Honor Bound: American Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia 1961-1973
by Nathan Alexander | View comments |
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This book tells the story of every American POW in Indochina, detailing everything from the torture they endured to their communication of tapping and methods of resistance.
Honor Bound: American Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia 1961-1973 is the definitive textbook on its subject. The authors have, in great detail, researched and, when possible, related the story of every American POW in Indochina. The book sheds little light on the MIA question and at times (especially given the book’s length) can be infuriating by its refusal to engage in polemics or even speculation. For instance, was there a connection between the intensification of the American military effort in 1968-69 and treatment of POWs? Cleary there was a radical shift in North Vietnamese POW policy around 1970. Why? The book ventures no explanation.
The mass of material presented, however, makes Honor Bound a useful source for further research on life as a POW, and of value to anthropologists. The authors describe too many subjects to list all of them; however, several I found interesting were the parts on the importance of communication between POWs, the difficulty POWs had enduring the tedium of prison life, and thirdly, the POWs’ ways of resisting their captors. Honor Bound also establishes a rough historical chronology of North Vietnamese imprisonment strategy.
Incarceration Variations
Rochester and Kiley argue that in the early sixties VietCong treatment of American POWs “shows no consistent patterns.” At times the VC attempted to capture American advisors for purposes of interrogation and indoctrination, but it isn’t clear this is part of a broader strategy. What is noteworthy about this first phase of POW treatment is the length to which the VC would go to convince captured Americans of the moral and historical correctness of the Communist position. It took a large amount of resources to move Americans around in the south, and yet the Vietnamese believed it was worth it because their captives could be won over to their perspective on the war.
The first prisoners in Hanoi were captured when the US begin bombing the north in 1965. Prior to October 1965, Rochester and Kiley write, “there were no documented cases of outright torture of American POWs in North Vietnamese prisons.” As the Vietnamese adopted more brutal methods in November and December 1965, they continued to go to great lengths to justify their actions to their American prisoners. As with the VC in the south, the Northern captors insisted their policy towards POWs was “humane and lenient.” It would seem that the North Vietnamese, in the early stages of the war, understood the conflict locally, approaching their captives with a sort of naïve idealism. They lacked the international perspective of later years, which would reduce POWs to objects to be manipulated in order to sway world opinion.
As US involvement in Vietnam increased in late 1965 and 1966, treatment of U.S. POWs also changed. Realizing that international opinion might be brought to bear on the military effort in the south, the North Vietnamese made the POWs an important part of their attempt to manipulate it. The ensuing period of torture, lasting until 1970, became an art, responsive less to American or even North Vietnamese whim, than to the vicissitudes of world opinion. The trick was to torture the POWs to the point of confession, but not to such an extent that the North Vietnamese’ “humane and lenient” image was harmed. This would seem to indicate that around this time the North Vietnamese perspective on the war had become international and winning the “hearts and minds” of American POWs in the south a secondary consideration to winning and confirming the skepticism of US and European public opinion.
The idea that imprisonment in North Vietnam was “humane and lenient” is false. Returning POWs estimated that 95 percent of US POWs underwent torture. Taken from the Chinese and used by the Viet Minh against the French, North Vietnamese techniques of interrogation had been refined for decades and were applied to Americans regularly through 1970. Some were physically brutal: These varied from the “use of the ropes, to cuffs of a ratchet type that could be tightened until they penetrated the flesh, sometime down to the bone,” to the “aggravation of injuries received at ejection or upon landing, such as twisting a broken leg; forcing a man to sit or kneel for long periods of time without food or sleep; beatings with whips and rifle butts; the application of an assortment of straps, bars and chains to body pressure points; and prolonged solitary confinement, often while in darkened quarters and/or in leg irons and manacles.”
