Surviving Hell (11 page)

The pepper-napping worked perfectly! I had two good-sized peppers covered by my pajamas. The guard cussed out Digger but nothing more. We all ended up in the bath area behind the wall for
a few minutes. Chuck and I rinsed our pajamas and hung them on the wall. As we walked back into the cell, Chuck and I each had a pepper cinched in our waistbands hidden by our pajama tops.

The second and last meal of the day arrived as usual at 4:30 that day. Making sure the guard was gone, we got our peppers from the hiding place. Using a spoon I cut both peppers into thirds. We each squished them and dropped our two pieces in the green weed soup. With the first spoonful we all nodded yes, we could taste the difference. There really was a slight “hot” spicy tinge, but the best part of the caper was that it had kept boredom at bay for nearly two weeks.

 

 

At about this time, the Vietnamese began to vary our diet. Occasionally, instead of green weed soup and rice they changed it to green weed soup and bread. The bread was French-loaf shaped, seven or eight inches long and two inches in diameter. It was a welcome change, and I've already described the effect it had on our dental woes.

I remembered my mother's flour bin. Like all farm wives in the 1930s and 1940s, she had baked our bread. I also remembered that sometimes weevils would invade Mom's flour. It would, of course, be thrown out. But the Vietnamese did not throw out weevil-infested flour. They baked the bread just the same.

As POWs we received no dairy products or meat. We were cadaverous and malnourished. There was no protein in green weed soup or rice. Some POWs spent a long time picking the weevils out one at a time while trying not to waste any bread. Some just ate them for nourishment. Weevils provided entertainment as well as protein. We came up with the idea of having a weevil contest. The next time we got bread, whoever had the most weevils won. A week later the bread came with the afternoon meal. We all took the contest seriously. The bread this time was very weevilly. Each of us wanted to win the contest, of course, and meticulously tore our loaf into very tiny pieces to make sure we found every weevil. After all results were in, the range was from 52 to 271. Turns out that I was again average: 121 weevils.

 

 

Chuck kept us entertained with one-liners. He generally started with the phrase “Just as my grandpa used to say ...” Digger and I would look at each other knowing full well we would question whether the saying really fit the situation and if his “grandpa” really said it. Sometimes we doubted that Chuck actually had a grandpa, or at least one that would say such odd things. We had a lot of discussion about Chuck's grandpa. Chuck always defended his grandpa as real and said someday we would meet him.

About once each six months, the POWs from one cell were taken out for a “work detail.” It was great to be outside for a couple of hours. In my two years at the Zoo, I was on three work details, one of them while living with Chuck and Digger. A guard, one who spoke more English than most, unlocked the cell door in March 1968 and told us, “You work—you make plants grow.”

Each POW had two pairs of pajamas, one t-shirt and one pair of shorts. The guard said, “Short,” and we put on shorts and t-shirts. Outside the cell door were two empty pails just like our toilet pail in the cell. He motioned for us to follow him off the path into a small area, about 10 by 20 feet. The dirt had been turned and broken up. It had half-grown plants: pepper plants like the one we'd recently robbed and something that looked a bit like spinach. The guard then pointed to Digger: “You go bath get pail water—bring here.” Digger went to the bath area, 40 feet away, dropped a bucket with the rope attached down the well about 15 feet, and drew up the water. When Digger brought the pail of water, the guard looked at me and pointed to the same open sewer where we poured our feces and urine each morning. With his best English, he said, “Go to sewer, bring half pail.” All three of us being sharp Air Force majors, the picture came into focus: We were going to fertilize the plants with human waste.

The opening to the sewer line was about two and a half feet across. The level of sewage was two feet below ground level. I got down on both knees by the sewer edge, and put one hand on the ledge about a third of the way around the circle opening. I held the dirty rusty pail in my left hand, reached down, pushed some turds aside with the bottom of the pail, tilted it, and let it fill about half.
Dripping scummy stuff from the side and bottom, I carried it back to where Chuck, Digger, and the guard waited and watched. I set the pail on the ground next to the full pail of water. The guard, seeming satisfied that we were performing satisfactorily, looked at Digger and said, “Pour half water in shit pail.”

