Visual code was slower than the tap code simply because it took longer to slide a piece of paper back and forth than it did to tap your knuckle on the wall. To send an L, for example: three taps, hesitate, one tap. To send an L, one slid the paper back and forth so that it was visible, then not visible, three times, hesitate, then one time. Sight took about twice as long as sound.
It took a couple of weeks to collect the boil contest count from each cellblock. First each cellblock collected the numbers for the POWs in that cellblock. Then, when all the conditions were right, the data was sent from one cellbock to the next. We designated which cell in which block was the collection point for the data. The final tally took a couple of weeks, and the winner was Ed. (Because he may not want to be known as the boil champion of the Hanoi Hilton after all these years, I’m omitting his last name.) Ed was a very light-skinned man. The average was between 20 and 40 boils per POW. (Ever the middle American, I had 33.) Ed, the poor guy, had 243.
Exercise was a part of every POW’s day and an expression of his creativity. How we exercised depended on the space in the cell, and our physical condition. Ray Vohden’s foot was attached by just a two-inch piece of bone and flesh in his lower calf; he did upper body exercises. My knees were badly damaged, so I learned how to walk again—awkwardly.
Having no exercise equipment, we found ways to use what we had. For example, we usually had a one-by-two-foot towel. For arm strength and muscle tension, we rolled the towel lengthwise to make a “rope.” By holding each end and pulling in opposite directions—in front or behind one’s back—we had a good arm and shoulder exercise. For the POWs who had good arms and backs, push-ups and sit-ups were standard. Contests were held via the tap code to see who could do the most. Sometimes the number seemed extreme. But who could tell if someone in solitary was exaggerating?
To exercise my leg muscles, I stood on one foot, touching the wall for balance, and raised myself up and down on tiptoes 50 times for each foot several times a day. I exercised my shoulders and arms with my towel or pajamas. I would do a few push-ups, using the edge of the bed slab rather than the floor because it was easier on my back. Back injuries from torture ruled out sit-ups.
Back injuries were common among the POWs as a result of ejection and the torture—mine was from torture. As the prison years rolled on, my back pain grew worse, especially while standing or walking. In the big cell we slept on three-by-six-foot bedboards—planks nailed together. I found a way to prop up one end of the board about a foot. While laying head down with my feet tied to the high end, my back pain was lessened.
When I walked, my back was crooked to the left significantly. Maybe because of how I looked while walking, I was able to scrounge part of a discarded blanket and fashioned a sling, and a short strap. I tied one end of the strap to the blanket sling and the other to the window bars. By slipping into the sling and hanging by my arm-pits, I was able to really stretch my back. It relieved the pain, and I spent a lot of “sling time.” My POW friends enjoyed repeating, “Yep. There’s Leo, just hanging around as usual.”
When I finally came home, I had back surgery. A doctor known as the best back surgeon in Seattle showed me my x-rays. He said, “Look at this, your back has been broken here, and here, and here, and maybe here—three times for sure, maybe four.” He went on about my bad shoulders and knees. Then a question: “Do you have good insurance?”
“Yes I do,” I responded.
He smiled: “If you stay in Seattle, I’ll make a million dollars off you.”
Military aviators have good dental care, and we all went to prison with good teeth. We came home with bad ones.
Many of our dental problems were caused by the debris in the rice we were fed. No matter how painstakingly I inspected my rice, it was impossible to find all the grit and pebbles. Some POWs claimed the North Vietnamese added the little stones to the rice. We never knew for sure. But the problem was significant. When you hit a pebble chewing rice, a filling was often knocked loose, or a tooth chipped. You found a new part of your mouth to chew the rice; eventually a pebble discovered that part too. I learned to gum my rice to avoid the impact.
