The Hanoi Hilton’s interrogation chamber was two-tone green, baseboards were dark and walls olive, and the room was twelve by sixteen feet. A long veneer table covered with blue cloth was at one end. A high-intensity lamp was placed on the table. The interrogator sat in a chair behind, the POW in front on a low stool, with the effect of making one look up over the table at the Vietnamese.
“So you have been through air force survival school in the States,” the pudgy, uniformed Vietnamese said as he took his seat. “Don’t worry. We too are survival experts. We can break you.”
I refused to speak. The Vietnamese ordered me to my knees and left me there two hours. After a few minutes the pain was killing. I was in bad shape from the beating I’d received in Vinh. My dislocated left shoulder sat well forward from the rest of my body. When Pudgy sensed I could take no more of the kneeling he made me stand in a corner another two hours. I looked down and saw that someone had scratched into the baseboards, “Keep the faith, baby.” Knowing other Americans must be around made me feel much better, but I realized my refusal to speak was getting me nowhere, and I decided to switch tactics.
I told him I was ready to talk. An intelligence officer, a civilian, walked in and Pudgy left. He knew I was from Cam Ranh Bay. He began to quiz me about the base. He asked how many pilots were in my squadron. We had twenty-two but I told him fourteen. He asked their names. I gave him fictitious ones. This went on two hours. He asked a question, I answered with a lie. He sat looking at me impassively, nodding his head as I spoke. He did not take notes.
He stood and left the room. He returned in a few minutes carrying a brown leather-bound book; it resembled a scrapbook, about two inches thick. He opened the book and leafed through it. The pages were cheap, tissue-thin paper covered with the delicate handwritten script of the Vietnamese. He briskly began to read out information about my squadron: how many planes we had; what missions we flew; what time we took off and returned; where we lived and ate; and the name of the squadron operations officer, Theodore W. Guy.
I was startled by the detail. I sat glumly thinking about the lies I’d just told. He looked at me and sneered, “So you see, Colonel!” There was no doubt in my mind that the information had come from VC agents in Cam Ranh.
Later when they asked for information, the North Vietnamese always added, “We don’t care if you lie. We’ll go south for it.” I don’t know how comprehensive it was, but they did seem to have a great deal of intelligence on many subjects, particularly information on our B-52 bases.
I changed then to a tactic of telling half truths. In order to protect myself for future interrogations, and I was asked the same questions over and over again the next five years, I developed a system of adding or subtracting a set number from true answers, or reversing digits. It was imperative to have a simple system of deception that could be easily remembered.
The intelligence officer interrogated me the remainder of the day. At the end he said, “We know you are still lying.”
He rose to leave and told me to bow. This was the manner by which the Vietnamese saluted superiors. “I will not bow,” I said.
He looked at me and said quietly, “We will teach you.”
He left and a guard entered. Two glass doors opened outward from the interrogation room. The guard placed a chair five feet from the door, ordered me to sit, and tied a rope around my neck, fastening the other end to a door knob. The guard stood behind me with a fair-sized stick. Someone outside pulled open the door. I was jerked forward. Simultaneously the guard hit me in the back of the head.
After I was jerked and hit a hundred times the intelligence officer returned. I said, “I have learned to bow.”
He made no reply. The rope was removed from my neck.
That night I was put in a jeep and taken to the Plantation Gardens. I was given a cup and a spoon and a bedroll, which was a thin bamboo mat. The jeep pulled up outside cell number 5. The building looked like a warehouse. The translator told me to keep my room neat; he locked the door and went away. The cell was lit by a dim, unshaded bulb which burned twenty-four hours a day. It was ten feet wide and twelve feet long, bare, except for wooden planks that served as a bed. The floor was concrete, square yellow tiles covered the ceiling, and the wall was divided by several barred windows that had French-style louvered shutters locked tight. I lay on the planks and immediately fell asleep.
At 5:30 the wake-up gong sounded, someone beating a section of rail with a steel rod, at first slow, then with increasing tempo. “Bong … bong … bong … bong bong bong bongbongbong … bonggg!”
I got up and straightened my gear. A turnkey opened my cell, gave me water, and allowed me to put my defecation bucket outside for collection. I was issued two blankets, a mosquito net, two pairs of black pajamas, two pairs of shorts, some sandals, and a toothbrush, which was replaced semiannually. Toothpaste was rationed out every two months and a brownish bar of strong lye soap every forty-five days. I was given three Truong Son cigarettes daily. The guards stuck a light through the four-by-four-inch peephole in the door, which could be raised and lowered only from the outside, at wake-up, 11:00 in the morning, and 8:00 in the evening.
