Surviving Hell (7 page)

We were on constant alert for their defining characteristics. Usually these had to do with their violent relationship to us. But sometimes their own strange proclivities came into play. One day, for instance, my future cellmate Mike Christian heard the desperate squawking of a duck. He and others in his cell immediately
took turns looking through a peep hole in the bricked-up window. There was a guard avidly having sex with this desperate creature, who became known to us as Darla the Duck. Another of the POWs, Jim Warner, reminded me recently of a guard who was caught in flagrante with a dog. Afterwards Jim and his cellmates would occasionally make the sounds of a dog in distress, knowing that the guard would frantically run toward the noise. He became known as Sniffles the Pooch Puncher.

However we caricatured them, we couldn't make the guards human because they had given over their selves to the system they served. Most were unemotional, skillful torturers who have left their indelible signatures on all our bodies and who still appear now and then in our dreams.

W
e each had a short, curve-handled aluminum spoon and a small porcelain pitcher, which a guard came around twice a day to fill with boiled water. It was not enough, especially during the hot summers. One can get past hunger rather quickly. It comes on, and, if no food is available, moves away. Thirst never leaves. Keeping a pebble in my mouth helped—a trick learned in Boy Scouts.

The food was bad. Back home people made jokes about fish heads and rice. We would have counted ourselves lucky to have had fish heads. We all lost significant weight within a few months. Some of the longest-term prisoners developed blind spots in their vision because of poor nutrition. We were fed twice a day, 9 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. Both meals were the same: a bowl of green weed soup, as we called it (boiled greens with no seasoning), and a saucer of steamed rice filled with debris.

The guards bringing meals carried two buckets—one with the green weed soup and one with the rice—on the ends of a shoulder board. After dishing up the paltry portion, the guard opened the door to hand it out. When we heard the keys in the lock, we had to line up facing the door. When the door opened, even if it was the lowest ranking guard, we had to make a full bow. If you refused to bow, or bowed wrong, it meant a beating. The same routine had to be followed each time the door closed. Occasionally one soup bowl was fuller than the others, or one saucer had more rice. To make it fair, we rotated who was first, second and last served for each meal.

The monotony of the food made eating mechanical. But then, late in 1967, when I had been in the cell at the Zoo with Jim and Ev for about six months, we received what we grandly called the “third dish.” This was a truly big event. We speculated on the reasons they were giving us more food. Could it be that they were trying to fatten us up because we were going home soon?

The third dish was a sort of mystery food that led to more speculation. It was a whitish color, firm in texture, and cut into half to one-inch chunks, which were covered with a greenish thick liquid. We each had opinions about what it was. We speculated before, while, and after we ate it. Each proposal was summarily dismissed by the others. Finally I had an “ah ha” moment and said that I knew exactly what it was. Ev, who considered himself more of a gourmand than Jim, said, “Go ahead, Leo, make another dumb suggestion.”

I gave him my opinion: “Green bananas cut into exotic pieces covered with béarnaise sauce.”

Ev exploded, “That's the dumbest idea of all—there is absolutely no way that it is banana.” He added, “Leo, I'll bet you a thousand to one drinks it is not bananas.”

Looking at Jim, I said, “You witness this,” as Ev and I shook. Fast forward two years: Jim, Ev, and I had long been separated and moved to other cells, but we were still at the Zoo. Ev had been to an interrogation. As the guard escorted him back to his cell they went by the walled cooking area. A door was standing ajar and even though he was hurting badly, Ev looked in. To his surprise, he saw someone cutting bananas. The next day we were served that same “green bananas cut into exotic pieces covered with French béarnaise sauce.” It took a couple of weeks for his tap code message to arrive from one cellblock to another: “LT fm ES, would you accept 500 banana daiquiris?”

Ev now lives in San Diego, and we live in Tucson. We see each other about every two years. Whenever I see him, at whatever time of day, if I want a drink or not, I order a banana daiquiri. So far I've had eight, but I plan on getting the remaining 492 I have coming to me.