Like most of the others, I developed cavities—mainly from fillings that came loose after biting a pebble in the rice. If the cavity was open to the nerve, touching it or breathing air over it often caused a “flash” pain. We had no material to craft temporary fillings. But after we were put into the large cells, we occasionally got bread instead of rice. It was filled with weevils, but not with pebbles. One of the first times we had bread, a piece stuck in one of my cavities. I started to try to pry it out, but then realized that the tooth nerve was less sensitive with the bread in. Several of us began using “bread fillings.”
We had many discussions about our teeth. During ejection, capture, or torture, a lot of POWs had teeth knocked out or broken. In prison we were given a toothbrush and occasionally a small tube of toothpaste. The brush soon lost its bristles and the toothpaste, even used sparingly, did not last long. Without care, as time went on, teeth with cavities or which had become loosened became worse. We wanted to keep our teeth no matter how bad they got, thinking that they could be saved when we got home. Some teeth, however, became so bad and painful that even we knew they were beyond salvation. None of us knew dentistry, and we could not get the Vietnamese to give us a pliers or some other tool to pull them. Most of us, however, knew that an abscessed tooth is an infection at the tooth’s root, or in the gum next to the infected tooth. If the abscess was in the gum, the swelling from the pus was obvious.
The last couple of years, when we had been moved into the big cells, we were allowed to take a bath every other day, going to a concrete tank near the cell door and using a rubber bucket to pour water over ourselves. The water drained into a shallow gutter that ran by the tank, under the prison wall and into the Hanoi system. One day a POW spotted a tiny box just under the water in the gutter. When the guard was not looking, he snatched it up and managed to get it into the cell. It was a phenomenal find. Inside, neatly packed in grease, were more than 50 razor blades—the old-fashioned ones used in a safety razor. The toilet in these large cells was a “squat hole.” We devised a way to secure and hide the razor-blade box just out of sight of the hole underneath the cement squat slab.
We had an instant and important use for the razor blades: to cut a slit in our gums so the pus could drain. It was a foul-tasting mess, but pure relief when the pressure was released.
I had a unique and somewhat humorous dental experience a couple of months before we were released in early 1973. The nightly “Christmas Bombings” of Hanoi in 1972 by our B-52s had convinced the North Vietnamese to begin serious negotiations to end the war. They started trying to burnish their image as captors, both with the outside world and even with us. They announced one day that a dentist was coming to the camp. We were all a bit skeptical, but I had several bad cavities causing varying degrees of pain and accepted the offer.
When the dentist arrived a few days later, three of us were taken to a familiar small building—the one used for interrogations. Inside was the dentist sitting at an old-fashioned dental drill. The business end had a bit at the end of the handle. Between that and the pulley were the two lines that rotated the bit. From the pulley downward were lines that were attached to the foot pedal. My first memory of going to the dentist dates back to 1937 when I was five. Even then, the dentist in Westbrook, Minnesota, did not turn the drill with a foot pedal.
I was directed to sit in the chair. My cavities were obvious to the dentist as he looked in my mouth. He stuck the drill in my mouth. The bit turned slowly—more like grinding than drilling. This went on for a couple of minutes; no anesthetics of course. In his most professional way, he held the bit up toward the light. Sure enough, there was some cavity debris on it. Wanting to keep things sanitary, he wiped the bit—several times—on his pant leg. Then back to drilling. He smoothed out two cavities and said, “Finished.”
I aske
d, “Any fillings?”
Rather indignantly he again said, “Finished.”
Others had even better dental experiences. Swede Larson, who was shot down six days after I was, told this story:Two months after I arrived (July ’67), I got my first rice. I was not aware of the stones the guards put in the rice at that time. I crunched down big time and badly fractured a molar. The big piece did not come out until it rotted badly in ’69. In the fall of 1970, while living with Robby, the tooth really bothered me. The V [Vietnamese] cuffed and blindfolded me late one night, and took me to a hospital. A squat woman dentist in uniform sat me in a dentist chair and badly crushed my tooth with pliers while trying to extract it. She then grabbed an awl and tried for a long time to pry out the many pieces, while resting the shaft of the awl on top of my lip. Needless to say, she cut through my lip in several places while prying. Somewhere during the procedure, I passed out. My PJs were soaking wet and I was shaking like a leaf in late fall. As you would imagine, I did not get any anesthetic at any time. She never said a word to me the entire time. When I staggered out of the chair, she said to me in excellent English, “Your pain threshold is very low!”
