Seconds before Jerry lost his aircraft, he planned to complete another routine bombing run and return to Independence for a gluttonous evening meal served on linen tablecloths followed by a steaming shower. He’d sleep in fresh sheets before the next day’s change-of-command ceremony, where he’d assume leadership of the Sunday Punchers. He’d arrive home in Virginia Beach by Christmas.
One explosion changed everything. It shredded two decades of confidence and rendered his considerable ability and status as a naval aviator irrelevant. His sense of invulnerability crumbled. During the thirty seconds he estimated he had before landing, he thought of evasion and escape.
Looking down, he observed that he’d land in the M River, which appeared muddy enough to hide his swimming downstream underwater. He’d splash down, the chute would collapse on top of him, and he’d strike out below the surface, swimming hard and surfacing far downstream. He’d hide in riverbank bushes, lying submerged and breathing through a hollow reed overnight. The next day, he’d make his way to the coast—only ten miles away—and signal for a rescue. He’d be flying missions again by next week.
Below him, uniformed enemy troops lined the riverbank. They watched him float helplessly toward them. His descent seemed to accelerate as he neared the river and his feet plunged into the muddy water. His whole body followed. The limp parachute settled just upstream. Below the surface, Jerry quickly freed himself from the straps and kicked off, heading downstream.
With sudden horror, he realized his left leg wouldn’t move. Until now, he hadn’t noticed the severity of his injury. He had a ruptured tendon that, after the rough ejection, now protruded through a gash in his skin and flight suit. His left leg was useless. His heavy flight boots began pulling him downward, into the river’s cold depths. Panic replaced calm. Jerry kicked for the surface and gasped for air. He swallowed water and choked. He gasped and began sinking; his boots were too heavy. In that moment, survival became more important than escape. He inflated his life vest and shot to the surface. Looking around, he could see soldiers watching him from the bank. They waved him toward shore; one fired a shot over Jerry’s head. No options remained except surrender. He could imagine nothing worse.
Soldiers dragged Jerry from the brown water and stripped him of every item he had except his underwear. They took his flight suit, boots, socks, weapon, radio, and watch. They left him wet, muddy, injured, nearly naked, and bound with rope. The accomplished naval aviator and father of seven struggled to retain his pride. He felt much less like an American officer than he had moments earlier.
Kneeling amid a gaggle of thirty soldiers, he first wondered when, if, or in what condition he’d return to his family. He had no real idea what might lie before him. Truthfully, he knew little about North Vietnam and even less about how the North Vietnamese treated American prisoners. He suddenly thought about what would sustain him through whatever lay ahead. He recalled a list of important quotations he’d kept during his college years at the Naval Academy. Now, facing an unknown test, several came back to him. “Nurture your mind with great thoughts,” Benjamin Disraeli had said. “To believe in the heroic makes heroes.”
Jerry also recalled an anonymous quote that seemed apropos: “The greatest heroes known are those that are afraid to go, but go.” Jerry was certainly afraid; he didn’t have much choice about going, however. He could only control how he went, how he would conduct himself. He could choose how to respond to whatever came. Despite all he’d lost, he remained a man of faith and a naval officer. He resolved to show North Vietnam what that meant.
JERRY UNCEREMONIOUSLY ENTERED Hanoi in the back of a jeep. His captors had blindfolded him on the riverbank, and since then he’d caught only narrow glimpses of roads, villages, and jeering citizens. Yet he knew he had arrived in North Vietnam’s capital city. He could smell it: the food, fumes from cars and trucks, garbage, and sewage. His guards, weary from the night’s drive, paid him little attention, and he adjusted the blindfold so he could see. He knew enough about Vietnamese history to understand the French influence he saw in the city’s architecture.
France had colonized Vietnam and renamed it French Indochina in 1887; Hanoi had been the seat of colonial government. The country remained a colony until H Ch Minh, then a young Vietnamese nationalist, led Vietnam to independence in 1954. Victory had followed the eight-year Indochina War between H Ch Minh’s Việt Minh forces and France’s colonial army. The United States had heavily subsidized France, its ally in the Cold War against Communism and the Soviet Union. Despite the United States funding more than half the French war effort, France lost. The Geneva Conference of 1954 ended the war along with France’s colonial rule. The treaty temporarily divided Vietnam in two, ceding the northern half to the Communist Việt Minh and the south to the regime of former emperor Bo ại. The peace agreement called for a single national election within two years.
Before a year had passed, the United States government helped Bo ại’s prime minister oust Bo ại himself. Ngô nh Diệm thus came to power in Saigon and founded the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), which was a republic in name only. The autocratic Diệm and his American supporters knew a national election would give H Ch Minh power over all Vietnam, so they declined to hold the referendum. Conflict between the Republic of Vietnam and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) was assured. The Việt Cộng began an insurgent campaign to topple the regime in South Vietnam and unite the country. H Ch Minh’s government in Hanoi heavily supported these guerrilla fighters, while Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson steadily increased US military backing for Diệm’s regime. By 1964, more than 23,000 US troops were deployed in South Vietnam, albeit as noncombat advisors. Their noncombat status changed in August of 1964.
