CHAPTER 12

TIES THAT BIND

FALL 1967–1968

IN THE LATE SIXTIES, Billy Graham held a ten-day crusade in Kansas City. Crowds totaling over 364,000 came from all over the Midwest by plane, train, and car and packed the Municipal Stadium. During a three-day youth event conducted at the same time, the arena filled to near capacity with people under twenty-five. Over ten thousand youth came forward at the end of the services for commitment and information. One of Dr. Graham’s primary messages emphasized the importance of the community of believers, the strength and mutual benefit gained by staying connected to one another.

In the dungeons of Hanoi, men —especially those with religious convictions —discovered just how much they needed one another. Though many discussed differences in beliefs, their individual theologies paled in light of holding together under the most trying circumstances as men of faith and men of courage.

Jerry could feel his body weakening more and more with each passing year. He was not certain how much weight he had lost, but he knew it was considerable. His forearms, normally muscular, were shrinking: it made the large scorpion-shaped scar on his right arm even more prominent. Jerry rubbed his finger across the bumpy tissue.

When he was twenty, he had pitched every inning of a fast-pitch softball game despite having a four-inch gash sewn up just a few hours earlier. The deep cut was on his pitching arm, and during the game all the stitches had pulled out. I probably wouldn’t have the strength right now to pitch even one inning, he thought, stitches or no stitches.

He looked down at his empty tin plate.

I am so thankful, God, that Terry and Tommy and little Lori will never have to experience hunger like this.

He wondered how much his children had grown. Tommy was nearly ten now and Lori almost seven, ready for school. He still had not been allowed to send or receive a letter, though many other POWs had been permitted to do so. The nightmare he first had experienced at the Zoo of his children drowning in a swift current and his desperate attempts to save them reccurred frequently. Each time he would wake up before the dream ended, always drenched in sweat.

My son is probably hungry all the time like I was as a boy, thought Jerry. He remembered when he would run into the house saying the familiar childhood mantra, “I’m starving!” He realized now he had never really known what hunger was before. He’d give anything for a piece of his wife’s pecan pie and coffee. His body craved food all the time: sweets, fruits, and vegetables, but most of all, protein.

Rice always came with worms; soup always came cold —and often with something floating in it. Jerry thought back to the many times he had found an inch-long piece of fatback, complete with bristles. He would bite into the fatback in an effort to lend a little flavor to whatever he was eating but also to ingest at least a smidgen of protein.

On this particular morning, he noticed something new bobbing in his bowl: a very small whole fish, sun-dried and salted. He lifted it out with his fingers and looked at it a moment. It was about four inches long.

He put the entire fish in his mouth and held it. Jerry’s saliva slowly dissolved the fish, and he was left with only a small ball of tiny bones. At least he had absorbed a little protein, and Will, gracious as usual, offered him the remainder of his water.

As he finished his soup that morning at the School, Jerry had just spit the ball of fish bones into his bowl when guards once again barged into the cell. They made rolling motions with their hands. He now knew exactly what this meant: roll up your mat and pick up your tin cup —it was time to relocate. And once more, the guards hauled Jerry and Will, both blindfolded, back to Hoa Lo Prison in downtown Hanoi.

After the V deposited him in his new location, Jerry realized he was back at Vegas. Guards led him to a corner cell, and in a few moments, the door opened. Will was pushed in too.

“Well, Will, here we are again,” Jerry said. “Can you believe this space?” Jerry looked around at this new area. The larger cellblocks had been modified to smaller seven-by-nine-foot units containing two sets of narrow, wooden top-and-bottom bunk beds coarsely built with no mattresses. “Surely they won’t add anyone else in here.”

But as he turned around, turnkeys shoved two more POWs into the cramped space. Four grown men now shared a cell no bigger than a large closet —grossly cramped for two adults, insanely suffocating for four.

This new arrangement defined staying connected in totally different ways. What men had had to adjust to in solitary or in two-man cells now had to be relearned to accommodate several other people.

Jerry introduced himself to his new cellmates. They recognized each other’s names from their communication through the walls. Everyone shook hands and began to arrange their meager possessions on the bunks: mats, cups, and thin cotton blankets. They quickly realized any activity done in the center space, which measured about twenty-four inches wide, would require other cellmates to be on their beds. If there were any idiosyncrasies, unusual habits, or other peculiarities of personality, all these would have to be accommodated, understood, and allowed for.