After a meal, the guard returned, and we put our bowl and
saucer on the bench outside the cell door. Generally while the door was opened in the morning, we got to empty our toilet buckets. The bucket was usually rusty and often did not have a lid or had one that didn't fit. (Living with the stench of your own urine and feces was itself a form of soft brutality.) Our sandals were made from old rubber tires. The soles were part of the heavy tread and the straps over the top of the foot were from the inner tubes. It was a big discovery when you found you could also use them as cushioning on the bucket. You carefully placed one sandal on each side of the bucket—holding on to each as you sat down for a bowel movement. Sometimes when you got up, one of the sandals would slip out of your fingers and plop into the bucket—it happened to each POW at least once.

 

 

Most days “camp radio” was broadcast from the headquarters building, which had a mike, radio feed, and tape deck to play recorded material. When the camp radio played, the guards would come around and make sure we were listening.

The junk on the camp radio was either propaganda or the exaggerations that passed for news. If the story was about Vietnam, it usually involved their glorious victories over the “Yankee air pirates”—how they decimated and seriously destroyed (their words) an entire company or battalion or regiment of the American forces in South Vietnam, etc.

Exaggeration was also the norm when news of the United States came over the radio. Gaylee was from South Dakota, and I had been there enough from neighboring Minnesota to be familiar with Rapid City. There was an exceptionally large rainstorm in 1972, which burst a dam in Rapid City. Unfortunately about 200 people were killed. The camp radio mentioned the event, claiming that the criminal capitalist construction had been responsible for the disaster, which had killed over 2,000 people. Exaggeration by a factor of ten or more was normal on the camp radio.

M
edical care in the prison was almost nonexistent. A few POWs got a cast for a badly broken arm or leg. But for most of us the only treatment was perseverance. The insides of my knees were torn up; I figured out how to walk pigeon-toed so the pressure was on the outside of my knees and I could move. Others were far worse off than I was. A couple of POWs had only one working leg. For them, the Vietnamese provided a crutch.

No POW was missing an arm or leg. In the early years that was a subject of much discussion by tap code. Later, when we were together in larger cells, we had that same conversation by voice. We wondered, we hoped, that there might be a separate amputee camp. We knew that when people pull negative “Gs” while ejecting from a speeding aircraft arms or legs are occasionally severed. Certainly some of the pilots who suffered these injuries must have made it to the ground alive. Eventually, after piecing together the various POWs' injury stories, including what POWs knew about their crew members, we figured out why there were no amputees in camp: those missing an arm or leg, or suffering other life-threatening injuries, were tortured for what information they might have, then left to die.

Bill Metzger, a strong young naval aviator, helped substantiate this theory. During ejection his right leg was mangled, resulting in a three-inch femur overlap. They interrogated him near where he landed outside Hanoi. When they finished the interrogation, they left him outside for two days. But he was too tough to die. He lived with the three-inch overlap until back home at Bethesda hospital.
There they medically salvaged one inch of three-inch overlap in the right leg, and cut two inches out of his left leg.

 

 

According to the old timers in the camp—those shot down in 1965 and 1966—the summer of 1967, my first in prison, was especially hot. With the windows bricked up, the air didn't move and the cells just got hotter and hotter. After sundown the concrete seemed to radiate the heat it soaked up during the long days, so there was little temperature relief at night.

At the end of the cellblock was a room with a water faucet. Every four or five days we were taken to the room. A rubber bucket was the only thing there. We were not allowed much time, and the water ran slowly. At best, we got maybe a half bucket each to pour over ourselves. That was our bath.

Most of us were fathers with children, and, having had small children in an era before servicemen had air conditioning in their homes, we were familiar with heat rash. Little babies would break out where skin touched skin: inside their arms at the elbow joint, under their arms by the armpit, and between the cheeks of the buttocks. In the hot summer prison days in 1967, with poor and inadequate food, not enough water to drink, and baths rare, our skin got the same problem in the same places, except that in Hanoi it was skin rash on steroids.