Twice a week I was taken from my cell and escorted to the shower room at the other end of the warehouse. Running water was collected in a large cistern. One bathed by filling a bucket and pouring it over oneself, Asian fashion. The water was cold, especially in winter, and the break from the monotony of the cell, I found, was more interesting than the shower. For the first two weeks the North Vietnamese removed all laundry from the clothesline near the shower before taking me from my cell. They thought this way I would not know other Americans were nearby.
Lunch, a bowl of soup and a French loaf, was served at 11:00. Half an hour later a gong announced naptime; another woke us at 2:00 P.M., and the long wait began for the evening meal and then the bedtime gong at 9:00. It was against regulations to lie down except during naptime and at night. The guards frequently and unexpectedly raised the peephole to check on me. I was made to sit at attention on the bed for long stretches if caught lying down at an unauthorized time. Other than this, I was completely alone and unbothered.
I became sick with dysentery shortly after reaching Hanoi. I was wracked by continuous bowel-bursting pains. I thought I was dying. The North Vietnamese refused to give me medicine; I wasn’t told why. One night when I was at my weakest point a guard opened the peephole, pushed through a half loaf of bread, put his fingers to his lips and whispered “Shhh!” I was too hungry to wonder why he’d taken such a risk, and I ate it gratefully.
As my intestines slowly mended, I realized my troubles had just begun. The walls started closing in. Boredom and inactivity could prove as deadly as a bullet, I knew, for I had always been extremely active; and so I began to devise a mental and physical discipline to keep me going, at least till I could better take stock of my situation and decide what I was up against. I went through the alphabet and tried to remember all the boys’ names that began with each letter, then did the same with girls. I tried to recall every detail I could about people I’d known with those names.
My dad, who was a professional musician, taught me to play the piano, accordian, and organ when I was a kid. He had started out in the 1920s with the big bands, had the Dorsey brothers with him awhile, later played piano for Paul Whiteman, and was an accompanist for Fanny Brice. In 1939 he switched to the Hammond organ and stuck with that till he retired in ’65. I began with songs like “Always,” “Because of You,” and “Dearly Beloved,” trying to recall the precise tunes and lyrics of numbers we used to play together. I’d whistle softly or hum. I kept up the exercise my entire imprisonment. It took me two years to get “C’est si bon” down perfectly.
Next I worked backward into my life. It was the first time I’d explored my childhood, the first time I’d really had time—prison at least gave me that. I thought of every mistake I’d ever made, why I’d made it, and resolved never to do the same again. I began probing my decision to become a professional military officer. I guess I’ve always liked the idea of military life. I can’t remember when I didn’t. I grew up during World War II and that perhaps explains a great deal. I’ve always liked authority and regimentation, liked the color and ceremony of uniforms, and thought a man could have no higher ideal than to serve his country.
At the end of World War II, I began military school. I was attending a large high school in Elmhurst, not studying particularly hard, and failed Spanish my sophomore year. My parents knew of my interests in military things—I’d been in both Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts—and I think they felt a military school might put me on the right track. They suggested it but left the decision up to me. We sent away for catalogues from various schools. After looking them over we settled on Kemper Military School in Missouri, a well-established institution that offered the equivalent of a junior-college degree. It turned out to be an excellent choice; my younger brother followed me four years later.
I was on the rifle team at Kemper and graduated in the upper quarter of my class. At the end of four years I applied for a competitive appointment to West Point. My real interest was flying, an interest that dated back to 1939 when I was given a ride in a Piper Cub for my tenth birthday. I saw West Point as a ladder to the cockpit. I was notified that I was the first alternate for the appointment. This meant I would have to wait another year. I checked around and found the air force had a flying program which required only the equivalent of two years of college. So I went down and signed up in April, 1949, and took my flight physical.
By summer I still didn’t know whether I had been accepted. I wrote air-force headquarters and told them I would join the Naval Aviation Cadet Program if I didn’t hear something soon. I got a quick letter back telling me to report for training in August, 1949. I graduated number two out of three hundred fifty cadets in flying grades and was first sergeant of my training company. I was commissioned a second lieutenant in September, 1950.