CHAPTER 9
WALKING HOME
In my nearly six years in prison, not a day went by when I didn’t think about and hope for freedom. I daydreamed about it, and I night-dreamed about it. I dreamed about it in the indistinct moments that separate sleep and waking. I dreamed about the physical sensation of freedom: how it felt on the body. I dreamed about how freedom might happen: by a daring rescue, by the military defeat of North Vietnam, by a POW exchange. These dreams sustained me for a time, but then, gradually, they stopped satisfying. I needed to do something. So one day I came up with a plan to walk to freedom.
It was 1968 and I had been moved to a cell with two other POWs: Chuck Tyler and Don “Digger” O’Dell. Chuck was a fountain of sanguine sayings. He was from Globe, Arizona, and told great stories in his “Tennessee Ernie Ford” style. He kept Digger and me laughing. Digger was quieter than Chuck, but a strong POW. He was from Michigan and had been an avid hunter and fisherman. We shared a lot of fun hunting and fishing stories, though Digger’s were better than mine.
Our cell was about 11 by 11 feet. We talked in a very low voice because if the guards heard any sound it meant a beating. There was no window, no communication with other POWs except by our tap code. So we only had each other. Depending on how we felt at any given moment, we did various exercises—sit-ups, push-ups. The North Vietnamese, for whatever reason, told us we could not exercise. We did it anyway, knowing that the better shape we were in, the less vulnerable we would be to disease.
Occasionally a guard took us a short distance from the cell to a small area where an open well was surrounded by high walls. Instead of a faucet with a slimy floor under it—what I had experienced in the last cellblock—there was a cistern. This was much better when every few days we got to bathe. We dropped a bucket down the cistern, pulled up water, and poured it on ourselves. It felt very good in the summer and very cold in the winter.
Going back to the cell one day, we spotted a curled-up piece of 35-millimeter film on the ground. We planned how to get the filmstrip the next time we went to the bath area. The plan was simple: We would spread out so the guard could not watch each of us closely. Whoever was walking ahead would stumble and fall, slowly getting up. The guard would go to the fallen POW to whack him for being clumsy, giving the last guy in line a chance to snatch the filmstrip and stuff it in his pajamas. It worked.
Americans like inches, not millimeters. We converted the 35 millimeters to 1.38 inches. Then, using a homemade bamboo needle and thread pulled from my blanket, we made a nearly invisible stitch at each inch in our pajama drawstring. Now we had a tape measure. I lightly etched each inch into the edge of my wood-plank bed with a rusty nail, another stolen treasure.
With our tap code, we spread the word about the tape measure. We usually had two sets of pajamas. We would rinse out a set periodically and hang them on the bath area wall until our next bath a few days later. POWs from other cells used the same bath area. With a bit of stealth, other POWs swapped pajama strings with us and made their own tape measures. Operation Swap Pajama Strings spread throughout the camp. Soon we were all measuring everything that didn’t move. Once we had a contest to see whose eyes were the closest—most narrowly set. The next contest was, of course, whose eyes were the farthest apart. We also studied how much the left and right hand varies by measuring the distance from the tip of our little finger to the tip of our thumb.
Once we had the tape measure, of course, we measured exactly how far it was around the open area in our cell. Our cell was 11 by 11 feet. We had three plank beds—two feet nine inches wide and six feet long—set on three brick stanchions 15 inches high, leaving about 16 inches between the beds. At the end of the beds was a space just over five by 11 feet. A two-by-four-foot hole on one end of the floor left an area of just over eight feet long and five feet wide. That was our walking track. With the tape measure we accurately measured the exact path we’d walk in this little track. It turned out that one lap was 23.4 feet. We next wondered how many laps to make a mile: 5,280 feet divided by 23.4 = 225 laps per mile.
