Operation Thunderhead (13 page)

In poor English, the man seated at the center of the table started to speak. What he had to say was chilling at the least.

Dramesi wasn't a soldier; he was a criminal, the blackest of them. He would have to answer all of the questions put to him, and answer them truthfully. Obey anything that he was ordered to do. And if he repented of his criminal acts, he would be treated in a humane manner.

Then the guard waited for a response from the prisoner.

The man was going to be waiting for a long time. Dramesi hadn't actually been asked a question, and he wasn't going to volunteer anything. He would remain as quiet as possible, not speaking at all if he could. Make the situation seem unworkable and try to end the interrogation session as soon as possible.

The man behind the table stood up, obviously angry at his prisoner's lack of cooperation. He repeated that Dramesi was a criminal, and a diehard. He was a diehard criminal. The criminal acts he had committed had to be punished. Dramesi was the blackest of pirates and would be held accountable for his actions. He would pay! Didn't he understand that he was a criminal?

The man's English wasn't all that good, but Dramesi could make out well enough what he was saying.

“I understand what you have said,” Dramesi said.

For whatever reason, the little bit that Dramesi said seemed to calm the man down. He sat back in his chair and appeared to relax. It may have been that he knew very well what was in store for the defiant prisoner seated in front of him. Instead of threats, he offered to be “reasonable.”

Soldiers would be going home from the war, the man said, many even before the conflict ended. Didn't Dramesi want to be one of those men who went home?

Of course Dramesi wanted to go home, and he said as much.

Now came the bargaining, the carrot instead of the stick. It was possible that Dramesi could get his wish. And he could have good food, even exercise, while he was still in Vietnam. The man struggled to come up with a word, one he wasn't sure he remembered.
Liquor!
That was it, Dramesi could have liquor! And with that, the man sat back and smiled widely, his big teeth shining.

Smiling himself, but for a completely different reason, Dramesi sat and didn't tell the man that he didn't drink. What he was certain of was that the price for his freedom was going to be cooperation, something he wasn't willing to give.

The rest of the men behind the table began peppering Dramesi with their questions. As during his other interrogation sessions, Dramesi was asked what type of aircraft he flew. And as before, he refused to answer that and other questions as well. The level of anger in the room went up again. Finally, one of the old men behind the table asked a question that Dramesi was going to answer.

“Why did you escape?”

“I am a military man,” Dramesi said.

There really wasn't anything else he could add to that short answer. The leader seemed to realize that nothing was going to come from this line of questioning. The man stood and said that Dramesi had a bad attitude. The man would think about that, and he would leave Dramesi time to think about it himself.

One of the guards came up to where Dramesi sat and tied his hands behind his back again. With a push, Dramesi was shoved off the stool and onto the floor. The men behind the table left. The closing doors gave Dramesi a glimpse of daylight. He was alone with his thoughts. It was April 13, 1967.

That afternoon, someone new came into the room where Dramesi sat. The jingling of keys at the door off to his right warned him just before the entry to the room opened up. The man was a very thin individual, appearing tall for a North Vietnamese, but that may have been due to Dramesi being on the floor and looking up at him. He had big feet, which stuck out of both the heels and toes of the sandals he wore. But what Dramesi noticed most of all was the man's long, thin neck, it was a goose neck on a person. That became Dramesi's nickname for the man—the Goose.

Goose had no expression on his long face as he indicated that Dramesi should sit on the stool. Getting up off the floor with some difficulty since his hands were still tied behind his back, Dramesi sat on the stool. Goose dragged a long iron bar and a pair of leg-iron shackles over from the corner. The bar was about two inches in diameter and from ten to twelve feet long. By the way Goose was handling it the contraption must have been heavy. Dramesi was soon to become intimately familiar with that bar and its weight of more than one hundred pounds.

As Dramesi sat on the stool, Goose put the leg irons around each of his ankles. The curved part of the shackles went around the back of his ankles with the open eyelets at the front of each arm of the shackles sticking out of either side of Dramesi's feet. The evil purpose of the huge iron bar became obvious as Goose threaded it through each of the eyelets on the shackles. When this was done to the man's satisfaction, the long bar extended out on either side of the prisoner's feet; the shackles held it in place. Most of the massive bar's weight bore down relentlessly on the bones of Dramesi's ankles and his feet, pressing down and flattening the arches of his feet into the floor.

Having completed his job, Goose left the room. There were no questions asked, there was no bargaining. There was just the growing agony of the bar pressing down on his bones and feet to keep Dramesi company.

To try and distract himself from the pain, Dramesi looked around the room as best he could. What he managed to see chilled him. Off to his left, behind him in the corner of the room, was a small table. On top of that table was a pile of materials including handcuffs. There was also a tangled mound of what could be nylon straps and ropes. There were also smaller pairs of iron shackles, much like the ones around Dramesi's ankles. Either they had prisoners of much smaller stature than the average American, or those shackles could be put around other parts of a prisoner's body.

Speculation about what could be done with the materials that he saw wasn't going to do Dramesi's mind any good at all, so he continued his examination of the room. It was a big room, about twenty by thirty feet; the floor was made up of rough-finished red tiles. The plaster walls were of a mostly uniform filthy white, except where there were streaks of dull green on them. The right rear corner was particularly filthy, as if it had been used as a toilet or where a bucket may have been placed, and missed, by prisoners relieving themselves.

There were dark spots on the walls in places around the room. If he had been able to look closely at them, Dramesi would have recognized them for what they were—splotches of dried blood. Stuck in some of the blood patches were long hairs. They were the mute testimony of where prisoners had their heads driven into the walls. One more ominous sight of what the room was intended for hung down from the center of the ceiling: a large steel hook very much like the meat hooks found in slaughterhouses.