The Korean War started the summer I graduated, and all of us in my class were made command-training instructors. I volunteered for jumbos, helicopters, recces, fighters—every aircraft we had in Korea at the time—in an attempt to get into the war. But instructors were critically needed in the States, and it was not until October, 1952, that I finally got there. I flew 101 missions as a F-84 fighter pilot, saw a lot of MIGs but never had the chance to shoot one down. We did mostly air-to-ground work, bombing targets north of the thirty-eighth parallel and flying close support for ground troops. For this I won two Distinguished Flying Crosses and six air medals.
After the war I went to Luke Air Force Base as a gunnery instructor. In 1958 I was transferred to Canada as an exchange officer with the Royal Canadian Air Force. At the end of that tour I was reassigned to the Air Command and Staff College, where I graduated in June, 1961. I was very fortunate to be selected for Command and Staff College. I was one of the first captains to go; most of the others were majors. After several years as ops officer of a training squadron, I was assigned to Randolph AFB in Texas, where I wrote syllabuses to teach young men to fly, and later became chief of standardization and evaluation.
Besides playing mental games and reconstructing my life, I undertook an intensive exercise program. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I walked nine miles in a circle around my cell. Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday it was six miles. When I walked around the room a hundred times, I stopped and did a hundred pushups. After the second hundred times of walking, I tried to do forty one-arm pushups. I built up two and a half inches on my chest.
My outside entertainment came from the Liar’s Box, a vibrating radio speaker inside an eight-inch-square green box, which was placed in each cell just out of reach above the door. Along with frequent interrogations, the radio was the primary means by which the North Vietnamese tried to influence us at the camps in Hanoi. (The secondary means was by infrequent indoctrination classes and by propaganda reading material.) The radio material was of two types. The first was programs fed directly from the Voice of Viet Nam, Hanoi’s official radio station, usually read by a man and a woman (whom we called Hanoi Hannah) and sometimes accompanied by music. The second was selectively edited news programs and propaganda which were tape recorded in the radio rooms of the particular camp and then run through a record-player-type amplifier into our rooms. The intracamp tapes, most disturbingly, I found, were being read by Americans.
The two chief pressure points of the North Vietnamese, I quickly learned, were centered on taping and writing. They constantly tried, by a variety of methods, to get POWs to make antiwar and propaganda tapes. They especially wanted tapes that could be broadcast and distributed world-wide by the Voice of Viet Nam. I considered the making of this sort of tape to be a far graver offense than that of a POW reading propaganda over the intracamp system, though I was very much opposed to both activities. The North Vietnamese, too, constantly pressured us to write or sign antiwar appeals and letters. They were intent on using us as instruments in their highly coordinated propaganda campaign around the world.
At the time we were getting up to five hours of radio programs each day, beginning at 6:00 A.M. with the Voice of Viet Nam. Over the intracamp system, with Americans reading, we heard the four-thousand-year history of Viet Nam. We heard reports from the Soviet Union and articles taken from Nhan Dan, North Viet Nam’s official newspaper, particularly those which told of so-called American atrocities. About an hour each day we heard what bad criminals of war we were and how we would enjoy better privileges if we corrected our ways.
We immediately learned about anyone in the States, from government officials to entertainers, who said anything against the war. We liked the popular music Hanoi Hannah played. If she said the U.S. had bombed hell out of them and killed many people, we knew of course that we were making advances on the battlefield. You had to listen between the lines, to pick up the overtones.
I enjoyed the radio even though I thought I was hearing a big bunch of b.s. It passed the time. I think that’s one of the reasons the NVA drastically cut down the programming time a few months later—we were taking it as entertainment. It gave the guys with roomies something to talk about. The North Vietnamese didn’t want us to talk about anything. They wanted us to sit around feeling sorry for ourselves.
Before going to Viet Nam I had read Bernard Fall’s Street without Joy, but nothing else except the usual news reports. I didn’t consider myself very knowledgeable about the country. Listening to the radio was often like sitting in a history class. I enjoyed the part where the Vietnamese fought against the Chinese. Even though they preached Mao’s doctrine, there was no love lost between North Vietnamese and Chinese, you could see that. We heard very often about the battle of Dien Bien Phu. The North Vietnamese did a fantastic job there, all historians recognize that; and in certain ways I came to admire them quite a bit.
