Surviving Hell (12 page)

The mission still turned out to be a huge success for us, however. Realizing that such rescue attempts could happen again, the North Vietnamese brought us in from outlying prison camps into the main Hoa Lo prison in Hanoi: the Hanoi Hilton. Within hours of the raid, we were moved into large cells—43 of us in my cell.

It was the greatest day of our prison life. For the first time, we were meeting POWs whose names we had memorized years earlier. Many of us had formed intense friendships through the tap code with men we'd never seen. As we met that night, “So this is what you look like” was heard over and over throughout the cell. We compared our treatment, and it seemed important to each of us to
tell one another of our torture experiences. I've never seen more empathy in anyone's eyes than when telling a fellow POW about being tortured. We each needed to tell our torture story—once. We never told them again to the same POW.

The handshakes, back slapping, and bear hugs went on and on. Some of us had been tortured for the protection or benefit of a “tap-code buddy.” Now there was love and respect to be repaid. No one slept that first night; too much joy, excitement, and talk.

The next morning, we needed to determine the SRO. The highest rank in our cell was O-4, which is a major. (“O” stands for officer, so O-1 is second lieutenant or ensign, O-2 first lieutenant, O-3 captain, O-4 major, O-5 lieutenant colonel, O-6 colonel, O-7 brigadier general, and on up to O-10 for a four-star general.) We put all the O-4s together and then compared the date when the rank was attained and arrived at a hierarchy. We did the same with the O-3s, the O-2s, and the O-1s. When we were done, all 43 of us knew exactly where we stood in the command structure. Our SRO turned out to be Ned Shuman—a really good Naval aviator.

The first Sunday in the large cell, someone said, “Let's have church service.” Good idea, we all agreed. One POW volunteered to lead the service, and we started gathering in the other end of the long rectangular cell from the cell door. No sooner had we gathered than an English-speaking Vietnamese officer who worked as an interrogator burst into the cell with a dozen armed guards. Ned Shuman went to the officer and said there wouldn't be a problem; we were just going to have a short church service.

The response was unyielding: we were not allowed to gather into groups larger than three persons and we absolutely could not have a church service.

During the next few days we all grumbled that we should not have backed down in our intention to have a church service and ought to do it the coming Sunday. Toward the end of the week, Ned stepped forward and said, “Are we really committed to having church Sunday?”

There was a murmuring of assent throughout the cell.

Ned said, “No, I want to know person by person if you are really
committed
to holding church.”

We all knew the implications of our answer: If we went ahead with the plan, some would pay the price—starting with Ned himself because he was the SRO. He went around the cell pointing to each of us individually. “Leo, are you committed?” “Yes.” Ned then moved to Jim and asked the same question. “Yes,” Jim responded. And so on until he had asked each of us by name.

When the 42nd man said yes, it was unanimous. We had 100 percent commitment to hold church next Sunday. At that instant, Ned knew he would end up in the torture cells at Heartbreak.

It was different from the previous Sunday. We now had a goal, and we were committed. We only needed to develop a plan.

Sunday morning came, and we knew they would be watching us again. Once more, we gathered in the far end of the cell. As soon as we moved together, the interrogator and guards burst through the door. Ned stepped forward and said there wouldn't be a problem: We were just going to hold a quiet ten-minute church service and then we would spread back out in the cell. As expected, they grabbed Ned and hauled him off to Heartbreak for torture.

Our plan unfolded. The second ranking man, the new SRO, stood, walked to the center of the cell and in a clear firm voice said, “Gentlemen,” our signal to stand, “the Lord's Prayer.” We got perhaps halfway through the prayer, when the guards grabbed the SRO and hauled him out the door toward Heartbreak.

As planned, the number three SRO stood, walked to the center of the cell, and said, “Gentlemen, the Lord's Prayer.” We had gotten about to “Thy Kingdom come” before the guards grabbed him. Immediately, the number four SRO stood: “Gentlemen, the Lord's Prayer.”