“So they are only giving us one toilet bucket to share?” one of his new cellmates asked, looking at the single two-gallon metal bucket about fifteen inches high with its thin, rusty rim, sitting in the corner. “This should be nice,” he muttered.

Jerry began adjusting himself to several cellmates confined in an area with no space for living, merely existing. It’s not much different from being the youngest in a family of nine, he mused, except, of course, then I could just go outside and ride horses if I wanted to get away.

The first evening together, the four pilots shared their stories of where and how they had been captured.

One of Jerry’s new cellmates told about his shoot-down experience and being marched through the streets of Hanoi, where he was photographed by a number of international journalists. After the war, they learned one of these pictures had become an image known worldwide, representing all POWs and MIAs. It had been printed in newspapers and magazines and broadcast on televisions around the world.

“I crushed my arm on ejection,” he told the others, “and it’s never really healed properly.” Jerry could easily see that his right arm was grossly disfigured, evidently broken and never reset, so it had mended at an angle and looked as if there were three elbows instead of one.

The other pilot had been shot down in 1966 and immediately had undergone extreme physical brutality that was intended to extract a confession for propaganda purposes. During this time period, the V often lit into new shoot-downs, counting on the trauma of their crash and capture to help elicit false statements. The new cellmate had been introduced to prison life in a trial by fire.

Though the cell was crowded, Jerry’s need to pace continued. He asked the other men if they minded, since all three would need to be in their bunks while he used up the narrow center space. No one objected. They were all in weakened conditions due to inadequate food and various illnesses, including diarrhea and dysentery, but for Jerry, pacing helped him meditate. The others sometimes did push-ups or sit-ups on their wooden beds to try to maintain some semblance of physical strength.

As the days stretched on, one of Jerry’s cellmates developed asthma. “Have you ever had this before?” Jerry asked him.

“Never,” he said, “but I heard several other POWs are having trouble with it too.”

After a few weeks his condition worsened. Now he was gasping for air nearly all the time, especially at night, and usually had to resort to sleeping sitting up. Jerry wished there was something he could do for his cellmate, but without proper medication, Jerry was powerless to provide assistance.

His cellmate’s condition continued to deteriorate. Jerry watched as this man stood in the middle of the concrete floor at night between the bunk beds, which were no more than twenty-four inches apart. He would raise his arms and rest each elbow on a slat of the wooden steps nailed to the vertical posts of the beds. Because the beds were so close together, this position allowed him to suck in some air and doze a little at the same time, propped up between the ladders. It was the only time he got any sleep.

Jerry hated the feeling of helplessness, realizing his cellmate was struggling to stay alive. He labored for each breath. Sometimes at night the other three men wondered if he was going to make it until morning.

At the same time, the asthma caused a sniff as dependable as clockwork —innocuous in the beginning but maddening as time marched on.

While Jerry did his usual pacing one day between the bunks, he became aware of his cellmate’s steady sniff. It seemed odd he had never noticed it before, but suddenly the sound amplified in his head as if with speakers. He tried hard not to focus on it in the seven-by-nine-foot space, but the harder he tried, the louder and more irritating the sniffing became. This went on day after day.

He tried to overlook the effect the noise was having on him. He told himself how silly it was to let this bother him. No one felt more compassion than Jerry did for this man, battling for every breath.

Jerry prayed for patience. He tried to lessen its impact by counting the length of time between sniffs —anything to distract his mind from the constant noise. One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three —until he reached one thousand eleven . . . then sniff. And the whole sequence started all over again. Every eleven seconds, the cellmate sniffed. Jerry thought he was going to lose his mind.

One day Jerry, who already was gaining a reputation among prisoners for having the patience of Job —an officer with “infinite patience,” as one of his SROs later described him in an official evaluation, whose “patience cannot be lost” —simply could go no longer without saying something.

In his usual, respectful demeanor, Jerry quietly said to the man suffering from asthma, “Do you realize you sniff every eleven seconds, round the clock, day after day, without stopping? Do you realize that? I am about to go up this wall.”

His cellmate, who was lying on his bunk, rose up slowly. In as measured a voice as he could muster, he looked steadily at Jerry and said, “Tom, do you realize that you whistle under your breath every day, day in and day out, especially when you’re pacing? And I’m about to go up that wall.”

They both looked at each other . . . and burst out laughing.

