The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me: because the Lord hath…sent me…to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.”
—ISAIAH 61:1
One of the greatest tragedies of war has been the suffering of military servicemen seized and held captive by the enemy, not only in recent times but all the way back to the Revolutionary War. From the beginning of the nation, American prisoners of war have undergone hardships and atrocities ranging from sadistic torture and deliberate starvation to brainwashing and murder.
“Death camps” like the Confederate’s Andersonville during the Civil War, Japan’s hellholes of Cabanatuan and Camp O’Donnell during World War II, and the “Hanoi Hilton” in North Vietnam became infamous for their maltreatment of prisoners. In them, American POWs daily confronted abuse, starvation, disease, despair, and death.
During the Revolutionary War, the British used obsolete, captured, or damaged ships as prisons. At least sixteen hulks, including the notorious HMS Jersey, were used to incarcerate thousands of Continental soldiers and sailors from about 1776 to 1783. Over 10,000 died from intentional neglect, more Americans than died in all the combined battles of the Revolution. Corpses were often simply tossed overboard to wash up on shore where local women recovered them.
During the Civil War, approximately 45,000 prisoners entered the gates of Andersonville Prison, the South’s largest POW camp, located in southwest Georgia. Nearly 13,000 of them died there.
“Five hundred men moved silently toward the gates that would shut out life and hope for most of them forever,” John McElroy wrote in 1864 of his stay in Andersonville.
Military historian William B. Breuer described conditions at Camp O’Donnell, one of the internment camps operated by the Japanese for the survivors of the Bataan Death March: “Death soon became the norm. Most POWs were skin and bone, had pipe stem legs and arms, and there was no flesh on their buttocks…. Lungs loaded with tissue fluid fell easy prey to pneumonia. Hearts weakened by prolonged starvation suddenly dilated and stopped beating. Men standing shakily in chow lines toppled over dead. Some straddling latrines slithered down into fecal graves, too weak to extricate themselves. Others hobbled back from long work details, lay down on their filth-covered pallets and died.”
U.S. Air Force Captain Howard Rutledge was shot down in his F-8 Crusader over North Vietnam on November 28, 1965, and caged for seven years behind the cold stone walls of the Hanoi Hilton. What he experienced was representative of conditions endured by modern-day American POWs.
“[The guard] shackled me to my slab in rear cuffs and irons,” he wrote in his memoirs. “For five days I couldn’t move. It was summer and very hot. The humidity must have been in the 90s, the temperature in the 100s. I developed one of those severe heat rashes where the red welts turned to blisters and ultimately to boils…. They wouldn’t come to a head, so I had to pick them to stop the swelling…. In a few days I counted at least sixty boils about one inch in diameter over my entire body—under my arms, in my nose, in my hair, on my ears, legs, arms, hands, and fingers.”
Prisoners of war who have miraculously survived internment or who have escaped or are rescued bring back stunning tales of the means they utilized to cope with captivity. The vast majority credit faith in a Higher Power for their survival.
ARMY AIR CORPS SERGEANT JAMES GAUTIER, JR.,
World War II, 1942
An aircraft mechanic with the 27th Bombardment Group, U.S. Army Air Corps, Sergeant James Gautier, Jr., arrived at Manila Harbor in the Philippines on November 20, 1941. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor six weeks later. Air raids against the Philippines began the next day, followed by the Japanese invasion on December 12. The 27th was bivouacked in tents on the parade grounds at a Filipino Scout base camp near Manila when General Douglas MacArthur declared “open city” on the capitol. This declaration meant he would not defend the city since his troops were greatly outnumbered by the advancing Japanese, and defense meant unnecessary sacrifice of American lives.
With the stroke of a pen, MacArthur transformed Gautier’s support unit into the 17th Provisional Infantry Battalion. Gautier and the other aircraft mechanics were each issued a 1918 Springfield rifle, three bandoleers of ammunition, a box of Nabisco hardtack crackers, and a can of corned beef. Their orders: Withdraw onto the Bataan Peninsula and hold off the Japanese until help arrived.
Japanese forces closed in and trapped beleaguered American and Filipino defense remnants on the Bataan Peninsula. Cornered and starving, the soldiers fought on without resupply or reinforcement until, by March, it became clear that MacArthur wasn’t coming back, at least not yet.
