The Cold War (59 page)

In the excerpt that follows, Norman details the life POWs led in the Plantation. The year was 1968, though chronology existed for these men mainly as a string of small incidents of determination and passive resistance pursued in semidarkness. The title, “That's Ocay XX Time Is on Our Side,” was the ironic epigram tapped out from cell wall to cell wall, using a twenty-five-letter grid (the letter C could be substituted for K). The POWs had adapted the basic matrix that generations of convicts had employed. Communication was the key to staying sane. But there were other constants of prison life to be dealt with, which Norman details. How to make a plaster substitute to seal a rat hole—and, when that failed, what common Vietnamese vegetable would keep the rodents at bay. How to make a toilet pail comfortable. How to exercise without being caught—which might lead, best case, to being locked in irons or, worst, a beating or a session of rope torture. How to play bridge when a potential foursome was in different and not always adjacent cells.

The POWs were held in eleven prisons in the North (which were at least an improvement over the prisoner cages used by the Vietcong in the South). Four were in Hanoi—the most notorious was Hoa Lo, the “Hanoi Hilton.” Six were within fifty miles of the North Vietnamese capital, and one was on the Chinese border. The POWs gave them names, hardly out of affection, such as the Zoo, Skidrow, Rockpile, Briarpatch, Alcatraz, and Dogpatch. From 1965 until l969, conditions were the dismal standard that Norman describes here. Then, in the latter year, Ho Chi Minh died; for some reason, still unexplained, the new leadership of North Vietnam eased up on the severity of treatment. Perhaps it was the delayed recognition, which the peace negotiations brought home, that the Americans were more useful alive than half dead.

GEOFFREY NORMAN has written thirteen books, including
Bouncing Back,
from which this excerpt is taken;
Alabama Showdown,
an examination of the football culture in that state;
The Institute,
a history of the Virginia Military Institute; and
Two for the Summit,
a narrative of climbing mountains with his daughter, including Aconcagua in Argentina, the highest mountain in the world outside of Asia. Norman is a former contributing editor to
MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History
and a frequent contributor to a number of periodicals, notably
The Wall Street Journal
. He lives in Vermont.

O
N MARCH 31, 1968
, President Lyndon Johnson told the American people that he was suspending bombing of North Vietnam above the 21st Parallel. At the end of his speech, he also announced that he would not be running for reelection. Johnson had been defeated by the North Vietnamese; he was quitting and going home. It remained to be seen if the U.S. prisoners of war, mainly airmen who had been shot down, would be so lucky.

The news was broadcast over speakers in every prison camp. And when there was nothing said about their release, many of the POWs drew the darkest conclusion. In a camp called the Plantation, on the outskirts of Hanoi, Lieutenant Commander Richard Stratton, the senior ranking officer, said to the three other men in his cell, “If we weren't part of some deal—no more bombing in exchange for our release—then we are going to be here for a long time. Probably until they start bombing again.” Stratton's prediction was accurate. He and the others would spend five more years in North Vietnam.

While Hanoi was no longer being bombed, the air war continued in the Panhandle of North Vietnam, and new shootdowns arrived with the unwelcome news that the war was still going on. There were no negotiations yet and no reason to believe that peace and repatriation were at hand.

A single rail line ran outside the Plantation, just beyond the back wall of the old building that the men called the Warehouse, which had been divided into cells. In his cell, designated Warehouse One, Stratton and his cellmates could lean a pallet bed against the wall, climb the ladderlike studs that held the boards together, and look through the gunports at the passing trains. Even after Johnson's decision to halt the bombing of Hanoi, the passing cattle cars were full of young men in uniform on their way to the fight. More than any information from recent shootdowns or the small seeds of truth amid the propaganda of
the camp news, this was the most vivid proof that the war was not winding down.

Guards still came to take prisoners out for interrogations, but these increasingly became what the POWs called “temperature quizzes.” Instead of being pumped for military information or pressed for propaganda, they were asked how they were getting along and how they felt about their captors and the war. Most of the POWs maneuvered to avoid head buttings. They answered vaguely and were eventually returned to their cells. They began to suspect that in many cases the quizzes were merely a pretext for interrogators to practice their English. Still, to see the door open and the guard point his finger at you was a frightening experience.

