The Hanoi Hilton: Stockdale, Denton, McCain, Alvarez, Risner and the POWs

Lt. Cmdr. Everett Alvarez Jr. heads a line of prisoners awaiting release at Gia Lâm airport in Hanoi on 12 February 1973, the first day of Operation Homecoming. Photo: U.S. Department of Defense, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The Vietnam War · People and units

The Hanoi Hilton POWs: Stockdale, Denton, McCain, Alvarez and Risner

Eight and a half years from the first capture to the last flight out: the prisoners of Hỏa Lò and the camps around Hanoi, and the men who led them.

August 1964 – March 1973Hỏa Lò · the Zoo · Alcatraz · Gia Lâm~13 min read

On 5 August 1964, the day after the reported second attack in the Gulf of Tonkin, Lt. (jg) Everett Alvarez Jr. of the carrier Constellation was shot down in his A-4 Skyhawk over Hòn Gai during the first American retaliatory strike on North Vietnam. He was taken to Hanoi and, a few days later, to Hỏa Lò, the old French Maison Centrale in the city centre. He was the first American airman held in the North. He would be a prisoner for eight and a half years.

Over the next eight years several hundred more Americans, nearly all of them Air Force, Navy and Marine aviators shot down over the North, passed through Hỏa Lò, which they called the “Hanoi Hilton,” and through a network of other camps around Hanoi that the prisoners named the Zoo, the Briarpatch, Alcatraz, Son Tây, Dogpatch and others. Most were held in isolation for long periods. Many were tortured, chiefly between 1965 and 1969, to extract statements for propaganda. They resisted, communicated by tapping on walls, and organised themselves under their senior officers.

Under the Paris Peace Accords of 27 January 1973, 591 American prisoners were released between February and April 1973 in Operation Homecoming. This page follows five of the best-known prisoners of the North: Alvarez, Robinson Risner, James Stockdale, Jeremiah Denton and John McCain. The diplomacy that freed them is told in Chapter 8; the air war in which they were shot down in Chapter 5.

Hỏa Lò

Hỏa Lò, whose name means something like “fiery furnace” or “stove,” was built by the French administration in Hanoi at the turn of the twentieth century as the Maison Centrale, the central prison of Tonkin. Under French rule it held thousands of Vietnamese political prisoners, among them future leaders of the Democratic Republic. After 1954 it became a prison of the new state. From August 1964 it held American airmen, first in a section the prisoners called Heartbreak Hotel and in another they named New Guy Village, where new captives were interrogated.

As the bombing of the North expanded under Rolling Thunder from March 1965, the number of prisoners grew, and the North Vietnamese opened other camps: the Zoo at Cù Lộc on the south-western edge of Hanoi, the Briarpatch west of the city, and a small block of cells near the Ministry of Defence that the eleven men held there in 1967–69 called Alcatraz. After the American raid on the empty camp at Son Tây on 21 November 1970, the North Vietnamese concentrated most of the prisoners in Hỏa Lò, in a large compound the prisoners called Camp Unity, where for the first time many lived in groups.

Isolation, torture and the tap code

The North Vietnamese did not treat the airmen as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, to which North Vietnam had acceded in the 1950s; it called them criminals who had bombed civilians. The returned prisoners’ testimony, compiled in the official history Honor Bound by Stuart Rochester and Frederick Kiley, records systematic torture between about 1965 and 1969: the “ropes,” leg irons, beatings and long periods in stocks or in solitary confinement, used to force written and recorded confessions, letters and appearances before visiting delegations. Conditions eased from late 1969, after the death of Ho Chi Minh and as the prisoners’ treatment became an issue in American politics and in Paris.

The prisoners communicated, against the rules, by tapping through cell walls. The tap code, introduced by Air Force Capt. Carlyle “Smitty” Harris in 1965, laid out the alphabet in a five-by-five grid without the letter K; each letter was two series of taps, row and column. Through it the senior officers passed orders, men learned the names of new prisoners and kept the roll of everyone known to be alive, and isolated prisoners kept their sanity.

Everett Alvarez Jr.

Alvarez, born in Salinas, California, on 23 December 1937, the son of Mexican-American parents, was 26 when he was captured. For almost a year he was the only American prisoner in the North. He spent eight and a half years in captivity, the longest of any of the aviators held there. (The longest-held American prisoner of the war was an Army Special Forces officer, Maj. Floyd J. “Jim” Thompson, captured in South Vietnam on 26 March 1964 and released in March 1973.) Alvarez came out with the first group at Gia Lâm on 12 February 1973. He later served as deputy administrator of the Veterans Administration and wrote two memoirs, Chained Eagle and Code of Conduct.

Robinson Risner

Lt. Col. Robinson “Robbie” Risner of the Air Force was already famous when he was captured. Born in Mammoth Spring, Arkansas, in 1925, he had been the 20th American jet ace of the Korean War, credited with eight MiG-15s in an F-86, and in 1957 flew an F-100F from New York to Paris in six hours and 38 minutes. In Vietnam he led F-105 strikes in the opening months of Rolling Thunder. He was shot down on 16 March 1965 and rescued from the Gulf of Tonkin, then shot down again on 16 September 1965 and captured.

