Surviving Hell (3 page)

As soon as we were airborne, little things started going wrong. Someone's emergency parachute beeper triggered on. We couldn't figure out whose it was so it beeped on and on. The refueling track was changed after takeoff, which added some temporary confusion. Just small things, but taken together they had the feel of premonition.

And there was another disconcerting thing that afternoon. It was not mechanical or electrical; it was the pilot. I had a knottier feel than usual in my stomach, a vague sense of not-rightness. It felt less like foreboding than forewarning. But I couldn't pin it down and said nothing to Harry.

We were scheduled to launch against a known hot SAM site. Our turn point was a large mountain peak a bit south of the Red River, about 70 miles west of Hanoi. As we came over the mountain peak, we accelerated to 600 knots. A minute before launch, we picked up a loud air-to-air warning signal. Some seven to eight miles behind the Weasel flight was the F-4 Phantom flight providing defense against MiGs. When we got the air-to-air signal, I called the leader, “Cadillac here, we've got air-to-air on us.” He responded, “Roger, I have you on our radar.” He left the impression that their radar was triggering our air-to-air signal.

In fact, two MiGs were orbiting in the valley just behind our mountain peak checkpoint. We had gone directly over them. At 600 knots the MiGs could not keep up with us, but they didn't have to. As we passed over them heading east, they happened to be turning east in their orbit. All they had to do was pull up and hit us with their Atoll air-to-air missiles. We took one right up the tailpipe.

The Weasel shook violently; it felt like we'd been smacked by a massive sledgehammer. The stick and rudder pedals immediately went limp; the cockpit filled with heavy black smoke.

Harry and I knew that the maximum ejection speed for an F-105 was 525 knots. But we also knew of pilots whose Thuds had exploded while taking the time to slow down. We had decided that if we were ever hit hard we would eject immediately.

I shouted “GO!” Harry knew that if he hesitated to blow his canopy and I ejected before he did, my rocket would throw fire directly into the rear cockpit. He said, “Shit!” and, as I heard his canopy blow and seat eject, I pulled my handle.

Vivid in my mind to this day is the feeling of catapulting into the slipstream doing nearly 600 knots (690 mph). My helmet ripped off, my body felt as though it had been flung against a wall, and my legs flailed outward. Two seconds later, the chute opened, violently yanking me upward. My body rotated a couple of times, then settled into a float.

Falling downward, I tried to take stock. When I cleared the cockpit, the wind had apparently caught my lower legs and forced my knees straight sideways at about 90 degrees. My boots were still on but the little pencil-sized zipper pockets on my sleeves were ripped away. As I looked up at my chute I saw that at least a quarter of the panels were ripped open; I would be slamming into the ground faster than normal—with destroyed knees.

One bright spot: a mile or two to the east I could see Harry's chute. I did not know at the time, but my wingman Bob Abbott had also been shot down by an Atoll.

The sky was full of F-105s. Colonel Jack Broughton, our wing commander and the strike force commander that day, had obviously diverted some or all of the planes to help the three of us floating down into enemy territory.

When you are doing zero airspeed dangling in a parachute, and a Thud zips by 100 feet away at 500 knots giving a thumbs up, it is a loud thrill. I pulled out my emergency radio from the pocket attached to the parachute harness. I pushed the “press to talk” button and gave them my name—then added, “Get me out of here!”

We had ejected at about 10,000 feet and so had several minutes of float time before we hit. Many thoughts I had then are still crystal clear today. I thought about my wife Gaylee and our daughter
Dawn, who were at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. Gaylee and I had many fighter-pilot friends at Nellis. Some had come to Takhli before I did and some of those had been shot down and captured, or, worse yet, never heard from or about again. I felt devastated for what my wife and daughter might be forced to endure. My floating-down thought was: “If I'm killed when I hit the ground, will they ever find out?” I felt guilty, too: reasoning that I had failed them. I was putting them in what could be years of limbo.