During the time following Jerry’s arrival back at Vegas, it soon became apparent why the North Vietnamese had remodeled this part of Hoa Lo Prison —to accommodate a burgeoning prisoner population. It was one of Jerry’s current roommates who had come up with the name “Little Vegas,” usually shortened to just “Vegas,” and the name had stuck. He had done his pilot training at Nellis AFB just outside Las Vegas. As time went along, other POWs called separate areas within this sprawling part of the Hanoi Hilton by names of casinos on the Strip —Stardust, Desert Inn, Thunderbird, Riviera, Golden Nugget, the Mint.

During remodeling of new areas, the Vietnamese had taken extraordinary measures to stymie communication among increasing numbers of inmates. No two cells faced each other, and spaces between walls separated cellblocks. Windows contained additional slats, and any opening was covered over with bamboo mats.

Yet Vegas’s labyrinth design and Vietnamese attempts to hinder prisoners’ ability to communicate with one another only heightened the creativity of men determined to stay connected. Some POWs discovered metal drinking cups pressed against vertical surfaces amplified mere whispers enough to be heard through walls, even ones with narrow corridors between. In Jerry’s cell, the men discovered tapping on the floor worked best for their cell. One POW noted that after lunch, when guards often napped and so much tapping commenced, it “sounded like a cabinet factory.”

Tapping, however, was not the only means of communicating. Sometimes men wrote notes on tiny pieces of toilet paper using a pencil fashioned from bits of coal. If intercepted, these notes could bring severe punishment, so they were often passed by sticking them in a crevice in the wall or some other hiding place around the area where toilet buckets were emptied. Guards made an effort not to go too close because of the stench. As a result, this often was the safest method to communicate.

But there were other ways messages could be sent. Footsteps could be timed in such a way as to “pat out” a signal. Chests could be slapped, clothes thumped, brooms swept, plates banged —anything that could exhibit a visual signal or produce a noise had potential for sending a message. Howard “Howie” E. Rutledge, shot down on November 28, 1965 —not long after Jerry —summarized the process succinctly and simply: “During those long years of captivity, we learned to communicate with anything and everything.”

It was always perilous to stay connected, but it was always done.

A primary goal for POWs during the middle years of incarceration —a crucial reason to stay connected —involved tracking who had been captured and when. Jerry used a simple method of memorizing prisoners’ names alphabetically using his knuckles. A man whose name began with A was on the top of his first knuckle, then the next name in alphabetical order was in the “valley,” or space between the knuckles. The next name, again in the alphabetical order, sat on top of the next knuckle, then the next name down in the valley. He memorized hundreds of names using this method, and sometimes he would know whether he had skipped someone just by a last name being in the wrong place on his hands. He practiced the list two or three times every day. When a new shoot-down came in, he would have to insert this new name into the system and make appropriate adjustments with all other names using the knuckle-valley method. This was tedious and time consuming, but it worked for Jerry.

It was imperative for the POWs to maintain an accurate head count: they all knew any of them could easily disappear. The grossly unsanitary living conditions had taken their toll on everyone. Any cut or scratch was certain to fester; skin conditions developed, including boils, rashes, blisters, and sores. Many used urine to cleanse these areas. Some who developed ear infections poured their urine directly into ear canals in an attempt to kill bacteria. One in four was seriously ill or injured or both.

Often POWs entered captivity with broken bones. One POW who broke his leg while ejecting was told by an interrogator that if the leg became gangrenous, they would throw the leg along with him onto the garbage dump for burning. The POW said he had no doubt that would have happened.

In addition, there had been an escape attempt. The two escapees had been recaptured within a short period of time and both submitted to brutal beatings. One man survived; one did not. All POWs knew there existed a very real danger of guards not letting up once punishment began. With their isolated living conditions, it was imperative to do what they could to monitor as many as possible.

One of the ways Jerry tried to keep everyone informed of who was held in Vegas and who was not utilized their porcelain-covered tin plates and aluminum spoons. The Vietnamese enjoyed bragging that the POW spoons were stamped out from the salvaged metal skins of US airplanes they had shot down. Jerry turned these aluminum utensils to good advantage.

Guards often asked him to clean dishes after meals. This was something of a misnomer since there wasn’t any soap, and when there was, it was non-sudsing lye. Some men licked their plates completely clean, trying not to leave anything on them that might attract bugs and rats.

