Among the hundreds of American fighting men who survived years as prisoners or war, few, if any, were tortured as long and as cruelly as Ted Gostas. His strong desire to live led him to inhabit an alternate reality as a shelter from the madness of his cruel treatment. His survival and return to active duty, even in a limited capacity, were nothing short of a miracle.
It was an ordinary house in an upper-class neighborhood in the ancient imperial capital of Hue, some sixty miles north of Da Nang.
The neighbors said the man living there was a German architect. He spoke German fluently, but Ted Gostas was an American. And he was no architect. Capt. Theodore Gostas, US Army Intelligence, was a spymaster, recruiting locals to spy on their neighbors. Gostas was interested in many things about Hue, but mostly about pinpointing Viet Cong agents and sympathizers and learning their plans.
Ted Gostas was born in 1938 in Butte, Montana. His mother was from Czechoslovakia, and his Greek-immigrant father owned a restaurant. In 1941, the family and the restaurant moved to Bayard, Nebraska, and two years later to Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Gostas studied English literature at the University of Wyoming. He also enrolled in the ROTC program. As graduation and army commissioning approached, the ROTC department secretary noted his college major by writing ENG on his Form 66, the document that launched his army future.
“Someone thought ENG meant engineering,” Gostas said, and he was sent to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, where he underwent basic combat engineer training. He learned to drive a bulldozer and build Bailey bridges over streams as he was trained in the duties of a combat engineer. While visiting St. Louis one night, someone broke into his car and stole his briefcase with his notes from his classes, and he barely passed the final exam.
US Army combat engineers also fight as infantry, so Gostas went to Fort Benning, Georgia, for infantry training. “The infantry was really tough,” he recalled. “I had a hard time at Fort Benning, but the commanding general gave me an extra three points for the leadership program, and I graduated as a second lieutenant.”
Desperate to leave the engineers, he took a test for army intelligence. He passed and went to Fort Holabird, Maryland, to learn the duties of an intelligence officer.
One day as he lunched in a shop across the street from the installation, he heard some men speaking Russian. “They had sophisticated cameras and photographed everyone coming or going to Holabird,” he recalled. Suspecting they were Soviet agents who sent their photos to Moscow, and that his image would be in a KGB dossier, Gostas shared his suspicions with a senior officer, who shrugged it off. The possible Soviet agents were not on government property, and taking pictures in public wasn’t against any law.
From Holabird, Gostas went to the defense language school in Monterey. He became fluent in German.
His first duty station was Kaiserslautern, Germany, home to several large US Army units. Almost everyone in the civilian community spoke English.
Later he was transferred to a military intelligence company in the Third Armored Division, near Frankfurt. “One day a train from the Czechoslovakian town where my mother grew up was hit by a US M-60 Patton tank that had skidded on an icy road and came to a stop with its 105mm gun barrel stuck under a rail,” Gostas recalled.
The crew jumped out of the tank, the locomotive flew three feet in the air over the tank, and twenty-five freight cars of industrial equipment derailed and were strewn over the top of the locomotive.
Gostas was in an armored personnel carrier behind the tank. He remained there, shivering under a blanket until a helicopter with two stars on its underside landed nearby. By then the battalion commander had arrived. The general hopped out of his bird, turned to the battalion commander, and said, “Colonel, clean up this mess!”
Salutes were exchanged, the general got back in his helicopter and flew away. The battalion commander turned to the tank company commander, Capt. Gordon Sullivan, and said, “Captain, clean up this mess.” He then left in a jeep.
Gostas was standing with a few other onlookers. “Gordie turned around and looked at me and the others. ‘Does anybody speak German?’ he asked.
“My frozen hand shot up straight in the air. ‘I speak fluent German,’ I said.
“Sullivan said, ‘Lieutenant, you’re the solution to our problem. You’re gonna talk to the railroad people so they can get out here and unscramble this mess.’”
They found a phone in a nearby village, and with Gostas translating, arranged for a ninety-seven-ton railroad crane to come from Dusseldorf. “To light that crane’s furnace took twenty men holding a long pole with a kerosene-soaked rag burning on the far end,” Gostas recalled. “They stuck it in there and whoosh! it lit up the afterburner. They pulled that fifty-ton tank out of the track as if it were a butterfly.
