Two Souls Indivisible (9 page)

Halyburton was then taken to Heartbreak Hotel, which some Americans compared to a frigid cement bunker. His cell had a cement bed with ankle stocks. A bare light bulb hung from the ceiling. Boards covered a window, and a small wastebucket stood next to a rathole. Gongs signaled the day's few activities. Martial music played from loudspeakers outside.

To wash up, Halyburton was taken to a cell with a spigot that dribbled only cold water. The prison still had Vietnamese inmates, and their civilian guards (as opposed to the military guards) would come into the Americans' corridor and urinate on the floor of the washroom. Halyburton, however, found some diversion when he entered the washroom for the first time, bent down to dump his bucket, and saw on the wall a circle with the words, "Smile, you're on
Candid Camera.
" That someone had retained a sense of humor lifted his morale.

He was even more pleased the first time he heard Americans whispering to one another. Above each cell door was a window covered by a wooden panel, and the inmates could stand on their beds, lift a panel, and talk. Of course, talking was forbidden, so they found other ways to communicate, such as whistling. When the prisoner on lookout wanted to indicate "all clear," he whistled a line from "Mary Had a Little Lamb." When a guard was coming, he whistled "Pop! Goes the Weasel."

Halyburton's flight suit was taken, along with his Rolex watch, a status symbol for aviators. He was given cotton pajamas, a tin cup, a straw mat, a thin cotton blanket, and a mosquito net. Two skimpy meals and three cigarettes a day provided moments of relief, though cigarettes would be withheld to punish his "bad attitude." He lost twenty-five pounds in a month and was down to about 150, but he still hoped he'd be home by Christmas. Like the other prisoners, he believed that the Vietnamese could not hold out against the bombing, that a settlement would be reached, and that the prisoners would be freed. To believe otherwise—to believe that the war would persist for six months or a year or even longer—would have been emotionally debilitating. No one anticipated such an outcome, or at least no one would publicly express it. For now, tedium and stagnation were often the enemy. When Halyburton wasn't being interrogated or confined in leg stocks, he walked back and forth across the cell—three steps and turn, three steps and turn—covering up to five miles a day. On Sunday the Americans had a "church call": everyone stood up, recited the Pledge of Allegiance, and said the Lord's Prayer.

His ability to resist the Vietnamese was reinforced by other Americans, notably James Stockdale. His rank (Navy commander), his intelligence (a graduate degree in international relations from Stanford), and his physical appearance (a weathered face and a shock of gray hair) all brought him respect, but his toughness inspired awe. When he ejected, he suffered a broken back and a fractured leg. He later pounded his face with a stool and against a wall until he was unfit to be photographed or filmed. When he entered Heartbreak, he feared he would die, so he told Halyburton, in an adjacent cell, everything that had happened to him in captivity. Halyburton, when released, was to speak to Stockdale's family.

Stockdale also urged Halyburton to remain strong during interrogations. "Stick to the code," he said. "Don't answer their questions, and don't ever think these guys are your friends."
^*

But Halyburton knew the punishment the Vietnamese would inflict on an obstinate prisoner. When Rod Knutson was shot down on October 17, he did not surrender quietly, killing two riflemen in a shootout before he himself was grazed by a bullet. At Hoa Lo, he thrust the pen that he was supposed to use to sign a confession right through the paper, and he defied the ban on communications by yelling to other Americans in nearby cells. His truculence coincided with his captors' new latitude to brutalize prisoners. The guards locked him in ankle straps, bound his arms, denied him food and water, and punched him until his nose was shattered, his teeth broken, and his eyes swollen. Still defiant, he became the first American to suffer the "rope trick." He was pushed face-down on his bunk, his ankles put in stocks, his elbows bound tightly with manila hemp rope. The long end was then pulled up and attached to a hook in the ceiling. As the torturer, known as Pigeye, hoisted the prisoner, Knutson was lifted so he could not relieve any of his weight, causing his shoulders to feel as if they were being torn out of their sockets. He could barely breathe. Screaming and in tears, he agreed to talk.

The torture was both excruciating and diabolical, as it minimized obvious scars that could have been seen by outsiders. It also sent a powerful message to the other POWs: from now on, belligerence would come at a heavy price.