There was no way of knowing, when you left the cell for the walk up to headquarters, if you were in for a temperature quiz or something a lot more serious. Delegations were still coming into Vietnam for tours; prisoners in all the camps were still being pressured to make statements, sometimes with the promise of early release; punishments were still being inflicted on men caught violating camp rules. In short, the weeks and months that followed the Tet Offensive of early 1968 were not better by any objective measure.

The POWs began psychologically digging in, adjusting to the long haul. Most were in their twenties or early thirties. A few were barely old enough to have voted in one election before they were shot down. Some were fathers of children they'd never seen; husbands of women they had lived with for only a few weeks. It seemed increasingly possible—even probable—that they would be middle-aged or old men before they left Vietnam. Their survival now included facing this hard reality. Somehow, they had to find ways to fill those years, to salvage something from their youth.

At all of the POW camps in North Vietnam, communication between prisoners was strictly forbidden. Roommates managed to communicate without being overheard, but a man could not shout through walls or windows, or leave messages, or try in any other way to make contact with fellow prisoners in the camp. Men were thrown into solitary, locked in irons, hung by ropes, and beaten when they were caught trying to communicate.

Still, it was worth the risk, since communication was the foundation of any kind of resistance. The senior man had to get his orders out to everyone in the camp, and everyone had to be tied in; four men alone in a room were not part of a unified resistance. With something called the “tap code,” prisoners were able to communicate and establish an organization. Working together helped
them overcome feelings of isolation and boredom, and ultimately enabled them to resist.

The principle of the tap code is ancient, at least as old as Greek civilization. In modern dress, it appears in Arthur Koestler's descriptions of life in the Soviet prison in his novel
Darkness at Noon
. POWs believed that it had been invented by an air force captain named Smitty Harris, who came up with it while he was in survival school and remembered it in Hoa Lo after he had been shot down. Although the POWs may have been wrong about the origins of the tap code, no group in history ever employed it more successfully or more enthusiastically. Learning the tap code was like getting a telephone: It opened a world.

The basis of the code is a grid that looks like this:

A B C D E

F G H I J

L M N O P

Q R S T U

V W X Y Z

The letter C could be substituted for K, and the code was read like the coordinates on a map—down and right. For example, the letter M would be three down and two across. To transmit an M through the wall, a prisoner would tap three times, pause, then tap twice.

Most men learned the code from a roommate, but it was possible to teach it through a wall to a man who was all alone and needed it worse than anyone. A man who knew the code would simply tap on the wall until he got a response. He might tap out the familiar rhythm of “Shave and a Haircut” until the man on the other side came back with “Two Bits.” Once that happened, they were in communication. Then the tedious business of teaching a language began, first using a more primitive system. The first man would tap once, pause, tap twice, pause, tap three times, pause … and so on, until he reached twenty-six. Then he would do it again. Eventually, the other man would understand that the twenty-six taps represented the alphabet. A was one, B was two, and so on.

When this had been established, a few messages would be transmitted. The men would exchange names, perhaps, and shootdown dates. It was exceedingly slow and tedious, but it established the link and the rudiments of the method. The next step was to tap out the message “Make a matrix.” That done, the newcomer was instructed to fill in the alphabet. In this way the first code was used to explain the much shorter, more efficient one.

At the Plantation, as well as the other camps, the walls were alive with the sounds of men urgently tapping out messages.

When it became clear to the men at the Plantation that they were not going home in return for an end to the bombing of Hanoi, they began trying to improve the physical conditions of their captivity. They would never be comfort-able—the cells were crowded and unventilated, and the men slept on boards and wore the same clothes day after day—but they could try to keep clean, and they could improvise several other ways to reduce their misery.

