CHAPTER 39


Vietnam: Lessons in a Prison

In 2012, I was asked to participate in efforts to help victims of land mines and other unexploded war ordnance in Southeast Asia. Until then, I’d turned down invitations to join boards and other such activities because I was already overextended in my work with Dream Change, the Pachamama Alliance, and speaking engagements. However, this felt like another opportunity to redeem my past.

The ordnance was the result of the Vietnam War. Had it not been for that war, I would not have spent eight years avoiding the draft and probably would not have completed college, been recruited by the NSA, joined the Peace Corps, lived in the Amazon and the Andes, or become an EHM. Vietnam was also a symbol of the places where EHMs and jackals had failed and the US military had taken over — a sort of harbinger of the current situation in the Middle East. Although it had played a very significant role in my life, I’d never been to Vietnam. I was thrilled to accept an invitation to travel to meetings there in March 2013.

Late in the afternoon of my last day in Hanoi, after all the meetings were over, I decided to visit the museum of the Ha Lò Prison. Once known as the “Hanoi Hilton,” it was the place where many US soldiers had been held captive. A woman who had attended the meetings, “Judy,” who was about my age and whose life had also been impacted by the Vietnam War, decided to join me.

When Judy and I arrived at Ha Lò, we were disappointed to see that it had just closed for the day; we were told, through hand gestures delivered by a non–English speaker, to return another time.

I’d twisted my knee and was using a cane. Now my knee started acting up. I sat down on a nearby bench and laid my cane across my lap.

Judy sat down next to me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you wanted to go inside.” Then she perked up. “We can come tomorrow morning, before the Bangkok flight.”

“It’s Sunday,” I replied. “I wonder if it’s even open.”

Just then, a man in a khaki uniform sauntered over to a desk under an archway near the doorway and sat down.

“I’ll ask.” I planted my cane in the ground, rose cautiously, and limped to him. “Excuse me,” I said.

He glared at me. “No speak English.”

Not willing to be deterred by his gruff manner, I smiled sweetly, gestured toward the door, and, waving my cane in the air, pointed at Judy. “Tomorrow,” I said, “Sunday . . .”

He pushed back his chair, quickly rose to his feet, and saluted me. He pointed at my cane and at Judy, who had wandered over to stand beside me. “Missus,” he said, and bowed to her. Then he grabbed his own leg, made a face as though in pain, shook his head sadly, uttered a sucking sound, released his leg, and motioned for us to follow him.

I looked at Judy. We both shrugged.

He motioned again, more vigorously, and said something in Vietnamese. We followed him through a small, sunlit courtyard to a large metal door. He unlocked it and gestured for us to go inside.

The interior was dimly lit. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that we were standing in a corridor with dark cells off to the side. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a Vietnamese bill worth about ten dollars. He pointed at it, at Judy, and then at me and held out two fingers. I had no idea what the entrance fee was, but twenty dollars for the two of us seemed reasonable.

“I’ll bet he thinks you’re a former inmate,” Judy said, “and I’m your wife.”

That struck me. “I think you’re right.” This was an act of compassion. He thought I wanted to show my wife a place that had robbed me of years of my life and had left me crippled.

After I paid him, he led us down the corridor and into a large room. A huge apparatus loomed out of the shadows, like some prehistoric monster. I took it for a crane of some sort. However, I quickly realized my mistake; this dark contraption was a different sort of monster. I just stood there gawking in disbelief at what I now realized was a guillotine.

“My God!” Judy exclaimed. She pointed at an inscription on the wall.

In English, it explained that Ha Lò had originally been a French prison, built in the late 1800s, and that the French had used the guillotine to decapitate hundreds of Vietnamese. As I wandered around the room, I continued to read explanations posted on the walls. This entire section of the prison had once held Vietnamese women as prisoners of the French. Hundreds had been tortured and raped here. A cutaway in one of the walls exposed a solitary confinement cell, about the size of a doghouse. A life-size, shackled manikin sat hunched over on the cement floor, crammed into the small space like a doll in a box.