Jerry, however, saw this as an opportunity to relay names of men captured. By carving into the thin edges of their tin plates the last name and shoot-down date of a pilot, he preserved a record —sometimes the only record in prison which identified a man as POW rather than MIA. The family of Commander Bill Franke, who had taught Jerry the tap code at Heartbreak Hotel when he was first imprisoned, had been notified of his death and had had his funeral —only to find out later, much to their disbelief and joy, that Franke was not dead at all but alive and in captivity.

One day, Jerry heard an incredibly poignant story from one of his cellmates. The incident had occurred at Heartbreak.

“My cell door banged open one night,” his cellmate said, “and the guards rushed in. I had heard ‘through the walls’ that they were working their way around, and I knew I was in for it —they were after any kind of confession or whatever they could get out of you. Man, I was really dreading it.”

Jerry knew the feeling all too well. Sometimes POWs who had experienced torture previously would start shaking involuntarily when guards came for them —because they knew what was about to happen.

“I just felt so alone,” he continued.

What happened next was a small incident by Hanoi Hilton standards, but in such a hostile environment, sometimes the small things loomed the largest.

“As the V were taking me down the corridor,” he told Jerry, “they had to stop in that narrow passage for something. And they had me shoved up against one of the cell doors.”

Jerry remembered well the gloomy appearance of the interiors at Heartbreak. Dim lighting and putrid smells created a foreboding and unpleasant atmosphere.

“As I stood there waiting —didn’t know if they were planning to put me in the ‘ropes’ or what —all of a sudden, I felt the finger of somebody gently touching the side of my foot from under the cell door I was leaning against.” Jerry’s cellmate stopped speaking a moment and looked down.

Their cell was quiet. Jerry and the others could imagine the scene.

“Do you know who touched your foot?” asked Jerry.

“No, I have no idea who it was,” his cellmate said, regaining his composure. “But it was as if that guy was saying to me, ‘You’re not alone.’ I really needed it right then.”

As the days continued at Vegas, men did everything they could to support one another. They knew the widespread brutality. Sometimes Jerry heard anguished screams in other parts of the camp, but usually coming from the direction of the bath area.

Most POWs who had been captured early on, like himself, had not experienced outright torture during the first few months of their captivity. This gave time for them to get acclimated, to some extent —other Americans could get in touch with them as soon as possible, like how Commander Bill Franke had reached out to him at Heartbreak. It helped the new shoot-downs to feel they were a part of a network and therefore not completely alone.

However, during the middle years, often shoot-downs immediately were subjected to a full-throttled torture session as soon as they arrived in Hanoi. Many had ejected, sustaining broken bones, one or two with broken backs. POWs already there in prison tried to get in touch with them as soon as possible to keep them from succumbing to depression and fear.

On one occasion, Jerry was sitting in his cell at Vegas when he heard someone screaming in the distance, then sobbing. He began to pray for whoever it was —he suspected it was a new guy just captured. Then he heard the man calling out in anguish, “God, please let me die!”

The cries wrenched Jerry’s heart. He knew the man was suffering horribly. He prayed for him all day long. Staying connected meant doing all he could —and sometimes, it meant simply sitting and praying.

It began as an ordinary, monotonous morning for the prisoners in the Thunderbird building at Vegas. Suddenly, however, the day turned ominous. A message came “through the walls.”

qzs . . . bios . . . ropes . . .

Jerry and his cellmates immediately dreaded what it meant: the V must be methodically working their way through the cells to obtain biographies. For some of the men in Vegas, this would be their first experience at straining to keep from writing a biography or confessions of war crimes. But Jerry knew what to expect —absolute viciousness.

For the moment, however, he had an even greater concern. What had he written before? When he had come out of the pit at Briarpatch, he gave misinformation in his biography to protect his family. Yet due to the diminished physical condition he had been in at the time, there was no way to remember now exactly what he had written then.

He had no more time to think about it. The cell door banged open. “You, Cuh, Cuh! You . . . now!” Jerry took deep breaths as two guards escorted him to the torture room.

The interrogator had him sit before him on a small wooden stool about fourteen inches off the ground. He explained to the prisoner that he would need to write a biography and comply quickly —they would not tolerate slowness.

Jerry sat still watching him. The interrogator’s face was stony, his voice hard. Occasionally in a “quiz,” a POW could sense if an interrogator might relent or go easy. That was not the case this time —Jerry knew he meant business.

“You Yankee air pirate! You will write biography.” The interrogator waited for Jerry’s response. Jerry paused and prayed.