After this was done, it was time for the high tech to kick in. The guard walked to the edge of the garden and picked up a sturdy stick about 18 inches long. He came back, handed it to Chuck and said: “You mix.” Chuck took the stick, held it as close to the top as possible and gingerly stirred. It wasn't a good mix. The guard, unhappy, sternly told Chuck, “Mix hard.” Chuck stirred a bit faster. More perturbed, the guard said, “Mix hard to bottom.” There was about three inches of clearance between the top of the turds and Chuck's hand. Eventually the guard felt the turds were broken up enough and said, “Stop.”

The guard nodded to me, the sewage carrier, and said, “Put by plants.” I knew the odds were that I would not do it the “Vietnamese way.” And I was right—I did it wrong. I didn't pour the right amount of turds and sewage by each plant, and I poured too close to the stem. By now, Chuck, Digger, and I were totally into it. Without saying anything, but with frequent eye contact, all three of us were finding this entire operation nearly unbelievable, a macabre combination of the humorous and the disgusting.

The process went on another hour. Eventually we met North Vietnamese standards, breaking up the turds into the proper size and putting the right number of pieces the right distance from each plant. I only let the pail slip once. I caught it as it was slipping below the sewer surface—getting only one small turd between my hand and the edge of the pail. No matter how carefully I poured, some splashed on my feet, and Chuck's “stir hard to bottom” caused sewage to splash nearly to his elbow. Digger, the clean water carrier, escaped the slop. He was quite pleased with himself and later on enjoyed pointing this out to Chuck and me.

There was no question in our minds that when we finished our “shitty” job, we would get to clean up in the bath area. Digger got one last pail of water and poured half of it into my last half-full pail. As we finished the last plant, the guard looked at his wrist-watch
and said, “Finish. Go in. Go in.” Chuck said, “We've got shit all over us, we must bathe.” “No time,” the guard replied. He looked at Digger's pail, half full, and said, “Use that water and go in—now!” Two other guards happened by from around the corner. We washed our hands the best we could, and quickly they locked us in.

We sat on our bed slabs and went back over the past couple of hours. Each of us, at least once said, “Can you believe what we just did?” Not surprisingly, Chuck had a saying to fit the occasion. He started, “You know, I just remembered something my grandpa always said.” Digger glanced at me and said, “Get ready, Leo, here comes another one.” Chuck said, “No this one is real—and it fits. My grandpa always said that ‘If you stir shit long enough, you'll get some on you.' ”

F
or the first three years, the prison officials did nothing special for holidays. The next couple of years they gave us an extra portion of food on Christmas. And the very last Christmas we were captives—Christmas, 1972—they gave us two whole cooked ducks, intestines and all. We ate around the innards. There were 28 POWs in the cell. Two scrawny ducks was not a lot—but it was a lot more than ever before. They were fattening us up.

In solitary, there was no real way to celebrate holidays except through memory. I recalled my good memories of each holiday as they came and went: Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, birthdays, our anniversary. When I lived with other POWs, we each recalled and told of good times (never of bad times) and compared how our families celebrated holidays. On these special days you missed your family more than ever.

I arrived in Hanoi on May 1, 1967. My first holiday, July 4th, was a bad day: on my knees for being caught communicating. Thanksgiving came: green weed soup and rice. Christmas came: green weed soup and rice. A few months later, in the spring of 1968, Easter approached but we weren't sure of the date. Ev, Jim, and I all knew that Easter was related to the equinox and the moon, but we didn't know how. We remembered it generally fell in March or April.

With the tap code, we asked if anyone in our cellblock knew how to compute the Easter date. Sure enough, Jim Shively, on the far corner of the backside, said he had the formula. He claimed it was complex and did not offer to share it. He mentioned it would
be difficult to specify the date because our windows were bricked up, and he could not see the moon. Jim was confident, however, that his “Easter computation” was better than anyone else's in the cellblock. He convinced us.