As the senior Air Force officer among the early prisoners he kept track of every man in the camps, set up committees to keep discipline, morale and religious observance going, and protested to his captors about conditions. That brought him repeated torture and long periods of solitary confinement. He was held for seven and a half years and released in February 1973. He received the Air Force Cross twice, and a statue of him, commissioned by H. Ross Perot, stands at the U.S. Air Force Academy, though he was not a graduate. His memoir is The Passing of the Night (1973). He died in Virginia in October 2013, aged 88.

James B. Stockdale

Cmdr. James Bond Stockdale was commander of Carrier Air Wing 16 on the carrier Oriskany. On the night of 4 August 1964 he had flown over the destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy during the reported second attack in the Gulf of Tonkin and, as he later wrote, saw no enemy boats. On 9 September 1965 he was shot down in an A-4E over North Vietnam, breaking his leg as he landed among the villagers who caught him.

As the senior naval officer in the camps he set out rules for resistance that the prisoners passed by tap code, and spent four years in solitary confinement, two of them in leg irons, much of it at Alcatraz. In September 1969, to avoid being filmed as a propaganda exhibit, he beat his own face with a stool and cut his scalp, and then, believing his captors would break other men to implicate him, inflicted a near-fatal wound on himself. He was released in February 1973, limping off the first aircraft to land at Travis Air Force Base on 14 February. He received the Medal of Honor on 4 March 1976. His wife Sybil helped found the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia. Stockdale became a vice admiral and president of the Naval War College, ran for vice president in 1992, and died on 5 July 2005.

Jeremiah Denton

Cmdr. Jeremiah A. Denton Jr. was shot down in an A-6 Intruder on 18 July 1965. In May 1966 he was put before a Japanese television crew for a propaganda interview. While answering the questions as his captors wanted, he blinked his eyes in Morse code to spell T-O-R-T-U-R-E, the first clear confirmation to American intelligence that the prisoners were being tortured. He also told the interviewer he supported his government’s policy, whatever it was.

Denton spent almost eight years as a prisoner, four of them in solitary confinement. He was the senior officer on the first aircraft out of Hanoi on 12 February 1973, and when it landed at Clark Air Base in the Philippines he spoke for the returning men, thanking those who had worked for their release and ending with “God bless America.” He retired as a rear admiral, wrote When Hell Was in Session (1976), and served as a Republican senator from Alabama from 1981 to 1987. He died in 2014.

Clark Air Base, Philippines · 12 February 1973

“God bless America.”

— Capt. Jeremiah A. Denton Jr., closing his remarks for the first released prisoners, as reported by the U.S. Air Force (2013)

John S. McCain III

Lt. Cmdr. John S. McCain III, the son and grandson of admirals, was shot down over Hanoi on 26 October 1967 on his 23rd mission, flying an A-4E of Attack Squadron 163 from the Oriskany. He broke both arms and a leg when he ejected and landed in Trúc Bạch Lake in the city, where he was pulled out and beaten. Badly injured, he received little treatment until his captors learned who his father was. In 1968, after his father, Adm. John S. McCain Jr., became commander of American forces in the Pacific, the North Vietnamese offered to release him early; he refused to go ahead of men captured before him. He was tortured and, as he later wrote, eventually signed a statement. He was released on 14 March 1973.

McCain later represented Arizona in the House and, from 1987 until his death, in the Senate. With Senator John Kerry, a Navy veteran who had become an antiwar activist, he led the Senate inquiry into the fate of the missing and the move to normalise relations with Vietnam in 1995. He was the Republican candidate for president in 2008, and died on 25 August 2018. His flight suit and parachute are displayed at the Hỏa Lò Prison Museum.

Operation Homecoming

The Paris agreement provided for the return of all prisoners within 60 days, in step with the withdrawal of American forces. On 12 February 1973 the first C-141 took 40 men from Gia Lâm airport in Hanoi to Clark Air Base, where they were examined, debriefed and fed before flying on through Hawaii to the United States. The first group of 20 reached Travis Air Force Base in California on 14 February, with Stockdale the first off the aircraft. The Air Force records that 591 Americans came home: 325 from the Air Force, 138 from the Navy, 77 from the Army, 26 Marines and 25 civilian employees of the government. Of these, 69 had been held by the Viet Cong in South Vietnam and were released at Lộc Ninh, nine had been held in Laos and three in China.

The missing

The return of 591 men left many families without an answer. In 1973 the United States listed 2,633 Americans as missing or unaccounted for in Southeast Asia. Since then the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency and its predecessors, working with Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, have accounted for more than a thousand; as of March 2026, 1,566 remained unaccounted for. The POW/MIA flag, designed for the National League of Families in 1971, still flies at federal buildings and at bases including Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, North Carolina, where the 4th Fighter Wing holds an annual recognition week.

The prison today

Most of Hỏa Lò was demolished in the 1990s to make way for an office tower. The gatehouse and part of the prison survive as the Hỏa Lò Prison Museum. Its displays are mainly about the French colonial period and the Vietnamese revolutionaries held there; the section on the American prisoners presents them as well treated, with photographs of men playing games and attending Christmas services. The returned prisoners’ testimony, and the official American history drawn from it, describe the same years very differently. Visitors, including former prisoners and McCain himself, have walked through both versions.