HANOI HILTON UPGRADE

[Minh Dang <dang@par.univie.ac.at>]

>From TIME 1997 VOL. 149 NO. 8 

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HANOI HILTON UPGRADE 

MORE THAN SIX YEARS AS A POW PREPARED PETE PETERSON
FOR THE JOB OF U.S. AMBASSADOR TO VIETNAM

BY TIM LARIMER/AN DOAI WITH REPORTING BY DEAN FISCHER/WASHINGTON


When U.S. Air Force fighter pilot Douglas "Pete" Peterson finally was freed after 6 1/2 years in
North Vietnamese jails during the Vietnam War, his sentiment toward his captors was
understandably bitter. "Thank God I won't ever have to return to this God-forsaken place," he
remembers thinking. But back to Hanoi he is headed. The 61-year-old former United States
Congressman, whose jets dropped bombs on North Vietnam before he was shot down and
captured, is slated to be the first American ambassador to Vietnam since the war ended in 1975.
Resentment toward the Communist regime that once tortured and interrogated him has mellowed
over time. "I put this thing behind me," he says. "It doesn't serve me to be hateful and filled with
retribution."

The evolution from prisoner-of-war to emissary-designee marks both a remarkable twist of
history and an unsurprising fact of politics. Peterson, who retired from the U.S. House of
Representatives last month, is a shrewd choice for a president who avoided military service during
the Vietnam War. The label of "draft-dodger" makes Bill Clinton vulnerable to criticism for any
steps he takes to mend fences with Hanoi, as he did in establishing diplomatic ties in 1995.

Some members of Congress complain that thawing relations will take away the only incentive
Vietnam has for helping to account for the 2,133 U.S. servicemen still missing in action. One of
those critics, in fact, is another former POW and a Peterson friend. "We just came out of that
experience with different ideas," says Sam Johnson, now a U.S. Representative from Texas. He
and others want to postpone a vote on Peterson's nomination until they can investigate whether
Clinton was influenced by campaign contributions from an Indonesian businessman who lobbied
for renewing ties with Vietnam. The appointment has already been delayed: a constitutional
provision barring a sitting Congressman from filling a position created by that Congress prevented
Peterson from accepting the ambassadorial post, so he had to wait until his term expired last year.

But at a Senate hearing last week, Peterson's former legislative colleagues seemed ready to give
him the nod. Final Senate approval will probably come within weeks and he could be at his post in
less than three months. "There was a time in our lives when the prospect of voluntarily residing in
Hanoi would have been unthinkable," says Sen. John McCain, a Peterson supporter and himself a
former POW. "Much time has passed since then. Things change."

Peterson first saw Vietnam in the 1960s, when he was flying bombing runs out of Thailand. On his
67th mission, an attempt to strike a railroad line, the tail of his F-4 was hit by a surface-to-air
missile. Seconds later, he and his co-pilot, Bernard Talley, parachuted from the burning jet into the
pitch-black sky. "I knew we had no chance of rescue," Peterson now recalls. His parachute
landed in the branches of a mango tree on the edge of a rice field near An Doai village. The landing
left Peterson with a broken leg, shoulder and arm. Talley helped him up, but Peterson couldn't walk,
so he ordered his co-pilot to flee without him. Talley, now a commercial airline pilot in the U.S.,
was captured the following day. "I had to really contemplate what I was facing in the future, and
decide whether to get off this planet or face the angst of whatever was ahead," Peterson says. He
fingered his .38 cal. pistol and considered shooting himself in the head. "But I have to admit I was
curious about what was in store for me." So he flung the pistol into the rice paddy.

Meanwhile, farmers in the local militia were aroused by clanging bells. "An enemy plane has been
hit," they were told. Nguyen Danh Sinh, 68, and Nguyen Viet Chop, 68, set out into the rice fields to
search for the plane and enemy pilots. "We didn't know what we would find," Chop recalls. "We
had never seen an American before." Chop and Sinh and a third man, who has since died, spotted
the parachute and devised a plan to approach it from three directions. "It was like a big white
billboard advertising where I was," says Peterson.