With the ground getting larger and larger below me, I also felt that I must have made a mistake and that what was about to happen to Harry and me was my fault. I knew the odds were high that I would be killed or captured within the hour, especially because my knees would not support an attempt at evasion. But there was another thought that alternated with the guilt that flooded me—a voice, actually, rather than a thought. It was loud and clear and kept repeating like a tape loop, “Leo, you are going to make it.... Leo, you are going to make it....” It was the first time in my life that the Lord preemptively answered my prayers. The voice and these words would stay with me for the next six years. This was God's gift to me as I descended into a nightmare.

I was still 2,000 to 3,000 feet in the air when something in a small darker area in the jungle caught my eye. I concentrated and realized that it was muzzle flashes. They were shooting at me!

As I entered the canopy of jungle, I remembered to cross my legs. Branches banged and slapped as I readied to hit hard on bad knees. Suddenly I stopped, bounced a bit and hung still. I looked up and saw that my chute had caught on a dead branch. I was maybe 40 feet off the ground. Just to my right was a tall stand of bamboo. I swung to reach for a stalk, thinking to grab hold, undo my chute releases and shinny down to the ground. But I couldn't get a good grip on the bamboo. We carried a one-inch-wide nylon lanyard in our g-suit for just this situation. I finally got it out, tied it above the quick releases, tried to wrap it around my waist and leg and let loose the releases. I used ten valuable minutes getting to the ground.

I was part way up the side of a mountain. My knees buckled each time I tried to stand. Thuds continued to fly over my downed
position but I doubted they could see me through the trees. I tried one more call on my emergency radio—both my transmission and theirs were so garbled I could not make out words.

I heard voices below me. I crawled on all fours up the hill.

The going was slow; they were gaining on me. A Thud flew over and the bad guys took cover. I crawled faster, hoping to find a clearing before they found me. If they had an opening, the Thuds could strafe the jungle around me, hold the bad guys back and maybe, just maybe, a chopper would show up to pluck me out.

But there was no opening and no helicopter. Knowing I was theirs, the North Vietnamese hollered excitedly when they drew near. I rolled on my back to face them. There were a dozen or more: all young males, maybe 15–20 years old. Most were armed with machetes. I saw one real rifle, an old one, and a couple of wooden rifles, probably for training.

They grabbed my feet and arms, and sat me upright. One pulled out a black cloth bag—pillow-case size. The last thing I saw just before he slipped it over my head was the hate-filled eyes of a young Vietnamese pulling back a machete to strike me. Perhaps it was fatigue or excess adrenalin, but I had no fear.

The machete blow never came. Instead there were a couple of minutes of excited jabber and then the bag came off. They stood me on my feet; my knees collapsed. They stood me on my feet again; my knees collapsed again. The third time they held me upright and began cutting off my clothes: g-suit; boots, flying suit, t-shirt; everything but my bloody shorts.

They insisted that I walk, but I couldn't. They decided to make me walk by beating me. Eventually my collapsing knees convinced them that I wasn't pretending. With sign language, I tried to explain that I wanted a machete to split bamboo, tie a strip on the inside and outside of my legs above and below my knees. They split the bamboo. Eventually four took belts from their pants and I used them to tie the bamboo to my legs. Of course the strips cut into my knees and legs, and stayed in place just a few steps. After a couple of tries, my body and mind gave out. I collapsed into unconsciousness.

I came to in the center of a large net. They had cut two poles,
crossed and tied them in the middle, attached the net corners on each pole beyond the cross. Four men hustled me down the mountain.

Well past dark, we came to a large hut, perhaps 20 by 40 feet, on stilts, surrounded by a group of women and children. They carried me inside. The floor was made of large bamboo poles. The walls appeared to be woven mats. Dried bamboo torches lighted the darkness. Men were squatting along the walls smoking opium pipes. Harry was already there, also in dirty bloody underwear, spread-eagled on his back with wrists and ankles tied. Soon I was in the same position next to him.

Harry and I spoke now and then, although when we did they hit us. Neither of us understood a word of Vietnamese. We both had heard stories that captured American flyers were summarily executed. The conversation around us finally slackened; an older man stood, looked down at us and spoke to the others. Obviously a decision had been made. Knowing the words would cause me a beating, I had to say, “Harry, I think this is a trial, and we may be executed tonight.” In that frightful setting, I will never forget, nor fail to appreciate, Harry's comforting response. “Leo, either they will or won't, we can't control it. No sense worrying about it.”

