What Life Was Like for a POW In Vietnam

for the Paris Peace Accords, the United States military

found it impossible to search the battlefields

for dead and missing soldiers.

Many of those men wound up being held as prisoners of war

by the North Vietnamese, and it was no day at the beach.

So today, we're going to take a look at what life

was like for a POW in Vietnam.

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After that, leave a comment and let

us know what other wartime stories you would

like to hear about.

OK, someone call John Rambo and Colonel James Braddock,

because we're going after some POWs.

Fought from 1954 through 1975, the Vietnam War

saw the Communist government of North Vietnam

and its Viet Cong allies in the south square

off against the government of South Vietnam who

was aided by the United States.

The North Vietnamese, who had driven

out the French colonial government,

wished to unite the entire country under the principles

of communism.

But the South Vietnamese wished to pursue closer relations

with Western countries like the US.

The human cost of the conflict would prove extremely high.

The war claimed the lives of one million

North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers, 200 to 250,000 South

Vietnamese soldiers, over 58,000 American soldiers,

and over two million civilians.

And of course, there were prisoners of war too.

Many of the camps used to hold American POWs

were located in or around Hanoi, where

prisoners were forced to survive in nearly uninhabitable cells.

The POWs gave their prisoners colorful and memorable names

like Zoo, Dirty Bird, Skid Row, and Rockpile.

But the prison known as Alcatraz,

located in north central Hanoi, might have

been the worst of all of them.