Strapping lean to begin with, Gautier lost thirty pounds he could little afford to spare. Malaria and lice ravaged the ranks, with the misery compounded by artillery shelling and constant attacks from enemy infantry. Weak and always hungry, GIs spent time away from the line scavenging for food like a troop of primates. Once all the horses and mules were devoured, they turned to edible roots, lizards, snakes, and monkeys. The jungle was soon picked so clean of edible plant and animal life that it appeared a plague of locusts had swept through.
During a shelling, one of Gautier’s buddies, Corporal Jesse Knowles, took off running ahead of a stick of bombs. A piece of shrapnel slammed him to the ground. Afterward he discovered only a huge blister on the back of his neck.
“Better sign up with us Baptists right now, Cajun,” Knowles teased Gautier, who hailed from Louisiana. “If I was a Methodist like you, I’d be dead.”
Even hard-core atheists and skeptics turned into believers at the random, almost haphazard manner in which death continued to claim its victims. How else to explain why some died and others lived, except through the divine plan of Providence?
One afternoon, Gautier and two other sergeants were sitting on the ground in a small circle munching on peanuts and sugarcane purloined from nearby fields. Suddenly a 240mm Jap shell homed in with the sound of a flying boxcar. It struck a grove of guava trees about a hundred yards away, close enough to make the sergeants nervous but not near enough to pose a threat.
The sergeant directly across from Gautier, only an arm’s length away, slowly toppled over, a single small, fatal fragment from the exploding shell having punctured the back of his skull.
The Japanese began their final push in April. Shooting erupted from every direction as the enemy closed in. A grim-faced platoon sergeant stared at Gautier and about fifty other survivors.
“Destroy your machine guns,” he ordered. “Break up into small groups and head south. Try to avoid the Japs. You’re on your own.”
Gautier rounded up Knowles and another friend named Inzer. “I’m heading south. Ya’all coming?”
“Aw, Gautier,” Knowles cracked, “you just want me with you ’cause you know God takes care of us Baptists.”
“We’ll make a good team then, because this Methodist is going to work as hard as he can to help the Lord save his skin.”
Except for a few fortunates, however, escape from the encirclement proved impossible. General Edward King, commander of the remaining forces on Bataan, met with the Japanese on April 9th to surrender his troops so they wouldn’t be annihilated. Gautier silently prayed as he trudged to the surrender assembly point with Knowles and Inzer.
In the Japanese culture, the Bushido Code governed the conduct of its military. Fighting to the last man, even committing hara-kiri at the end, was more honorable, and preferable, to surrender. Japanese soldiers treated the capitulating Americans and Filipinos with contempt. They went through the prisoner ranks taking money, watches, pens, rings, food, medicine, and everything else of value. Gautier stared in horror and disbelief as men who protested were kicked, slugged, and hammered with rifle butts. Some were jerked out of ranks and bayoneted on the spot, especially those who possessed anything that might have been taken as souvenirs from Japanese soldiers.
Guards divided prisoners into groups of one hundred and started them marching north on the National Highway. They were bedraggled, filthy, unshaved, and infested with lice and fungi. All wore rotted, torn clothing. Many had no hats to protect their heads from the merciless sun. The feet of those without shoes were soon cut and blistered. Gautier was fortunate because he had managed to replace his worn-out combat boots with a pair of white nurse’s low-quarters, scrounged from the hospital.
Since the Japs appeared to pick on those guys nearest the edge of the processions, Sergeant Gautier positioned himself in the middle of a group. Good plan. Japanese troops passing by in trucks made sport of trying to whack prisoners on their heads with rifles or with long bamboo poles. Once a man was knocked down and couldn’t get up, guards bayoneted him and left him on the road, wallowing in his own blood.
Men weak from wounds, sickness, or starvation received the same treatment. Soon the roadside was littered with corpses bloating in the burning tropical sun, emitting a hellish stench and crawling with maggots. Of the 75,000 captured American and Filipino soldiers who began the so-called Bataan Death March, more than 10,000 would die of hunger, disease, brutality, and murder before they reached Japanese POW camps—first the infamous Camp O’Donnell, then later force-marched the additional eight miles to the equally infamous Cabanatuan prison.
Temperatures reached triple digits. No one was allowed to stop for water or to relieve himself. Gautier saw a GI crazed by thirst attempt to sneak away and steal a drink from an artesian well. Guards shot him before he reached the water.
Stronger prisoners attempted to help the weak. All were in such bad shape, however, that they hardly had strength to help themselves. Weeping in frustration and fear, they went on automatic pilot, lurching along like wasted zombies. They were delirious, hallucinating, trudging through heat and dust in a trancelike state, obsessed with their own thirst and misery.