“According to the Geneva Conventions, I don’t have to do that,” said Jerry.

Suddenly, the two guards on either side of him pulled his hands behind him and locked his wrists in metal cuffs and put him on his knees with a guard on either side.

“We want biography, Cuh! We want you write biography!” the interrogator said.

“According to the Geneva —” but Jerry never got to finish the sentence.

The guard on his right side raised his AK-47 and struck Jerry’s cheek and ear with the butt of his rifle full force. Jerry collapsed, and excruciating pain surged through his face, especially his ear. For several seconds he couldn’t see and struggled to regain some composure, his head ringing.

“Cuh, I not tolerate this! You will write!” barked the interrogator.

Jerry finally was able to rise into a sitting position. He simply shook his head slowly, and in the next seconds, guards began winding small cords around his left arm just above the elbow as tightly as they could. Then with the end of the cord, they pulled his left arm over to his right arm behind his back and wound the cords as tightly as possible just above the right elbow. Next, they pulled the two arms as close together as possible. Jerry could feel his shoulders straining under the intense pressure.

Within moments, however, the pain became numbness, and somehow the guards knew when that occurred. No sooner were both Jerry’s arms and hands completely deadened from lack of circulation than guards quickly released the tension on the ropes and blood suddenly surged back into his arms with tremendous force. The intensity of pain was staggering.

Jerry screamed out. The “ropes” created the most debilitating sensations he had ever experienced in his life.

Sweat immediately poured from his head and chest. The guards seized him again. They wound the cords, tightening them as much as possible behind his back so that almost the entire length of his arms was touching, then allowed both his upper arms and hands to go completely numb and loosened the cords again. It sent shock waves through Jerry’s entire body. His yelps were completely involuntary.

Through the next several hours, he couldn’t form any specific prayer in his mind. All focus centered on the numbing, followed by the screaming explosion of blood tearing back into limbs that, by this time, were completely useless. His arms felt like they were about to burst from their shoulder sockets.

At some point, the guards began raising his arms up and over the back of his head. One guard placed his foot squarely into Jerry’s shoulder blades to provide more leverage against bones and ligaments resisting the press upward. Now the POW was bent over, nose to knees, and could hardly catch a breath, his internal organs straining to function.

He vaguely thought about the first torture session he had endured in the pit: slow and deliberate. The “ropes” torture was a type of explosive brutality meant to force submission as quickly as possible.

Jerry was drenched, wet all over. He couldn’t tell if it was just sweat. He suspected not.

Two or three days passed, maybe longer. He couldn’t tell. He only knew he was reaching the edge of his mental faculties once again. He relinquished: pride and ego were matters that had little meaning under such circumstances.

“Bao Cao . . . Bao Cao,” he was gasping for breath, nearly suffocating in the bent-over position. When guards untied his arms, he couldn’t lift them. Finally, they helped him place his hands on the table and wrapped his fingers around a pencil. He was so weak he couldn’t hold it. The interrogator rapped his knuckles on the table, then left the room for a while. Jerry put his head down on the desk.

Lord . . . God . . . help me write something. No idea what I said before . . . make this work. Oh God . . . help me . . .

When Jerry finally was taken back to his cell, his cellmates quietly watched him lurch through the door. He was beginning to get some return of feeling in his shoulders but remained weak all over. He looked terrible, pale and sweating, and his arms hung limp at his sides.

“Are you okay?” one of them asked tentatively. They were all concerned —and not just for him. They knew their time in the torture room would not be far off.

There was dead silence for several seconds. Jerry shuffled to his bunk, then raised his head to look at them. They saw on his face a glimmer of well-being untouched by the brutality he had just endured.

“Well,” said Jerry slowly, “I guess you’ve got to expect a few losses some of the time.”

His cellmates erupted into chuckles and helped him lie down.

That night as Jerry rested on his bunk, he wondered if the man he had heard scream several weeks before had been in that same torture room, perhaps enduring the ropes. He prayed again for him. And he prayed for all the POWs.

Lord, help me stay committed. We need each other more than ever. If I can help in some way . . . Keep all of us here in prison committed to our mission and committed to faith and country. Help me find a way to do that.

Jerry suddenly had to cough. When he did, he heard a distinctive wheezing sound swooshing out from his ear accompanied by a quick, sharp pain.

And, God . . . please heal my ruptured eardrum.