Life was not comfortable. One night, Jerry awoke needing to urinate. The one bucket the men shared lay on the floor. If Jerry didn’t find an option quickly, Jim Mulligan below would get a shower. Finally, Jerry said, “Jim, I have to piss so bad I can’t stand it!” He heard Mulligan drink from his cup. “Use this,” Mulligan said. He handed up his drinking cup. “It’s the only thing I can reach. Besides, I don’t want to get wet down here.” Jerry took it and soon felt much better. His bunkmate stayed dry. The next morning, a guard unlocked Mulligan, who emptied the cup and bucket. Jerry had to stay put.
Jerry came to know Jim Mulligan even more intimately. With weeks of uninterrupted time together, Jerry shared his life’s story and his innermost concerns. Mulligan did the same. They considered each other through the lens of their common Catholic faith, which also helped sustain them hour by hour. Jerry would pass vast blocks of time in prayer, reciting the rosary over and over. He tried to remain thankful; many other aviators had died at shootdown. Jim Mulligan and Jerry believed their ordeal had purpose; they couldn’t let themselves think otherwise. Perhaps God intended them to emerge as better men. They made themselves open to those lessons: They couldn’t control their circumstance, but they could control how they responded.
Immobilized on his bunk day and night, tormented by mosquitoes, and covered with perspiration, Jerry’s mind drifted to various parts of his life. He often returned to his years at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. He’d decided to attend during his sophomore year at McGill Institute. He saw the 1937 film Navy Blue and Gold, starring Jimmy Stewart and Lionel Barrymore. After that, he didn’t want to go anywhere but Annapolis. He admitted to himself he loafed along in high school. He thought the challenge of becoming a naval officer would summon his very best. He applied for admission.
After long months of waiting, he earned an acceptance and arrived on the Yard, as the Naval Academy calls its campus, in 1943 with brimming confidence but little understanding of his new world. He made an unfortunate entrance. Jerry had been a high school quarterback and never lacked swagger. First year midshipmen, called plebes, weren’t supposed to show any swagger, however. Jerry arrived in Annapolis with an empty stomach. Before registering, he sauntered into the dining hall, filled a plate, and sat at a table with several upperclassmen. Galled by the temerity of this plebe, one upperclassman began a personal campaign to drive Jerry out of the Brigade of Midshipmen, the student body. Throughout the fall, he had Jerry running drills in the rain, counting out endless push-ups, and reciting naval knowledge and trivia. Finally, Alan Shepard, who would become the first American in space, feared the relentless hazing would, in fact, run this promising young plebe out of the Academy. He finally told Jerry’s tormentor to leave Midshipman Denton alone.
Thinking back to those miserable months, Jerry abruptly proclaimed out loud, “Jim, if this place gets any worse it will be almost as bad as my plebe year at the Naval Academy!” Both men burst into laughter. Guards yelled at them, but they kept laughing. They had companionship. They had a common enemy. And they had little to lose. Release and homecoming seemed ever more distant and even unlikely.
As Jerry had predicted, guards released him and Mulligan from the stocks on September 2, North Vietnam’s Independence Day. They mercifully returned the precious mosquito netting too.
The Camp Authority did not extend mercy for long, or to many. Several weeks later, guards arrived and dragged Jerry through the adjacent cellblock—the Desert Inn—and into a dark corner of Little Vegas. He thought he’d arrived in the Mint, a special punishment section about which he’d heard. Guards pulled his hands behind his back and cuffed them. A blindfold went over his eyes and a gag went into his mouth. The guards pushed Jerry through one small door into a small anteroom. They opened yet another door and shoved him into a filthy cell; to Jerry, all the Hilton’s cells looked alike now. Worse, they smelled and felt alike: pungent, steamy, and hopeless.
He continued to suffer for the BACK US directive; the united POWs were maintaining their hard line against the Camp Authority. Nearly every quiz Jerry had in September and October focused on the POW leadership and its resilient communication system. Cat, Rabbit, and their henchmen seemed to obsess over framing POW leaders and exposing the command structure. POWs thwarted them at every chance; many paid a stiff price to protect Jerry, Jim Stockdale, and other leaders. After pumping Jerry unsuccessfully for information in one session, Flea said with some resignation, “Denton, I think that no matter what we do, you will not tell us anything [about the POW organization].”