I didn’t know the South Vietnamese. A lot of them worked at the Cam Ranh base when I was there. They did common-labor-type jobs, mowed the grass, and so forth. The base had a large community-relations program. We taught them to drive automobiles and taxis and to operate machines. We had a very expensive civic-action program in Cam Ranh city to construct an orphanage. We also built them a merry-go-round, a latrine, and fixed up their school.
I had no personal contact with the South Vietnamese, however. None whatsoever. I was working sixteen to eighteen hours a day. I suppose I felt about them the same way as I had about the South Koreans. They were an undeveloped nation who needed our help. This was the point. I had done a lot of reading on communism. I thought we were right being in South Viet Nam. I felt very strongly that as long as anyone wanted to be free, regardless of their race, creed, or color, the United States ought to help them.
I had been in solitary confinement only a few weeks when I received a note by covert means. It said, “Welcome to the Plantation Gardens. You are in our smallest suite. There are more of us here and we are all praying for you. To beat these guys you must have faith in us, have faith in your country, and keep your spirits high.” The note went on to give me the tap code. It was signed, “The Rogues.”
Receiving the note was a tremendous morale booster, as was the description of the tap code, by which I was able to establish communications with other prisoners. The tap code was very old—someone said it had appeared long ago in the Boy Scout manual—and it was brought to Hanoi by a navy commander. The first line of code was A-B-C-D-E. To spell out a word containing one of these letters, you made a tap on the wall, then paused and tapped out the number one for A, two for B, three for C, and so on. The second line was F-G-H-I-J. Two taps and a pause, then the number of the letter, one for F, two for G, etc. K was omitted and C substituted where necessary. The third line, introduced by three quick taps and a pause, was L-M-N-O-P. The fourth and final lines were Q-R-S-T-U and V-W-X-Y-Z. The method was bulky at best. But we were able to transmit rapidly by devising a shorthand composed of many abbreviations.
We also established commo by setting up message drops. I dropped my first notes by scratching messages on the bottom of my dinner plate. Four or five POWs were assigned to collect and wash the plates and utensils for the entire camp. The duty usually was rotated among various cells. The guard opened the door and I left my plate outside when I finished eating. Soon a POW came by and collected it, read the message, and someone later answered through the tap code or by several other methods we developed.
Through commo I began to learn more about the camp. The Plantation Gardens had opened fourteen months previously. Before then all POWs apparently were maintained at the Hilton, kept separate from the regular complement of political and criminal Vietnamese inmates. The Hilton was a large—perhaps a city square block in size—former French prison. There was no way to conceal that it was a dismal and drab affair. It was thought that the North Vietnamese wanted a show place, a camp where foreign dignitaries and international reporters could be shown carefully screened POWs in relatively pleasant surroundings for maximum propaganda advantage.
From an aesthetic point of view, the Plantation was an unusual prison. It had been the home of Hanoi’s Vietnamese mayor during the French occupation. In the center of the walled compound was a two-story yellowed stucco colonial-style villa, similar to any of the nicer houses in Viet Nam. It served as the camp staffs offices and quarters, and had rooms with tiled floors and fire-places. We called the villa the Big House; we were more familiar with its interrogation room. Outside was a large bomb shelter, and flowers grew here and there.
On the compound’s east side was a long building we code-named the Warehouse. Judging by the hooks hanging from the walls, that’s exactly what it had been during the mayor’s time. At the south end were outbuildings, probably formerly servants’ quarters, which we named the Gun Shed; at the north end were more outbuildings converted into cells, the Corncrib. On the west was an area called the Movie House, for that’s where we were later shown outdoor propaganda movies. A small, worn, pressed-gravel courtyard near the Warehouse had a basketball goal at either end.
I learned of the secret POW organization within the camp and the senior ranking officer’s policies. The SRO was a lieutenant colonel like myself—I think he had me by a month on date of rank. In June and July he was beaten by the North Vietnamese in an attempt to extract a confession from him. He was then jailed in a section of the camp where it became impossible to contact him for guidance.
In July, 1968, I decided, as next senior ranking officer, to assume command of the camp. I was prompted partly by what happened the same month when some American prisoners were released and sent home. The day before the release I could see other POWs through a crack in my door as they passed on the way to take showers. They gave me the thumbs-up sign or tried to whisper to me when the guards weren’t looking. The announcement that three men were going home brought a stunning change. The other POWs shuffled by my cell with heads hung low, wouldn’t even try to look my way. Camp morale was shattered.
