Hanoi: The Prison They Named After a Hotel

The prison’s history before the American POWs arrived is longer and less celebrated in the exhibit. The French colonial administration built Hoa Lo in 1896 to hold Vietnamese political prisoners, and it held them in significant numbers until the end of French rule in 1954. Among those imprisoned there were many of the figures who subsequently led the independence movement, including Nguyen Van Cu, who became General Secretary of the Indochinese Communist Party, and Le Duan, who led the country after Ho Chi Minh’s death in 1969 and oversaw the final military campaigns that ended the war in 1975. The French called it Maison Centrale. The Vietnamese called it a fiery furnace. The museum’s framing of the American POW period is careful about the narrative it presents, emphasising the humane treatment of prisoners in a way that the accounts of some of those prisoners do not entirely corroborate, which is the nature of institutions telling their own stories.

John McCain was shot down over Truc Bach Lake in Hanoi in October 1967, his A-4 Skyhawk hit by a surface-to-air missile during a bombing raid. He ejected at low altitude, broke both arms and a leg on landing in the lake, and was beaten by the crowd that pulled him out before being taken to Hoa Lo. His flight suit and helmet are in the museum, displayed under glass. He spent five and a half years as a prisoner, much of it in solitary confinement after he refused early release offered because his father was a senior naval officer. The museum presents this last detail with some ambiguity. The suit is real.

The war itself is called, by the Vietnamese, the American War, which is a designation that shifts the frame of reference considerably. From the Vietnamese perspective, the conflict of 1955 to 1975 was the second of a series of wars of independence: the first against France, the second against the United States and its South Vietnamese ally. The French Indochina War ended in 1954 with the Geneva Accords, which divided Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel and stipulated elections in 1956 to reunify the country. The elections never happened, because the United States and the Diem government in the South calculated that Ho Chi Minh would win them. The American military involvement that filled the subsequent twenty years, at a cost of roughly three million Vietnamese lives and fifty-eight thousand American ones, was an attempt to prevent the reunification that the 1954 agreements had intended to produce through democratic means.

Hanoi in 2011 carries the war less visibly than you might expect. The city was bombed extensively during the American campaign, the residential quarters of the old quarter among the targets, and the marks of that bombing are mostly gone beneath reconstruction and the particular Vietnamese attitude toward the past that seems less interested in preserving its wounds than in getting on with what comes next. The Doi Moi economic reforms of 1986, which introduced market mechanisms into the socialist economy, produced a growth rate that has continued, with interruptions, ever since, and the Hanoi of 2011 is a city of scooters and street food and small business energy that bears little visual resemblance to the city that appeared in the war photographs.

The taxi incident happened on the way to a Pizza Hut, which is either an embarrassing detail or an honest one and I have chosen to treat it as honest. Jonas wanted pizza. We hailed a cab. The meter was running at double speed, visibly, the numbers climbing at a rate that bore no relationship to the distance. I offered the driver the correct fare. He took the approximate sum I had in my hand and then hit my sunglasses. This was unexpected. The sunglasses survived, having been tested across two years of snowboarding falls and apparently equal to the challenge. The driver left. Every other taxi driver I used in Vietnam was fine. One bad encounter in a country is a data point, not a conclusion.

After a few days in Hanoi we took the overnight train south to Ho Chi Minh City, which most people still call Saigon, a usage the city’s government officially discourages and most of its residents ignore. From there, with no time to spare, straight onto a bus for Cambodia.