“That’s right,” Jerry responded boldly. Flea looked at Jerry for a long moment, then sighed. “Get up. Go back to your room,” he said, waving his arm. Jerry sensed a change for the worse was coming.
THE CHANGE JERRY FEARED came on the night of October 25, 1967. He heard the distinctive light, quick footsteps of guards as they rushed into the Stardust cellblock. Keys rattled, padlocked doors creaked open, and curt orders echoed along the corridor. Jerry’s closest friends, his fellow Stardust prisoners, began shuffling by his door; he tried to identify them by their walk. Then a guard arrived for him. He carried a blindfold and Jerry turned around in resignation. The guard tightened the cloth around Jerry’s head, then led him into the hallway.
Jerry felt his way forward through Stardust, then sensed the autumn breeze circulating through the alleyway between the cellblock and the prison’s outer wall. For a moment, he appreciated the refreshment of being outside. A hand pushed Jerry into a kneeling position. His shoulders rubbed against other POWs; soft nudges in code told him George Coker and Howie Rutledge were next to him. The POWs knelt together in the alleyway; they heard others arrive and join them. They listened not only to the sounds of movement but to the rare sound of an open sky at night.
Someone grabbed Jerry’s ear and wrenched him to his feet. He and some number of other POWs were led down the alley and into the corridor at Ha L’s entrance; he could hear voices echo off the arched ceiling. Arms and hands loaded him into a truck bed. He sat on piles of metal pipes, which pinched his legs with every bounce of the truck as it rumbled through the quiet night to God knew where.
In fact, the truck carried the POWs to a tiny prison on a small street behind the North Vietnamese Ministry of Defense, at 4 Ph Lý Nam . (Ph means “road” in Vietnamese. Ph means “soup.”) The French had built the small thirteen-cell gulag in the 1950s especially for dissidents, troublemakers, and political leaders who required more isolation than Ha L Prison could provide. The new prison on Lý Nam had removed enemies of the French regime from the world. There, they could no longer spread their political ideas or incite other prisoners. There, they effectively vanished.
The Camp Authority had reopened this most forlorn outpost, hoping it could help restore their control over the US prisoners. They looked across the entire prison system and identified the eleven Americans most responsible for stoking resistance and ruining their plans to subjugate American POWs. On this night, they rounded them up and sent them away.
The truck carrying Jerry Denton stopped after a short ten-minute ride. A hand pulled him down from the truck bed and guided him forward. He descended several steps and sensed he’d entered a compound. His guard pushed him against a wall and left. Still blindfolded, Jerry listened intently. He heard the voices of guards, the shuffle of feet, the whine of hinges, the rattle of keys, and the clink of cell doors being locked.
Finally, a guard ushered him down a bricked path. He sensed a long building on his left and open space on his right. When he’d traveled along the building for forty feet, the guard stopped him and turned him ninety degrees to the left. Another guard fastened leg irons around his ankles, then removed his blindfold. Jerry stood in a dark courtyard facing the last room in a long cellblock. A small open doorway lay directly before him. Inside, a dim light bulb illuminated the interior of the tiniest cell he’d ever seen. The prospect of being confined to this stark concrete box terrified him, but he was too shock
ed and too proud to let his captors see it.
Jerry heard a voice behind him: “How do you like your new home?” He turned and saw Rat grinning at him.
“No one can stand this,” Jerry said.
Rat didn’t reply. Guards pushed Jerry toward the cell’s interior. With no choice, he shuffled his weighted feet across the threshold, leaving the world outside, perhaps forever. Rat closed the door, sealing Jerry in what he feared would become his tomb.
Jerry heard the guards leave and the noise subside. Alone, he looked around the new home the Camp Authority had given him. He wondered, How much more can I take? What is honor worth? He felt a choking sensation in his throat; the walls seemed to press against him. He heard the skittering of roaches along the floor. He looked around in disbelief, then horror. He stood on a patch of concrete flooring that measured forty-eight inches square—four feet long by four feet wide. He stretched out his left arm, then his right. Both hands touched the sides of his cell. An elevated concrete sleeping platform rose at one end of the four-by-four concrete floor and stretched six feet to the back of the cell. On the platform, guards had laid a pathetically thin sleeping pallet, made of dirty bamboo strips. A nail protruded precisely where his right shoulder should lay. A faint light bulb, ten watts or less he surmised, plunged the four-by-ten-foot space into a permanent twilight.