I passed the word that I was taking over. The camp policy at the time was that the sick and wounded could go home first if offered release by the North Vietnamese, followed by those who had been captured longest by date of rank. I felt that no one should go home regardless of date of rank or how long held. There was one man at this time who I thought was sick enough to accept release—John McCain, Admiral McCain’s son; he was badly wounded.
We were all in it together. We should all go home together. There were only two ways to get out as far as I was concerned: either dead or with heads held high. We would all stay if it took another twenty-five years.
I put out my policies by tap and note. I kept them simple and followed along the lines of the Code of Conduct. “First,” I said, “We will back U.S. policies.” By this I meant the U.S. would remain in Viet Nam until American interests could be maintained and the South Vietnamese were able to determine their own destiny. “Two, we will resist as much as possible. Three, we will not accept any personal favors or gratuities from the enemy. Four, remember your American heritage, that you are an American and proud to be one. Five, do not write. Six, do not tape. Seven, do not go home early.”
Forty-four POWs were in the Plantation, all air force and navy pilot officers, except for an eighteen-year-old navy-enlisted kid who had managed to fall off a ship and get captured. It took nearly three months to pass my new policies through the entire camp. I had vacant rooms on my right and left, so I had to tap through an empty room to get to the next wall. To hear more clearly we placed a tin cup with the open end toward the wall and put an ear to the cup bottom. First we tried thumping on the wall to get the other room’s attention when we wanted to transmit. But the NVA caught us at that and we then worked out specific times to send; right after the last morning gong, for example. Some days I spent several hours tapping, till my knuckles were bloodied.
We sent out everything through commo. It became our life line. I learned how to play chess through the wall. We swapped information about our families and kids and told jokes we’d heard. Some jokes got awfully long; you forgot what it was about before the punch line was tapped out. When I first started, I wrote what was coming over on a piece of toilet paper with a toothpaste tube. But this was dangerous because the NVA would hear us tapping and bust into the room and catch us with the paper. We soon learned to remember without writing.
I was trying to boost morale. That was my main idea. I wanted to get everybody thinking about resisting as much as they could. Many prisoners were beat once and thereafter routinely began to comply with the NVA. Once was not enough. My policies were not totally inflexible, however. I modified them to say that if you felt like you were going to be beaten, then go ahead and make the intracamp tapes, the ones being played over the radio to us. But you should absolutely not do anything that could be used on the Voice of Viet Nam. They really had to have a go at you to make tapes for Hanoi Hannah.
A value of the tap code was that we could find out what questions the North Vietnamese were concentrating on at interrogations, prepare our answers to jibe, and stay one jump ahead of them. A POW who was pulled out for questioning returned and told us what he was asked. I then put out my policies regarding the questions. For instance, the NVA asked what we thought of China. I had written a paper for the Command and Staff College in 1961 in which I said I thought we should establish diplomatic relations with Red China but, at the same time, not desert Taiwan. So that became my policy. As camp commander I had to be, in effect, president of the U.S.
In August the North Vietnamese began cracking down. I was called in. The camp political officer was in charge of POWs. We had little contact with the camp commander, who was mainly an administrator.
The political officer, a small and skinny effeminate-looking guy, told me, “We know you are passing out orders. You must stop or you will be punished.”
My policy since the Vinh beating was to be polite to them. I said, “No, sir, I won’t do it anymore. I’m sorry.”
I was returned to my cell. I immediately called up the next room and said, “Press on.”
We were setting up a secret organization. Every combat pilot heading for Southeast Asia was required to go through the air force’s survival school in Washington State. When I went through the school I was convinced that the only thing I had learned was how to be miserable for three weeks. But when I got to Hanoi I realized that I had absorbed many things—interrogation methods, overt and covert communications, escape techniques—and I began to try to put them into practice.
As 1969 began we had made a good deal of progress. Our communications committee was a cell containing four prisoners. It was their job to make drops and to figure out new ways of communicating. The commo officer coordinated call signs (only code names, of course, were used) and assigned cells different times to transmit. Our morale officer, a physical-education major in college, passed out ideas for exercises to keep people busy and in shape. Our overt committee began to plan a harassment campaign against the NVA. Some POWs sent out to spade flower gardens for the Vietnamese flipped the dirt over their shoulders into the guards’ faces. They were sent back to their cells. When we carried our defecation cans to the bathroom, we were supposed to stop, set them down, and bow to any Vietnamese we encountered. Instead, we dropped the cans and spilled the contents all over the ground. They made us clean it up, but they were getting the message.