President Johnson seized upon a murky naval incident off the North Vietnamese coast and dubiously claimed North Vietnam had repeatedly attacked American vessels. He used the episode to rally support for direct American intervention in Vietnam. Patriotism and anticommunism ran high in Washington and the resulting Gulf of Tonkin resolution passed 416–0 in the US House of Representatives and 88–2 in the Senate on August 7, 1964, just three days after the incident itself. The resolution broadly authorized the president to send American planes, ships, and men directly into combat against Communist forces in Southeast Asia—and do so without a formal congressional declaration of war. Thus, with little oversight from Congress, the Johnson administration began rapidly increasing troop levels in South Vietnam. The administration also initiated the Operation Rolling Thunder air campaign against North Vietnam. The president and his advisors aspired to defeat the insurgency in South Vietnam, break North Vietnam’s will to support the Việt Cộng, and halt the spread of Communism. The public seemed confident victory would come quickly. Jerry had seen France lose its war in Vietnam just eleven years earlier; he hoped the Johnson administration would not similarly underestimate the determination of Vietnamese guerrillas and H Ch Minh. Jerry had to trust the president had a winning strategy.
Through glimpses beneath his blindfold, he saw tree-lined boulevards reminiscent of Europe. They carried a mix of mostly bicycle and pedestrian traffic. Periodically, he spotted manicured gardens and parks. As Jerry well knew, US policy prohibited attacks on Hanoi, and the city hummed along undisturbed. A noticeable number of military trucks offered the only hint of war.
The jeep turned off a main artery onto a quiet side street. On his right, Jerry saw a long yellow stucco wall at least fifteen feet high. Shards of glass lined the top. Over the glass ran lines of wire. The wall seemed impenetrable from without. Carved over its one portal were the words Maison Centrale, a French term Jerry knew meant “prison.” He gulped. He feared this was his destination and that it would prove as inescapable as its wall was impermeable.
As the jeep idled outside the gate, Jerry suddenly felt a handbag smash into his face. He shook off his surprise and lifted his nose to see a Vietnamese woman with a purse briskly walking away. Aviators fly
ing high above hostile lands never saw the citizens their bombs affected; they remained largely immune from the personal consequences of war. An unlucky explosion had changed that reality for Jerry. He lost his immunity the moment he ejected from his aircraft. For the first time in his life, he feared the personal anger of foreign citizens. He worried far worse treatment awaited him inside the imposing walls where he would be at the mercy of North Vietnam.
The gates soon groaned open, and the jeep rolled through them. Jerry heard the echoes of a tunnel followed by the quiet of a courtyard. The jeep stopped. Guards lifted Jerry out and walked him back toward the entrance, then ushered him to the right. He entered a drafty corridor. As he shuffled along blindfolded, he heard “Yankee Doodle” whistled low and mournfully. A small burst of hope ran through his body. At least another American is here, Jerry thought. Perhaps his bombardier-navigator, Bill Tschudy, would be here too.
Part of being an untouchable naval aviator involved paying little attention to the tragedies or failures that combat inevitably brings. Consequently, Jerry did not know how many Americans North Vietnam had captured since the air war Operation Rolling Thunder began in March of 1965. He’d been vaguely familiar with Ev Alvarez, the first American captured. Younger Naval Academy graduates Bob Shumaker and Phil Butler had also been downed north of the DMZ, as had a World War II air force vet named Guarino. Other than that, he knew little about who or what he might encounter as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.
Like all pilots and aviators, Jerry had received training in survival, evasion, resistance, and escape—SERE, they called it. The course taught officers how to survive behind enemy lines or in captivity. The navy based its training on one constant: the rules established by the 1949 Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. The agreement outlined humane treatment for POWs and defined what captors could and could not ask a prisoner. Mainly, POWs had to give only their name, rank, service number, and date of birth; Americans called these the Big Four. Any other information was off-limits. Captors also had to treat prisoners humanely. The United States, North Vietnam, and 102 other countries had signed the treaty.
The American military also developed its own code governing conduct of captured servicemembers. Jerry Denton and countless other men had committed the principles of its six articles to memory. If an unexpected situation ever created doubt about how to act, an American could fall back on the Code of Conduct.
For the moment, Jerry assumed North Vietnam would honor the Geneva Convention, and he concentrated on absorbing every detail of the old prison. Unfortunately, his tour ended after only thirty yards. His guard stopped him before a metal door, opened it, and pushed Jerry inside. The guard removed the blindfold, and Jerry observed a room approximately nine feet long and eight feet wide. Two raised concrete platforms served, presumably, as bunks. A barred window looked out onto an alleyway between the cellblock and the foreboding wall Jerry had seen upon arrival. He spied roaches darting into crevices. The guard motioned to a metal bucket in the corner; that was Jerry’s latrine. He also saw a wooden block with two recessed arches affixed to the end of each bunk. A rusty, hinged metal bar with corresponding raised arches lay across the wooden block. Were these leg stocks? Surely, he thought, their use had ended along with French colonialism.