Those who collapsed were either shot, clubbed to death, or left to die.
Guards finally permitted Gautier’s group to drink where a bridge spanned a small creek. Sergeant Gautier broke into a stumbling run. He dropped on all fours and thrust his entire head underneath the brackish water. He felt a little stronger after he drank. He looked around and saw fly-swarmed corpses floating in the creek. Dead for days, they were bloated up like balloons. Pieces of rotted flesh sloughed off into the water.
He forced himself to drink again, all he could hold. He had to survive.
“Lord, keep me from getting sick,” he prayed.
At nightfall, marchers were packed two thousand or more into barbed wire compounds large enough for only five hundred. On the third evening, they reached the town of Balangao. At the entrance to the compound on the edge of town was stacked a grisly pile of men freshly killed.
Guards entered the compound that night with the severed heads of GIs impaled on the ends of their bayonets, parading about to terrorize and taunt the American POWs. The heads were gruesome objects, dusty and soiled, with glazed, bulging eyes and slack-open mouths, jagged skin flaps hanging from the necks. Gautier dropped his head and closed his eyes; he didn’t want to give the guards any satisfaction in seeing the horror on his face.
After five more days on the road, those still alive were corralled inside a school yard at San Fernando, about 25 miles northwest of Manila. They had walked in the searing sun for almost seventy miles, each with only a single spoonful of uncooked rice and enough water to keep him barely alive. They were so ravaged and spent that they hardly recognized one another.
At that point, they received their first real food since capture, such as it was. Gautier, who had become separated from his friends Knowles and Inzer, staggered into line to get his share of boiled rice from one of the large black kettles. Other prisoners served, scooping rice into a man’s cupped hands or whatever other “plate” he might have salvaged. Gautier had found a slab of board. He held it out.
“Aw, Cajun. You’re a pitiful sight. What have they done to you?”
Gautier looked up to find Jesse Knowles grinning at him while ladling out rice.
“Have you seen Inzer?” Gautier wanted to know.
“Not since we left. Tough as he is, I think he’ll make it.”
Camp O’Donnell, only nine miles more up the road, proved to be the destination for Gautier and his batch of POWs. As he and Knowles tramped along together in a near stupor, he happened to notice a familiar figure in the road ahead. Inzer! The three friends reunited for their arrival at what could only be termed hell on earth.
The prison compound loomed ahead by the side of the road. Japanese troops corralled the ragged hordes of prisoners through the gates. Gautier prayed for his friends, for himself and other survivors, and for the souls of the thousands who perished along the way. That he had come through the long siege of Bataan and the march following surrender could only mean that God wasn’t through with him yet, and that he would make it the rest of the way, whether he be Methodist or Baptist.
Sergeant James Gautier, Jr., survived the nightmare and was rescued by American Rangers and Alamo Scouts in 1945. “Different things gave different men the will to live,” he said. “For some it was their faith. They accepted their circumstances with the belief that God was still in control…. Other men survived on hate alone. They lived for the day when they might repay the Japs for all they had done to them and their friends…. For me, it was a combination of the two. Prayer was something the Japs couldn’t take away, and although I was suffering I believed God was still in control. The Lord had His hand on my shoulder all the time I was a prisoner.”
ARMY SERGEANT DAN PITZER,
Vietnam, 1964
On October 29, 1963, Captain Rocky Versace, Lieutenant Nick Rowe, and Sergeant First Class Dan Pitzer from the Tan Phu U.S. Army Special Forces camp accompanied a 129-man Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) of Vietnamese against a Viet Cong command post located on the Ca Mau Peninsula near the small hamlet of Le Coeur. Never before had American and Allied troops ventured so deep into the enemy’s well-established sanctuary in the legendary Forest of Darkness.
It turned out to be an ill-advised venture. An estimated one thousand seasoned guerrilla fighters of the Main Force 306th VC Battalion trapped the much smaller band of CIDG in a farm village next to a stream. The battle raged for three hours. Finally, nearly out of ammunition and still facing large numbers of attacking VC, the surviving South Vietnamese and their American advisers attempted to withdraw and slip away through fields of cane and reeds. Machine gun fire nearly tore off Versace’s leg, and grenade fragments struck Rowe in the chest and face before the VC captured all three Green Berets. They were stripped of their boots and led to a remote prison camp deep in the U Minh Forest, a dark labyrinth of canals and mangrove swamps.
