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 Wednesday in Haiphong, Vietnam.
He was 93, according to his family. The cause of death 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 over the years of Vietnam’s brutal conflict remains contested, blurred forever perhaps by competing traumas of war and nationalist narratives.
For Mr. McCain, who died in 2018 at age 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, starting in 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, however, denied that prisoners at Hoa Lo were tortured. In interviews after the war ended, 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, with a narrow bed surrounded by wartime ephemera.
“He was a man of great discipline and perseverance, qualities he always instilled in his children and grandchildren,” said Tran Hai Yen, one of his daughters.
Perhaps that created a degree of respect from the warden for captives because, surprisingly, when Mr. McCain ran for president, Mr. Duyet declared himself a fan and supporter. His endorsement was both unexpected and well-covered by American media outlets.
“John McCain! My friend! Victory!” he shouted when a New York Times reporter 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. But Ms. Yen 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.”
During his warden years, Mr. Duyet faced intense pressure to present the prison in the best possible light, for public persuasion. In a war fought for hearts and minds as much as 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.
Starting around 1969, President Richard M. Nixon tried to flip the script. He made war prisoners a priority, demanding that fighting continue to get them home. To critics, it was a manipulative move to drag out the fight and “revive sagging emotional support for the war,” as one historian wrote in 1971.
But the scrutiny pushed Vietnam to adjust, or at least make more of an effort to improve its image. Mr. Duyet was charged with trying to keep resistance from becoming riots or suppress anything else souring public relations.
During the intense American bombing raids in December 1972, Vietnamese officials even brought the singer and antiwar activist Joan Baez to Hoa Lo to see American captives. It was 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 stands with a guitar slung over her shoulder in front of three Americans in striped prison garb. A soldier in front stands with his hands behind his back and eyes down, emotionless and stern.
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 everyone 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. A German nurse detained at Hoa Lo whom Mr. Duyet later said he had befriended (even taking on the task of buying her underwear), told a reporter she kept a cat and received sufficient food and water.
Walter Wilbur, the commander of a U.S. Navy fighter squadron, appeared on “60 Minutes” soon after being released and said he was not tortured during nearly five years at Hoa Lo.
“I was not beaten or handled in this way that we’ve heard described before,” he said. By that point, he had become opposed to the war but without repudiating any other prisoner’s account, he added: “Each person has to tell his own story.”
Mr. Duyet’s story followed a common trajectory in Vietnam — from war fighter to proponent of reconciliation.
He was born in 1933 in Thai Binh, in the Red River Delta around Hanoi, to a large intellectual family. His father was a Confucian scholar and teacher with five sons (out of eight children) who all fought against the French.
Part of the reason Mr. Duyet said he did not torture anyone during his time at Hoa Lo was because he witnessed his mother’s grief when the French executed his elder brother at the entrance of their village for participating in the resistance war against the French.
Mr. Duyet joined Ho Chi Minh’s resistance forces in 1949.
He went on to study at a military academy, before mixing combat with teaching politics at an antiaircraft artillery officer school. He worked he worked in radio for revolutionary broadcast programs for about a year before arriving at Hoa Lo just a few months after Mr. McCain’s plane was shot down in October of 1967.
In photos from the time, he looks bookish, with wire-rimmed glasses and a square chin.
Addressing American prisoners just before their release in 1973, he wore a military cap and had a book in hand.
“He felt he was part of history — he held his head high about it,” said Tom Wilbur, Mr. Wilbur’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 serving the government in various roles. 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.
“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, Vietnam.
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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