1969 proved to be a particularly dreadful year for the POWs. The intensification of US military efforts in the south and the reprisals on POWs for the escape attempt by two of their fellows, “resulted in a final wave of havoc and brutality that . . . pushed many . . .POWs to the brink.” One POW, Red McDaniel, “over a period of two weeks. . . received approximately 700 lashes, suffering 38 open wounds during one session alone. In between he was slapped in the face with a hard sandal, given electric shock, bound in irons, and hoisted in ropes, at one point left dangling hideously with a compound fracture of the arm, the interrogation continuing while a guard attempted to put the protruding bone back into place.” One sadistic interrogator, nicknamed “Cheese,” enjoyed “poking and squeezing the eyeballs of his subjects.” Outright killing of POWs was not acceptable, however, because this might damage the North Vietnamese’ public image of being “humane and lenient.”
Another sign of the North Vietnamese’ awareness of world opinion was their obsession with obtaining written confessions from the POWs. While it is hard to put a date on when the North focused on extracting written confessions, it probably came at a time when the World Court’s opinions were imagined to have an effect on the American military effort. Paradoxically, extracting confessions gave the Americans a chance for a reprieve. Often, Americans about to break under pressure, would write a false confession that would buy them time to recuperate. POW Ralph Gaither wrote, “[I] couldn’t help but laugh at some of the enemies comments, such as ‘Johnson must really be hurting for pilots to have an ensign flying an F-4.’” They “could not understand that when you force a statement out of a man by physical abuse that it is not binding. But their Army lie was built around repentance and confession.”
The final chapters of Honor Bound are some of the most interesting and frustrating among the book’s over 700 pages. Rochester and Kiley characterize the final period of POW captivity, from late 1970 until release, as “the Good Guy era.” During this time, there was a “genuine and arresting” improvement in the POWs treatment and conditions. And “while life as a POW was still difficult, prisoners were not tortured.” The authors also write about the (very few) POWs who came to support the North Vietnamese vision of the war, offering their captors confessional anti war statements, and earning the contempt of their colleagues for “selling out for favors.” However the analysis of why the dissenting POWs chose to turn against their fellow POWs and the war effort is negligible. No explanation is offered for the “Good Guy era.” As their Vietnamese guards became less menacing, “philosophical differences among the Americans' own ranks suddenly loomed larger, posing threats to command, organization and morale that in their own way became just as serious as those posed from without by the enemy.” Why?
Communication
The conflict between POWs and their North Vietnamese captors may be seen as an attempt by the Americans to preserve their own “sign codes,” and of the North Vietnamese to reduce the Americans' sign code to their own. This was the real objective of torture. Unable to communicate directly (for the most part), and consigned to isolated, alternately cold or sweltering (and infested) cells, the American POWs’ communications were reduced to a series of taps, which was all that enabled them to maintain contact with their fellow Americans. The most dramatic story of the POW existence was how the Americans were able to use these tapping codes to reinforce their own beliefs, and to undermine the ideology their captors were trying to impose upon them.
The tapping code was first used in the summer of 1965 by Captain Carlyle Harris. It used the alphabet, arranged upon a five by five matrix that covered all letters except for K. “The communicator transmitted a letter by using two numbers, the first referring to the letter’s location in the horizontal rows of the matrix, and the second placing it in the vertical columns.” For example, 2-2 signified G; 1-2 B, and so on. The sequence GBU, an abbreviation for “God bless you,” became one of the most frequently passed messages. . .and eventually the universal sign-off signal. A famous if inelegant early transmission that used C to denote both C and K was “Joan Baez Succs,” sent after the Vietnamese played a recording over the Hilton public address system by the well-known American anti-war activist.
Communication by tapping was used for simple things, such as playing games of bridge. Of course a game that would take ten minutes under normal conditions, could last for two or three weeks when every play had to be tapped through several walls. But such lengthy games were never thought to be a waste of time. “Communication was . . .a primal necessity,” the authors write, “[it was something] as vital and nourishing to the POW’s spirit as food was to his body. It was “the heart of our existence,” Jeremiah Denton declared. Many POWs would write that even “idle chatter” was the key to withstanding the “sometimes overwhelming sensory deprivation of the prison camps.”
