Around what he estimated as 10:30 a.m., Jerry heard footsteps, jingling keys, and the clanking of bowls. He’d heard the sound so many times that his mouth reflexively watered. Denton silently cursed his captors; they’d turned him into a Pavlovian dog. He felt almost more animal than man.
Footsteps neared and a bowl slid under his door. In it sloshed watery soup with stringy greens and bits of rice and pork fat. No different from the food he’d received everywhere else. And just like he’d done at nearly every meal in North Vietnam, he pounced on the food and slurped it straight from the bowl. As he licked remnants from his stubble, he was just as hungry as he’d been before the food arrived.
After guards collected the bowls from beneath each door, Jerry heard sweeping. He noticed a deliberate cadence and recognized the tap code. He peered under his heavy door, and eventually Bob Shumaker, surrounded by a small cloud of dust, came into sight. Shumaker had apparently been tasked with sweeping the packed-dirt yard. The sandy-haired whiz kid didn’t waste a stroke as he worked his way around the compound, broadcasting as he went. Each sweep of the broom sent a message in tap code. For Jerry and the POWs, Bob Shumaker was Walter Cronkite—although Shu’s knowledge extended only to happenings at 4 Lý Nam ; anything else was opinionated speculation.
That afternoon, McKnight relayed taps from George Coker. “This place is like Alcatraz,” Coker sent. “What a lockdown.” The cellblock’s residents immediately liked the name. Coker requested Jerry’s approval and the POWs christened their new prison Alcatraz.
Jerry, like his fellow inmates, took some pride in being banished here. Members of the Alcatraz Gang, as they called their band, had distinguished themselves as fanatical resisters, troublemakers, and persistently subversive leaders. The Camp Authority apparently considered them beyond hope of reform. They surely considered them their absolute worst POWs. America would consider them its best.
The day passed without event. In fact, nothing happened. Jerry realized how difficult passing time might become in this isolated little dungeon. The late afternoon feeding, which he estimated came around 4:30 p.m., offered the same fare as breakfast. After guards collected the licked-clean bowls, Jerry heard the clank of iron. He heard barks of anger from other POWs; guards were issuing leg irons. Soon, his own door opened and a guard clamped iron cuffs around his legs and locked them to a metal bar. The Camp Authority had already locked him behind a heavy padlocked door; the irons were a needless slap. Jerry lay down on his mat with his legs in irons and the dim light bulb still burning. Eventually, despite his discomfort, he dozed off wondering how long this exile would last.
With no other choice, the Alcatraz Gang began settling into the daily routine foisted upon them. It began with sounds of daybreak. Yawns, coughs, and hacks came from the captives who were always slightly ill. These sounds would wake Jerry, who hoped, just for a moment before opening his eyes, he might be back aboard Independence. Could this be a dream? The cheery voice of Hanoi Hannah would remind him that it wasn’t. Her propaganda helped the POWs start each day on the wrong foot.
Activity in the streets would gradually increase; sounds of happiness and commerce floated over the wall, reminding Jerry life went on outside Alcatraz. The first POW to visit the latrine would usually deliver a weather report. Even though the POWs would spend their entire day locked inside windowless boxes, much discussion was given to the conditions outside. Other messages delivered in morning soliloquies included birthday wishes and reminders of anniversaries. In their bizarre world, anniversaries were not of marriages but of shootdowns. “HAG,” Jerry scraped out on November 6: Happy anniversary, George McKnight. By necessity, the POWs became exceptionally proficient at shorthand code. Each man in Alcatraz adopted a one-letter name. Jim Stockdale claimed S and Jim Mulligan took M. Howie Rutledge had H, Harry Jenkins was J, and Sam Johnson took L, since his seniors had both S and J. Bob Shumaker, Ron Storz, and Nels Tanner had B, R, and T, respectively. Escapees George Coker and George McKnight picked C and G. Jerry claimed D for Denton.
Seven days later, Jerry heard someone send “Swish, swish—swish, swish, swish—pause—swish—swish, swish— pause—swish, swish—swish, swish, swish.” He translated “HBH”: Happy birthday, Howie Rutledge. For the POWs, birthdays were less painful than anniversaries. Anniversaries reminded them how long they’d been in Hanoi.
