to their own treatment of American prisoners of war during the Vietnam war.

Or perhaps it is because their own term for it, Hoa Lo, means ‘hell hole’.

In any case, to Americans, it became known by the sarcastic nickname ‘Hanoi Hilton’ and was the site of much inhuman treatment of our captured soldiers.  The first American to be held there was Lieutenant, Junior Grade Everett Alvarez Jr., shot down on August 5, 1964.  Of course, the most famous is Senator and 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain, whose flight suit is displayed in what remains of the original building, used as a museum, not a prison. No mention is made of the torture he endured because he refused to be released as a propaganda tool once they realized he was the son of a four-star Admiral.  In fact, using an odd sense of humor, a nearby display maintains that accommodations and treatment at Hoa Lo were so humanitarian that the term Hanoi Hilton was meant literally by the Americans.

There’s an old saying:  History is written by the victors.