Surviving Hell (6 page)

More American aviators were shot down in 1967, the year I was shot down, than any other year of the war. So when I arrived, the Vietnamese were hustling to find new prisons. In addition to the Hilton, we gave the various POW camps names like Skid Row and the Plantation. They opened a new complex that had once been a French film studio. It was farther out on the outskirts of Hanoi than the Hilton. We called it the Zoo. It was there that I was moved with Ev right after being tortured at Heartbreak.

The Zoo housed over 100 POWs. It had a swimming pool in the middle of the several large one-story rectangular buildings. The pool was full of stale water, garbage and bugs—a bad-smelling, mosquito-breeding site. Since the Zoo was not originally a prison, most of the rooms (now cells) had a window. But the Vietnamese didn't want communication between the POWs, and soon after we arrived, our guards became bricklayers. They bricked up all windows to prevent us from seeing each other or using hand signals to communicate.

Within minutes of being put in with Jim and Ev and Jim's telling me that everyone who survived the horrendous Heartbreak interrogation
went past name, rank, serial number, and date of birth, I heard a syncopated knock on our wall.

I already knew about the tap code. While in Heartbreak, I had learned about it from a POW named Fred Cherry, who was in the cell next to mine. Fred had been shot down in late 1965: He was a tough old-timer and knew the system. An African-American, who now weighed about 120 pounds, Fred was back in Heartbreak to be punished for having refused to make a propaganda tape. One day, when I was on the slab in stocks, I heard an-ever-so-quiet seven taps in the rhythm of “shave and a haircut—two bits.” I had no idea who it was or what it meant. I made a few random taps back. “Shave and a haircut—two bits” came again. Once again I tapped several times. Fred knew that the new prisoners started out in Heartbreak, and, since I didn't give the right response (two taps), he knew I was a new guy who didn't know the code.

It was essential to know the tap code—at times it literally meant the difference between life and death. Fred Cherry, bless him, hollered from his cell to make sure I heard. He yelled, “Who are you?” I hollered back, “Major Leo Thorsness out of Takhli.” “Okay, got your name. Now learn this tap code—organize the alphabet into a matrix of five rows, five letters in each row. Throw the K away so you have 25 letters. For a K, send a C, from the context of the word, you'll know if it's a K.” He went on, “First tap the row, pause, then tap the column, pause before the next letter.”

The guards heard Fred, of course—all of Heartbreak heard Fred. They came running and beat the hell out of him and put him into the stocks. But he had clued me into the tap code.

Visually it looks like this:

Communications were our life blood. In practical terms, the tap code allowed us to get the names of the new shoot downs. And as
soon as any POW learned the name of a new guy, like Fred did for me, it was spread throughout the camp. Then a POW would tell a Vietnamese interrogator that he knew that Leo Thorsness was alive and in Heartbreak. That meant another beating because it proved he had communicated. But we felt that if the North Vietnamese prison officials knew the other POWs knew, then the odds of the named POW disappearing went down.

Another reason communications were critical was to pass on news of the beginning of a new “purge.” Every so often the prison officials were told by the North Vietnamese government to get propaganda from American POWs. The North Vietnamese believed that if officers in the United States Air Force and Navy condemned the war, it would help the antiwar movement turn America against the war. The North Vietnamese loved the antiwar movement. I had an interrogator tell me more than once: “We know we cannot defeat the United States military in the jungle, but we will defeat you in the streets of Washington, New York, and Los Angeles.” As the years went by, they knew that the longer they hung in there, the better their chances were.

At the beginning of a purge, the Vietnamese picked a prisoner and told him to condemn the war by making a tape recording or writing a letter to the American government or memorizing a statement to be repeated to some visiting delegate. When that POW got back to his cell, after having been tortured for refusing to be a propaganda tool, he immediately went to the wall and began to tap. It was terrible news to know what might be coming, but, if you knew what they wanted, what the POW had done—what he said and how he said it—and why they finally stopped torturing him, the information might make the difference between living or dying during your own torture session.

When a guard wanted to check on us, or had something to give us, he used the flipper in our cell doors—an eye-level window about a foot long and eight inches tall with a hinge on the bottom. Frequently the guard would sneak along the outside walls of our cell blocks and, when he got to our flipper door, quickly yank it down in hopes of catching us tapping a message. We learned how to catch them by lying on the floor and eyeing the half-inch gap between
the bottom of the door and the floor. If a guard was standing there, or sneaking up, we could usually see the soles of his shoes. When we knew there was no guard outside our cell door, we quietly tapped the first five beats of “shave and a haircut.” The POW in the next cell would check under his door to make sure there were no guard shoes there, then come to the wall and tap twice—the end of the rhythm.

Of course it was an advantage if there were two or three in the cell. One would do the tapping, the other stay on the floor looking through the crack under the door. If a guard came, the POW “clearing” under the door would slap the floor. Hearing this, the POW tapping or listening on the wall would hit the wall with the butt of his clenched fist, making a thumping sound that stopped communications instantly.

Being caught usually meant a beating. Occasionally, instead of a beating, the prison guards made us kneel as a punishment. To kneel while having to hold your hands above your head may not sound difficult or painful. But try it on rough concrete for an hour or so with bare knees. Keep trying until you no longer can keep your arms up, then until your back gives out. Forced kneeling is a long, slow, and increasingly painful punishment.