Daily life was brutally difficult for American soldiers captured in South Vietnam. Rarely were more than seven or eight held in a camp at any one time. They were kept isolated from one another in small bamboo crates called “tiger cages,” deprived of food, and exposed to insects, heat, and disease. Moved regularly to avoid rescue by U.S. troops, they were unable to grow vegetables or tend small livestock such as rabbits or chickens. Their diets consisted of rice and whatever they could catch or gather in the surrounding jungle, and this led to dysentery, edema, beriberi, malaria, eczema, and depression.
For propaganda purposes, guards and political cadres attempted to break the POWs down by deceit, force, and brainwashing, and indoctrinate them into the “enlightened” practice of communism.
“Do not think that merely because the war ends that you will go home,” VC political officers cautioned prisoners. “If you unrepentant Americans ever wish to go home, you must denounce your Wall Street capitalists and declare the United States imperialistic, unjust, and illegal.”
Pitzer and Rowe adopted a “sit and listen” posture to mandatory classes, preferring to keep a “low profile” and wait it out. Versace, on the other hand, attended only at the point of a bayonet.
“You can make me come to class,” he conceded, “but I am an officer in the United States Army. You can make me listen, you can force me to sit here, but I don’t believe a word of what you’re saying.”
Recalcitrant and defiant to the end, Captain Versace was finally taken away. He was singing “God Bless America” at the top of his lungs when guards marched him out of camp. Pitzer later learned that he had been escorted into the forest and executed.
Sergeant Pitzer spent his first year of captivity in virtual isolation. Although he attempted to escape a number of times, he was quickly recaptured on each occasion. A feeling of hopelessness and despair overcame him. Having had a fairly religious upbringing, he now began to blame God for putting him through this ordeal. He questioned God’s motives. It was fist-shaking time in his bamboo cage.
“Why are You doing this to me?” he raged. “Why am I being put through this kind of torture?”
Jesus Himself had asked such questions during His sojourn alone in the desert.
On Christmas Eve at the beginning of Pitzer’s second year in captivity, he was working outside the camp in the jungle attempting to gather something to eat when he heard the high drone of an approaching airplane. Overcome with excitement and hope, he watched as a light OV-10 FAC (forward air controller) aircraft used by the U.S. Air Force to “spot” targets appeared through a break in the forest canopy. Its pilot must have seen the enemy camp, for it dived and dropped red smoke to mark it. Almost immediately, a Huey helicopter gunship soared in at treetop level and opened up on the VC camp with its machine guns.
Pitzer’s excitement turned to fear and disappointment. He hid in the trees, afraid to show himself since he might easily be mistaken for a VC in his issued “black pajamas” and be gunned down before he made his identity known. Profoundly exasperated, almost in tears, he cowered in the forest like a hunted animal until the chopper departed.
The camp had been all shot up. After nightfall, VC guards gave prisoners a handful of cold rice and ordered them to gather their meager possessions. They marched for several hours through the night along a river on their way to a new prison camp.
Just before midnight and the start of Christmas Day, the procession rounded a bend in the river. Pitzer gasped in astonishment. One of the guards exclaimed, “Choi-hoi!” That roughly meant, “My heavens!”
Directly ahead loomed a magnificent evergreen tree thirty or forty feet tall, standing alone next to the water. Something about the tree had attracted thousands and thousands of fireflies. The “Christmas tree” twinkled merrily, as though decorated by strands of lights, reflecting and displaying itself in the black river. Above its top branches hovered a brilliant light in the sky, like a Star of David. A very bright star.
A sense of peace and well-being engulfed Pitzer. He couldn’t explain it, but somehow he suddenly knew that everything was going to be all right. The feeling persisted, even after he arrived at the new prison camp and had ample time to consider the spectacle. He decided God didn’t have to use lightning bolts or burning bushes to communicate with men. In this instance, He had chosen something recognizable to all Americans every Christmas in order to let Sergeant Pitzer know He was with him.
From then on, whenever Pitzer spoke to God all alone in his little tiger cage, and communist guards asked him who he was talking to, the American replied simply, “Someone you will never know.”
In November 1967, the VC National Liberation Front released two GIs in a propaganda move to demonstrate its “humane and lenient” treatment of captives. One of them suffered so badly from malaria, beriberi, hepatitis, and amebic dysentery that the VC also released Medic Pitzer to take care of him.
