Surviving Hell (10 page)

I recalled scouting experiences. When my family had moved to Walnut Grove, I started high school, and Boy Scouts became a passion. I worked my way from Tenderfoot to Eagle Scout. A particularly lively memory involved a ten-day canoe trip from Ely, Minnesota, into Canada with five canoes, ten scouts, and the guide. Some of the scouts had never been in a canoe, so we practiced the first morning, then loaded up after lunch, and pushed off. Each canoe had two persons except for the one I shared with a friend named Bud Schultz. We took the 11th person since we had some canoeing experience. Chuck, a high school friend, was our passenger. He was, in the parlance of the day, a “spaz.” It was better to have him riding in the middle than paddling from the front or back where his lack of coordination could do us damage.

The lake we crossed into Canada was crystal clear. As we approached shore, we could easily see the rocks on the bottom through several feet of water. Bud and I slowed the canoe as we approached shore. The bow was maybe five feet from touching the bank when Chuck decided it was time to help out. He looked over the side, saw a nice flat boulder, and felt it was right to step over the side
onto the boulder and help us get the canoe on shore. Lakes around Walnut Grove have gradual slopes. We measured later and Chuck had tried to step on a rock that was seven feet under water! Anyone who has ever been in a canoe knows what happened. The canoe flipped us and all the supplies into the lake. The first time I relived that memory while in solitary, I laughed out loud.

I spent a lot of time reviewing lists that I learned in grade school: presidents, state capitals, Great Lakes. Using the tap code with other POWs, I filled in the blanks in those lists that I couldn't remember. Like most kids, I had gone to Sunday school whether I wanted to or not. Part of Sunday school was memorizing Bible verses. As a POW, remembering those verses became important to me, and I learned others using the tap code. By the time we came home, nearly all of us knew the 23rd Psalm.

During the really tough first couple of years in prison, I felt like the 23rd Psalm was dictated by the Lord specifically for POWs.

I decided to remember the 31 seniors who were in my small graduating class from Walnut Grove in 1950. At first I could remember only a few. But then I came up with some of the others by trying to remember whom I sat by in certain classes. Then a couple more popped up from my football, basketball, and baseball teams. A couple more were found by remembering the girls I had dated. At this point I could remember 17 names.

In prison I learned my dreams could be controlled by concentrating hard on a specific topic or subject while trying to fall asleep. So I told myself, “Find the other 14 classmates in your dreams.” And I did—all but one. Shortly after I was released in 1973, my 1950 graduating class held a luncheon in Walnut Grove. I shared my experience of how I remembered all the names but one. I'm not brilliant, but I did not make the mistake of telling them which one I couldn't remember.

Using the tap code I memorized the poetry those around me knew. I lucked out and lived on the other side of the wall from a POW who knew all 96 lines of “The Ballad of East and West” by Rudyard Kipling. It took a long time to memorize. Once I forgot a line; I had only 95. You can imagine how long it took by tap code to find that dropped line.

Over the following few months, I lived next to POWs who knew other poems. Within six months I had memorized “Gunga Din” and “If” by Rudyard Kipling, “High Flight” by John Gillespie Magee, “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae, “The Cremation of Sam McGee” by Robert Service, and “'Twas the Night Before Christmas” by Clement Clarke Moore.

Part of the memorization involved recitation. It was the only way to embed the poems firmly in my mind. I even worked on a good delivery, as if I were performing before a crowd. One day in the middle of “The Cremation of Sam McGee” the guard opened the door to give me my afternoon meal of soup and rice. I was half disgusted with him for interrupting me.

I made a commitment that when I was again free, I would study subjects I knew nothing about.

F
reedom is the most profound of subjects and also one of the hardest to say something profound about. As an American, freedom was handed to me at my birth, and I had taken that freedom for granted. A rusty nail helped me think about and understand freedom.

As I have said, we got a bath about once a week. The bath was at the end of the long building that comprised the 36 cells—two rows of 18—of Skid Row. It was not enclosed, just a faucet that dripped onto the accumulated slime of a concrete slab. On bath day, I was taken there by the guard, who hung around as I got a bit of water in the pail, splashed it on myself, and washed the best I could.

One day as I stood filling the pail, I noticed a rusty nail about four feet away just off the slab. I casually moved to that side of the slab as I splashed the water over my naked body. Intentionally I slipped a bit and while kneeling down got the nail in my hand and then in my shorts as I put them back on. Now I had a tool!

There were once windows in the solitary cells of Skid Row, but they had been bricked up. North Vietnam being a communist country, however, the mortar between the bricks was of poor quality. With my rusty nail and a lot of time, I slowly drilled a tiny peephole in the mortar. With my eye directly next to the hole, I could see a one-to-two-degree slice of the prison yard. When not peeking out, I plugged a bit of dirt in the hole so that the guard in charge of the cell could not tell that I could see outside.

I spent hours at that peephole. Now and then a POW walked by. The tap code allowed us to know and memorize the names of
all POWs known to be alive in the system and to communicate with some of them. Very few, however, did we know by sight. Now, when a POW walked by my peephole on his way to interrogation, I would immediately start tapping to find out who he was. I could put a face together with a name.

One day a chicken hen with a flock of chicks walked past my peephole. For someone who had grown up on a farm, that was exciting. It brought a bit of normalcy to a sad place. It was big news to tap out the word that we had a hen and baby chicks in the camp.

A few days after the joy of seeing baby chicks, a guard walked through my view and an unexpected string of thoughts flashed through my mind. I imagined myself flipping a coin; reaching out, catching it, and slapping it on my hand. Heads it was! That meant the guard got tails. I won; he lost. The stakes of winning the imaginary coin flip were profound. My thought was this: Neither of us had any control over who our parents were. Had I gotten tails, my parents would have been North Vietnamese and his would have been American.