Halyburton chose to defy but not provoke—being respectful, he believed, carried no cost. Knutson was tough and even inspirational, but he could have avoided his beating. One of the leaders in the camp, Robby Risner, the Air Force lieutenant colonel, would later advise, "You catch more flies with sugar than you do with vinegar." But in the early stages of captivity, politeness did not satisfy Eagle, who began offering Halyburton the "better place-worse place" option. If he provided details about his missions, targets, and his own history, he would receive medical attention, better food, and more comfortable quarters. Halyburton didn't know what the "worse place" would be.

On the night of October 31, two weeks after his capture, Halyburton was blindfolded, handcuffed, placed in a truck, and taken to Cu Loc Prison. His small black cell with a bricked-up window reeked of wet cement, and he felt like Fortunato, the doomed character trapped in the wine cellar in Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Cask of Amontillado." That night, his spirits declining, Halyburton prayed for strength. The next morning he awoke to a scratching sound from the mostly covered window. He looked out of a three-inch gap and saw a green leaf on a branch, which the wind had pushed through the shutter. Porter held the leaf and rubbed it between his fingers, grateful for evidence of life and, he felt, a sign that God could reveal Himself even in terrible conditions.

Over the next several days, a light bulb and bed board were brought in to him. More important, he heard tapping from the adjacent cell. It was Navy Commander Jerry Denton, a senior officer from the
Independence,
using a code common among the POWs.

Denton himself was a hard-line resister who had already been starved and placed in irons for his defiance. He told Halyburton that Risner was the senior commander at this prison and that Halyburton needed to contact him with information about himself and any other prisoners whom he had seen.

A few days later, Halyburton looked through the slats in his cell window and saw Risner in the yard, doing pushups. Guards stood nearby, but Halyburton tried talking to him through the window, identifying himself and naming other inmates. Halyburton didn't know if Risner heard him, but it felt good to be sharing "intelligence" and to be part of the resistance.

As the days passed, Halyburton needed to relieve his boredom and loneliness, so he and Denton decided to play chess. Halyburton had a piece of the coarse brown paper used for toilet paper. He folded it so that the paper had the right number of squares, then used a burning cigarette to mark the black squares. He saved pieces of bread and pinched them to resemble pawns, rooks, and the other pieces. Denton did the same thing so that each player had a complete chess board, and they signaled their moves by tapping on the wall, such as "queen's rook three to queen's rook five." Whenever a guard came they hid the board, but they did complete a game. As part of the crackdown, the Vietnamese began conducting room searches and punishing offenders. Halyburton couldn't risk getting caught with the game, so he ate the pieces. But the experience was a gratifying act of disobedience; while the Vietnamese could imprison his body, they could not destroy his imagination.

Halyburton underwent one or two interrogations a day, typically conducted by Rabbit, yielding the same "better place-worse place" impasse. Seven days after arriving at Cu Loc, he was moved to the cell known as "the auditorium"; it was smaller, darker, and more isolated than his previous space. The Vietnamese became more vengeful, screeching "Black criminal!" "Bad attitude!" and "Air pirate!" and forcing him to kneel on the cold concrete. The abuse mystified Halyburton, who assumed his captors would mistreat the senior commanders to send a message to the entire camp. Why would they single out a lowly lieutenant j.g.?

It was in the auditorium that Halyburton saw a beam of sunlight across the wall, which he marked with a piece of paper shaped like a cross. There was nothing unusual about the light, but like the leaf that poked inside his previous cell, Halyburton gave these signs divine meaning, drawing from them comfort and hope.

Denton had told him that if the Vietnamese had taken his picture, the CIA would know he was alive. So he assumed his family knew he had survived, but he despaired of his inability to contact anyone. In his final weeks on the
Independence,
his longing for Marty had become overpowering. Now, he couldn't reach her and didn't know how many days or weeks it would be until he'd see her again. To pass the time he continued to pray, but he also sang and whistled, cupping his hands to muffle the sound. He played "Am I Blue" and "Hit the Road, Jack," "Makin Whoopee," and "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot"—pop songs, show tunes, and gospel. Like his imagination, his ear for music was beyond the reach of the enemy.

