After roaming the Old Quarter the day before, we decided to set out on day two to explore the darker side of Hanoi. For the better part of a decade the city was relentlessly bombed by B-52s and because of it any small victory against the American forces is glorified.

Basically day two became the John McCain Experience…

You simply couldn’t avoid the fact. En route to one of the pagodas, we passed Truc Bach Lake (the lake where he parachuted in) and found a memorial commemorating the anti aircraft gunners that shot his plane down along the sidewalk.

Further down the road we arrived at Hoa Lo Prison, aka the “Hanoi Hilton” a short time after lunch.

Understand that visiting a prison under any circumstances is haunting. But even this paled in comparison to the trip to the county jail that our school sent us on to scare us straight as teens. Within minutes of setting foot inside the temperature dropped. Ordinarily on a hot day in a place like Hanoi this would be welcomed, but such was not the case.

The pictures that M took are quite good, but at the same time they really can’t capture the feeling of wandering the corridors while trying to imagine the hell of really being there.

Escape route…

A tree grows in the executioner’s garden..

Solitary…

Throughout our travels we’ve often faced the enemies of our past, but perhaps here more than anywhere else did we face the understanding of what our boys endured. The isolation, fear, and suffering is not something to be trivialized, so whether or not you like John McCain as a presidential candidate, you have to give credit to the man for having survived this ordeal along with so many of the other POWs.

M Ponders: Hoa Lo was truly haunting. As most of the prison is open for viewing including many of the cells that both Vietnamese and foreign prisoners were kept we were given a glance at what life might have been like. It is important to note that the focus of the prison as a museum was not on how foreign prisoners were kept, but instead how the French used the prison against the locals. There was a room devoted to the POWs and their lives there but much like the other war museums we visited in Vietnam it was clearly a very sanitized version of events. Though revisionist history is possible, it is important to realize both sides are likely equally guilty on that point for this particular historical incident and thus I was there simply as an observer, not an American.

That said, having seen the evidence of torture, starvation and cruelty it is amazing that anyone survived it. Though my political leanings are clearly not a secret, I was left to really wonder how McCain can be a supporter of the Iraq war. Given the US does not have a clean record in human rights overseas during war, I am rather shocked that a man who has endured such suffering could support a situation that could lead to others suffering the same fate.

I am quite sure he has reasoning behind his views, but I still find it rather impossible to understand. I can also hope that what happened in Hoa Lo and other such places around the world is something that we learn from and never is repeated again.