The American code was more than just a means for maintaining a “perspective” different from that of their torturers. It was a way of preserving their humanity. James Stockdale wrote in his memoir:
Our tapping ceased to be just an exchange of letters and words; it became conversation. Elation, sadness, humor, sarcasm excitement, depression—all came through. Sam (Major Samuel Johnson, the prisoner in the adjoining cell) and I would sign off before dark with abbreviations like GN (goodnight) and GBU (God bless you). Passing on abbreviation like conundrums got to be a kind of game. What would ST mean right after GN? Sleep tight, of course. And DLTBBB? I laughed to think what our friends back home would think of us two old fighter pilots standing at a wall, checking for shadows under the door, pecking out a final message for the day with our fingernails: “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
Passing Time
Perhaps the biggest enemy of the POWs was not their guards, but boredom. Denton, from time to time, would “greet quizzes with relief” and others periodically risked propaganda exploitation by visiting museums and participating in media events just to get a break from the monotony. Gaither wrote “Time functioned in the inversely logarithmic manner. If a man could make the minute, he could make the year. We did not even try to face the years, only the minutes.” Gazing at the insects, lizards and other creatures that shared their cells became addictive as the “captives began to relate to the creatures.” POW Douglas Hegdahl said “The smallest little thing became the biggest event.” Many POWs came to imagine the personalities of the small animals and insects which regularly stopped by their cell windows. How a small bird might eat several seeds, would become the object of conversation.
The POWs most extensive diversions were not outside themselves, but were in their imaginations. The first was to be found in memory. “By 1968 and 1969,” Rochester and Kiley write, “[most] long-term POWs had reconstructed whole chapters of their lives with the precision of diarists.” Over the period of his captivity, POW William Lawrence relived his life in minute detail three times.
But eventually, as was the case with Saint Augustine in the famous book 10 of his Confessions, one’s memory is exhausted. At this point the imagination would offer another diversion: it would allow the men to recreate experience itself. They would embark on “fantasy trips or adventures, practice invisible pianos or guitars.” POW Howard Rutledge wrote that “I built five houses in my imagination during my seven years in North Vietnam. . . .Carefully I selected the site, then negotiated with its owner for purchase. Personally I cleared the ground, dug the foundations, laid the cement, put up the walls, shingled the roof, and landscaped the property. After I had carefully furnished the home, I sold it, took my profit and began the entire process once again.” POW Charles Plumb “Scratched out a keyboard on his bunk and practiced chords until he could actually hear the notes in my mind.”
Imaginative activities varied from POW to POW. James Stockdale “counted one of the greatest gifts he got while at (POW camp) Alcatraz as being the formula for expanding exponential numbers that he got from a fellow prisoner. “I became the word’s greatest authority on the exponential curve. POW Richard Risner . . combated recurring panic by running up to 25 miles a day and solving square root and fractional problems with lessons he had learned from POW Ron Mastin. “Math became something like a personal friend.” Other men studied languages, using stolen toilet paper and ink made from cigarette ashes to compile dictionaries. Lt. Cdr Claude Cower returned home with a 2000 word Spanish dictionary he copied in minute writing and hid in a bar of soap. The champion linguist may have been POW Bob Craner who could speak French, Spanish and German and toward the end of the war would pick up some Russian from 1968 captive Marine Capt. Lawrence Friese.
Conspicuously absent, however, from the POW’s accounts are references to sexual imaginings. “Women certainly were a topic with us,” said POW Robert Doremus,” but it was something we just kind of put out of our minds.” POW Ernest Brace wrote that “as for discussions of sex, I’d say that matter was insignificant. We had other things on our minds. . . .”
The world of the imagination, for some POWs, seemed to supplant the reality around them. One POW wrote “Sometimes with all the tapping and clearing, along with my own prayer and exercise time, working on my French vocabulary, POW roster and other memory lists, memorizing and composing poetry and planning projects for the future at home again, I’d frequently go to sleep at night thinking, Hell, I didn’t get done everything I’d wanted to do today.” Still, this was the exception, not the norm.