Jerry usually ended Alcatraz’s morning latrine rituals with a benediction as he washed down the area. He often included new orders and policies. His congregants quickly tired of directives; orders seemed to have little relevance to men locked in tiny cells with no immediate prospects for release. When that feedback came tapping hotly down the walls to Jerry, he shifted direction. The next day, he brushed out, “In Thy gentle hands, we are smiling our thanks.” His men approved.
Sometimes, Jerry’s orations ran long. One day, he focused so hard on a lengthy tap code soliloquy that he failed to hear Rat approaching. Suddenly, he sensed the commandant’s presence behind him. He turned around and saw Rat grinning. “Denton,” he said, “that is a very long message.”
At the end of his first week, when Jerry finished cleaning the latrine, a guard led him to the cistern and trough near Stockdale’s cell. The guard indicated he should strip and wash. He pulled off his pajamas and boxers and stood naked in the middle of the camp. He dumped cold water on himself. In the late autumn air, the chilly water felt as pleasant as Pigeye’s fists. Yet it at least helped rinse away a layer of filth. He tried to extract some lather from his sliver of soap, but the water temperature made that even more difficult. He did his best to spread the lather over his body with a thin washrag. Then he dumped water on himself again. Shivering against the cold, he washed his pajamas in the trough and hung them to dry. He slipped on spare shorts that the guard had brought and trudged back to his cell. He berated himself for feeling gratitude to his captors for letting him bathe.
Jerry had endured two years of solitary already, but the isolation of Alcatraz proved even more demoralizing. No new POWs arrived with news from outside. Nobody transferred in or out. Almost no interrogations occurred, so he had no opportunity to fight. Nothing at all happened. Minutes seemed to last hours. Seconds seemed to last minutes. Even at the Hilton and the Zoo, Jerry had never felt time pass so slowly or depression settle so heavily upon him. He struggled to endure this psychological torture.
He began to retreat inward for long periods of time. Daily, he recited his list of POWs in Hanoi. He learned that most other prisoners did the same. Jim Mulligan’s alphabetized list of POWs had stopped growing as of their move to Alcatraz in October 1967, but he had more than three hundred to recite and share. Jerry also undertook the detailed mental construction of an elaborate home. He created lists of materials and contractors, architectural plans, and imagined the house being built brick by brick and joint by joint. He also worked complicated mathematic equations entirely in his head. One day when he tried to communicate with another POW, he got a message back: “Call me later, I’m working on something.” POWs did their best to pass excruciatingly long minutes, hours, and days. They’d spend prodigious blocks of time immersed in mental exercises and journeys into memory.
In the mornings and at night, Jerry would think about his wife, Jane, and his family. He’d let himself dwell briefly on those pleasant memories. Occasionally, he’d even relive his meeting Jane on a summer hayride shortly after he graduated from McGill. A classmate brought Jane as his date; Jerry brought another girl. Sixteen-year-old Jane Maury quickly caught his eye, however, and he forgot about his own date. Something sparked between the two. Jerry decided he’d met his wife. Jane graduated as valedictorian of the Convent of Visitation School in Mobile and enrolled at Mary Washington College in northern Virginia, not far from Annapolis. The day after Jerry graduated from the Naval Academy—June 6, 1946—he married Jane in the Naval Academy Chapel. The two walked through the arch of sabers formed by Jerry’s classmates and began an extraordinary life together. Jerry could not dwell on
that life now, however. He prayed for his family only at dawn and dusk; otherwise he locked away their memory and focused on getting his men through their present ordeal.