I froze to that spot, staring at the manikin and wondering what motivated human beings to do such horrible things to each other. How could the French, who prided themselves on their art, their literature — their humanity — have been so cruel? What had driven them to erect a guillotine? To rape and torture Vietnamese women? I recalled that they’d justified it with religious ideals. Spreading Catholicism. But the real goal was a commercial one, like that of more modern EHMs. The wealthy French upper classes had sent the young men of the poor to the killing fields of Indochina so their corporations could profit off opium, tea, coffee, and indigo. Those young Frenchmen had fallen victim themselves to the depravations of war; in addition to becoming murderers, they’d turned into torturers and rapists. I looked around. Neither the attendant nor Judy was anywhere in sight.

I hurried out of the guillotine room as fast as my bum knee would allow, back along the corridor, toward a glimmer of light that defined the doorway to the courtyard. Off to my right was a dark opening in the wall. I pulled out my iPhone, flipped on the flashlight app, and peered inside. A cave-like cell. Although it was totally empty, I had a vivid impression that it had been filled with frightened women, ones who had already been raped and tortured or were awaiting their turns. I shut off my light and looked down the corridor toward the courtyard.

A shadow bisected the halo of doorway light. “I’ve seen enough.” Judy’s voice echoed off the walls. “This place creeps me out. I’m going back to the hotel.”

“Okay. I’ll stay a bit longer. See you at the dinner tonight.”

Her shadow slipped away. I glanced back at that dark cell. A shudder ran through me. I turned toward the doorway, let out a long breath, and headed down the corridor, beating my cane against the floor.

Once in the sunlit courtyard, I changed my mind. I, too, had seen enough. I started for the entrance doorway, and then the uniformed attendant appeared. He solemnly beckoned me toward another corridor. I hesitated. He beckoned again, more insistent than before. Obediently, I followed him.

As we arrived at a dimly lit room, I was shocked to see that it was populated by two lines of people, sitting facing each other. Then I realized that these also were manikins — replicas of Vietnamese men whose legs were shackled to the floor. I walked between the two lines. Each manikin was different from its neighbors, and amazingly lifelike. Some, despite their shackled legs, were holding others in compassionate poses, obviously offering solace to despairing comrades. One was ministering to the wounded arm of another. All of them were emaciated; their protruding ribs told the story of famished men.

At one end of the two lines was a platform with two holes in the floor and buckets underneath — the toilets. I wondered how often each man got unlocked from his shackles and led, probably in chains, to these.

I felt despondent and alone. I glanced toward the doorway I’d entered. No sign of the attendant. I was, in fact, alone. I had a strong desire to get out of this place. However, I forced myself to take a last look at those two lines of manikins. They seemed alive. I could feel both their sense of desolation and their determination to survive. I lifted my cane in a salute to them and then slowly walked away.

The attendant was waiting for me in the courtyard, at the bottom of a metal staircase that led up the outside of the building to the floor above the guillotine. Although my injured knee throbbed, I followed him up the stairs. He opened a door at the top and flipped on a dull light. I went inside.

The room was a gallery of photographs, taken long after the French had departed. In the ghostly light, they showed US military men, mostly pilots. Some were standing in lines at attention; others performed chores around the prison. There was a particularly touching series of the men preparing a Thanksgiving dinner and sharing it with one another at a long table. This was followed by scenes from the end of the war, of the prisoners marching out to be greeted by US officials, to freedom. There was no attempt in any of the photos to gloss over the fact that the men in the prison were a somber and unhappy lot; yet the contrast between them and the guillotine and manikins in the rooms below delivered a clear message: the Vietcong had treated American prisoners far more humanely than the French had treated the Vietnamese. I had no idea whether this was true. I did know that US soldiers had been tortured into confessing that what they and their country had done was criminal.

Looking at those photographs, my mind flashed to the famous photo of a naked Vietnamese child fleeing her napalmed village, and to more recent ones of hooded men at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq — handcuffed, bleeding, beaten, dragged across the floor on leashes, and attacked by vicious dogs, all at the hands of US soldiers and CIA agents. I hurried on to the next room.

