News-Info-Alerts

Re: Hao Lo - 2002

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: July 09, 2002

Travleogue on Vietnam 2002 - Hao Lo Prison excusion -

"Even more well-known than the opera house - at least among foreign visitors - is Hao Lo Prison Museum, the "Hanoi Hilton." The museum is as sobering as the opera house is uplifting. Most of the once-substantial complex was demolished in recent years to clear land for one of the city's few highrises. The museum occupies what remains of the former prison, built by the French in 1896 to tame (and, not infrequently, torture) Vietnamese rebels.

The prison walls are topped with broken glass and electric wire. Inside, cellblocks are carefully restored. Leg irons, hole-in-the-floor toilets, basins once used by the French for forcing prisoners' heads underwater and guillotines used for removing Vietnamese prisoners' heads are exhibited.

One room of this sizable museum is devoted to Americans imprisoned here during the Vietnam War. A simple cot, wooden desk, pairs of prisoners' sneakers and sandals, concrete floors and small windows adorn the room, along with wall-mounted photos of POWs. Among the latter are vintage mug shots of Sen. John McCain, who was shot down during a bombing raid over Hanoi in 1967, and Pete Peterson, who became the first U.S. ambassador to socialist Vietnam in 1995, also captured in 1967. Understandably, both men look grim and exhausted.

Also mounted on the wall is a sign: "American pilots suffered no revenge once they were captured and detained. Instead, they were well-treated, with adequate, food, clothing and shelter." This statement doesn't wash with McCain and other POWs, who say they were tortured.

I hurried past the small souvenir shop, buying nothing, eager to leave. All told, the museum seems to me broadly emblematic of America's relations with Vietnam: We represent just one room in the prison that is Vietnam's history, the long and tormented history of a nation so often at war.

David Armstrong, Chronicle Staff Writer"