Soon list mania infected everyone in the cell—then expanded to other cells. We developed lists for the first ten things we would eat, the first ten trips we would take, the top ten cities we would visit, the top ten cars we wanted. I reviewed them each day so I would not forget. Of course we started comparing lists and plagiarizing shamelessly.
We had a discussion one day about the speeches we would give if we were ever released and if anyone back home was interested enough to listen. Bob Lilly suggested we should do a Toastmasters class in the cell. In college he had been on the debate team and later had taken a Toastmasters course.
Bob said, “We will need a speech timer—who volunteers?”
Chuck volunteered.
“What’s your pulse rate?” Bob asked.
“It varies a lot.”
“You won’t do. We need someone with a steady pulse and best if it is about 60 beats per minute.”
John Stavast spoke up, “I already know how to speak, and so I’m not interested in any Toastmasters stuff, but I have a good heart, pulse about 60.” He became the official counter.
Rather than just asking us as a group, Bob individually asked each POW to sign up for his course. He gave a little pitch about how Toastmasters would help us better explain our experiences to the organizations he confidently predicted would be interested in hearing about them. A high percentage of us signed up.
Time came for the first Toastmasters class, and 14 of the 25 POWs in the cell showed up. (“Showing up” meant we sat on our bed boards in one end of the cell.) It was obvious that the other nine, however much they pretended to be doing something else, were listening to see how things would go.
Bob had given a lot of thought to his class. “Gentlemen, no matter how well you speak in public now, this class will make you better,” he began. “So listen up; here are the expected results if you stick with the syllabus.”
Several of us glanced around making eye contact with one another thinking, “Whoa, what have we gotten ourselves into?”
Bob spelled out what we’d gain:• Be comfortable giving impromptu speeches.
• Develop and present ideas.
• Control nervousness when speaking to a group.
• Learn gestures and body movement as part of speaking.
• Learn how to appeal to the self-interest of the audience.
There may have been a couple of other goals, but at this point the other nine POWs had stopped talking, started listening, and moved closer. None of us knew this Bob. Until now, we had all been through the same hell and were more or less equals in a prisoner-of-war camp. Suddenly Bob had become a teacher.
Bob reconfirmed with John that he was going to time the speeches. Next he asked for a volunteer to count the “ahs” in each speech. By now, I was a bit anxious as we were randomly assigned to speak from three to five minutes, and so I volunteered to count the “ahs.” John used his 60 heartbeats per minute for time, and we began. The speeches ranged from mediocre to polished. The two-week class added more students than it dropped and everyone “graduated.” To his credit, when we came home Bob contacted Toastmasters International and told the story about having a Toastmasters class in the Hanoi Hilton. The organization found it such an interesting story that they recognized us retroactively as a club and sanctioned the graduates as successfully having fulfilled the real class credits while in prison.
If 24 POWs were in a cell, there were often ten or so separate conversations going on. The subjects were the same—when will the war end, how are the wife and kids doing, sports, and fishing. There were rarely stories that had not been heard before.
Listening to them day after day, I determined to find a new topic of interest that would draw out my cellmates. I started a casual conversation with Bill, a POW from Wisconsin. “Why do you think that folks raised like us in the Midwest have higher values—you know, more honesty and that sort of thing—than those from the East or West coasts?”
“Because our parents had better values,” Bill answered.
“Why is that?”
“Because they worked hard and lived off the soil.”
“That’s exactly right,” Norlan, a POW from Iowa, chipped in. “My parents were farmers and worked harder than the big city slickers on the coasts.”
Ray, an Ivy Leaguer from Connecticut, hearing these comments, couldn’t restrain himself. “That’s a bunch of bullshit.”
Soon everyone in the cell was involved in the argument, which became heated and lasted over two hours. After the first five minutes, I pulled back and lay down on my bedboard to listen. It was a great afternoon.
A few days later, I got another one going about why Air Force pilots had fewer accidents than Navy pilots, throwing out a made-up accident rate for Navy men and theorizing that it was because we Air Force men were better trained. In the rhetorical melee that followed, the Naval aviators never questioned the premise but argued hard on the causes. Again I pulled out just after things got hot and enjoyed another good day while lying on my bedboard.
It took a couple of months and several more heated discussions before my cellmates finally caught on to what I was up to. They all gave me a bad time. These discussions took place the last months of 1972, our last Christmas in prison. We drew names for pretend presents. In addition to having my name in the hat, I also got a special gift from everybody. It was a large pebble they sneaked into the cell. The toilet paper wrapping had this inscription. “To the Harmony Officer, Leo. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
CHAPTER 19
MIKE’S FLAG
Though things got marginally better for us after 1970, we never forgot who or where we were. We all knew that we were marked forever and would always see things—particularly things involving our country—from a different angle of vision than that of our fellow citizens.
When I finally came home, I got involved in politics, eventually serving in the Washington state senate from 1988 to 1992. It was a time of heated debates about desecrating the United States flag. The Washington legislature had scheduled its own debate, and our caucus asked me to speak in favor of protecting the flag. I agreed to do it. I had been in the senate for two years and never yet mentioned my POW experience on the senate floor.