Most nights, especially when in solitary, we would tap to the POW in the next cell “GBU”—
God bless you
. Those three letters were tapped like this: G is second row, second letter so tap ** **, slight pause, then B, * **, finally U, **** *****.

Tapping these faint percussions on the walls of our cell kept us human. They also were the key to our defiance.

 

 

One of the worst things about being tortured is not being able to fight back. But every once in a while, thanks largely to the tap code, we got in a lick or two. Soon after I was shot down, for instance, the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal was staged in Stockholm. Russell, the British peace activist and philosopher, was by then in his dotage, but he pulled together an international group of communists, pacifists, and antiwar fellow travelers whose common
denominator was a hatred of America and a belief that North Vietnam was heaven on earth. Among those who testified against and judged us at the Tribunal were figures such as philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, then in his Maoist phase; the Australian communist journalist Wilfred Burchett; Carl Oglesby of Students for a Democratic Society; the American pacifist David Dellinger; and Ngo Thi Nga, a teacher from North Vietnam.

The North Vietnamese government ordered the authorities at the Hanoi Hilton to obtain “confessions” from two POWs that could be presented to the War Crimes Tribunal. The torture was brutal. The two men chosen were Nels Tanner and Ross Terry, a two-man Navy crew. They were in solitary cells but with the tap code were able to make up similar stories. One fabricated story flattered the North Vietnamese air defense system. It made their defense look top notch, and they knew it would please those attending Russell's event.

Perhaps it was the simplicity and similarity of the concocted stories that made them seem believable. One story the POWs told was of a Lieutenant Clark Kent who was so fearful of the North Vietnamese flak that, shortly after launching from the carrier, he would dump his bombs on the coast and turn back for the safety of the Gulf of Tonkin.

The other Navy flyer told of a fellow pilot named Lieutenant Ben Casey—from the popular eponymous medical drama on television—who launched with the others, crossed the shore line, but was too scared to fly over defended areas or to his target. Instead, he flew over rice paddies where there was no flak, dropped his bombs on remote foot paths in an open field, and used his afterburner a lot so as to run low on fuel in a few minutes and have to return to the carrier quickly.

Once the Vietnamese got these statements, the torture of the two POWs ended. The stories made it to the War Crimes Tribunal in Stockholm. They were entered into the record and received significant discussion until one of the Americans noted the names: Clark Kent and Ben Casey!

When the word got back to the camp, the two Navy flyers were
tortured long and hard. Both were beaten and isolated. Ross spent 18 months in solitary with his arms handcuffed behind his back. Why? Because their fabricated stories caused the North Vietnamese to look foolish in the eyes of the international media attending the War Crimes Tribunal. The news spread throughout the camp quickly by tap code. We had embarrassed the America-haters meeting half a world away!

D
ays when you were not pulled into interrogation were days to look forward to. They had a routine centered around a wake-up gong, emptying your rusty bucket (toilet) into a sewer line, getting two thin meals and three daily cigarettes.

Time loses its shape and meaning in prison. Aviators' pride and joy are accurate watches they can “hack” (synchronize) each morning at the general briefing. These were lost during ejection or taken by the North Vietnamese, but the obsession with the clock remained. Many of us wondered constantly what time it was and tried to synchronize the passing hours to the prison's gongs.

Most POWs were able to keep their wedding rings until they arrived at the Hanoi Hilton, where, if not given up voluntarily, they were pulled off by the guards. Mine was a simple white gold band that had only once been off in the 14 years Gaylee and I had been married—during surgery. I felt it was worth a fight. After knocking me down, two guards forced my fist open but still could not remove the ring, which had grown into my finger. A short time later another guard came into the interrogation room with a large knife and said, “You give the ring, or you give the finger.” With as much courage as I could muster I said, “I keep my ring.”

I won very few battles as a POW, but this was one of them. We have now been married for 53 years, and I still have my wedding band and all ten fingers.

The morning gong sounded around 6 a.m. About an hour later a guard would open the flipper in the cell door. Typically, he handed over three cigarettes to each man in the cell. After the extreme brutality,
this was the last thing I had expected. I got more cigarettes each day than meals. The guard had a “punk” with him to light a cigarette. The punk was a long piece of toilet paper that looked like a quarter-inch piece of rope; it was rolled so tightly that it burnt slowly with a live ember at the end. If you were “good,” the guard appeared again at noon and again in the early evening with the punk so you could smoke all three of your cigarettes.

Smoking was a big deal for the guards, who were almost all nicotine fiends. There were times when a torture session was suspended, and the POW was allowed to smoke a cigarette because the guards wanted to take a break and light up themselves. Smoking became something of a fetish for us, too. On those occasions when I had a non-smoking cellmate, I would get him to take his three cigarettes and then give them to me. I smoked two cigarettes each time the punk came around, lighting one off the other.

 

 

There were one or two guards who showed their humanity. One of them in particular would occasionally talk to us in sign language while one of his friends watched as a lookout. He showed us a scar he apparently received from a U.S. attack while driving a truck in the south. We taught him to count to ten in English and he taught us to count to ten in Vietnamese. I'd probably buy him a beer if I ran into him today.

For the most part, however, we would have gladly killed our guards. Many of the POWs stay in touch today by email and sometimes reminisce in staccato communiqués about the guards—ill tempered, sometimes vicious men to whom we gave names like Bug, McGoo, Mr. Blue, Frenchy (because of his accent), Holly-wood (because he wore dark glasses), Pox (because of his pitted face), and the Soft Soap Fairy (who usually played the good cop in interrogations).