Surviving Hell (5 page)

 

 

My interrogation started immediately. The setting was ominous. The walls in the small room where they put me were knobby with hand-daubed concrete. (It hurts a lot more when you are knocked against knobs than against smooth walls). The interrogators sat in two wooden chairs behind a narrow plain table; they could look down intimidatingly at me when I was allowed to sit on a short wooden stool in front of them. There was a sinister pile of paraphernalia in the corner of the room: ropes, nylon straps, two metal u-bolts with a one-inch eye on each end of the bolt, and a long metal rod.

The questions came at me like anti-aircraft flak. What was your target? What is the target tomorrow? What is your squadron? Who is your squadron commander? What is your wife's name? I gave the Geneva Convention answer. That didn't work. One of the guards hit me in the head and knocked me off the stool. Then they forced me to lean into the knobby wall with feet far back and my face touching it as they hit me from behind. They grabbed my hair and yanked me around the room, then slammed me to the floor. After they put me in a sitting position, they fastened bars to my ankles
through the eyes of the u-bolts; they tied the nylon-strap ends to my upper arms over my back. As they twisted the strap tighter and tighter, I felt as though I was being separated into pieces.

Elbows are not designed to touch behind your back, but this can happen if your shoulders are popped out of their joints. When the white-hot pain failed to produce correct answers, they pressed my elbows together behind my back and doubled me forward, forcing my head down toward my legs. Later I learned that the POWs called this the “suitcase trick” because they are trying to fold you up. It was pain beyond painful.

What did they want? The equipment we flew in combat and our weapons were not new. The F-105 and F-4 Phantom were good aircraft but had been around many years. The bombs we dropped were identical to those used in World War II—“dumb bombs” that obeyed the rules of gravity. The North Vietnamese already had most of what they needed to plan their defenses against our airplanes and weapons.

But soon I understood. It was not information they wanted, but propaganda: to get American military officers to condemn the war. They pursued this objective with single-minded brutality. That was what our torture, indeed our entire imprisonment was about. They believed that POWs condemning the United States for fighting a war of aggression against “a small peaceful nation” would influence American politicians and the American public. They were right about politicians and public opinion being the key to the war's outcome; they were wrong about us being willing to do anything that would influence either.

The suitcase trick was just one torture. Another was to wrench the elbows behind the back, and tie them with a rope or wire that cut off circulation. The longer circulation was cut off to the lower arms and hands, the more painful it was when blood began to flow again: an excruciating pain. In addition to stopping blood flow, nerves were frequently damaged. After one such torture session, they ordered me, “Now write that you apologize for bombing our peace-loving Vietnamese people and demand that the American imperialist government stop bombing.” The feeling in my hands was gone. Even if I had been willing to write a statement, there was
no way to use a pencil, even holding one hand with the other. The North Vietnamese were not big on irony: They didn't see anything amiss with torturing someone until he agreed to write a statement saying that he was being treated humanely and leniently.

Each of us had a different threshold of pain. Each reached the breaking point at a different moment. The rule old-hands tried to pass to new prisoners as quickly as possible was this: “You cannot give information because of verbal abuse. You must take physical punishment until you are on the verge of losing your mental capacity to be rational. When you reach that point: lie, cheat, and do whatever you have to do to stay sane. Whatever lies you tell, keep them simple so you can remember them.”

The prison guards and interrogators, of course, wanted to do their job—even if it was torturing someone—with the least effort. The harder they had to work to extract anything from you, the less frequently they used you. Some POWs, once broken, had so little resistance left that they were used over and over to make statements. They became the North Vietnamese's go-to guys.

Between interrogations, I was kept in the Heartbreak Hotel. This block of seven small cells—each about six by seven feet—was the most feared place in the Hanoi Hilton. On each side of the cell was a cement slab with old-fashioned stocks. The bottom half of the stocks was attached to the cement slab and had half-moon-shaped indents. I was placed on the slab face up with my ankles in the indents and the top hinged part was locked over them. The stocks were rusty and tight. Within minutes the pain started. It wasn't long until sores developed on my ankles, draining and scabbing over. When the stock was unlocked and opened; it ripped off the scabs.

For a couple of days I had no urge to urinate or have a bowel movement. I finally peed in the corner by a six-inch opening in the cell floor, which the rats used to come in and out. I was in the stock when I finally had a strong urge to defecate. I called for the guard several times. There was no response. I hurt badly and didn't want to be more miserable by lying in my own feces. The aluminum drinking cup they had given me was within reach. I was able to turn just enough and bend my knees just enough to squeeze
the cup somewhat below my anus. Much of the feces went into it. I flicked it toward the corner. I had enough urine to “wash” the cup mostly free of feces. The next drink from my cup was not pleasant—but the thirst at Heartbreak was unbearable and water was so rare that you couldn't waste it.

 

 

I would say that my 18 days and nights of interrogations were unendurable if I hadn't endured. For much of that time I lived in a knot of pain I can only compare to that produced by a dentist's drill. I'm convinced that I survived only because of the hallucinations that became a sort of refuge for me—when I was being tortured and in between torture sessions. They were a form of mental anesthesia.

Often I felt perched on a little bench up in the corner of the cell looking down at myself—that piece of meat being worked over by the North Vietnamese. Some hallucinations were fuzzy; some vivid, such as one about a little angel. Without effort he came through the locked cell door and had a small bucket of water, which he poured into my mouth. (I recall that some spilled over my cheeks.) The problem was that no matter how many times he poured water into my mouth, it never satisfied my thirst. Finally it dawned on me: This was heavenly water, the water of life.