I have never heard five or six words of the Lord's Prayer—as far as we got before they seized him—recited so loudly, or so reverently. The interrogator was shouting, “Stop, stop,” but we drowned him out. The guards were now hitting POWs with gun butts and the cell was in chaos.

The number five ranking officer was way back in the corner and took his time moving toward the center of the cell. (I was number seven, and not particularly anxious for him to hurry.) But just before he got to the center of the area, the cell became pin-drop quiet.
In Vietnamese, the interrogator spat out something to the guards, they grabbed number five SRO and they all left, locking the cell door behind them. The number six SRO began: “Gentlemen, the Lord's Prayer.” This time we finished it.

Five courageous officers were tortured, but I think they believed it was worth it. From that Sunday on until we came home, we held a church service. We won. They lost. Forty-two men in prison pajamas followed Ned's lead. I know I will never see a better example of pure raw leadership or ever pray with a better sense of the meaning of the words.

B
eyond torture, isolation, and loneliness, what made prison ever harder to bear was feeling the years slip away without any sense of profit. We told each other that if we had a set of encyclopedias we could earn a PhD. Or if we had pencil and paper we could write deathless prose or poetry. Our peers in the free world were flying and fighting; we were running in place. We were missing a hundred holidays, birthdays, anniversaries; we weren't watching our children grow up. It was 1972, but we were stuck in 1967. If we ever got out we'd be a bunch of Rip Van Winkles!

But when you are locked in a cell with 20 or 30 people with good educations, you are living with knowledge. Once we were in the big cells, it took about a month to settle into a routine in which torture was the exception rather than the norm; in which talking aloud was permitted and no subjects were forbidden. We started thinking about self-improvement.

Our common POW thread was aviation: Mostly we were fighter pilots, but also navigators, electronic warfare officers, and weapon system officers. Beyond having a love for flying, we were diverse: from all states, at all ages (between 25 and 45); of all races and religions. Our ranks varied from first lieutenant and ensign to full colonel.

When President Johnson stopped the bombing in 1968, there were, as far as we were able to determine, 350 of us in the prison system. Of those, about two-thirds were Air Force and about one-third Navy—with five Marine aviators. There were also three enlisted men from helicopters shot down near the DMZ and one
Navy seaman who fell from his ship in the Gulf of Tonkin and was picked up by the enemy.

The three Air Force enlisted men, Neil Black, Art Cormier, and Bill Robinson, were on helicopters shot down in 1965. They had been tortured just like the officer pilots and kept the faith. The idea to commission them as second lieutenants was hatched. The enlisted men were taught leadership and military courses by the officers living with them. After our release in 1973, the promotion for all three was upheld, with President Nixon giving the final okay to their commissions. Commissioning those deserving enlisted men was a wonderful idea and universally supported by all the POWs.

After settling down into the new routine of life in the big cells, we discussed holding classes. The subjects would be decided by three factors: who knew something well enough to teach it; whether there was interest from other POWs in learning the subject; and whether the material could realistically be taught without pencil and paper. An overriding concern was whether the Vietnamese would allow us to gather in groups within the cell. Someone came up with the excellent idea of appointing a “school mom” (education officer) who would talk to the camp authorities. The pitch would be that we would like to share each other's knowledge by holding classes. The school mom would invite the camp authorities to sit in and learn with us. This would take away the threat of a “crowd.” The school mom tactic worked, and we started to design a curriculum.

We began by asking who majored in what discipline in college or at the academies. Once we learned who had taken Spanish, for example, we got them together, and they figured out who remembered the most. We all agreed that if there was a Spanish class, all who knew some Spanish would contribute to the POW designated as the teacher.

We discovered we had a music major. He was exuberant at the idea of teaching a bunch of yank-and-bank fighter pilots some real culture. There were also two math majors in our cell. They were hesitant to try teaching math without pencils and paper. But it is easy to make a rudimentary pen from small bamboo pieces, and
there were always small pieces of broken red roof tile in the bath area. We experimented (out of the sight of the guards) with grinding little bits of tile back into a powder and adding drops of water. The ink was faint but readable on the coarsest squares of toilet paper, which we hid in the middle of our little stack away from the eyes of guards who might think it some kind of cryptic information about an escape attempt.