To any American, the next question was obvious: How far could we walk in a day? We kept track. Each day we set our goal higher. Within a week we were walking ten miles daily. We set up a pattern in which one of us would lead for a mile, then the next would take the lead for a mile, then the third, and so on. Whoever was in the lead was also the counter. We soon learned to change directions every 25 laps to prevent dizziness. Using the camp’s gongs, we computed we were walking about 1.75 miles an hour. If we were healthy enough, and not at interrogation, we could make ten miles in just under seven hours!
I knew that Vietnam was 10,000 miles from the United States and began thinking about this distance that separated me from freedom and the people I loved. We had decided not to walk on Sunday out of respect for the Lord. So if I stayed healthy and had no long interrogations, I could make sixty miles a week. Ten thousand divided by sixty is 166.6 weeks: 3.2 years. So I began to walk home.
The more I thought about it, the more real it became. If I really did walk 10,000 miles in that cell, somehow . . . some way ... freedom would be mine at the end. I explained the idea to my cellmates; they agreed. I became so convinced that I would get home in 3.2 years that, if I were sick or being tortured and the other two POWs walked their ten miles, I got half mad at them because they would get home before I did!
When I finished ten miles I was euphoric. Often at night I reviewed my plan and recommitted myself to the effort required to walk halfway around the world to freedom.
Those I’ve told this story to usually have the same question: “Did you actually walk 10,000 miles?” The answer is that a year after I started my trek, I was moved to solitary confinement in another prison. The cell was only five and a half by six feet. It was not possible to walk, only to turn. In the one year I was in the larger cell, however, I walked 3,000 miles—about a third of the way home. I had made a cerebral escape and was closer to freedom in every way at the end of this time than I had been when I began.
CHAPTER 10
THE MEDAL OF HONOR
It was the summer of 1969, about two years after I was shot down, that I received an unusual tap code message. It had made its way slowly to the Zoo through a dozen cells in three different buildings to reach me. Like all messages, it was abbreviated and came through as: “LT U NOMINTED 4 MOH.” I was the only POW with these initials so it had to be me.
One of the laws that ruled our lives was the more famous the prisoner the more torture he received. Had the Vietnamese discovered that Leo Thorsness was up for the Medal of Honor that would have been bad news for me. All the POWs knew this, and they were very careful not to let the message be intercepted.
As I later found out, recipients of the Medal of Honor must meet the following criteria: The actions for whic
h they’re honored must have at least two witnesses and the actions must be “above and beyond” the call of duty at the risk of their lives. “Above and beyond” means that if the serviceman had not undertaken the action that led to his nomination, there would have been no criticism.
There is always an enormous amount of research and documentation behind a nomination for a Medal of Honor. The person who had taken the lead in making the case for me was Bill Sparks, a fellow Wild Weasel who had served with me at Takhli Air Base. Bill was a good pilot; he was a lucky one too, since he completed his 100 missions and was rotated back to the States. Before he left, he told another pilot, Jim Clements, that he was doing the Medal of Honor research on me, although at that time there was no word whether I was a prisoner or had been killed in action. Some months later, Jim too was shot down and ended up in the Zoo. When he learned that I was there too, he initiated the tap code message that finally got to the wall of my cell.
It is sometimes said that character is doing the right thing when no one is looking. Something similar is true about the Medal of Honor. There have been countless cases of extreme bravery in combat that didn’t have the requisite two witnesses to qualify for the Medal of Honor. Receiving it is sometimes a case of ending up in the wrong place at the wrong time and simply having to summon the courage to survive. Sometimes you are the only one who can save another’s life and, as Hillel said, it becomes a matter of “If not me, who? If not now, when?”
When it comes down to it, almost every Medal of Honor recipient will say, “Look, I was just doing my job.” That was certainly true with me, as I described in the opening chapter of this book.
Surviving Hell Page 6