Operation Thunderhead (18 page)

The trick worked. Guards would look in and shout at the men to raise their lowering arms. When their evening meal was delivered to the room, the prisoners were allowed to lower their hands in order to eat. Then it was back to standing in the middle of the room with their hands up.

For three days the men stood in that room with their arms up. The only thing they could do while watching for the guards was talk. They spoke a lot over those three days, and it wasn't always on subjects that they could agree.

The North Vietnamese had been constantly indoctrinating all of the prisoners that they were criminals, that the United States had not formally declared war on North Vietnam. That made the pilots criminals in the eyes of the North Vietnamese and the world at large. When one of the POWs voiced a question about why they hadn't declared war, Dramesi had an answer.

His experience at the front lines against the Communist Iron Curtain in Europe had taught Dramesi well just what the cost of an all-out war could be. A nuclear exchange would be the inevitable result of an escalation of conflict with the Soviet Union, or Red China, in the case of Southeast Asia. He said that if the United States had declared formal war against North Vietnam, then the allies of North Vietnam, Red China and the Soviet Union, would have been forced to back up their ally and declare war on the United States. A direct confrontation between the world's superpowers would lead to one conclusion that had to be avoided—all-out nuclear war.

The tight rules of engagement the American fliers had to follow also went against the accusation that they were criminals. The pilots endangered themselves so as to avoid possible damage to civilian population centers, hospitals, and schools. Each of the prisoners there was a pretty good example of how careful the men were in their attacks; they all knew how hard it was to conduct an attack under the rules they had to follow. And it was plain that the North Vietnamese knew that the Americans wouldn't attack indiscriminately. The fact that they would hide military supplies and materials in villages and near hospitals and schools proved that. Dramesi had seen the stacks of ammunition and the vehicles hidden in a village himself.

Three days went by as the prisoners dealt with their ordeal. It was only through their own actions that they were able to lessen the torture of standing with their hands raised. Finally, guards came in the room and blindfolded each of the men. Spoon was separated from Dramesi and Baugh. The two of them were placed together in a cell of the building that the prisoners called the Office.

A third POW was in the cell when Dramesi and Baugh arrived. Shot down about six weeks after Dramesi, Don Heiliger had been the back-seater in an F-105F when it was shot down in a bombing raid. The pilot of the aircraft, Ben Pollard, had also survived ejection and been taken prisoner.

The conversations continued as the men tried to keep their own and each other's spirits up. There were conflicts as debates on subjects grew heated. But that was as much a reflection of the constant stress the prisoners were on as simple personality conflicts. Each of the men had his own stories to tell, and each had his own style in telling them. For Dramesi, he told the others what he knew about a variety of sports. From skin diving to sky diving, mountain climbing to boating, he spoke of what they were like, how you did them, and what you could expect to feel, hear, see, taste when you were involved in them. For Baugh, he was more the entertainer. He told a good joke, or a bad one for that matter. And he knew a lot about movies and television, and could mix a good drink too, though the others had to take his word on that. For Heiliger, he spoke of music and religion. But always, the situation the men all found themselves in eventually became the subject of their discussions.

The days had settled into a fairly predictable routine. There were two meals a day, though still very poor rations, and usually included the green soup Dramesi had never positively identified. The men were also allowed a washing period early in the morning where they could clean themselves and their clothes up to some extent. It was also a chance to empty and clean out their room's waste bucket, cutting back a little on the overall stink of the place. For about three hours every day, there was a quiet period where the incessant clanging and noise that was going on behind their building stopped for a while.

There were also the regular indignities thrust upon the prisoners by the guards. There were weekly searches for contraband and information. The prisoners in each cell would have to stand facing the wall, leaning up against it so that they were off-balance. Then the guards would shake them down, searching every nook and cranny of their persons, clothes, and cells.

In spite of the searches, Dramesi always kept one item hidden from the guards: his Golden Key, the bent nail that had first opened his handcuffs back during those horrible first weeks at Heartbreak that was something he kept. The bent nail was hooked into his shorts, up between his legs, and the guards always missed it.

Resistance was a constant struggle. Several of the prisoners along with Dramesi would hold back on any cooperation with the guards or the camp staff. There was the constant demand that the prisoners bow to any Vietnamese they met. Severe punishments could result for the slight bow, the lowering of the head that Dramesi and some of the others did. There were prisoners whose will to resist was less. Among other things, they would bow deeply to the guards, the staff, almost any Vietnamese they came across.

Injuries were treated minimally if at all. Food was consistently poor and insufficient. And there was the constant threat of torture, a threat carried out on a regular basis for what appeared almost any reason. The punishments for simply looking out a window or hole in the wall resulted in tortures such as the prisoners had never heard of during their military training. It wasn't a system that punished simply by the withholding of conveniences and privileges. It was an active campaign of physical abuse, extortion, and retribution. There were those among the staff of the camp, or all the camps in reality, who derived pleasure from the act of inflicting pain. Goose and Bug back at the Hanoi Hilton were far from being the only sadists in the system.

Among the various prison camps scattered in and around Hanoi, the Zoo had developed a reputation as a “bad treatment” camp. None of the places that the U.S. prisoners were kept at were particularly good, but several camps were harsher than others. These were the camps where the more resistant prisoners were kept. In the early part of 1967, there were about 120 or more American prisoners kept at the Zoo. The number of POWs moved up and down as men were moved about; and since they were kept in fairly segregated buildings, an accurate count of the POWs by the prisoners themselves was difficult. But the men resisted their captors, some more than others, and established communication nets throughout the camps.