Because of his “unrepentant” and “reactionary” stubbornness, Lieutenant Rowe was sentenced to be put to death in December 1968. However, before the death penalty could be administered, he took advantage of the appearance of a flight of American helicopters and escaped.
CONFEDERATE PRIVATE JAMES PAXTON,
U.S. Civil War, 1863–64
Confederate General Joe Shelby raided into Missouri from Arkansas in the fall of 1863, one of his purposes being to recruit men to join the insurrection. Yanks surprised and captured several of his soldiers, including Private James Paxton, who had grown up in the Ozarks of Arkansas.
Prisoners were herded through Springfield and St. Louis on foot, in wagons and on horseback to Camp Morton, Indiana, where they arrived in November 1863. Located a mile or so north of Indianapolis, the camp was named in honor of the state’s war governor, Oliver P. Morton. Nearly four hundred Confederate prisoners of war were confined on flat, hard soil inside box walls constructed of planks solidly nailed to timbers. Some fourteen feet tall, the walls blocked out the sun until midmorning. Guards oversaw the prison yard and its inmates from a walkway that ran around the outside of the stockade about four feet from the top. Old livestock sheds near the north and west walls served as barracks. Through the center of the compound ran a sewer drain. Prisoners called it the Potomac.
Paxton assumed his confinement was temporary, that the warring sides would soon hold a prisoner exchange. Weeks stretched into months. Word came that there would be no exchanges. Immediately after this, rations were reduced to the point of starvation—about six ounces of stringy beef and a half loaf of “duffer” bread per man per day. No coffee and no vegetables.
Men who died of disease, starvation, and deprivation were lugged outside the walls and buried in unmarked graves in the Indiana soil. Guards said the harsh treatment was retaliation for the starving of Union prisoners held in Andersonville and other southern prisons.
“You starve us down there, we starve you Rebel boys up here. That’s how it works.”
Lieutenant James A. Corry from Georgia, Paxton’s friend, preferred to pass as a common private to avoid being singled out by vengeful guards. He was a strong Christian who joined several preachers among the inmates to hold Bible study and church services. Congregations met underneath shade trees in the summer and inside the shed-barracks in the winter. Old southern gospel singing and down-home fire-and-brimstone preaching by the self-ordained ministers rocked prison walls every Sunday. The more desperate conditions became, the more readily men turned away from gambling and other pursuits to join the “church.” Private Paxton noted that a great many sinners came to a knowledge of their Savior underneath the shade trees at Camp Morton.
Lieutenant Corry died of pneumonia in the early winter of 1864. After his body was hauled away to be buried, the entire prison population turned out to hold a memorial service in his memory. Even some of the Union guards attended. Paxton wondered if the lieutenant’s relatives in faraway Georgia would ever find out where and how he died.
“There won’t be no more war up there where Lieutenant Corry has gone,” the presiding preacher promised the silent and bowed-head assemblage. “That there is something we all can look forward to.”
Private James Paxton survived Camp Morton and was released after the war ended in 1865.
AIR FORCE LIEUTENANT JACK M. BUTCHER,
Vietnam, 1971
Jack Butcher slowly circled his Cessna OV-10 above a river ford on the Ho Chi Minh Trail near the Laotian border with South Vietnam. A thousand feet above the jungle, he scanned the ford with a pair of binoculars, looking for movement or other indications of enemy activity. The trail was the primary route used by the North Vietnamese to bring in troops and supplies to pursue their war of subjugating the South to communism. FACs like Butcher and his partner Captain Tom Yarborough, who worked a second grid nearby, scratched and sniffed around enemy supply lines and other congested areas. If they spotted anything, they called in “fast movers” to dump rockets and napalm on-target.
The only movement Butcher detected through his binoculars were ripples reflecting sunlight where the primitive twin ruts of the trail crossed the shallow river. He thought he had caught sight of something else down there in the Big Green, but he must have been mistaken. He banked once more to make sure.
Flying FACs was one of the most, if not the most, hazardous aviation job in Vietnam. The low-flying, slow-flying aircraft literally invited anyone and everyone to take a pot shot, from the VC farmer-by-day with his antique .50-caliber single-action rifle to the surface-to-air missile (SAM) gunner. It didn’t surprise Lieutenant Butcher that he would be shot at. What surprised him on that morning of March 24, 1971, was the suddenness of it, the unexpectedness.
Seemingly out of nowhere, originating from somewhere down in the jungle’s vast expanse, a single antiaircraft shell streaked up at him trailing smoke. It slammed into the nose of his little airplane before he had time to react and exploded with a deafening bang below his left rudder pedal.