“By the time the track was cleared, I was almost exhausted. A mess cook brought me a tray of food. Up until then the troops never spoke to me. When they saw me coming, they’d go the other way, because they knew I was a spook and they were kind of afraid. Now they made me an honorary member of the Third Armored Division, the same division Elvis Presley had served in.”
In 1967, Ted Gostas arrived at Cam Ranh Bay, South Vietnam, as a replacement. He was not happy to see his name in the Army Times under the heading “Army Intelligence” with the announcement, “Capt. Theodore Gostas assigned to Vietnam.”
His next stop in-country was Saigon. After going to sleep one night, he was awakened by North Vietnamese rockets. When his commanding officer gave him a choice of remaining in Saigon or going north to Hue, where he’d be nearer the action, he decided to go to Hue. He didn’t want to stay and do menial tasks.
His commanding officer pulled out a manila folder with pictures of Gostas’s wife and kids. “Still want to go north?”
Gostas replied, “I love my family, but a lot of guys love their families and they go north, sir.”
In April 1967, using a cover name in a clandestine unit that was part of the 135th MI Battalion, Gostas set up shop in Hue with a small crew.
On the last day of January 1968, Gostas was writing to his wife when he heard the unmistakable sound of an AC-47 Spooky gunship firing its miniguns. One round in five is a tracer. “It looked like one solid stream of red, so I knew the rate of fire was incredible,” he said. “The sun was just going down. I saw the fire hitting an area to the southeast.”
Gostas called headquarters. “I got a man on the phone and told him we were under attack. I said that we were in trouble. He said, ‘Well, we are too. We’re being hit—’ And then the enemy cut the phone lines.”
It was the beginning of the Tet Offensive.
Immediately, Gostas began burning his files—and accidentally set his house on fire. “I sent my men next door to a cement building. As we went out the front door, we passed North Vietnamese troops carrying supplies to set up a perimeter around the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) compound two blocks away.
“We hunkered down and watched thousands of NVA going toward the MACV compound. One of my men took a rifle and crawled outside and killed five NVA.
“They returned fire by shooting through a slit in the cement and hit him in the neck. He died soon after,” Gostas said.
“That night I stood guard in that room and about a hundred rounds of rifle fire came through the slit. How they all missed me, I’ll never know,” he recalled. Then he went to look out the window. One of his men came to warn him against exposing himself and was killed by a sniper. “I’ve always wondered why it wasn’t me the sniper killed. He had a bead on me for more than half an hour.”
A few minutes later, a US Marine unit led by a jeep and followed by an M-48 tank came down Highway One. “We had no radio, but all of us tried to wave them off. They probably thought we were welcoming them, but we were trying to warn them that the enemy was everywhere. The NVA had an antitank weapon concealed near a street corner. Its first round blew the Jeep and everyone in it to smithereens,” Gostas recalled. “The second round missed the tank, and the M-48 started backing up. With another man, I went to help what was left of the marines caught in the ambush.
“We got out to the sidewalk, and the tankers thought we were the enemy and fired off a round. It exploded just above our heads—we were both covered with plaster. We realized that they’d kill us before we had a chance to identify ourselves, so we ran back upstairs, and the tank fired again and blew off part of our building. The blast also destroyed the staircase. On the second or third day, the enemy realized that someone in our house had killed five of their troops. They fired a B-40 rocket, an RPG, at us at about 0600.
“I had my arm around a dying man. He was twenty-five years old and in a flak jacket, and he was on top of me, with my arms around him, when the B-40 came through the roof and exploded. He took most of the shrapnel in his back and I took some in my foot.
“We had been blown into the ceiling and it came down on our heads. I crawled out of the place and he crawled out behind me. The back of his flak jacket had been shredded by the B-40, and you could see part of his spine. He turned over and died.
“After a short firefight, we ran out of what little ammunition we had, and we knew our goose was cooked. We ran out of the building. I knew the Vietnamese stop signs said Dung Lai, so I yelled, ‘Dung lai! Dung lai!’
“Then we worked our way down the twisted staircase. When we got downstairs, they tied our arms behind our backs with piano wire and took us across the street. We had to step over the bodies of five hundred dead marines.”