But Halyburton was now questioning his survival. He had not lost faith that the war would end soon; he just feared he wouldn't see it. He still had not disclosed any information beyond his name, rank, serial number, and date of birth; but he noticed that the interrogators weren't asking military questions anymore. The quizzes were increasingly used to lecture him on the centuries of exploitation suffered by the brave Vietnamese and the corruption of the American imperialists.

He stayed in the auditorium for ten days before being moved to the coal shed—a worse place, indeed. It was dark, cold, and filthy, and by now he was suffering from dysentery. The food had become steadily less palatable: he was receiving little more than rice infested with ants and soup with pig fat. He was surrounded by weeds, insects, geckos, and mosquitoes, he felt too weak to exercise, and he feared he was breaking down mentally and physically. He saw no more rays of light and heard no more scraping leaves.

Finally, he was taken to Fred Cherry's cell.

"You must take care of Cherry," the guard told Halyburton when they entered cell number 1. He left and locked the door.

It seemed, to Halyburton, an odd punishment. He was now in the same building, the Office, where he had been initially imprisoned at the Zoo. The cell, ten feet by twelve, had teak boards for beds and hooks for mosquito nets. A light bulb hung from the ceiling, and an adjacent cell allowed inmates to tap messages. His cell also had a roommate, Halyburton's first since his imprisonment. Having spent three weeks in dark, isolated rooms, he suddenly had contact with another human being. Close to a breakdown, desperate to talk to anyone, he was grateful to see Fred Cherry. But he was soon puzzled.

Cherry was clearly in bad shape. His left foot in a cast, his left arm in a sling, he had not washed in more than two weeks, and he had a hangdog, melancholy look on his face. Halyburton assumed that Cherry, wearing a standard olive prison uniform, was an American POW. But when Cherry said he piloted an F-105 as a major in the Air Force, Halyburton was doubtful. He had never known a black pilot—he wasn't even sure that blacks had the depth perception to hold such a job—and he certainly had never known a black major, which was two ranks higher than his own. Halyburton had never met a black who had outranked him—most African Americans he knew were laborers or domestics. He wasn't sure what was fact and what was fiction about Fred Cherry.

Cherry had even graver doubts about Halyburton. He didn't believe that he was a Navy lieutenant. He figured the Vietnamese would try anything to make him talk, so he thought Halyburton was a Frenchman spying for his captors. Halyburton didn't say or do anything to suggest such an identity; but Cherry's experience at survival schools had prepared him for Vietnamese duplicity, and he knew about the history of French colonialism in Indochina. It made sense to him that his handsome roommate would be a French spook, whose southern accent was one more clever ploy to throw him off the scent.

On their first night together, Halyburton hung his mosquito net and tried to make conversation, asking Cherry questions: When was he shot down? Where had his flight originated? Where was he from? These were many of the same questions the Vietnamese had been asking, confirming Cherry's suspicions. He either brushed them aside or told lies.

"I flew out of South Vietnam," he said.

"I was shot down a couple weeks ago," he reported.

He saw no reason to fib about his injuries, however. He said he had a dislocated shoulder, a broken ankle, and a cracked wrist.

Halyburton was disappointed at his frosty greeting and remained skeptical of his credentials, but he was still glad to have a cellmate. The gong sounded, signaling bedtime.

"Goodnight," he told Cherry.

Cherry played along. "Goodnight."

When Halyburton woke up the following morning, shafts of light penetrated a three-inch gap in the bricked-up window, and he got a better view of Cherry. He noticed that his forehead had a cut and that the ankle cast was so loose that it didn't appear to do much good. Cherry described how he injured his shoulder during his ejection, and Halyburton realized that he couldn't move that arm. It just hung limp in the sling.

"Does it hurt?" he asked.

Cherry shrugged. "If I move it," he said.

Halyburton was relieved that he was no longer isolated from other cells. He began tapping on the wall, and a response came from Rod Knutson, the Navy RIO who had been with him in Heartbreak. Halyburton described his grim journey through the Zoo and explained that he was now with Fred Cherry. Knutson knew of Cherry; he thought the Vietnamese may have intentionally placed a "southern gentleman" with a black officer to cause each man additional stress. This worried him, though he didn't disclose his concerns to Halyburton.