When the guards and staff learned specifics about the communications, they acted thoroughly and with viciousness. The place was brutal, particularly after the U.S. bombing raids over North Vietnam returned in the spring of 1967. The fact that the summer of 1967 was one of the hottest and driest throughout Southeast Asia also added to the prisoners' suffering. The heat and discomfort were made worse when the walls went up between the buildings in the compound and cracks in the walls and windows were sealed. These actions were intended to cut back on interbuilding communications, but they also served to hold in the heat and prevent air circulation.

Heat was a constant agony to the prisoners. Adding to their misery was the starvation diet intended to sustain them, but little else. Rice that was badly contaminated with impurities and filth made up a major part of the food along with the small serving of pumpkin soup the prisoners received twice a day. There were the occasional fragments of pork fat in the soup, and an unknown meat paste was issued. No one really knew what the paste consisted of and none of the prisoners asked.

Even the water was of poor quality. Illness was a constant companion to the prisoners. Heat rash could drive a man almost insane from the itching and burning pain. Disabling boils were also common, hygiene being limited at best. The heat helped maintain a level of sweating that when combined with the still air of the cells, almost forced the prisoners to rot in place.

Harassment was common. In one series of ten cells in the building known as the Pool Hall, the guards would bring the soup to the prisoners and serve it at a near-scalding temperature. As soon as the last cell was served, the guards would immediately start collecting up the bowls from the first cell—whether the men were finished or not. To eat even their poor meals, the prisoners would have to force themselves to burn their mouths and tongues on soup that already wasn't a lot more than hot water.

One guard, called Magoo by the prisoners for his resemblance to a cartoon character of the time, came into some cells a couple of times a week just to beat the prisoners for no apparent reason. It was as if he had some very strange kind of exercise program for himself, one that just cost him sweat and caused the prisoners pain.

COKER AND McKNIGHT

The North Vietnamese government was not simply employing sadists in order to make the lives of their prisoners hell. They knew well of the Code of Conduct and what training the U.S. forces received in it. The Vietnamese well knew that there were sections of the Code of Conduct that prevented American servicemen from cooperating with their captors. They had obtained copies of the Code and studied it carefully. It didn't specify that prisoners weren't allowed to give out more information than their name, rank, service number, and date of birth, only that they had to evade saying any more to the best of their ability.

That ability varied greatly from prisoner to prisoner. The carrot-and-the-stick approach was well known to the trained interrogators. The carrot, privileges, persuasion, and such were tried. But more often than not, the stick approach was used. One of the surprises that the Communists received from using these methods came directly from their own propaganda. They were occasionally astonished at how much abuse the prisoners were able to absorb before yielding to the demands of their captors. Americans were supposed to be weak, but some of the prisoners were strong, very strong. And they resisted torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese to a degree that had not been expected.

One of the ways that the North Vietnamese minimized the strength of the American prisoners was to separate the really resistant ones, the troublemakers, from the general population. There were also a growing number of prisoners to house as the increase in U.S. bombing raids also increased the number of fliers shot down. To this end, several new prison facilities were opened. One of these places was opened in the early summer of 1967. Located near the Yen Phu Thermal Power Plant in northern Hanoi, one of the new camps served a double purpose.

As the prisoners arrived at the Yen Phu prison facility, the North Vietnamese made certain they were seen by large numbers of civilians in the area. In addition to the civilian display of the prisoners, they were shown off to foreign journalists and diplomats as a political ploy. By making the existence of the prison facility so obvious, the North Vietnamese were able to ensure that the United States knew where some of their captured servicemen were. That made the prisoner camp safe from air strikes, and by a coincidence, made certain that the power plant was safe from aerial attack as well.

The first prisoners to arrive at the Yen Phu facility in June 1967 found the place covered with black coal dust, sooty remains left by the nearby power plant. The black dust and incredibly filthy conditions resulted in the prison being named “Dirty Bird” by the POWs. A second holding facility that opened in the vicinity of the power plant received a variety of names depending on the prisoners who were assigned to it, where they came from, and where they were eventually sent to. “Doghouse” and “Foundry” were some of the names given the new facility by prisoners coming in from outlying camps. To the POWs who had been transferred over from the original Dirty Bird, it was the Dirty Bird Annex, or Dirty Bird West.

The dark cells in each of the locations had the original windows bricked over for security. There was no real ventilation, and the summer heat, combined with the dust from the power plant, made the Dirty Bird cells particularly excruciating. The location was so bad that the North Vietnamese allowed the prisoners to be out of their cells rather than have them die of heat and dehydration. The eight-foot-high brick wall surrounding the facility kept the POWs from having much of a view of the surrounding area.

The prisoners were paraded around in the full view of the public a lot more than any of them could remember happening at any other prison. The prisoners were even sent out to the public street, under heavy guard, to perform civic duties such as street sweeping or digging. The extensive “fire drills” made the prisoners realize that they were hostages being held for the safety of the power plant. The problem was that the United States didn't know about the location of the prisoners at the power plant site. There were bombing raids against the plant, but no collateral damage to the prisons or injuries to the prisoners. This was due to the extreme accuracy of the U.S. aircraft and bombs; at least that's what the prisoners told their interrogators. Among themselves, the prisoners thought that they had been lucky indeed.

There was some limited medical service given to the prisoners at Dirty Bird, more than they had received at other camps. The filthy living conditions, combined with the unventilated rooms, very limited washing facilities, and some of the worst food served in the prison camp system offset the medical care and helped underscore the punishment aspects of the camp.

Located as it was in northern Hanoi close to the Red River, Dirty Bird was surrounded by North Vietnamese homes where people worked, lived, and hated Americans. The prison facility was close to Pham Hong Thai Street near Yen Ninh Street. That put the camp in the vicinity of a major roadway, increasing the view of the prisoners to the locals when they were paraded about. It also made it that much harder to contemplate escape by Americans who would have a very hard time blending in with the local crowds.