Afterward, Gostas was held in solitary confinement for four and a half years in a room about the size of a fat man’s coffin. His only friends were a praying mantis and a white rat. He was given perhaps four ounces of water a day and often had to drink his own urine. He was tortured and interrogated constantly. “I said, ‘I’m a clerk typist. I don’t have any idea of what you’re asking,’” he recalled. “They treated me as though I was Nixon’s right-hand man.”
Almost until he was released, Gostas was subjected to endless varieties of such cruelly innovative tortures as would have inspired Tomás de Torquemada to quivering ecstasy. He was beaten daily, interrogated by Soviet officers, and trucked to China to be tortured and interrogated. Gostas found the only respite from his pain, fear, and loneliness was to abandon reason and take refuge in insanity.
Six months before the war ended, Gostas was moved to the Hanoi Hilton, where one of his fellow captives, Capt. Hal Kushner, a doctor, saved his life.
“He examined me and said, ‘You’ll die if I don’t pull some of your eighteen abscessed teeth.’
“I said, ‘I’m not gonna let you pull my teeth! I’ll bite your fingers off. Just leave me alone. Didn’t Socrates at least have hemlock?’ “He said, ‘I save people. I don’t kill them.’”
Four B-52 crewmen held Gostas down while Kushner wrapped a string he had made from threads of bamboo fiber around three teeth that had to come out.
“When they ripped them out of my mouth, a little bit of my jawbone came with them. I emptied about a half a cup of pus into Doctor Kushner’s face,” Gostas recalled. “He vomited and I vomited and all the other guys vomited. The whole place was full of vomit. Then I crawled off the bed and to the corner, and I sat there with my face swollen like a diseased chipmunk.”
Ted Gostas came home with other surviving POWs in early 1973. After emergency medical treatment in the Philippines, he went to Denver’s Fitzsimons Army Hospital, where his gums were found to be so rotted they couldn’t hold a needle for a lidocaine injection. A specialist in pediatric dentistry was flown in, and he carefully removed the rest of Gostas’s abscessed teeth.
Doctors found Gostas was hosting some ten thousand hookworms in his intestines. These were purged with medication. Then shrapnel was removed from his foot.
Shortly thereafter Gostas’s wife divorced him.
Though his body was on the mend, Gostas remained clinically insane. He was housed alone on the hospital grounds until, little by little, his mind healed. “They locked the door and I proceeded to destroy the room—mirrors, footlockers, everything. I destroyed my own bed. I destroyed everything in there. I don’t know where I found the strength to do that, but when I looked over my handiwork, I was very happy with it.
“My mother came to see me while I was having dessert once. She said, ‘My son,’ and I punched her in the stomach. I didn’t recognize her as my mother,” he recalled. “I thought she was trying to take my dessert, and I hadn’t had dessert for five years. No one was gonna take my dessert.”
Asked by a general officer for advice for future POWs, Gostas suggested every combat soldier should be issued cyanide tablets. When he was released to go home, Gostas lived in his mother’s basement. He drank heavily. “I would have drunk hair tonic if it had enough alcohol in it.” Along with the drinking, he wrote a book titled Prisoner, which nobody wanted to publish.
“Later it was published by Golden Books for children, but I had to pay them for it,” he recalled. He bought ten thousand copies and has sold or given away all but eight. He gave most of the books to Vietnam veterans who came to the 1992 dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Because they were fellow veterans, he refused to accept payment.
For a brief time Gostas returned to active duty. Doctors finally discovered that his sometimes erratic behavior was caused because his brain was bleeding, undoubtedly the result of his many beatings. The medics suggested a very risky operation with a better-than-even chance he’d wind up in a vegetative state. Gostas refused the surgery. He was medically retired from the army with the rank of major.
In the forty-odd years since regaining his freedom and his mind, Ted Gostas has established himself as a painter. He explained, “I started painting to save myself from going into a loony bin.”
With paint and canvas, and to critical acclaim, he tells the excruciating story of his years as a prisoner of war, producing some ten thousand sketches, more than three hundred acrylic paintings, and five metal sculptures. He has sold most of this work, not to support himself and his second wife but to help indigent veterans. Gostas has raised and donated over $35,000 for scholarships for the children of veterans.
He also spends much of his time speaking to active-duty servicemen and to students about his experiences as an intelligence officer and as a POW.
Now in his eighty-first year, Ted Gostas shows few signs of slowing down. He continues to paint and sketch, a burning example of the resiliency of the human spirit.