Its walls were adorned with pictures of the havoc US forces had wreaked on Hanoi during the days prior to the American evacuation of Saigon. Government buildings, schools, and even a Buddhist temple had been reduced to rubble. I thought I recalled Nixon, at the time, claiming that this assault was a final drive to victory, waving his hands at the TV cameras and proclaiming our intent to “bomb them back to the Stone Age.” Yet, judging from all I was seeing and had come to learn, the United States had known by then that it had lost the war. These photos told a story of revenge, not of a march to triumph.

I took a second look at the rubble of the Buddhist temple and wondered what on earth our leaders were thinking when they did such things. Could they not see how such ruthless disregard for people and cultures eroded the reputation of a nation that had gained the world’s respect for its role in winning World War II?

I left the room and the photos of Hanoi’s devastation and headed toward the next one. It was pitch black. I stood looking into the darkness. Then I turned on my iPhone flashlight and stepped inside to glance around. It was just an empty room, probably another cell for multiple prisoners. I leaned back against the cool wall and slid to the floor. I sat there, allowing my phone to cast a small funnel of light across the floor, and focused on the emotions that swirled through me. Yes, I felt ashamed and sad and angry. But there was something else I couldn’t quite identify.

I felt sorry for the people who had suffered in the wars and in this prison, the Vietnamese women and men, the American soldiers, all those who had been tortured, imprisoned, maimed, or killed — and their families. I felt compassion for the prison guards who had committed torture and for the soldiers who had to deal with the fact that they had killed others — the horror of the knowledge that they’d taken a life, made children fatherless, and inflicted the worst sort of tragedy on the parents of those they killed. I felt for the emotionally wounded, the ones who survived and ended up in mental institutions, the far too many who committed suicide.

My eyes lingered on the funnel of light that spread from my phone, through my outstretched legs, and across the hard floor toward the opposite wall, and finally I got the other piece of what I was feeling. Grateful. I felt a sense of gratitude that I’d managed to avoid being in a war. I hadn’t murdered anyone. I’d not bombed cities, dropped Agent Orange, or planted land mines.

Then it struck me in the gut — a resurgence of guilt. What about the people I’d corrupted? The threats and bribes? The resources I’d plundered in the name of progress? How did this compare with the killing, maiming, and raping? How did extortion and the ravaging of rain forests measure against land mines, flattened temples, and children running naked, screaming, through flaming villages? I was mulling over these questions and the horror of it all, my guilt, when I heard a noise that set my nerves on edge.

A door slammed. The sound echoed throughout the Hanoi Hilton. A metal door. I jumped to my feet, panicked by the prospect of being shut in this place alone for the night. Then I made myself calm down. I leaned into the cold cement of the wall and assured myself that the attendant would not abandon me. After all, I was an American.

And that realization — that I was an American and therefore would not be shut up in this place — brought another jab to the gut. Why should Americans feel so privileged? We, who had tried to destroy this country, somehow had the right to feel assured that we wouldn’t be abandoned for the night in a prison-turned-museum. Where was the justice in that? And I, of all people, a man who had enslaved countries through debt, who had threatened and corrupted presidents . . . what right did I have to feel secure anywhere?

The cold cement of the wall sent another shiver through me. How could I compare what I’d done as an EHM with the actions of soldiers and torturers? Then I realized that comparison was not the issue. The one supported the other. Economic hit men counted on their marks knowing that the military waited in the wings. In the end, the only thing that really mattered was that we had to change, that there had to be a better way. Human beings had to find another means of dealing with our fears and with our urge to possess more territory, more resources. We simply had to move out of our dysfunctional patterns of exploitation and mayhem. We had to awaken from our stupor.

I turned off my light. Sitting there in the darkness of a prison where so many people had suffered for so many years, I thought about the tools used by EHMs and jackals, and about how these had changed since the days when the Vietnam War was ending and my EHM career was beginning.