I kept watching out the peephole at this guard who had unfortunately lost the coin toss and spent hours comparing his life to mine. He was stuck living under a controlled system governed by brutality, not consent. He had very little chance to move up or even sideways in life, his freedoms were minimal and always conditional, and instead of having the right to open inquiry he was spoon fed only the information his government wanted him to know. He had nothing exciting or adventurous to look forward to; likely he would never visit another country or get a choice of whom to vote for. The more I thought about him and his life, the sorrier I felt for him.

By a figurative flip of a coin, I had been born a free American and he had been born a captive communist. Here I was, locked in a grimy, tiny five-by-six-foot cell, and he was walking around unrestrained outside. But I knew that I was the lucky one. In my 35 years of freedom, I had had a better, fuller life and had done and seen more than he ever would. A thought stuck in my mind that never left me in the years I was a prisoner: If I die now, I am way ahead of the game.

A
fter a year or so in solitary I was moved into a small cell with Jack Bomar. We hit it off and faced together the POW's greatest enemy: boredom. We spent our days in a trance of memory and sometimes pain, waiting for something to awaken our attention.

To our utter amazement, and without the “camp radio” explaining why, the guard opened the flipper door one day and gave us a deck of playing cards. We were ecstatic if a bit suspicious. What was going on? Was this a trick of some kind?

The cards were Chinese-made, and thicker and less pliable than standard U.S. playing cards. We soon learned not to hold them long or firmly when it was hot because they absorbed sweat and became floppy. We played rummy and cribbage. The man in the cell on our left was in solitary. He told us by tap code that he too had cards and played solitaire every day. Soon he began tapping to us that he was winning about half the games he played. On the spur of the moment, I tapped, “Jim, are you cheating?” There was a long pause, then he tapped back, “Well, a little, it's more fun to win.” Jack and I laughed and laughed. We gave Jim a very hard time with the tap code. But he kept cheating.

There were two POWs in the cell on our left. Both happened to be good bridge players. A few days after the cards were handed out, they tapped to us: “Jack and you know how to play bridge?” Jack was good, and I could play. “Yes, we know how to play bridge—too bad we can't get together a foursome.”

The next day, they tapped to us, “We figured a way to play
bridge with two of us in each cell using the tap code.” It seemed a bit far-fetched but we tapped back, “Let us know how.”

The first problem to solve was how to randomly deal two decks of cards and have the same deals come out. Jim Bell, one of the POWs next door, developed the system. Set up the decks as they were when new: ace through king in each suit. Put the spades on the bottom, hearts next, then diamonds, and clubs. From the top, deal seven cards down in a row—left to right. Start over and put a second card on top of each of the first seven cards. Continue dealing and you will end up with three stacks of eight cards and four stacks of seven. On the cell wall, tap the stack number you want on the bottom—three taps for, say, number three stack. Next tap seven, then two—whatever sequence you want. Just put each stack on top of the last until all seven stacks are back into a whole deck. You now have two identical randomly arranged decks that can be dealt out.

Say that players North and South are in cell number one and that East and West are in cell number two. Let's say North starts the bidding at One Heart. The POW closest to the wall in cell one taps an H: two taps, pause, three taps (** ***). East, in cell two, passes: tap P (*** *****). South, in cell one, bids Two Hearts. Two taps (**), longer pause, then the H: (** ***). West, in cell two, bids Two Spades: two taps (**), longer pause, then S (**** ***). North bids Two No Trump: two taps (**), pause, then NT (*** *** **** ****). East passes: P (*** *****). South bids Three NT: (***) (*** *** **** ****). West Doubles: D (* ****). North, East, and South pass. P (*** *****). And so on.

It took perhaps ten times longer to play a hand than in normal bridge. But, what else did we have to do?

After about four months of bridge fever, they took the cards back with no more explanation than when they had given them. We looked for other obsessions.

 

 

Back when I was living with Chuck Tyler and Digger O'Dell, between our cell door and the bath area—some 50 feet away—were a
few hot pepper plants. As we were escorted to the area, we noted that the plants had fruited and very slowly started growing peppers. We frequently talked about how those peppers, when they got bigger, would add flavor to our green weed soup. We worked endlessly on plans to steal them without being caught by the guards. And we had endless conversation about the peppers themselves. Were they hotter when small or when large and ripe? How much did they grow each week? How much would one pepper, if cut into thirds, affect the taste of the soup? The pepper caper taking shape in our minds passed a lot of time.

One day after the trip to and from the baths, Chuck declared, “They are big enough.” Nodding, Digger added, “Yep, the next bath trip they are going down.” I agreed, throwing in my two cents, “It's now or never. If we don't get 'em soon, the Vietnamese will.”

The guard always followed the same routine: Unlock and open the cell door, line us up and make us bow, point to the bath area and fall in behind the three of us as we marched single file along the little path. Some bath days we were allowed to rinse out the pajamas we had worn for a week or more and then change into the clean set we carried to the bath. Our plan was that I would go first and have my clean pajamas in hand along with my towel. Chuck would follow me and Digger would be last in line. I would walk briskly and be next to the pepper plant, just 15 feet up the path, by the time Digger walked out the door. Just as Digger got out the door he would say, “
Boa coa
, towel.” (
Boa coa
was the phrase we were supposed to use if we needed the attention of a guard.) Then, as he went back in the cell for his towel without waiting for permission, I would “accidentally” drop my pajamas, partly covering the pepper plant. As expected the guard stepped just inside the cell to see what Digger was doing, saying, “You stop—go bath!” Chuck stopped just behind me, blocking the guard's view of me, and I nabbed the peppers.