He turned toward the door and saw a peephole in the heavy wood, but no window. Above the door he saw a metal plate perforated with a number of small holes for ventilation. Two electrical wires snaked through one of the holes, feeding the bulb and a small speaker. He felt sure the speaker would soon pump Hanoi Hannah’s diatribe straight into his cell. A slight breeze brushed his toes, and he noticed a six-inch space beneath the door. Tomorrow, he thought, he could curl himself on the floor and see outside.
Next, he inventoried his belongings, which a guard had tossed onto the floor behind him. He had a toothbrush but no toothpaste, a water jug, and a porcelain drinking cup. He had a hard piece of soap and washrag. Two sets of underwear and two shirts were on the platform along with a turtleneck sweatshirt and pair of rubber sandals; he had no socks for his feet. A torn mosquito net would offer some protection against the nighttime insects drawn to the cell’s light; maddeningly, more insects than air seemed to pass through the cell’s few openings. Finally, he had the one item that had accompanied him since the day he arrived in Hanoi more than two years ago: a latrine bucket, with all its filth, odor, and humiliation. Once again, Jerry found himself without any control over his circumstance. And once again, he would call upon all his resources to handle it as best he could.
He could survive any ordeal with the support of his men. Even sporadic messages or taps were enough to screw up his determination, to remind him that others counted on his example. Had the Camp Authority isolated this group of POWs from the Hanoi Hilton and from each other, he didn’t know how long he’d survive. Then, this cell might truly become his grave. Could he make contact?
He said a prayer, put his cup to the wall, his ear to the cup, and tapped, “Denton.” In response, he heard “McKnight.” George McKnight, who’d made a legendary fifteen-mile escape, was next to him. He soon learned McKnight’s accomplice, George Coker, occupied the next cell. Jerry had heard rumors of how the two POWs had picked the locks to their cuffs and escaped from a small prison near the Red River two weeks earlier. They’d swum fifteen miles toward the Gulf of Tonkin before being apprehended. Their stunt apparently earned them a place in this new prison, which Jerry began to suspect the Camp Authority had reserved for its most problematic characters.
Jerry soon had the new facility’s lineup. In the first cell, near the entrance, lived navy commander Howie Rutledge. Progressively closer to Jerry were navy commander Harry Jenkins, air force major Sam Johnson, navy lieutenant commander Bob Shumaker, air force captain Ron Storz, navy lieutenant commander Nels Tanner, young navy lieutenant junior grade George Coker, and air force captain George McKnight, all in solitary from what Jerry could tell. Jerry Denton was senior officer and at the end of what the Camp Authority must have considered an actual murderers’ row. Jerry realized the Camp Authority had sequestered nearly the entire gang of troublemakers from Stardust, except for Jim Stockdale and Jim Mulligan. What had Cat done with them?
The next morning, Jerry awoke at what he guessed was 6:30 a.m. For twenty-seven months, he’d never been entirely certain of the time, except on the rare occasions when he glimpsed the face of an officer’s wristwatch. He heard jingling keys and soft commands in the courtyard. A door opened and closed. He crawled from his pallet and curled up on his four-by-four standing area. Leg irons made this even more difficult. He peered under the door into the dawn. He saw a scraggly courtyard surrounded by a yellowish stucco wall, what looked like a concrete latrine almost directly before him, and a pigsty in the opposite corner. One look at the freely wallowing pigs reminded him even livestock in Hanoi fared better than he did. At least the hogs served a purpose, he thought. After two years of resisting to no apparent end, and being no closer to going home, Jerry confronted the creeping specter of purposelessness. Did all their resistance and all their suffering have a point?