Of all the dumb luck! Every combat pilot lived with the nightmare of possibly being shot down over enemy territory and risking capture. Butcher’s nightmare-turned-real was just beginning.
The OV-10 burst into a ball of flames. It shuddered violently and rolled forward. Although dazed from the concussion, barely conscious, Butcher reacted instinctively to training and managed to open the door and bail out. He blacked out as his parachute opened with a positive jerk.
Captain Yarborough, patrolling nearby, saw what happened. But by the time he reached the site, Butcher’s airplane and Butcher himself had vanished into the green canopy below. However, the high-pitched shrill of the downed pilot’s emergency beeper filled his headphones. That meant his friend had ejected and was possibly still alive down there. Yarborough radio-alerted search and rescue (SAR) helicopters.
Lieutenant Butcher awoke lying next to a tree. Still groggy, hardly aware of what he was doing, he crawled into some bushes to hide. They would be coming for him. Only a few weeks in-country and here he was already shot down. Shock and the aftereffects of the explosion in his cockpit made him pass out again.
The next time he opened his eyes, he was lying flat on his back in a dim place. At first he thought it was nightfall. He blinked rapidly, trying to orient himself. How much time had passed? Hours? Gradually, his senses returned. He discovered himself stretched out, still in his flight suit, on a reed sleeping mat inside what he assumed to be a Vietnamese hooch. He was looking up at the underside of a thatched-grass roof.
Other unsettling features about his environment came into focus. An IV needle protruded from his wrist. In the open doorway, staring in at him, stood a sentry dressed in peasant “black pajamas” and a cone hat. He pointed his AK-47 at Butcher when the American stirred.
Butcher studied the VC with a mixture of fear and curiosity. It was the first enemy soldier he had ever seen close up. All he could figure was that this guy and his comrades must have found him and whisked him away to their base camp. By the look on the guard’s face, this was not going to be a pleasant experience.
“If I had my druthers,” Captain Yarborough once drawled, “I’d druther die right away rather than end up in gook hands. Chances are they’ll kill you anyhow—only it’ll be so much slower and more painful.”
Butcher wondered why they hadn’t already finished him off. Probably because they intended to torture and interrogate him. Then they’d kill him.
The guard lowered his rifle and walked off a few steps, where he resumed his sentry duties. As Butcher lay helplessly gazing up at the thatched roof of his prison, he began to prepare himself mentally for what he felt to be certain and eventual execution.
He began to pray. He prayed for over an hour. He prayed the Sinner’s Prayer: “Lord, I know I have sinned. In Jesus’ name, forgive me of my sins and come into my heart.” He accepted Jesus as his Savior and afterward felt much better. He believed God was listening and would guide him through his ordeal.
Except for the omnipresent guard, he was left alone in the hut for the next several days with nothing but his increasing apprehension. He soon recovered from being shot down, but he seemed to be getting weaker rather than stronger. The cause was his meager diet—a handful or so of boiled rice once a day. Maybe starvation was how they intended to accomplish his execution.
Butcher and his guard soon formed a symbiotic routine. After lunch, the guard sat down against the trunk of a tree and took a nap. Butcher used the opportunity to explore, peeping cautiously out the open door to discover his hooch was only one of several in some kind of small village camp. Guerrillas and gray-green uniformed NVA regulars were always about. There was no way he could simply walk away without being noticed.
On hands and knees, he patted down every inch of his hut’s dirt floor before he found what he was looking for—an escape tunnel concealed underneath a reed mat. His in-country indoctrination course had been right on the money. The enemy was ingenious in burrowing a way to flee in case he was surprised and had to get out without being seen. His hopes soared.
The next day, during his guard’s after-lunch siesta, Butcher said a prayer, grabbed his boots and a canteen that had been left in the hut, and wriggled into the tunnel. It was almost too small for the average American’s body. He feared he might get stuck in it and starve to death. With great relief, he popped up in the jungle a short distance away.
He was free! God had been listening!
Running, stopping frequently to listen for pursuit, he made his way toward the western sun, away from the Laotian border and deeper into Vietnam, where his chances of being found were greater. He climbed a wooded ridge and worked his way along it until he came to a wide meadow. He heard voices drawing rapidly nearer on his back trail. Trackers.