He learned later that this was the terrible room 18 of the Hoa Lo Prison. The French had built the prison when they controlled the area, then known as Indochina, in the early 1900s. The Vietnamese name for the place was very fitting; Hoa Lo translated into “Fiery Furnace” in English; it could also mean a kind of small stove. Either way, it was hell for the prisoners who were held there. The Americans would call the place the “Hanoi Hilton” as a kind of macabre joke among themselves and to use that as a code name for their own communications. Whatever the Vietnamese people had experienced in that repulsive place, they made certain that the Americans had a worse time of it. Room 18 had another name used by the prisoner who spent so much time there: It was the Meathook Room, and the main torture chamber of the prison complex.

These facts would all come to Dramesi later on during his imprisonment. As he sat there during his first day, all he could do was gather as much information about the room as he could by simple observations. He didn't know if it was soundproofed, but it was certainly secure. The double doors off to his right were closed and locked at the center. Windows were in one wall of the prison room; they were shuttered with frosted glass but the bars across the openings were still visible by their shadows on the dirty white glass. Dramesi was still facing what he considered the front of the room—it wasn't like the iron bar securing his ankles allowed him to turn his body in any other direction. The table was still there, covered by that blue cloth. One of the lamps had been taken away, but the five high-backed chairs his interrogators had sat in were still in place.

One of the other features Dramesi had noticed earlier was a large drain hole to his right front. He had already seen a large rat enter the room through the hole. The rodent had looked around, sniffed, and left the way it had come. At least the animal hadn't come up to nibble on Dramesi's toes after his feet were secured in place. There may not have been much he could have done about that kind of situation except shout and wiggle.

As he sat with his pain wrapped about him like a thick blanket, there was the sound of keys at the door again. It was the Goose coming back. Just as before, Goose didn't say a word. He walked in shuffling his feet and pushed the double doors wide open. The flow of air helped clean out the dull smell of the room, and gave Dramesi an opportunity to see some of the area that he had missed coming in blindfolded that morning. He could see the hall leading past the doors, and the archway at the end of the hall itself. Through the archway, Dramesi could see outside of the building a bit; a garden of some kind was growing in the sun.

The reason for the room being aired out was shown shortly. As the prisoner had suspected, the airing-out hadn't been done for his comfort. The old man who turned out to be the camp commander came back into the room, accompanied by two of the other interrogators who had been there during the morning session.

Getting painfully to his feet, Dramesi stood and waited. The pain in his ankles and feet had grown more intense when he moved. He must have given some sign of the agony he felt, or the commander was just very experienced in this kind of thing. Coming up to where Dramesi stood, the commander indicated that the prisoner should sit again.

As soon as Dramesi began to sit, the commander swung his arm hard, smashing Dramesi in the face. The blow toppled him backward, off the stool and falling to the floor.

The commander stood over the fallen prisoner, screaming at him to get up. It was at this point that the screaming camp commander reminded Dramesi of some kind of loathsome insect. Something even worse than the leeches he had taken off his legs just a few days earlier. From that moment on, the commander was the Bug.

TORTURE

As Dramesi struggled to regain his balance, Bug kept shouting at him to get up. As Dramesi got situated a little better, Bug started to explain that the prisoner had to greet him properly, be respectful, bow. He was very demanding about that last word, repeating loudly that Dramesi was to bow when he greeted the commander; he had to bow, to bow!

Understanding the demands but still trying to give as little as possible, Dramesi nodded his head and leaned forward slightly. This show of deference to his superior was far from good enough for Bug. He rushed at the prisoner and struck him again. This time Dramesi was expecting the blow and managed to keep on his feet. The pain in his feet and legs was agony, and if he was knocked down again, there was a real chance he could break one or both of his ankles.

With Bug screaming at him to bow again, Dramesi leaned forward. He bowed, but not all the way. Satisfied with the victory over his bound and tortured prisoner, Bug went back to sit behind the long table again. Bug was still angry at Dramesi's refusal to show respect, but he indicated that the prisoner should sit on the stool again. As Dramesi sat, he could feel the irons digging into his ankles and feet. The metal was breaking through the skin, tearing through it and badly bruising the flesh beneath. The pain was becoming unbearable, and he knew that there was going to be more to come.

The questions started coming at him again. This time they were much more personal as the interrogators tried to build up information on Dramesi's past life. They wanted to know about his family, his childhood, and his parents. Did he have a wife? Did he have any children?

To everything he could, Dramesi gave evasive answers or simply outright lies. He hadn't known what his father did for a living; he had been too young to remember. He didn't know where his mother lived; she had moved since he had joined the service. No wife, no children. Yes and no answers whenever possible, and those given reluctantly.

Then the questioning turned to military matters.

“What is the name of your wing commander?” Bug asked

“I do not remember,” was Dramesi's answer.

Again, Dramesi was called the blackest of criminals. And he had to tell what the name of his wing commander was.

But Dramesi just said that he didn't remember.

With a wave of the hand from Bug, Goose came up to where Dramesi sat and knocked him over. Falling off the stool, Dramesi smacked into the hard tile floor, his legs twisting from the iron bar. The skin on Dramesi's ankles was torn and bleeding, but that didn't matter to Goose. Going over to the table in the corner, Goose selected some nylon webbing straps. As Dramesi lay where he fell, Goose slipped the strap loop around his prisoner's upper arm. Putting a foot on one of Dramesi's arms as a brace, Goose hauled back on the end of the strap with all the strength in his arms and legs. Pulling hard again and again, Goose drew both of Dramesi's elbows together. Finally he stopped just at the point where the bones in Dramesi's arms would have broken. The circulation in his arms stopped as Dramesi felt Goose secure the webbing around his upper arms.