Hỏa Lò Prison

I mean, it's hard.

What was heartbreaking to me is the people that were enjoying their stay in the Hanoi Hilton who paid that price for so many years.

I was trying to win.

I mean, that's criminal.

Yeah.

I want to go to a moment in your life, Amy, where, like you said, you wrote a great book, Six Years in the Hanoi Hilton.

And by the way, did you enjoy Donald Trump saying he'd win the Vietnam War in one week and he named the wrong capital city that he was going to bomb? What a great military leader.

Oh, my word.

And the reality is this, torture produces information, but it's not reliable.

The Hanoi Hilton would be a great example of our own soldiers and what happened to them in that environment where almost, I think all of them broke actually at some point when it came to the torture and they gave them whatever information would get them to stop.

I just don't think it should deny justice.

What shouldn't deny justice?

I actually think that when I read the literature, it was pretty clear to me that connection orientation was missing.

The human brain is fundamentally a social organ, right? I think one of the worst things you can do, I talk in my book about the Hanoi Hilton prison camp and that the Viet Cong were putting the Americans in prolonged solitary confinement.

That's the worst thing you can do to a human being.

We know Joanna Holtz-Lunstead, she's done research that shows that being lonely is as bad for your health as smoking 10 to 15 cigarettes a day.

because flying helicopters off ships is a dangerous business, and especially back then.

I mean, our crew in the Navy are called wafus by the other branches, which means wet and effing useless, because we're always wet, we're always ditching, right? And so especially, I think, in the air crew world, developed that culture of hardiness.

And we saw that in the Vietnam War in the Hanoi Hilton prison camp, where Jim Stockdale was.

He's a bit of a personal hero of mine.

Yeah.

We went to the Hanoi Hilton, which is where Dave was staying for a few days.

Mm-hmm.

and um walked we walked we walked around pretty much all the old quarter at this point

[clicking] No.

When you, uh- Prisoner of war, like fucking John McCain in the Hanoi Hilton.

You don't pick and choose, motherfucker.

Have to see your fly, yes.

Do you? Heh.

No, you do not, motherfucker.

Maybe motherfuckers is prisoners in Hanoi Hilton, and he in a good old United States of America, I know right now.

No better.

the guys that...

I was just going to say this, I mean, famously happened in the Hanoi Hilton as well.

And there's that photograph of, I believe it was in Newsweek, where the guy giving an American POW giving two middle fingers and to censor it in the American press, they like blurted out and it looked like it's, you know, I remember a story where like his niece or his daughter thought that the Vietnamese had chopped off his fingers.

It's like, no, that's not.

Broke his own world record eight times, gold medal winner in the 1960 Olympics.

Through my mom and dad, I met Captain James Stark, a POW in Vietnam, who was, he had a big scar on his back, and we'd always run on the beach, and I always saw that scar, and that's where they hung him on a meat hook in the Hanoi Hilton when he was a prisoner of war.

Admiral James Stockdale lived in our town.

His leg was fused from being broken.