The guard also left clothes that looked like Valentine’s Day pajamas to Jerry. They were long-sleeved, thin, baggy, and had broad red-and-pink vertical stripes. With a gesture, the guard ordered him to put on the clothes, then locked Jerry behind the heavy door. Jerry looked disdainfully at his new outfit. At least the clothes were clean, and he put them on. Dressed, he found himself alone for the first time since being shot down. He was exhausted. He lay on a hard bunk and fell asleep. Perhaps he’d wake up aboard Independence and find Hanoi had been nothing but a bad dream.
The voice that awakened him did not belong to an American. In surprisingly good English, a North Vietnamese guard roused Jerry and informed him he was to be interrogated. Jerry indicated he felt terrible and couldn’t walk. He pointed to the snapped tendon that had popped through the skin on his left thigh. “I can’t walk,” he said. A second guard applied a bayonet point, and Jerry got moving on his hands and knees.
He crawled along several passageways. He entered a room numbered “18” and found two officers seated behind a desk. They indicated Jerry should sit on the low stool before them. He took his seat and glared at the officers, hoping a look of pride would mask his fear. For all his confidence, he had no weapons, no friends of influence, and no real protection from whatever his captors wished to do.
One officer wore civilian clothes and introduced himself as a student of history and literature. Jerry guessed he was about thirty. The other might have been forty and wore an unmarked military uniform; he claimed to be a pilot. They informed him he had arrived at Ha L Prison in Hanoi; the name, he learned, was pronounced “wah-lo.” They explained that the building had been constructed by the French to house Vietnamese prisoners during more than fifty years of unjust colonial occupation.
They asked Jerry his basic information and he politely answered, giving them his name, rank, service number, and date of birth, as permitted by the Geneva Convention and Code of Conduct. Then the civilian asked, “What kind of plane were you flying?”
The A-6 Intruder was the navy’s newest aircraft, and Jerry had already fretted over how his captors might ply him for information about the new jet. He had vowed not to divulge its capabilities. Instead, he answered by repeating his name, rank, service number, and date of birth; the Geneva Convention required nothing more and the Code of Conduct bound him to surrender only those four pieces of information. The two interrogators kept at it for ten minutes. Jerry kept up his resistance, and eventually they sent the new prisoner back to his cell with their questions unanswered. Jerry was so exhausted, he later could not recall if he’d walked or crawled back to his cell, or if he’d been carried. He fell asleep once again.
After he awoke, he discovered his new diet. Guards brought him lukewarm phở, soup with stringy greens and various scraps of meat, fat, and vegetables. They fed him twice a day; his stomach rarely stopped growling. His 6-foot, 167-pound body needed more.
For several days, Jerry slept when he could and faced off against the interrogators when he had to. The pair continued battering him with questions: “Where were you born?” “What aircraft carrier were you on?” “What bomb load did your plane carry?” Jerry parried them all, answering with name, rank, service number, and date of birth as best he could. If he said something else, he made it innocuous or false.
The interrogators grew as weary as their prisoner. Finally, the civilian said, “If you continue to refuse to cooperate in a reasonable way by answering our questions, we cannot guarantee your safety. If you continue to insult us, we will have to turn you over to the civilian authorities, who will force you to talk.”
“If we turn you over to the civilians, they will apply severe punishment,” the other elaborated. “If that punishment results in losing a limb, they will dispose of you. They would not want to send you home a cripple.”
Jerry raised his voice and said, “Are you daring to make threats against my life in contravention of the Geneva Conventions?”
His adversaries conferenced and decided to dismiss their prisoner. But they left him with a worrisome warning. The Geneva Convention did not bind them in this situation, they explained. The United States had not declared war on North Vietnam. Thus, they could treat the Americans as war criminals who’d attacked their villages and people. The prisoners should not jeopardize the leniency they’d experienced to date; the North Vietnamese people could, if they wished, try them in court. Jerry, whose leg remained untreated, was not impressed with North Vietnam’s mercy and hospitality so far, and he felt certain America would protect him. Yet he limped back to his cell nervously wondering what this legal perspective might mean.
Jerry had heard one American whistling when he first
arrived in Ha L Prison. He knew a good whistle would carry through his brick, stone, and concrete environs, but he’d also been ordered and threatened not to communicate in any way—and he believed the guards’ threats. After two days of silent, isolated residence, he couldn’t stand being quiet any longer. Near his window, he began softly whistling “Anchors Aweigh,” the Naval Academy fight song. Maybe an American would hear him.
Shortly, Jerry heard, “Hello, Yank!” The voice drifted through his window from somewhere down the alleyway between the cellblock and yellow exterior wall. Jerry guessed the voice came from two or three cells down the row.
Jerry replied, “Yeah.” He was skeptical. Could it be a trick?
“What’s your name,” the voice asked.
“This is Jerry Denton, US Navy. Who are you?”
“Guarino, major, Air Force.”
Jerry recognized the name; he could trust this voice. “Oh … yeah, I heard of you,” he said. “The Vietnamese released your name as captured.”
“No kidding? That’s great news, Jerry,” Larry Guarino replied. “What kind of airplane were you flying?”
Jerry laughed. “That’s what they’d like to know!”
“I bet you’re from Canoe U,” Guarino said, meaning the Naval Academy.
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