Tran Trong Duyet, John McCain’s Captor at the ‘Hanoi Hilton,’ Dies at 93

Asia Pacific|Tran Trong Duyet, John McCain’s Captor at the ‘Hanoi Hilton,’ Dies at 93

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.