Perhaps a little too well. In July they found a note I had circulated through the camp. They beat several prisoners and got some information out of them about me. There was another POW release around this time. The navy-enlisted man, who asked for and got my permission to leave, was sent home, as were three more pilots, who accepted release unilaterally. The North Vietnamese continued to interrogate prisoners about our organization during August, and near the end of the month I was called in. They had a prepared list of a hundred crimes they said I’d committed. They knew my commo call sign, which at the time was Fox; they knew all my policies.
I was interrogated for four days. I wasn’t bothered September 2, Independence Day. I was recalled the morning of September 3 and ordered to confess to the hundred crimes. I wouldn’t. I was taken by three guards and an officer into the torture room, a bare chamber in the northeast corner of the villa. They made me kneel and began to beat me across the back with a rubber hose. At about 9:30 A.M. the camp political officer entered and said something to the others. The guards quit beating me. I was taken back to my cell. They gave me no explanation. Later I was told that Ho Chi Minh had died that morning.
We enjoyed a two-week moratorium while North Viet Nam was in mourning. They left us completely alone. At the end of it I was called back in. They said that because of Ho’s death I would not be punished further if I realized my mistakes and promised not to communicate. I said, “Thank you very much. I will not communicate any more.”
I was ordered to write a letter of apology to the camp commander. I began, “Dear Camp Commander, I’m sorry for my very bad acts.”
On October 15, 1969, our treatment changed for the better. I think it was because President Nixon had come out very strongly in support of the POWs, focusing international attention on the problem. We were given six cigarettes instead of the usual three when the guards made their morning rounds on October 15. Next day we began to get three meals instead of two, with the addition of half a loaf of bread for breakfast. Then we were allowed outside about thirty minutes a day to exercise. We could see each other for the first time. Three rooms at a time were turned out. No one was allowed to talk. The guards kept us apart. From personal descriptions passed through commo I recognized every man.
I was given my first package from home. I almost didn’t get it because during interrogations I was asked my wife’s address and I had given a fictitious one. The NVA officer said, “This package is not for you because it’s from another address.”
I thought a minute and said, “Okay, that’s me. I lied before. Give me the package.” It contained my reading glasses from Cam Ranh, some One-a-Day vitamins, M & M’s candies, Lifesavers, and a T-shirt.
Inside my glasses case was a picture of a bird and the number six. I said, “Oh, my God! My wife’s mixed up with the peace movement.” I thought the bird was a dove and the six meant “in six months the war will be over.”
I passed on this info through commo.
Someone replied, “Well, I think the six means oh-six, the numerical listing for a full colonel, and the bird is an eagle, a colonel’s insignia.”
I said, “No, that can’t be it.” I was promoted to lieutenant colonel six months below the zone, but I couldn’t believe I was being advanced to the rank of full colonel three years ahead of my contemporaries. In fact, I didn’t actually believe it until I received confirmation when I returned to the States.
We re-established commo. I was caught once again. On December 10 I was transferred to the Hilton. At this time the NVA moved most of the light and full colonels from the various camps into the Hilton. I think it was because they planned to pull a big propaganda stunt at Christmas—POWs photographed enjoying Noel—and because they knew we all had strong organizations going in the camps and this was the best way to break them up. I was put into solitary confinement in a cell-block with twelve other lieutenant colonels. I was allowed out for exercise each day. Though the Hilton was rat-infested and exceedingly dreary, the food was a little better there than at the Plantation Gardens.
The beatings had generally been stopped by this time. But we were under heavy pressure to write antiwar appeals and to make tapes for the camp radio. One side of my head turned snow white. The white hair eventually fell out and I was half bald till it grew back its normal brown color. By Christmas I felt very low, depressed; the loneliness was becoming harder to face. Nearly two years had passed without my talking to another American. My family did not know I was alive. I thought constantly about my wife and three sons.
Over the radio I heard POWs thanking the camp authorities for permitting them to write home. On Christmas Eve there was a commotion on the cell-block as other prisoners were given roommates. Only three of us were left in solitary confinement in my section of the prison. Shortly after New Year’s, 1970, I was told I would be given a roommate and allowed to write my family if I agreed to read over the camp radio. I went back to my cell and thought it over. The North Vietnamese wanted me to read a chapter from Viet Nam Today, an English-language publication that was mainly a description of the country. The chapter I was to read began with the climatology of Viet Nam and covered the country’s early history.