One day I noticed a small lump in a rash area near my groin. By the next day it was larger and sorer. Within a couple more days I found a couple more tender lumps. Soon the groin lump developed a “head.” It was a boil. Once a boil developed a head and broke, because we did not have soap and water to clean the area, the drainage infected other areas of the body. Soon more boils developed. The boils eventually became carbuncles, which continued to enlarge. Eventually I had so many boils and carbuncles that it was nearly impossible to sit or lie down without significant pain.

According to the tap code, a lot of POWs had the same problem. We learned there was a relationship between skin pigment and the number of boils: the darker the skin, the fewer the boils. As I recall, Fred Cherry, the African-American pilot who had taught
me the tap code in Heartbreak, had none. I tapped to him one day, “Sure, you black guys get all the breaks.”

Having too much time on our hands, someone came up with the idea of having a “boil contest.” We decided to expand the boil contest to other cellblocks by using a visual format of the tap code. This required a line of sight between the cellblocks from two peep holes with a POW at each peep hole at the same time. We also needed POWs in each cellblock “clearing” so guards would not catch us communicating. Finally, we needed something to slide in and out under the door so the other cellblock could see. The best thing for that was toilet paper.

A couple of times a week, or less, a guard would come around with large sheets of very coarse toilet paper. The sheets were about 10 by 20 inches. The paper went from thick, where you could see the wood fibers, to gossamer thin. We would tear the paper into squares about three by four inches. The bigger each “wipe” the fewer wipes you had. There was no certainty when you would get more toilet paper. If you used all you had, you made do without.

Visual code was slower than the tap code simply because it took longer to slide a piece of paper back and forth than it did to tap your knuckle on the wall. To send an L, for example: three taps, hesitate, one tap. To send an L, one slid the paper back and forth so that it was visible, then not visible, three times, hesitate, then one time. Sight took about twice as long as sound.

It took a couple of weeks to collect the boil contest count from each cellblock. First each cellblock collected the numbers for the POWs in that cellblock. Then, when all the conditions were right, the data was sent from one cellbock to the next. We designated which cell in which block was the collection point for the data. The final tally took a couple of weeks, and the winner was Ed. (Because he may not want to be known as the boil champion of the Hanoi Hilton after all these years, I'm omitting his last name.) Ed was a very light-skinned man. The average was between 20 and 40 boils per POW. (Ever the middle American, I had 33.) Ed, the poor guy, had 243.

 

 

Exercise was a part of every POW's day and an expression of his creativity. How we exercised depended on the space in the cell, and our physical condition. Ray Vohden's foot was attached by just a two-inch piece of bone and flesh in his lower calf; he did upper body exercises. My knees were badly damaged, so I learned how to walk again—awkwardly.

Having no exercise equipment, we found ways to use what we had. For example, we usually had a one-by-two-foot towel. For arm strength and muscle tension, we rolled the towel lengthwise to make a “rope.” By holding each end and pulling in opposite directions—in front or behind one's back—we had a good arm and shoulder exercise. For the POWs who had good arms and backs, push-ups and sit-ups were standard. Contests were held via the tap code to see who could do the most. Sometimes the number seemed extreme. But who could tell if someone in solitary was exaggerating?

To exercise my leg muscles, I stood on one foot, touching the wall for balance, and raised myself up and down on tiptoes 50 times for each foot several times a day. I exercised my shoulders and arms with my towel or pajamas. I would do a few push-ups, using the edge of the bed slab rather than the floor because it was easier on my back. Back injuries from torture ruled out sit-ups.

Back injuries were common among the POWs as a result of ejection and the torture—mine was from torture. As the prison years rolled on, my back pain grew worse, especially while standing or walking. In the big cell we slept on three-by-six-foot bedboards—planks nailed together. I found a way to prop up one end of the board about a foot. While laying head down with my feet tied to the high end, my back pain was lessened.