Generally when a senator spoke, the initial polite attention was gradually overwhelmed by side conversations among the legislators. On this afternoon, a flag resolution was introduced with the usual reading and paper shuffling, and I stood up, the first to speak. I glanced at the gallery, normally sparsely occupied by a handful of spectators but on this day full. The room was silent. My seat was near the rear, the normal location for freshman senators. I took a deep breath, glanced at my speech outline on my desktop, and looked at the members as I took up the microphone. To my surprise, all the senators had turned in their chairs to face me.
My speech was short—only about three minutes—and, unknown to me, a concerned citizen in the gallery was taking notes, and, a few months later, a summary of my speech appeared in Reader’s Digest.
I spoke that day about Mike Christian and something he had done in 1972, our last year in prison. By that time, we were allowed outside most days for a few minutes to pour a bucket of water over ourselves from a concrete tank in the prison yard and call it a bath. A gutter ran by the tank, under the prison wall and into the Hanoi drainage system. While 25 naked POWs poured water over themselves, there was always a bit of milling around that delayed the guards locking us back up.
During one of these moments, Mike saw a slimy rag in the gutter and whispered to me, “Leo, there’s something in the gutter I want to get back to the cell—keep the guard’s attention.” As a prisoner, you scrounge anything you can and help others to do the same. In this case I helped by talking loudly to draw attention while Mike stooped over and hid the rag in his pajama top. Mission accomplished. Back inside the cell we saw that it was a small handkerchief. Soap was precious but when Mike asked us we all chipped in a little to clean the
cloth. Tattered gray was as good as he could get it.
Mike scrounged a small piece of red roof tile and laboriously ground it into a powder, which, mixed with a bit of water, became a faded red or maroon color to make the flag’s stripes. We had gotten a bit of medicine in the last year of our captivity, usually a blue pill of unknown provenance prescribed for all afflictions. Mike patiently leached the color out of one of the pills and used it to make a blue square in the upper left of the handkerchief. With a needle made from bamboo wood and thread pulled from our single blanket, he stitched little white stars on this field of blue.
It took Mike a couple of weeks to make the flag—working at night under his mosquito net so the guards couldn’t see him. Early one morning, he got up before the guards were active and held up the flag, waving it as if in a breeze. He said in a loud whisper, “Look here, gang.” As we turned Mike’s way, we automatically came to attention and saluted. Some of us began to cry.
Mike knew—we all knew—the Vietnamese would eventually find the flag during one of their periodic inspections when they stripped us naked and ran us outside so they could go through our belongings.
The night after they found the flag they took Mike to the torture cell and beat him badly. Sometime after midnight they pushed him back into our cell. He was bloody and semi-conscious, so badly hurt that even his voice was gone.
But as I’ve said, Mike was a tough man. He recovered in a couple of weeks and immediately started looking for another piece of cloth.
CHAPTER 20
CHRISTMAS 1972
The end of 1972 was an intense time. We were able to follow the presidential election because the North Vietnamese were convinced that Senator George McGovern would win and filled camp radio with daily news booming his antiwar candidacy. During the campaign, the North Vietnamese often quoted McGovern. One of his quotes stuck in our craw: “If elected president I will go to Vietnam and beg on my knees for the release of our POWs.” Every POW was instantly enraged. During torture, many of us had been forced to “stand” on our knees until we passed out. To picture an American president offering to kneel to those who had done this to us was an abomination. We held our own presidential vote. Of the 189 POWs available to communicate by tap code, the vote was 188 for Nixon and one for McGovern. We never found out who the one was.
In addition to McGovern’s overwhelming defeat, other good signs began appearing in the fall of 1972. We received a little medicine; torture abated; we got to stay outside the cells for longer periods at bath time. In addition to our two meals a day and two dishes per meal—soup (cabbage, pumpkin, or green) and bread or rice—occasionally a third dish appeared. It was about a third of a cup of raw sugar.
We were always looking for omens and naturally we wondered why they were giving us sugar. The answer that we liked best was that sugar contains calories. Thanks to our families, the North Vietnamese had begun receiving bad publicity for their brutalization of us POWs. If we were to be released in the near future, our death camp appearance would validate this charge. So maybe the sugar meant they were fattening us up for release.
Hanoi was hot in summer, cold in winter. In summer the old cellblocks soaked up the heat during the day and radiated it at night. Winter temperatures would get down to 45 degrees. That’s not cold in Minnesota where I grew up, but without heat, and sleeping on concrete with a worn blanket, 45 degrees is freezing. As part of improved treatment during the last “big cell” years, we received a pair of green, ankle-length cotton socks. They were not Eddie Bauer, but they were a lot better than no socks at all and cut the chill.
When Christmas had come during those first brutal POW years, it was just another day. We, of course, had no presents, no trees, and no church service to attend. We knew it was Christmas and mentally tried to celebrate the miraculous birth. Once we were in the big cells, we could at least exchange family Christmas stories.