Peterson heard them talking before he saw them. The three men charged toward him and knocked
him flat on his back. Chop took off Peterson's boots. "We were taught it was the first thing to do
because without their boots the Americans could not run away," says Sinh, who stands barely 1.5
meters tall. "I was afraid because he was so much bigger than me." Soon, reinforcements came,
armed with pitchforks and machetes. One of the men rushed toward Peterson with a knife. "I
thought he was going to cut my throat so I bit his finger," Peterson says. Another man shoved the
barrel of his rifle into Peterson's mouth. Then they cut away his flight vest.

They led the hobbling pilot into the village, where dozens of people jeered at him and threatened to
pelt him with rocks. "It was our duty to protect him," Chop says. So they locked him in a rice
storage bin and waited for military authorities to arrive. The villagers were angry because one of
their sons had been killed on a South Vietnamese battlefield the week before. "I assumed I would
die whenever it was most convenient for them," says Peterson.

He nearly did die during his first weeks at the infamous Hoa Lo prison, nicknamed the Hanoi Hilton
by American POWs. For the next 6 1/2 years, Peterson, like his fellow inmates, was tortured, kept
in solitary confinement and transported, blindfolded, from one prison to another. "We were the only
thing they had to show people," says Tom Pyle, a former POW who was Peterson's cellmate and is
now his next-door neighbor in Florida, Peterson's home state. "They didn't have any pictures of
great battlefield victories. There was nothing tangible. So we were a tool they used to keep hate as
a motivation."

Having endured such wartime animosity, how can a former POW like Peterson set it aside and
function as a diplomat? McCain calls it "an act of selfless patriotism which is beyond conventional
measurement." Vietnamese officials have publicly welcomed Peterson's appointment; the
government has not yet named its envoy to Washington. "I don't think Peterson will be impeded by
a perception that he's there to remind them of the war," says Neil Jamieson, a Vietnam scholar. If
anything, notes a Western diplomat in Hanoi, the Vietnamese will probably respect the former
POW for having survived their wartime prisons. "I'm not going back to relive any of the
experiences I had there. But I do think I owe this one to the American people: the Vietnamese
need to hear what happened to us," Peterson says.

Resentment about the war persists in Vietnam, though it is usually kept hidden from public view.
Officially, the government insists that the war is history. Most people do not talk about it, yet 
nearly
every family's household altar has a photograph of a relative killed fighting the French before 1954
or the Americans afterward. And the state-run press continually reminds people of the past it
claims to be forgetting. Before the recent New Year's holiday, Tet, newspapers carried
Communist Party founder Ho Chi Minh's battle cry after the 1968 Tet offensive.

Vietnam seems ambivalent about a closer relationship with its former enemy, as well. While
welcoming warmer diplomatic ties, Communist Party officials have warned its members to beware
of Americans trying to undermine the government. Broadcasts by Radio Free Asia, the new U.S.
service, have been jammed. The Communist Party newspaper called it a "wicked political
instrument and a product of the Cold War period." A recent U.S. State Department report on
human rights was similarly dismissed. Said the same paper: "The U.S. is the greatest violator of
human rights, launching some 70 wars against other countries in its 200-year history including the
Vietnam War which the former Secretary of Defense [Robert] McNamara has admitted was a
serious mistake."

In many ways, Vietnam is a different country from the one where Peterson was imprisoned. "We
maintain pictures of the Vietnam of 1973," says Peterson, who has visited Hanoi twice in the past
six years. "Now maybe we can update the information on both sides." The Hanoi Hilton itself has
been demolished, and in its place are rising two towers, one 25-stories tall, for offices and
apartments. The first tenants are expected to move in next month.

Out in the countryside near An Doai village, where Peterson was captured, the landscape appears
much the same, however. The village was wired for electricity only four years ago. There is just
one telephone. The village hall rice bin where Peterson was briefly kept is empty, the front door
bolted, the stucco walls crumbling. Scores of villagers gather around Chop and Sinh and a recent
visitor, and one of them shouts: "If that American prisoner is coming back, ask him to give us some
money to fix this building."

--With reporting by Dean Fischer/Washington