Resistance
Soon after Jeremiah Denton, Jr. was captured in July of 1965, he would begin to devise a variation of the original tap code. Denton, a leader among the POWs, wanted to use the code, to “coordinate resistance, keep informed of prisoner health and morale, and circulate possible escape routes and methods.” Under Denton’s leadership, the POWs were able to coordinate their resistance to their torturers and through collective action, gain limited respite from the most excruciating tortures.
Both communication amongst themselves and passing time were ways the Americans maintained their culture and perspective; however, the Americans actively resisted the North Vietnamese and this was because of their ability to manipulate the enemy’s signs. Particularly brutal interrogators were given ironic or condescending names such as “Chihuahua” or “Mickey Mouse.” One “young and bright” interrogator was given the name “Rabbit,’ on account of his large ears while some names were directly pejorative (“Dipshit”, “Pigeye”). Most indirectly degraded their recipients, countering their presumptions, rather than directly insulting them. Such mischief was cathartic as well as diverting. POW Gerald Coffee remembered that each man developed his own unique signature sneeze,” using expletives such as “Rat Shit” or “Fuck Ho!”
A man could get up a good healthy sneeze and practically shout out his pent up anger, contempt and frustration. The guards never seemed to regard this practice for what it really was—insults really—and it would afford us some small pleasure in putting something over on them on a continuing basis. Strangely enough, it would become comforting to hear these expletives throughout the day and night; sort of a humorous little reminder that the family was all there, and things were normal; dismal as ever, but normal.
Prisoners who were broken from torture and forced to read confessions, often slurred words or punned on them, making a mockery of what they were supposed to be saying. Richard Bostad, for instance, was required to read the news and regularly mangled the names of North Vietnam’s President “Horseshit Minh” and Australian Communist “Wellfed Bullshit” and devised exaggerated southern, Italian, German and British accents that had long suffering colleagues howling with laughter. John McCain “diverted interrogators with useless information, once listing the offensive line of the Green Bay Packers as the members of his squadron.” McCain in particular, several POWs noted, was “an inventive resister, one of the very best at screwing up the propaganda broadcasts.” The other POWs considered him a master at garbling the syntax of the camp news.
American resistance couldn’t simply be about manipulating language. Risner, knowing that he was about to break after continuous torture, resolved to destroy his vocal cords by gargling and drinking the lye in some soap. Other POWs, when about to break, had recourse to “puke balls,” scraps of laundry soap that enabled them to retch on cue. Another effective counter extortion technique was self defacement. “Freshening” bruises with one’s fist permitted the eyelids to stay swollen and the cheekbones mashed. Because the Vietnamese did not want to risk a propaganda loss from having killed a POW, they would sometimes relent if they thought a POW too severely injured. In this way, public opinion was able to be manipulated by the POWs and used against the North Vietnamese. The North Vietnamese captors, on the defensive in the South by the late sixties, could not afford to lose their most powerful asset, world opinion’s belief that they were “humane and lenient.”
What enabled the POWs to resist their captors was, in the end, not simply communication, imagination or defiance. Rutledge wrote that “what sustains a man in prison is something that he has going for him inside his heart and head—something that happened , or did not happen, –back in childhood in the home and church and school. Nobody can teach you to survive the brutality of being alone.” In the microcosm of the war to be found in the Northern POW camps, Americans confronted their North Vietnamese captors without the aid of the planes and artillery. This was truly a contest of cultures, one based upon communication and individualism; the other on the uniformity of signs. Today, decades after the South’s military defeat in 1975, the North’s archives remain sealed and discussion of the war forbidden. It is only in the work—often clandestine—of a few writers, such as Bao Ninh, that one—only today—detects the sound of a faint tapping.
Vietnam Honor Bound: American Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia 1961-1973 is available on Amazon.com.
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