I felt it was worth the risk to myself to read one chapter. I told them I would do it. I was taken to the small radio room to tape the material. A week later I was called in for another interrogation. I asked the interrogator, a guy we called the Pig, when I could write home. He said, “In the near future. The camp commander is considering.”
I knew then that I’d fallen for their lies. I regretted it very deeply. I said, “When he considers favorably I’ll consider reading again.”
The Pig continued to pressure me. I refused to read. I was put in a cramped sweatbox and kept there three days without food, but I did not give in. The Pig was a North Vietnamese with a fat face, a blunt snout of a nose, and beady eyes. He said his mother had been killed by cluster bomblets. He loved Ho Chi Minh dearly. When he started pressing me, I asked about Ho. He would sit back, relax, and recite the history of Ho. It was the only way I could get him off my back.
On June 10, 1970, I was called before the Hilton’s camp commander. He said, “What is this sniff-sniff?” He made sounds with his nose.
I said, “I guess you have a cold.”
He said, “No. You communicate.”
I had worked out a commo method when I bathed. The bath-house was closed but without a ceiling. There were usually other POWs outside exercising during the time I was washing. One of them worked his way close to the bathhouse, and I talked to him by sniffing out the tap code. He answered by doing a body code as he exercised. I watched him through a peephole in the door. If the head was touched that meant one tap, the shoulder was two, the chin three, and on. This way I learned the camp policies and recent news, particularly about the space shots.
The camp commander, speaking through an interpreter, said, “We are sending you to a place where you’ll never be able to communicate with anybody. You’ll never be able to organize any activities. You’ll stay there till you die.”
That night I was jeeped eighteen miles southwest of Hanoi to a large North Vietnamese training area that was encircled by SAM missile sites. Half a mile from the main training center was a POW camp. There were three small cells on the POW camp’s outer perimeter. I was locked in one of them, a cell six by nine feet, extremely hot, and occupied by rats. It had been, I think, an old ammo storage room; scratched into the wall was the date 1939.
I was more than a hundred yards from the main camp, which was surrounded by screens. Through cracks in my cell door I could see legs walking under the screens. I estimated there were thirty people in the camp; I later found the correct number was forty-four; they had all been captured in Laos and South Viet Nam. We were getting only two meals a day, roughly half the food I’d received in Hanoi, and were down to two cigarettes. Half the POWs were kept in solitary or total isolation. I was getting no exercise. I was supposed to sit on my bed at attention at all times, something I did only when I knew guards were looking.
The Vietnamese gave me communist literature to read and quizzed me about what I’d learned. If they gave me something to read, I read it just to have something to do. It was like interrogations—you looked forward to them because you were actually talking to someone. I could never, however, answer the questions they asked. They made me sit at attention for hours on a stool in the middle of the interrogation room until I tumbled off from exhaustion. But I was not really physically touched at this camp.
In late November a U.S. Special Forces rescue team made a surprise helicopter raid on the Son Tay POW camp, which was about ten miles north of us. The raid was unsuccessful, the prisoners had been moved a few weeks earlier to another camp. I, of course, didn’t know what was happening. But I heard NVA fighters go up, the sounds of explosions, and SAMs whooshing off in the distance. Next day the Vietnamese put gun emplacements around our camp and hung wire to prevent helicopters from landing. Then at 7:00 Thanksgiving evening guards opened my cell and told me to roll up my clothes and bedding. I thought I was being taken to the main camp to get a roommate. I was put on a bus with the camp’s other prisoners, and we were driven to the Plantation Gardens.
The Plantation had been vacant for three months. The POWs who were with me last time had been consolidated in the Hilton. From the night we arrived till near the end of the war the Plantation was to be used mainly as a prison for Americans captured in Laos and South Viet Nam, many of them enlisted soldiers and marines. No one in the U.S. knew whether most of us were alive or dead. I was placed in solitary in a room next to my old cell. I tried without success to make contact with POWs passing by. The NVA decided to take away the temptation after a month. I was moved to the compound’s south end into the Gun Shed. I was the only prisoner in that section, in total isolation.