Jerry eventually began indexing former colleagues and classmates, which he found less painful than thinking of his family. He started with his squadron, VA-75, aboard Independence. Then he reconstructed his US Naval Academy class, name by name, face by face. High school came next. Within several months, Jerry was reassembling yearbooks and desk arrangements from elementary school. Long-forgotten names and faces miraculously returned. Other POWs experienced similar phenomena; Stockdale flashed across the yard, “We are regressing. We’re going back to our childhoods.” Indeed, Jerry wallowed in childhood memories; he spent hours recalling a riding airplane he received for his third birthday. He imagined himself riding the toy through the hotel his parents managed. He considered how fascination with flight had ultimately led him to fight his war on the ground, locked in a cell in North Vietnam.
Jerry found sleep difficult. Other than running in place, he had virtually no physical activity to tire his body. Yet even if he’d had an entire gymnasium at his disposal, his meager rations wouldn’t have fueled any exercise of worth. The constantly burning light bulb added another challenge. Leg irons added one more. He could either sleep flat on his back or flat on his stomach. His thin bamboo mat scarcely softened the concrete underneath it. And there was the one protruding nail, right at his shoulder.
To pass late night hours, Jerry turned to his only companions: gecko lizards, spiders, ants, and mosquitoes. He observed that a large male seemed to run the gecko colony; he nicknamed him “Bullmoose.” He concocted a veritable soap opera around Bullmoose as he darted across the ceiling, catching mosquitoes, courting females, and producing the next generation of geckos. Not all of Bullmoose’s offspring thrived. Jerry would swat mosquitoes and feed the insects to the weakest lizards. Once he downed a mosquito, Jerry had to collect it before the cell’s other inhabitants descended upon it. If he didn’t, ants would arrive first. A spider usually came next, taking the ants’ prize. An adult gecko typically showed up last, eating spider and mosquito. For Jerry, the cell’s food chain became his television. Too bad, Jerry thought, that the geckos showed little interest in the flies blanketing his walls.
In his hours alone, Jerry devised a variant of the POW tap code. The men were so sick that he figured the guards wouldn’t think anything of coughs and sneezes. He issued new signals for the grid coordinates used for tap code. One or two coughs signified 1 or 2. Clearing a throat meant 3. A loud hock was 4 and a loud sneeze or spit indicated 5. The new system gained favor. Jerry figured the guards must have thought the POWs were near death given the volume of bodily noise coming from Alcatraz.
ONE DAY IN DECEMBER, Rat unexpectedly opened Jerry’s door. He poked his head inside and asked, “Denton, what would you like for Christmas?” The question stunned Jerry. He recovered and asked for a letter from home. Rat left without committing. Jerry heard him proceed to other cells. POWs tapped encounters up and down the cellblock. Howie Rutledge’s quick response got a laugh from Jerry: “A cup of coffee and a bus ticket to Saigon.” Saigon was the capital of America’s ally South Vietnam.
On Christmas Day, Rat brought most of the requested gifts to the POWs; the men tapped their surprise and details about their loot. Jerry received a priceless letter from Jane; his first in two and a half years. He devoured Jane’s letter and read it time and again. The gentle handwritten words brought tears of joy and pain. Jerry missed his family dearly. They’d had no contact since July 1965. He knew Jane would remain faithful, he knew his children would remember him. Still, every man had lingering doubts about how his family would endure such a separation and how they’d receive him when he returned, if he returned. After reading the letter, however, Jerry locked away their memory so he could survive the day. Thinking of his family too often would have crushed him.
On that Christmas of 1967, all the men received a meal of turkey, egg rolls, spiced salad, and caramel candy. Jerry ate it all, his shrunken stomach somehow expanding to handle the rare serving of real food. As Jerry lay in his cell, belly bloated with Christmas dinner, Rat appeared again. He handed Jerry a paper chessboard and told him he could play only by himself; he was not to communicate. Other POWs received the boards and soon the walls were alive with taps from POWs playing one another. Occasionally, Jerry would hear shouts like “You dirty bastard!” He knew one POW had outfoxed another. When POWs grew weary of chess, Five Questions became the game of choice. POWs would tap to a partner and pose a question such as “Name five fish that can live in both salt and fresh water.” Vicious debates often ensued and other POWs joined in. The men placed heavy wagers on their answers and opinions. Bets were always payable in cash or food upon homecoming, whenever that might be.