My father also visited me. He had died some years earlier, at the age of 57, much too young. We'd had a good relationship, but he was a quiet man who devoted all his energy to keeping our family afloat in hard times. When he was alive, we worked together and talked about the farm. But we didn't have much time for discussion of the important things. Now I could “call him up” almost anytime and spend hours talking with him. He was my companion during the darkest moments. I leaned on his strength.

I could also call up old friends, people Gaylee and I had known in our life together. Even in my hallucinations, however, there was a certain reality principle: I was always in prison, and they weren't. The friends discussed this fact and were always sympathetic, but however much they pitied me, things were good for them—their
health, their marriages, their jobs—and not for me. This bothered me, and I'd summon someone else. But it was always the same story: all good for them, all bad for me.

I became so addicted to these hallucinations, and so adept at arranging them, that once when I emerged from a torture session and was briefly put in a holding cell with another POW, I offered to summon his wife and tell her he was alive. Naturally he gave me a strange look before skeptically saying, “Okay.” So I closed my eyes and called her. I told her he was alive. I asked how her kids were and she said fine. I opened my eyes and told him his wife was fine, and so were his kids—the four girls. That got his attention—he indeed had four girls. But he also had three boys, a fact that never penetrated my altered state.

 

 

My back was broken and refrozen during these first torture sessions. My knees were further damaged. My body was wrenched apart. There was nothing particularly imaginative about the North Vietnamese techniques. They hadn't improved much on the devices of the Spanish Inquisition. They bent things that didn't bend; they separated things meant to stay together. At times I couldn't tell if I was screaming or imagining that I was screaming.

When we finally came home, several journalists, perhaps annoyed by the brief support for the war our stories of our captivity had generated, skeptically implied that when we said torture we actually meant intimidation, coercion, and degradation. But the reality of the torture we experienced was engraved on our bodies. We later calculated that some 65 POWs died from torture during the years of captivity—nearly 20 percent of all those imprisoned. Some, like Lance Sijan, were tortured so long and so hard that they simply withered away. Others, like Earl Cobeil, were tortured so expertly by some of the Cubans working for the North Vietnamese that their minds stopped working and they no longer felt pain and eventually died.

There were three Cubans, headed by a sadist we called “Fidel,” at the Hanoi Hilton. They ran a little program called “Operation
Submission,” focusing on eight POWs who had been more or less picked at random for extreme torture intended as on-the-job training for the North Vietnamese. (I was number eight-and-a-half and only got a sampling. I particularly remember being on the floor with Fidel working me over as he played Nancy Sinatra's “These Boots Are Made for Walking” on the phonograph.) The Cubans frequently told us, “You will do everything and anything we ask you to do before we're finished with you.” Earl was their research project. They killed him from within. A POW who had been his cellmate later told me that he saw “Fidel” hit Earl directly between the eyes with a rubber hose, but Earl was so bad off that he didn't even blink. This POW had to pry Earl's teeth apart to put rice in his mouth, but eventually could not keep him alive. (While still in prison, several of us pledged $1,000 each to find someone to find and kill “Fidel”—it didn't work out.)

Our loved ones were tortured too. After he bailed out, Captain Charles Shelton was seen on the ground, destroying his radio. But he never made it to the camps and was likely killed where he landed. But the Pentagon didn't know for sure, and for 20 years kept promoting him to higher rank. This encouraged his wife to keep up hope. Eventually, after a lengthy review, Shelton was declared presumptively dead and his wife committed suicide, one of the last victims of the North Vietnamese.

 

 

When I broke—when I went beyond name, rank, serial number, and date of birth—it was the lowest point in all my six years of captivity. When floating down in my parachute, I believed I had failed my family. If I died when I hit the ground, they might never know what happened to me. I also felt that I had failed my profession by allowing myself to be shot down in the first place. But these feelings were small in comparison to what I experienced when I broke under torture. I had friends who were already in the POW system. I knew they must have emerged from the same horrific torture that had broken me with their honor intact. But I had failed. Strapped on a slab, I tried to cry. But I was past tears. If I ever saw my fellow POWs, I wouldn't be able to hold my head up.

After eighteen days, they pulled me out of solitary in Heartbreak —along with a naval pilot who had been shot down two weeks after I was, Ev Southwick. They moved us to the Zoo and pushed us into a cell with Jim Hiteshew. Jim, badly injured, was lying on the center of three bed boards. We said hello and told him our names; Ev adding that he was Navy. I said that I was Air Force out of Takhli Air Base in Thailand. Jim, almost entirely covered in a cast, said, “Hi, Leo, I'm Jim Hiteshew. We knew each other at Takhli.” We had both changed so much in six weeks we didn't recognize each other.

Jim was an Air Force major shot down six weeks before I was. He had ejected at the bottom of a dive run doing about 600 knots, breaking both legs and one arm so badly that the Vietnamese had almost let him die in the field. But he had refused to give up and they had reluctantly brought him in, putting him in close to a full body cast covering both legs, his chest, the lower half of his back, and one arm. They left a small opening so he could defecate and urinate. Jim needed help to survive.

Ev looked me over and said, “You're in bad shape. We've got to get you back on your feet so we can both help Jim.”

I immediately began to tell them I had failed. As soon as they knew what I was talking about, Jim said roughly, “Knock it off, Leo. Don't you know?”

“Know what?”

“That everyone who goes through that type of interrogation has one of two things happen: either they broke or died—some did both.”

There was—and there still is—no way for me to express my absolute euphoria at hearing these words. I was not a failure. I was average and happy to be so.

M
y six years as a POW were divided into two more or less equal periods. The first three years were brutal. I lived in solitary confinement or with one or two other POWs in a small cell. If the guards heard any sound, we were instantly beaten or made to kneel for hours on rough concrete. The last three years were more of a routine. Fifteen to 45 POWs lived together in big cells. We could talk out loud.