“Jim, when is Easter?” we continued to tap him. It was getting well into March, and he was still replying, “I'm working on it, don't worry.” As best I remember, it was mid-April 1968 when Jim finally had the Easter date computed. With full confidence, he tapped, “Easter 1968 will fall on Sunday, May 12.” There was a tap code uproar. None of us could remember Easter ever falling in May. But Jim tapped with self-assurance: “Yes, it is late this year, but that happens once in a great while.”

Jim was a good guy, and so we accepted his assertion. Besides, we reasoned, what difference did it make? (Who knew that Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox, and the vernal equinox always falls within a day of March 21?) We were confident the Lord would be pleased if we celebrated his resurrection on whatever date. And so it was, while the rest of the world celebrated Easter on April 14, 1968, we POWs celebrated it on May 12. Every Easter, I remember this and smile.

 

 

Another scientific question that obsessed us—primarily because we were being starved to death—was how much we weighed. I found out the answer when I was moved to a larger cell in a POW camp, built on the backside of the Zoo, that we called the Annex. We were eight POWs in an 18-by-18-foot cell. Attached to the outside of the cell was an eight-foot high brick wall surrounding an area 18 by 15 feet. The walled yard had a well, a squat-down toilet, and a small concrete tank. Twice a week we were allowed to stay in the outside area for about 30 minutes without the guard. We pulled water from the well and bathed, washed our extra set of pajamas, and got a little sun.

One day Bruce Hinckley said rather casually, “Well, let's see how much we weigh.” Good idea. But how to do it? One of the POWs claimed that each inch lost around the waist equaled six pounds. With the tape measure, we measured our waist frequently.
None of us, however, had much confidence in this inexact and impressionistic formula.

Bruce said, “We have all the tools—tape measure, rectangular tank, and water.”

The concrete tank in the courtyard was three feet high, three feet long, and 22 inches wide. If we scrunched ourselves into a ball, we could just fit into it. Our self-appointed weight expert said, “We will use Archimedes' Principle. You remember that, of course.” Along with the other POWs I nodded knowingly and pretended that I knew what he was talking about. He gave us a quick review and the simple version of the principle: If you immerse a body in water, the body is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of water displaced.

When the guard left, we quickly filled the tank with water. Bruce got in the tank and scrunched up so he wasn't touching the sides or bottom; the displaced water spilled out, and he got out. The tank was rectangular so we could fairly accurately measure the length, width and depth. We calculated the cubic inches displaced, converted them into cubic feet, multiplied by 62, the weight of one cubic foot of water. Bingo—we had our body weight.

A line of guys quickly formed to get into the tank. When my turn came, my body displaced 2.25 cubic feet. I weighed 135 pounds, about 40 pounds less than when I was shot down. The tap code was soon in high gear passing “Archimedes” around.

Pastimes such as the weight mania made the Annex a lively place. My stay there ended because of an escape. On the night of May 10, 1968, John Dramesi and Ed Atterberry got out through the roof of one of the cellblocks. They made it over the prison wall and into the Red River. They got four miles by daybreak, but couldn't find reeds or debris under which to hide. They were spotted by farmers, recaptured, and brought back to the Zoo. Then the punishment began. Ed was slowly tortured to death, but John somehow survived it all. The ranking officer in each cell was also brutally tortured for several days to extract information about any other escape plans. Over the next two months, torture was as constant and brutal as it ever got.

S
unday morning at the Hanoi Hilton was church time. To gather our “congregation,” the Senior Ranking Officer (SRO) tapped “CC,” quietly on his wall. Each cell in turn tapped “CC,” and soon all have been alerted to Church Call. The service was a prayer and a reciting of Bible verses. If I was lucky, I was in a cell with one or two other POWs, and we could pool our knowledge of the Bible.

A failed rescue attempt led to the most memorable of our church experiences. It happened on November 20, 1970, when U.S. Special Forces staged a mission to rescue the POWs believed to be at Son Tay, one of the small prisons the North Vietnamese maintained outside Hanoi. The raid was brilliantly planned and executed perfectly. Our men landed at the prison in helicopters and came home without the loss of a single American. There was only one problem: all the POWs had been moved out of Son Tay about four months before the rescue effort so none of us went back with our rescuers.