It was the beginning of an ordeal that would brutalize me, and, paradoxically for anyone who didn't share the unique experience of the POWs, also allow me to become a better and fuller person.

A
s I lay there I wondered whether, if the North Vietnamese allowed me to live, I could survive—not just physically, but mentally and morally. Would I break? And if I did, would the failure stay with me forever? These were some of the questions that swarmed into my head in that hut in the mountains of North Vietnam. Most of all I wondered if my 35 years of freedom had prepared me for what lay ahead.

Born into the Depression in 1932, I was a Minnesota farm kid from what always seemed to me a typical family. Mother and father, older sister and brother. My parents didn't get past the eighth grade; their education came from working the land on a farm near the town of Walnut Grove where they settled after getting married.

My dad was not much of a talker, but he was a good worker and I learned from that. He believed in the American Dream and was ambitious. Even as a young farmer with his own fields to till, he hired himself out to work for others, digging potatoes and picking corn by hand. When my brother John and I were old enough, dad bought a hay baler and converted a 1932 Chevy coupe into a tractor to pull it. We baled alfalfa for other farmers; it was hard and itchy work.

Later on I would discover that we had been poor—working hard to scratch out an existence. But we never went hungry, and we never had to sell our land. If we were poor economically, we were rich in love and responsibility. Like most of our neighbors we
felt lucky to be who we were and had no doubts about America, for the present or the future.

Farmers raise food. So we fed ourselves. It wasn't always sweet corn necessarily, but new field corn tastes almost as good. Our oats went into our cattle, hogs, and chickens. We sold our barley and wheat and made our own flour. Cattle supplied a lot of our needs. A horse-drawn manure spreader fertilized the fields. Using a hand-operated milk separator, we were able to sell the cream and to make cottage cheese. The family drank the skim milk, and the rest put weight on the hogs. When the cows passed calving age, we had them for dinner. Chickens gave eggs to eat and to sell for grocery money; when the hens and roosters passed their prime, they, too, went into the pot. We hand-pumped water from the well and had a cistern in the basement. In summer, a nearby lake offered an easy way to clean off the day's grime from shucking grain and slopping the hogs. In the winter, coal and corn cobs heated the water in which we bathed and washed our clothes.

We defeated the Depression one day at a time. Spread-eagled on that rough bamboo floor, I told myself that I would have to fight captivity the same way.

 

 

Samuel Johnson once said that the prospect of death concentrates the mind wonderfully. This was certainly true in my case. Like most people, I had skated along the surface of life assuming that things would always be good and taking for granted the miraculous gifts I had been granted. There was no question in that hut about what truly mattered to me: family, faith, and friends. Family was constantly—almost obsessively—on my mind in those first hours: my parents, sister and brother, but most of all my wife and daughter. I realized sadly that they too were about to become prisoners, trapped by my captivity.

I was physically bound—bound into my pain, so to speak. My mind was my only escape. I built a memory room in those first hours of imprisonment. It wasn't fancy. It was a lot like the tree house I built in our farm grove as a seventh grader. I used the old lumber piled behind our barn, adding a crude door and tin sheets
from a torn-down hen house for the roof. I sawed a few boards and two-by-fours and nailed in a couple of crude shelves. It was a perfectly serviceable memory room.

I used the old egg crates we kept in the barn to store my memories. Three crates were labeled Family, Faith, and Fun. Soon I added another, for Friends. So much of my life involved airplanes that I added a fifth crate: Flying. Underlying every memory was the worry about what my wife and daughter were thinking. Had they heard yet? Are they busy constructing memory houses too?

The image of Gaylee shimmered in my mind. I met her after graduating from Walnut Grove High School in the fall of 1950. Knowing I would have to put myself through college, I had enrolled at neighboring South Dakota State in Brookings. Right away I learned that my high school strengths—sports, girls, and hunting—wouldn't help me academically. After finishing a quarter at Brookings, I made a wise decision: Join the military, grow up, decide what I wanted to do in life, and perhaps use the GI bill later on to help pay for college after I got some real-life experience.