In the far corner of the small compound, he spied a trough and cistern next to a small tile-roofed building with three cell doors. Suddenly, a guard escorted Jim Stockdale out of the door on the far left. The two senior officers had communicated through notes, taps, and whispers but hadn’t laid eyes on each other in Hanoi. Jerry knew Stockdale would serve as senior officer; Jerry would serve as executive officer, second in command. Jerry’s former Naval Academy classmate looked haggard and old; Jerry wondered if prison life had aged his own countenance so harshly. The commander’s left leg appeared stiff and he swung it awkwardly as he hobbled across the yard; Jerry attributed the limp to an ejection injury coupled with local medical care. Stockdale climbed up the latrine’s two steps, bringing his bum leg with him. He emptied his bucket into the hole as his guard watched with disinterest. Jerry had known Stockdale since age eighteen; to many POWs he was simply a name, however. To make sure everyone in the compound knew his identity, Stockdale washed out his bucket methodically, using the brush to scrape out “Stockdale” in code: “scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape—pause—scrape, scrape, scrape” for S, and so forth. Ten minutes later, the guard returned Stockdale to his cell. Then the guard unlocked the small building’s third door and pulled out Jim Mulligan. God, it was good to see Jim and his big sideburns.
After Jim Mulligan used the latrine, guards brought out a POW Jerry had never seen. The guard led the prisoner to the latrine where he used a brush to scrape out “Howie Rutledge.” Jerry recognized the name as the fellow navy commander in cell 1 of Jerry’s cellblock. Next came a gangly six-foot-five POW who seemed unable to hold a straight face: Harry Jenkins. Jerry guessed the rail-thin specter that came next was cell 3’s Sam Johnson, the Texan who Jerry had learned flew lead solo for the US Air Force Thunderbirds. The guard next brought into Jerry’s view a freckled, boyish face. The young man moved along efficiently and used the brush to communicate a stream of rapid abbreviations Jerry strained to translate. Jerry caught “Shumaker.” Jerry had learned the reputedly brilliant naval aviator had nearly spent the war with NASA’s Apollo astronaut program. An enlarged lymph node had cost him his place in the program, however, so he was spending the war in Hanoi and now occupied this new prison’s cell 4.
Next, Jerry got his first glimpse of Ron Storz, whom he remembered from his first months in the Hanoi Hilton. Jerry noted Ron’s striking blue eyes; he also noticed their evident melancholy. Later, when Ron bathed, Jerry saw the remnants of a once-impressive physique. Sadly, even the strongest men succumbed to a diet of cold soup.
Guards brought into view a POW who scraped out “Nels Tanner.” Jerry recognized him as author of the “Superman Confession.” Earlier in the year, Nels had signed a statement naming Superman’s alias, Clark Kent, as his squadron commander. He’d named television character Ben Casey
as a wingman. Cat publicized the confession, unwittingly embarrassing the Camp Authority on an international level. Nels paid a stiff price when Cat learned about his subterfuge. He’d become a celebrated legend among the POWs.
The guard escorted Tanner out of Jerry’s field of view and returned with a trim, five-foot-six, baby-faced POW who looked like actor James Cagney. He scraped “George Coker.” Coker’s fellow escapee, George McKnight, walked into view next. The six-foot boxer and air force captain still walked with a swagger. The look on his face clearly said, Don’t mess with me. Jerry took great joy in knowing what his compatriots looked like— especially after knowing them as only names for so long. He knew these men had to carry one another through the ordeal they’d face in exile at Alcatraz.
The guard came for Jerry last. He released Jerry’s leg irons and the commander stepped into daylight, seeing his surroundings from eye level for the first time. He confirmed his was the last cell in a building with ten cell doors facing the courtyard. He ran through the nine men from his cellblock: Rutledge, Jenkins, Johnson, Shumaker, Storz, Tanner, Coker, McKnight, Denton; he wondered if a tenth man stood silently behind one of his building’s ten doors. He’d also seen Stockdale and Mulligan exit two doors in a three-door building across the courtyard; the middle door had remained closed. Perhaps the North Vietnamese were using the empty cell in each building to foil communication. Considering how faint McKnight’s taps seemed, Jerry deduced the empty cell in his building was next to him. The Camp Authority must have aimed to isolate him entirely.
Outside at the latrine, Jerry identified himself as the others had. When he finished cleaning his bucket, it stank only slightly less than it had before. Jerry started to return to his cell, but the guard indicated he should wash down the latrine. Jerry complied, then the guard locked him away. His cleaning duties at least allowed him several additional minutes outside his shoebox of a cell.
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