Ripple Effect: Paul Louis Granger Profile by TAYLOR BALDWIN KILAND Photography by JAMIE HOWREN, in partnership with the Coronado Historical Association
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t was after 11 p.m., and the streets of Hanoi were deserted. Everywhere he looked, Paul Granger glimpsed a city in disrepair: dilapidated buildings held together with bamboo scaffolding, streets strewn with potholes, and a crater large enough to hold an SUV. It was 1994: could this still be damage from the American bombing in 1972? It had been more than twenty years since the end of the Vietnam War. Relations between the United States and Vietnam were better, but they were not yet “normalized.” That would not happen for another year. Paul’s hotel was just a few blocks from the “Hilton”—the infamous “Hanoi Hilton” prison where Paul, then an Air Force lieutenant, had been held captive for three months at the tail end of the Vietnam War. His B-52 bomber was one of the hundreds of planes involved in the massive bombing campaign over the skies of Hanoi that had been initiated by President Richard Nixon in December 1972. Now, Paul was back in Hanoi—this time as a tourist—and he and two fellow pilots were going to attempt to get inside the prison where he had wanted so desperately to escape two decades before. Paul and his traveling companions started walking through the dark, empty boulevards of the city, which still boasted French colonial architecture. “I was really apprehensive,” Paul remembers. They passed by a few bars, but not much else. “I told the guys that
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I didn’t want to go.” But Paul Granger’s friends were adventurous and persuasive. Approaching a uniformed guard standing at the formidable entrance of the Hanoi Hilton—the French-built structure officially called Hoa Lò, which means “fiery furnace”—the three men casually asked if they could take a tour. The guard spoke a little English and understood their request. Not surprisingly, the answer was no. “So, we walked around the perimeter, and I showed them where I thought my room was after I got out of solitary confinement,” Paul recalls—a prison cell isolated from other men but surrounded by humanity, situated in the middle of a bustling city. Deterred from
their primary mission, the trio headed to a bar, where the patrons welcomed them warmly and spoke enthusiastically of their hopes for normalization between their two countries. It was surreal: sharing a beer with his former enemy a few blocks away from his former prison. But the real surprise came the next day when they visited a Vietnamese army museum. Piled at the entrance was a mountain of debris, including B-52 airplane parts, the helmet of one of his friends, dog-tags, guns, artillery pieces, and a radar that was used to shoot down a B-52 on December 20, 1972, the day Paul’s plane was felled. Then, on a wall near the artifacts was