He followed a trail that meandered along the base of the ridge between it and the meadow. He dared not try to make a run for it across the open; he would be spotted and promptly shot. At the same time, he knew by the sound of voices that his trackers were catching up to him. There was no way he could outdistance them in his weakened condition. Instead, he crawled into dense underbrush, covered himself with foliage, and prayed.
Armed and enraged searchers combed the ridge for him for the next several hours. Butcher lay motionless in his hide, hardly daring to breath. His heart pounded so hard when soldiers passed nearby that he feared they must surely hear it.
Finally, they seemed to give up. The forest grew silent. Butcher waited for another hour to be sure before he crept from cover. Sundown was only an hour or so away, and he needed to put as much distance between himself and the base camp as he could before nightfall forced him to hole up somewhere.
He pushed downhill to the edge of the meadow, where he could make better time and the growing dusk was not quite so thick. Suddenly, more than a dozen NVA stood up in the grass, bayoneted AK-47 muzzles pointed at him. They had been waiting patiently like deer hunters on a stand for him to show himself—and he had fallen into their trap. His few hours of freedom were over.
An English-speaking officer interrogated him for the next few days. Butcher refused to cooperate, playing dumb and pretending not to understand the officer’s accented English. Soldiers congregated in the door of the hut to watch and cheer on their communist hero. The discouraged officer finally gave up.
“I am sorry you have chosen not to answer,” he said. “We have decided to execute you.”
Soldiers and villagers in the door scattered at that announcement. One guard remained standing behind the American. Butcher heard him chamber a round into his pistol. As the interrogator walked out, he turned back and sadly repeated how sorry he was that the American pilot refused to talk.
The muzzle of a handgun pressed against the back of Butcher’s head. He felt his life about to stop. He sat on his little stool, eyes closed in a final prayer, hands clasped in his lap, the muzzle of the pistol jammed against his skull, and waited for his life to end.
To hell with them, he thought. I’m not breaking the code. God’s will be done.
The guard did not shoot. It was a bluff. After a few minutes, the interrogator returned, looked at Butcher, and shook his head.
“We did not realize how much your President Nixon has brainwashed American soldiers,” he said.
On May 4, six weeks after Lieutenant Butcher’s initial capture, he and two guards started the long walk up the Ho Chi Minh Trail to Hanoi. On May 9, during a rest break in the jungle, he said he had to go to the bathroom. The guards moved to the other side of the trail to smoke while he nonchalantly walked into the forest. Once out of sight, he took off running.
Within a few hours, the top-secret Allied Joint Personnel Recovery Center (JPRC) intercepted an enemy radio message stating that an OV-10 pilot had escaped along the trail in southern Laos. JPRC was established by the United States earlier in the war to keep track of American and Allied POWs, and attempt to recover them. Immediately, the great hunt was on to find Butcher. JPRC monitored communications and filled the skies with SAR aircraft.
For ten desperate days, Lieutenant Butcher evaded the heaviest concentrations of NVA and VC troops in Southeast Asia while suffering from malaria, headaches, fever, and overwhelming hunger. Several times he spotted friendly aircraft flying overhead, but failed at contacting them because of heavy jungle.
On May 19, driven by hunger, he sneaked into a village to steal pineapples. An elderly woman spotted him. He fled the village and stumbled down a trail. He crossed a dry streambed and was hurrying through the woods when he heard shouts. Armed NVA soldiers promptly ran him down.
He resumed the long walk to Hanoi—with four guards this time. He knew God was by his side to see him through whatever came.
Lieutenant Jack Butcher survived incarceration at the notorious Hanoi Hilton until “Homecoming” at the end of the war, when the North Vietnamese released him.
NAVY LIEUTENANT COMMANDER JOHN MCCAIN,
Vietnam, 1970
During a bombing run over Hanoi in October 1967, Lieutenant Commander John McCain’s A-4 Skyhawk was hit by a SAM missile, knocking off its right wing. Reacting automatically, McCain radioed “I’m hit!” and pulled the ejection seat handle as the aircraft spiraled toward earth.
Somehow, he struck the plane as he ejected and broke both arms and his right knee as he hurtled through the air. Knocked unconscious by the force, he revived only after his parachute dropped him into the center of shallow Truc Bach Lake in the middle of Hanoi in the middle of the day. Unable to use his arms, he inflated his life vest by pulling the toggle with his teeth.