We had courses in math, Spanish, German, Russian, English grammar, psychology, real estate, and bridge. It was a rugged marketplace of ideas. A POW might be sitting in on a math class and hear something more interesting that the German teacher was saying a few feet away. Soon the German class was larger by one and the math class smaller.

Mike Christian and I were the Spanish students. Neither of us had taken a language class before, and we discovered we didn't know tense, mood, or conjugation rules. Our “teacher” was a bit disappointed that we had to first learn grammar before we could study Spanish, but then what else did we have to do? Mike and I enjoyed the language and frequently sat in the corner of the cell practicing. Unfortunately the vocabulary of those who had studied Spanish years ago was woefully limited. When we needed a word our “teachers” didn't know—cement slab, for example—we made one up.

Mike and I were “talking Spanish” in our favorite corner one day, for instance, and needed a word for the feces barrel under the squat slab. Mike hollered to Jim, the Spanish expert. “What's the word for the crap barrel, Jim?” Jim thought a bit, and said, “shit-are-a.” From that day on, it was
shitarea
.

Mike and I shared our toilet paper vocabulary list. Later we sat with the Spanish experts and reviewed what we'd written down. It turned out that 40 percent were real Spanish words and 60 percent were made up. Mike and I got good enough to actually carry on a decent conversation in “Spanish” with each other. But when we came home a couple of years later, there was not one Spanish-speaking person in the entire world who had any idea what we were saying.

Ted Ballard taught two unique courses: memory and hypnosis.
He was a good teacher. In the hard times, Ted used self-hypnosis to lower or eliminate pain. In the early years, I was in tap code range of Ted and tried the technique he explained to me. With a lot of practice, I became a somewhat successful self-hypnotizer. I could not use self-hypnosis for extreme pain, but it helped me through the short-term troubles like forced kneeing or a toothache.

A
s I've said, the rescue attempt at Son Tay in November 1970 failed to free us but was a success in that it moved us from outlying camps to the big cells at the Hanoi Hilton. It was part of a general change for the better in our lives that dramatically separated the experience of the final three years in prison from the first three. The primary cause for this change was the POW families, who had taken our cause into their own hands.

When I was imprisoned in 1967, the U.S. government refused to give Gaylee the names of any other wives whose husbands were POWs. It also told her and the other families not to make an issue of the fact that their husbands, fathers, or sons were POWs: Don't talk to the press, don't do radio or TV interviews, and don't talk to service clubs. The rationale for this position was that if we became an issue, we'd be more valuable to the North Vietnamese and our release would be delayed. This was just flat wrong.

Communist delegations occasionally visited the POW camps. That was always bad. The delegations wanted to see POWs; the North Vietnamese wanted the POWs to give the “correct” answers to the delegation's predetermined questions. When a POW was taken to the delegation, all that could be seen were the POW's head, hands, and feet. The marks on the body were not visible. (POW Jeremiah Denton famously got around this when he looked straight at a camera and blinked T-O-R-T-U-R-E in Morse code.) Those POWs selected to show that we were receiving “humane and lenient treatment” were occasionally allowed to give the delegation a letter—restricted to six lines—to take home and mail directly
to the POW's family. (The families were instructed by our government to slip the letter into a plastic glassine and send it to Washington for analysis by “experts” who determined that we were being tortured and, as time went by, were becoming less able to cope.) By using certain codes in those letters, we were able to sneak out names of POWs who had not been declared as captured.

Growing increasingly impatient with the government's failure to help the POWs, the families decided, in effect, that enough was enough. They had to do something to help their men. In 1969, a few wives got started. Sybil Stockdale in California was one leader. Gaylee was another. Her sister and brother-in-law, Vange and Bob Renshaw, were printers. On her own, Gaylee asked Bob to print a batch of bumper stickers: “Release POWs from Hanoi.” Gaylee distributed them to the few POW wives she knew. Those wives knew a handful of other wives who wanted bumper stickers too.