Tran Trong Duyet, the chief warden at Hoa Lo Prison, nicknamed the Hanoi Hilton, during the captivity of John McCain and other American pilots shot down during the Vietnam War, died on Wednesday in Haiphong, Vietnam. He was 92.
His family said the cause was lymphoma.
Mr. Duyet played a significant but disputed role in both the war and the biography of Mr. McCain, the senator from Arizona and Republican presidential candidate in 2008.
The prison where their lives intersected is now one of Hanoi’s most popular tourist spots. But what happened there during the Vietnam War remains contested, blurred perhaps by competing traumas of war and nationalist narratives.
For Mr. McCain, who died in 2018 at 81, Hoa Lo was a hellhole run by captors who he said were “cruel and sadistic people.” Many Americans there said they witnessed or experienced beatings, starvation and solitary confinement from 1964, when the first captured U.S. airman arrived, until 1973, when 591 American prisoners of war went home after a peace deal.
Mr. Duyet denied that prisoners were tortured. In interviews after the war, he insisted that the American captives he managed — a select group of mostly pilots — received more food than their guards in a time of great scarcity, and better treatment than enemy combatants would have received anywhere else in the world during a conflict.
As evidence, he often pointed to photos of basketball games in the prison yard or dinners he shared with captured American pilots. Some of the images hang on the walls of the museum that now occupies part of the former prison. He kept others at home, in a small windowless room resembling a cell, where a narrow bed was surrounded by wartime ephemera.
“He was a man of great discipline and perseverance, qualities he always instilled in his children and grandchildren,” said one of his daughters, Tran Hai Yen.
Perhaps those traits fostered in him a degree of respect for captives because, to the surprise of many, when Mr. McCain ran for president, Mr. Duyet declared himself a fan and supporter. His endorsement was well-covered by American news media.
“John McCain! My friend! Victory!” he shouted when a reporter for The New York Times visited him in 2008.
“I used to meet with him in my office at the end of the day and debate with him,” Mr. Duyet said of Mr. McCain. “We debated quite fiercely, but there was never any personal prejudice between us. The debate was between two men in a manly style. But after that we were quite friendly. We didn’t take it personally.”
Mr. McCain did not seem to share such warm impressions; he never confirmed that account.
Shot down over Hanoi in October 1967, he suffered broken arms and a shattered leg and, by his telling, was subjected to solitary confinement for two years, sometimes suspended by ropes and beaten frequently during his five and a half years of captivity. He said he attempted suicide twice. He rejected early release to keep his honor, he said, and to avoid giving the enemy a propaganda coup.
During the war years, Mr. Duyet was pressured to present the prison in the best possible light for public persuasion. In a war fought for hearts and minds as much as for territory, the politics of prisoner treatment in Vietnam played a potent role for both sides.
North Vietnam used P.O.W.s to undermine American support for the war, parading them around to show good treatment, or forcing them to confess to war crimes they did not commit.
President Richard M. Nixon made the return of P.O.W.s a priority, demanding that fighting continue to accomplish that goal. To his critics, it was a manipulative move to drag out the conflict and “revive sagging emotional support for the war,” as the historian Jon M. Van Dyke wrote in 1971.
But the scrutiny pushed Vietnam to make more of an effort to improve its image. As Hoa Lo’s warden, Mr. Duyet was tasked with keeping prisoner resistance from boiling over into rioting and suppressing anything else that might sour public relations.
During American bombing raids in December 1972, he even let the singer and antiwar activist Joan Baez in to Hoa Lo to see American captives. It was likely an effort to contrast the American attack on civilians with Vietnam’s prisoner treatment. The results were mixed.
In one awkward moment captured by a photographer, Ms. Baez stood with a guitar slung over her shoulder in front of three Americans in striped prison garb. A soldier in front stood with his hands behind his back and his eyes down, emotionless and stern.
One former P.O.W., Robinson Risner, a senior Air Force officer who went on to become a brigadier general, said before his death in 2013 that he had encouraged fellow inmates to follow an adapted code of military conduct — to “resist up to the point of permanent injury, then give them something but give as little as you can.”
Some captives painted a more nuanced picture. One detained German nurse, whom Mr. Duyet later said he had befriended (even buying her underwear), told a reporter that she had kept a cat at Hoa Lo and received sufficient food and water. And Walter Wilber, the commander of a U.S. Navy fighter squadron, appeared on “60 Minutes” soon after being released and said he had not been beaten or tortured in almost five years at the prison.
Mr. Duyet’s story followed a common trajectory in Vietnam — from war fighter to proponent of reconciliation.
He was born in Thai Binh, in the Red River Delta around Hanoi, to a large, intellectual family. His father was a Confucian scholar and teacher. Five sons, out of eight children, fought against French colonial forces in Vietnam’s earlier war for independence.
One reason Mr. Duyet said he did not torture anyone at Hoa Lo was because he had witnessed his mother’s grief when the French executed one of those brothers at the entrance of their village.
Mr. Duyet joined Ho Chi Minh’s resistance forces in 1949. He went on to study at a military academy and then mixed combat duty with teaching politics at an antiaircraft artillery officer school. He worked on radio propaganda programs before arriving at Hoa Lo just a few months after Mr. McCain’s plane was shot down.
In photos from the time, Mr. Duyet looks bookish, with wire-rimmed glasses.
Addressing American prisoners before their release in 1973, he wore a military cap and had a book in one hand.
“He felt he was part of history — he held his head high about it,” said Tom Wilber, Mr. Wilber’s son, an independent Vietnam researcher who first met Mr. Duyet in 2016 and attended his funeral on Thursday. “He achieved his objective, which was to make sure they got home healthy and safely.”
After the war, Mr. Duyet continued to serve the government in various capacities. He was the political chief at the Vietnamese Navy’s Staff Department when he retired in 1994. Afterward, he often sought to remind family, friends and officials that enemies could grow into partners. He expressed sorrow when Mr. McCain died in 2018.
Ms. Yen, his daughter, said Mr. McCain was among those whom her father had talked about most “and who left one of the strongest impressions on him from his years at Hoa Lo.”
In his later years Mr. Duyet became a voice of reconciliation.
“Good Vietnam–U.S. relations benefit both sides,” he said in a documentary released this year to celebrate the 30th anniversary of restored diplomatic ties between the two countries. “So when John McCain passed away, I regarded it as a loss for the United States. But for us, the Vietnamese people, it was also the loss of a good friend, because he brought two once-hostile nations closer together, and that relationship has continued to grow.”
Tung Ngo contributed reporting from Hanoi.
Damien Cave leads The Times’s new bureau in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, covering shifts in power across Asia and the wider world.
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