Angry Vietnamese civilians hauled him ashore, shouting, spitting, kicking, and striking. Someone smashed his shoulder with a rifle butt. Someone else stabbed a bayonet into his ankle and groin. A female nurse and the arriving Viet military rescued him before the civilians could finish him off. They transported him to nearby Hoa Lo, the former French prison notorious among American POWs as “Hanoi Hilton.” He was confined there and at “the Plantation” for the next five and a half years and endured unspeakable deprivation, hardship, and torture.
Denied initial medical care, he suffered further injuries and abuse at the hands of brutal military guards and interrogators. The camp officer of the Plantation, a short, fat Viet called “Bug” because of a cloudy right eye, finally decided the American pilot was going to die, no matter what.
“Are you going to take me to the hospital?” McCain asked.
“No. It’s too late.”
Just as McCain accepted his fate, Bug returned, excited. “Your father is a big admiral,” he exclaimed. “Now we take you to the hospital.”
Delivered because of his propaganda value, McCain was treated and placed in a cell with two U.S. Air Force majors, George “Bud” Day and Norris Overly. Day suffered from the aftermath of his own injuries and from incessant torture. Overly was in better shape. Together, the two men saved McCain’s life. They cleaned him, fed him, helped him on and off the toilet bucket, and massaged his leg. Gradually, he began to recover.
Prisoners of war knew well the meaning of the term “steady strain.” It meant to buckle down and endure, to take life in captivity and everything that came with it in a stoic, patient manner. They would go home when the time came. Nothing they did could hasten it.
North Vietnamese guards and interrogators were “mean sons of bitches,” as McCain put it in describing Bug. Raised and indoctrinated through communism, which acknowledged no moral principle of a god or a higher being, they seemed to possess none of the restraining influences that might have tempered their harsh treatment of captives. Many of the guards and even some of the interrogators had never even heard the word “god” in any language. They beat and sometimes murdered prisoners without compassion or conscience.
“Interrogation,” which meant torture, continued long after a prisoner no longer possessed useful military information. It became an effort to brainwash him into accepting communism and making statements against his own country. McCain, like other POWs, settled into the “steady strain” of a prisoner of communism.
The daily routine of life was both simple and excruciatingly dull. Each morning began at six with the ringing of a gong. POWs rose and folded their bedding. They sat while loudspeakers broadcast Hanoi Hannah and the “Voice of Vietnam” into their cells. “News from home” consisted of updates on antiwar activities, incidents of civil strife in the United States, and recordings of speeches delivered by prominent American opponents of the war.
POWs emptied their waste buckets and were fed two meals a day, each usually consisting of weak tea, a small slab of bread and a bowl of pumpkin soup with, sometimes, a piece of pig fat in it. The rest of the day, they simply waited in solitary with nothing to occupy their minds, boredom broken only by irregular interrogations.
Sometimes three or four weeks might pass between events in the interrogation room, a Spartan cell furnished only with a wooden table, a chair behind the table, and a low stool. At other times, a prisoner might be jerked out of sleep two or three times in a single night and hauled down for a session. McCain would shoot bolt upright in terror every time he heard the sound of jangling keys at his cell door.
The “Soft Soap Fairy” was an interrogator with delicate manners and a solicitous good-cop routine. He spoke fine English.
“How are you, Mac Kane? This terrible war. I hope it’s soon over.”
Bug, on the other hand, was a sadist filled with irrational hate. On occasion, he had McCain trussed in ropes with his hands and feet cinched behind his back so tightly that it cut off circulation and caused him to lose consciousness.
But whether the interrogator was a Fairy or a Bug, the POW could only accept it and endure. Only once during McCain’s captivity did he encounter a Vietnamese who seemed to possess some true compassion toward his subjects. In 1970, a young interrogator practicing his English on the pilot appeared interested in American religious customs, especially the significance of Easter.
“It’s that time of year when we celebrate the death and resurrection of the Son of God,” McCain explained.
The Viet frowned in disbelief as McCain recounted the events of Christ’s Passion: His crucifixion, death on the cross, resurrection, and ascent into Heaven.
“You say He died?” the interrogator demanded suspiciously.
“Yes. He died.”
“Three days He was dead?”
“Then He came alive again. People saw Him. Then He went back to Heaven.”
The Vietnamese stared at the American, and pondered, clearly puzzled. He got up without another word and left the room.
Shortly, he returned, his friendly manner gone. He glowered at McCain.
“Mac Kane,” he barked, “the officer say you tell nothing but lies. Go back to your room.”
Lieutenant Commander John McCain was released in 1972 and later became a U.S. senator and presidential candidate.