In Warehouse Four there was a lieutenant (j.g.) named Tom Hall who gained a reputation among his fellows as an especially gifted improviser. A farmboy from outside of Suffolk, Virginia, who had grown up learning how to doctor animals, fix cars, and make all of the endless repairs necessary to keep a farm running, he knew how to “make do.” After graduating from Virginia Tech, he had gone into the navy and learned to fly fighters. He had been stationed on the
Bonhomme Richard,
on Yankee Station, when his F-8 was hit by a SAM. He had gone to afterburner and pointed the plane toward the beach. Over the Gulf of Tonkin, safely out of reach of the patrol boats and fishing junks, he ejected. The rescue helicopter picked him up and flew him back to the carrier, whose captain was waiting to greet him. A photographer caught the moment, and the picture made the papers back in the States.

Like any pilot who has ejected, Hall was ordered to stand down for a day. The following morning, the weather was so bad over North Vietnam that no missions were flown from the ship. The next day Hall was flying again, and he caught another SAM. This time he bailed out near Hanoi—and the North Vietnamese got him. That was June 1966.

To the men who shared space with him in North Vietnam, Tom Hall was the perfect roommate. He knew how to be quiet, but when he talked, he always had something interesting to say. He told them stories about life back home on the farm, including one about how his family kept a hummingbird flying free in the house to keep the bugs down. The other pilots loved this story; the idea of a hummingbird in the house was somehow otherworldly.

Hall never got too high or too low. He maintained an even strain, as pilots say, and he looked after his comrades first and himself second. He didn't bitch and he didn't quit and he knew, by God, how to cope. It was Hall who figured out how to ease the problem of the drafty cells in the winter of 1968, when the men would wake up in the morning close to hypothermic and spend the first hour or two of the day trying to warm up. hats, he tapped through the wall. Use
extra cloth or, better, a sock to make a hat. Stretch it until it fits over your head like a watch cap. You lose most of your body heat through your head, he explained, and this would help. The men tried it, and it did help. Nevertheless, it was cold, especially during the night.

MOSQUITO
NETS, Hall tapped. When it is below forty outside, he explained, you do not need to guard against mosquitoes, but the net can be turned into a kind of insulation, like the fishnet material that Scandinavians use for underwear. Before you lie down to sleep, wrap your upper body in your mosquito net. Like the hats, the improvised underwear was a help. The men were not exactly warm, but they weren't chilled to the bone any longer.

Tom Hall improvised sewing needles from fish bones, or from pieces of wire picked up in the yard. The POWs could now mend their clothes, and they even amused themselves by learning to do a kind of needlepoint. The favorite pattern was, far and away, the American flag.

Hall was also given credit for discovering that a man could use his sandals, which were cut from old rubber tires, as a toilet seat by laying them across the cold, sharp, dirt-encrusted edges of the bucket before he squatted. This, in the minds of many POWs, was the most inspired bit of improvisation in the entire war.

Another persistent, seemingly unsolvable problem at the Plantation was the rats. They were abundant and they were bold. You could chase them out of your cell during the day, but they returned at night. Men were frequently awakened by the pressure of small feet moving across their chests.

Using items that he scrounged—pieces of metal, string, and an empty tin can—Hall built a working mousetrap that kept his cell rat-free. He could not use the tap code to teach the other men how to build such a trap from odds and ends, but he could tell them how to improvise a substitute for plaster out of brick dust and water and use that to seal the rat holes. The other prisoners went to work plastering the holes, and for a while this worked as well as all of Hall's other ideas. But the rats were not pushovers. They began to gnaw their way through the weak plaster barricades, and soon the men had to struggle to replaster the holes faster than the rats could gnaw them open again.

Once more, Hall came through. The Vietnamese grew a kind of bell-shaped pepper, which the men ate with their rations. The pepper was fiercely hot, hotter than any jalapeño the Americans had ever eaten. It was possible to sneak one or two of these peppers out of the mess hall when you were on food detail, and Hall advised the other prisoners to plug the rat holes with them. Checking
the holes a day or two later, the men noticed that the rats had tried gnawing through the new plugs but had given up before breaking through. The peppers were too hot even for them.