From my room I had a view of the rest of the camp through faults in the louvered shutters. I was upset by what I saw. I estimated that from 80 to 90 per cent of the nearly fifty POWs were either sympathetic to or actually collaborating with the enemy. Most of them, I think, were doing this out of fear. They were extremely subservient, bowing all the time, saying “sir” to them, and making tapes for the camp radio.
It was easy to separate the prisoners who were forced to tape from those who weren’t. Those forced spoke in a monotone, mispronounced words, slurred phrases. The guys not forced read with feeling. It was obvious they believed what they were saying. I could see everyone who entered the radio room. When a tape was played over the box, I correlated the voice with the prisoner I’d seen go in two days earlier.
How could an American be a fighter and then all of a sudden turn his back on his country? I couldn’t understand it. I used to tell the POWs through commo, “I may be the first one to turn against this war, to condemn it when we get home. But I’m not just going to listen to what the North Vietnamese tell me to believe. We will go home and read both sides of the story when we’re released.” By then we’d been captured a long time and didn’t know what was happening in the outside world.
I had a tremendous amount of faith in our elected leaders. Maybe it was one of my shortcomings, but the faith was there—and still is.
I began trying to construct another organization. When I bathed I tapped on the next stall trying to make contact. Nobody knew the tap code. This stemmed from a failure, I thought, on the part of the military. We had POWs captured in late 1972 who didn’t know the code, although it had been widely used in Hanoi for years. The reason it was not taught in stateside military survival schools was, I assume, for security reasons. But this was rather foolish. The NVA already had caught us using it many times and knew what it was about. What they didn’t understand were the abbreviations, nor did they have enough people who spoke fluent English to monitor us all the time. So nothing should have been classified.
In February, 1971, I was allowed out twice a week for thirty minutes. As I exercised I flailed my arms, trying to attract the other POWs’ attention, but the guards caught on and stopped me. I was getting a little discouraged. Then in April, ’71, big things began to happen. I was called in by the camp commander on April 18. It was my forty-second birthday. The Vietnamese knew our anniversary dates, and they tried to use them to maximum advantage. I was given my first comb. My hair was long and unkempt.
The NVA said, “We are thinking about giving you a rommate.”
I said, “When?”
“Maybe in a week.” I didn’t know what had caused their change of heart.
The following day I was taking my after-lunch nap when I heard noise outside. Three guards, grinning broadly, flung open my door and escorted Major Artice Elliott inside. Elliott was captured in 1970 near Dak To in South Viet Nam. He was a U.S. Army adviser to ARVN troops. After thirty-seven months in solitary confinement I could hardly get the questions out fast enough. I quizzed him about what had gone on in the States up until he was captured, the changes in fashion, cars, if we actually had a man on the moon, how the war was going in the south, and his opinion of the ARVN.
His opinion of the ARVN wasn’t too high. They had run off and left him in battle minutes before he was captured. He thought the Saigon government would eventually fall. I didn’t. I made a bet with him then and there.
Elliott had been transferred from another cell in the Plantation. I asked if he knew who I was. He said, “Yes, we saw you going to the bath and we were quite sure you were an officer.” I guess they were able to tell by the way I carried myself. I always tried to walk very straight and tall.
I gave Major Elliott my policies, both official and private. When we were in the room, I told him, he could call me by my first name. Outside he would call me Colonel Guy and I would call him Major Elliott. He was to walk on my right and one step behind me in the proper military manner when we went to our baths and took exercise. I didn’t particularly want to do this, but I thought it best so that if any POWs overheard or saw us they would know our ranks and who we were.
I made it clear that I was the camp’s senior ranking officer and, as such, in charge. I explained my policies concerning discipline. I was a very firm disciplinarian. I thought we had to have discipline in the camp in order to survive. The decisions I had to make, in my opinion, involved people’s lives. This may be a hell of a thing to say, but I felt that in the military you had to act like a machine. You tell someone to do something and he has to react instantly. I told Major Elliott all this the first ten minutes he was in the room. He received it well. He was a military man.
Something else happened in April. Harker and his bunch arrived at the Plantation, followed by another group ten days later. They were allowed outside quite extensively at first. I could see them and I knew by their clothes that they had been held somewhere in the south or Laos. I didn’t think too much about their taking extra privileges from the North Vietnamese. They didn’t know my policies; they didn’t realize that other POWs were not getting outside to exercise that much.
But it was not long before I heard some of their group reading propaganda on the radio. I made up my mind to get in touch with them.