The Day the Torture Stopped Ho Chi Minh's Death and the American POWs of North Vietnam

For five years, American airmen vanished into the prisons of North Vietnam. They were starved, left to heal on their own, locked in the dark, and broken on ropes in cells the world would come to call the Hanoi Hilton. The Geneva Conventions promised them protection. In Hanoi, those promises existed only on paper.

Then, in September 1969, Ho Chi Minh died.

Within months, something changed. The beatings thinned. The food improved. Men who had spent years alone were brought toget…