In her January 30, 1968, broadcast, Hanoi Hannah asked American soldiers, “Why do you want to fight against the just cause of Vietnam? You can see you are losing. Lay down your arms! Refuse to fight! Demand to be taken home, now! Today! Do you want to die in a foreign land, eight thousand miles from your home?”
It was Tt, the Vietnamese New Year. And from Hannah, the POWs in Alcatraz learned North Vietnam and the Việt Cộng had launched an eighty-thousand-man offensive across South Vietnam. Their troops and insurgents staged simultaneous attacks on five of six major cities, thirty-six of forty-four provincial capitals, and numerous other targets, including unprepared or unaware US bases. Việt Cộng guerrillas even attacked the US Embassy and held a portion of its grounds for six hours. The violence and scale of the attacks shocked the American public, who had been led by the Johnson administration to believe that America was winning the war. The news delighted Hanoi Hannah. She did not report the final assessment of the attack, however: US and South Vietnamese forces had rallied and generally claimed victory. But the real victory, in accordance with North Vietnam’s strategy, was turning American public opinion against the war in Vietnam. The Tt Offensive accomplished that goal.
A February 1 image by photojournalist Eddie Adams dealt a blow almost as powerful as Tt to support for what was becoming known as President Johnson’s war. Adams snapped a vivid and chilling photo of South Vietnam’s national police chief summarily executing a suspected Việt Cộng insurgent. Americans wondered what madness gripped Vietnam. After Tt 1968, the people of the United States began losing confidence in the war.
Jerry didn’t trust the reports from Radio Hanoi, but he knew something was up. And it didn’t sound good. A message came down from Sam Johnson in cell 3. Rabbit had visited and walked him through an Alcatraz quiz room covered with photographs of Communist victories during the Tt Offensive and of increasing domestic turmoil in the United States. Images were harder to discount than Hannah’s diatribe.
“Your country has deserted you,” Sam reported Rabbit saying. “You will never go home. You have been left here to die.”
Jim Stockdale responded from across the courtyard, “The US will never give up on us.”
“Never happen,” agreed Jerry. “They won’t leave us here.” Jerry hoped this promise helped his men. At heart, he had begun struggling to believe it himself. For the next three months, Hanoi Hannah brought selective reports of the Tt Offensive and its aftermath; none lifted the POWs’ spirits. How, with more than five hundred thousand troops in South Vietnam, was the United States losing the war?
Hannah delivered another blow when she announced that Hanoi had released three American POWs on February 16, 1968. Hannah broadcast their conciliatory statements; they thanked North Vietnam for its kindness and good treatment. Jerry nearly exploded with fury. He and Stockdale had been isolated only four months and the POW organization was clearly disintegrating. How could leaders have allowed men to accept an unconscionable early release? What happened to their bedrock edict, “We all go home together”?
At February’s end, Hannah brought still more demoralizing tidings. She reported a devastating statement from
revered news anchor Walter Cronkite, who’d recently returned from a trip to Vietnam. “To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion,” Cronkite had announced on national television. “It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” It seemed Americans were giving up on victory in Vietnam. What would that mean for the POWs?
To men struggling to find purpose and clinging to hope of an eventual homecoming, the Tt Offensive, early releases, and Cronkite’s eulogy stung. Jerry and others couldn’t help but question their perceptions and their mission. The news undermined their bedrock belief that America would win. They wondered what was truly happening in the big world outside their tiny cells. Three and a half years removed from the real war, they wondered if their mission and their sacrifice were still relevant. Despite creeping doubts, they had to believe both still mattered.
Uncertainty outside encouraged POWs to seek certainty within themselves. Jerry ensured that the men worshipped on Sundays, and he personally gave himself to prayer, spending hours on his knees. He’d pray the rosary again and again; he’d meditate upon its meaning. The Alcatraz Gang declared a Sunday in March as Easter 1968, and Jerry Denton composed a three-stanza poem. He had no paper, so he composed the verses in his mind.
He delivered the stanzas one at a time, on Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday.
The Great Sign
His manger birth drew kings in awe,
His smile the former blind men saw,
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