On Christmas 1972 we decided to have a Christmas tree made out of our green socks. Mike Christian came up with the idea and suggested it to the SRO. The SRO thought at least a minute and said, “Let’s see if we can get away with it.” We needed rice paste made from steamed rice mixed with a tad of water and squeezed into stickiness. Mike had tested its powers of adherence with one of his socks. He put rice paste on one side of it and pressed it against the wall. After he held it in place a few minutes, it stuck. By experimenting, he found the right consistency of the paste—not too wet, not too dry.
Fortunately, it was unusually mild and we could do without our green socks. Mike collected them and laid them out on his bed slab. He decided to start on the bottom with a double row of six socks, three on each side pointing slightly up like pine tree branches. Above that were two rows of four socks, two rows of two, then one sock pointing straight up at the top center. A 25-sock Christmas tree.
Luckily we got rice on December 24. We saved plenty and started making paste in the afternoon. Mike was diligent, critically checking the viscosity. With toilet paper he made a template on the wall. We dabbed the paste on the socks and stuck them up. Everyone got into it. We were kids again decorating the tree at home.
When Mike stuck the last sock straight up on top, Jim Seahorn suggested a star. It wasn’t long before Jack, the resident artist, had a small star fashioned from toilet paper. There was our tree, star and all. We all stood back and admired it. The tree was the conversation topic all day. In the prisoner-of-war camp setting, the green-sock Christmas tree brought home the true meaning of Christmas. We had been through years of torture and tough times and through it all we supported and depended on each other. Now, in better times and hints that this hell might be ending, we were celebrating the Lord’s birth with our brothers. Most of us still remember this as one of the most memorable Christmases in our lives.
The guards saw the tree on Christmas morning and acted like it wasn’t there. That was our signal we could make it better. We made various Christmas tree ornaments from toilet paper. Then we had a Christmas gift drawing. Once we each had a name, we created gift cards. The blue pills made decent ink, and we put each name on the card and what the gift was. We promised that when we got home we would send the real gifts. We did.
But the real reason Christmas was special that year had to do with something that began a week before the holiday on the evening of December 18.
Occasionally during our years in Hanoi, we sometimes heard a “recce” (reconnaissance plane, F-4 Phantom usually) taking photos blast low over Hanoi at or near supersonic. Generally we would hear flak firing at it. But, on December 18, the sound was different—a muffled sound, at first barely audible, and then slowly building. I will never forget the look on each POW’s face as we realized what it was. We had often speculated and hoped that Nixon might bring the war to North Vietnam—right into Hanoi—using full airpower. Was this finally it, a month after his reelection and a week before Christmas? Yes!
The roar overhead grew ever louder. Intermingled with the jet sounds, we heard SAM after SAM blasting off their launch pads. The constant flak sound came from every direction; small arms fire came from the prison area. Beside the heavy B-52 noise, occasionally fighters zipped through—some were Wild Weasels, my old plane, trying to negate the SAMs; some were MiGs going after the B-52s. Next the muffled sound of bombs began. At first far off, then closer, and then on top of us. We knew each bomber carried 72 500-pound bombs. The explosions rippled in continuous waves. We felt certain that the B-52 crews knew from the recce flights exactly where we were and that they were allowed to bomb within 2,000 feet of our camps. (Dropping from some 30,000 feet there was not much room for error.) Plaster fell from the ceilings; the dim lights flickered on and off a few times and then went off for the rest of the night. The large windows high up in our cells were not bricked shut, and we had a view of a patch of sky. We could see the show: bomb explosions, tracers, and periodically the rocket flame of a SAM.
As if talking to the B-52 crews, we shouted: “Get the bastards” and “Final
ly!” and “The war is over!” Someone yelled, “Remember Uncle Ho’s cabin.” (Supposedly Ho Chi Minh had a mountain cabin off-limits to American bombing.)
We were in the middle of it but had no fear. Bud Day summed up everyone’s feeling. “If a B-52 is hit and its string of bombs dumps directly on us, it’s over.” He continued, “If we survive the bombing, the Vietnamese will sign the accords, and it’ll be over.” He ended, “Either way, it’s over.”
The bombing lasted 15 minutes or more. Later in the night, a second wave of B-52s arrived, then a third. Finally the sky was quiet. We all talked at once. Would this force the Vietnamese to sign the peace accords the camp radio had talked about for months? Would the B-52s come in again? How would the guards and camp authorities treat us tomorrow morning?
Sleep was short that night as bunkmates speculated in whispers. The guards arrived later than usual the next morning, heightening our speculation that the camp authorities would make us pay for the raids. But when the cell door opened, there were no beatings and only one word: “Bath.” We took our time at the tank and were not hurried back in. As the prison routine continued throughout the day, rather than animosity from the guard, there seemed to be a feeling of calm. As we discussed events in the cell, we came to the conclusion the Vietnamese too realized that the war would soon be over. They realized that having been reelected, President Nixon did not have to worry about another term and would pull out all the stops. The Vietnamese knew that if they began to brutalize us again, their allies in the “international community” would not be able to protect them from American wrath.
The next night we heard once again the low rumble of jet engines in the distance. Again the SAMs, flak, small-arms fire, and fighters. There were a couple of very loud airborne explosions. Sadly we knew it was a B-52 taking a SAM, and the plane exploding with all the men still on board.
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