The Cold War

by Robert Cowley

  Next came the fundamental problem of how to play the game. The men who decided to make up a bridge foursome would each arrange their cards the same way. Then the instructions for how to shuffle would be tapped through each wall. Sometimes these instructions would be relayed by a man who did not play bridge but was willing to help keep the game going and do a little tapping to pass the time.

  And so on until the deck was shuffled.

  Then every man would deal four hands, pick up the one that was his, and begin the bidding. Once the bidding was complete, the dummy hand would be turned over. The other hands would remain facedown, and as a card was played, the man making the play would identify the card and its place in the original pile by tapping, so the other players could find it without looking at the rest of the cards in the hand. It would have been easy to cheat, but also, under the circumstances, utterly pointless.

  A hand of bridge that might have taken ten minutes to play under normal conditions could last for two or three weeks when every play had to be tapped through several walls. Now and then a new man would decline an invitation to play, saying that it couldn't be done, that tapping all the bidding and the rounds and the scorekeeping through several walls would just take too much time. The other men had an answer, which went back to a time when Dick Stratton had been thrown into a totally darkened cell for punishment.

  Long periods of light deprivation are known to cause disorientation and severe emotional distress. Stratton had been kept in that cell for nearly six weeks. His only lifeline was the wall and the man on the other side, Jack Van Loan. At first, simply to give Stratton some kind of reference point, Van Loan would estimate the passage of time and give Stratton a hack every fifteen minutes. It was something. Then, as time went on, Van Loan began asking Stratton to explain things to him: books that Stratton had read, courses he had taken in college, anything that he could remember and describe in detail. Eventually, they came to the subject of philosophy, and Stratton was trying to tell Van Loan, through the wall, about a course he had taken in existentialism. That word alone was tough, and Van Loan missed it several times. Each time Stratton would patiently tap it out again. When they had finally gotten that single word straight, Stratton began tapping out the name Kierkegaard. It seemed to take hours. At one point, Stratton tapped out an apology: sorry this tacing so long.

  Van Loan tapped back: DONT WORRY ABT IT XX I THINC TIME IS ON OUR SIDE XX CEEP TALCING.

  From then on, whenever a man protested that a bridge game would take too long to tap through several walls of the Warehouse, the man on the other side would tap back: THATS OCAY XX TIME IS ON OUR SIDE.

  Card games and chess were good for filling time, but they were not enough to fully engage the minds of college-educated men accustomed to learning as a routine discipline. So they began memorizing lines from poems or plays that they might have been taught to recite as children and had never forgotten, even if they had to work hard at the job of recall. When a man had the lines, he would tap them out to a prisoner in the next cell, who recited them over and over until he had memorized them himself. The music of the lines, the hard cadences—especially of Kipling—provided a kind of solace.

  Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' “Tommy, 'ow's yer soul?”

  But it's “Thin red line of 'eroes” when the drums begin to roll—

  Men who had never cared much for poetry began to crave the verses, waiting eagerly for them to come through the wall. The POWs in one cell were in the midst of learning “The Highwayman,” line by painstaking line, when they were ordered to move. The order came just as they were reaching the climax of the poem and Bess was prepared to “shatter her breast in the moonlight” to warn the highwayman. It was like losing a mystery novel when you are three or four chapters from the end. From their new cell, which had no common wall and could not receive messages by tap code, the men smuggled a message asking what had happened. A message was smuggled back to them—at some risk—and it read: highwayman and bess—kia.

  As in some old, preliterate society, storytelling became an important art. The stories and myths of their generation were often films, so after the evening meal and the order to put up nets and lie down on the hard wooden pallets, it would be time for movies. A cellmate who could remember a film would lie on his bunk and begin patiently narrating the action, scene by scene, going into character for dialogue and adding as much detail to the physical descriptions as he could remember or invent. Many of the men had favorite movies they had seen more than once, so they were able to relate a passable summary. Some had a real talent for the work and, with the help of other men who had seen the movie, could assemble a fairly complete account. Certain movies became very popular. Doctor Zhivago was easily the best-loved movie at the Plantation.

  Still, there were long stretches of dead, empty time when nothing happened and a man was reduced to mute awareness of his situation. He was hungry. In the summer, he was hot and eaten up with skin infections; in the winter, cold and shivering. He was desperately uncertain about the future. He did not know if he would be hauled out for a quiz in ten minutes, still be a captive in ten years.

  Almost all of the POWs learned to fantasize. There was a distinction, however, between idle daydreaming and disciplined fantasizing. No one needed to be told that simply crawling under a blanket and dreaming childhood dreams of mother and dog and painless innocence was unhealthy. That kind of random, formless escape would lead a man further and further into passivity, self-pity, and isolation. Instead, when you fantasized, you tried to create real situations and solve real problems. Properly done, a good session of fantasizing would tire you out, leave you with a sense of having accomplished something.

  Al Stafford had always loved to sail, so he would sit up straight with his eyes closed and imagine himself out in Chesapeake Bay. He would decide on the season and then try to remember just what the prevailing weather would be. In the summer, when the cell was stifling and full of bugs, he would picture himself out for a winter sail on the bay, with the water the color of lead, the wind blowing whitecaps off the tops of the swells. He saw himself wearing oilskins, and except for a lone freighter moving up the channel, he had the bay to himself. In the winter, while he huddled under his blanket, he would imagine himself stripped down to a bathing suit, skimming past crab boats and other crafts scattered across the mild green expanse of the bay.

  At the end of an hour or two of sailing, Stafford could taste the salt on his lips and feel the sun on his skin. He sailed for hours and hours. He used real checkpoints and kept a real logbook. “Five knots equals a mile every twelve minutes…. I'll be at the Oxford lighthouse by 1610….”

  In another cell, farther down the Warehouse, another man played golf. He would spend two hours a day playing a course he remembered hole by hole. He concentrated so hard on his shots that he could feel the tick of the ball when he made contact with the sweet spot. When his mind wandered for a few moments, he would feel the ugly, metallic sensation all the way up his arms and into his shoulders. A goddamned duck hook, he would tell himself, and trudge off into the rough, hoping that he would be able to find his ball and learn not to use too much right hand.

  During his golf games, his cellmates left him alone. It was easy to tell when he was playing, because he would be sitting on his pallet in something like a lotus position, with his eyes closed and his lips moving just slightly as he talked himself through the round. Then, after a couple of hours, he would open his eyes and begin to stretch, as though to relieve the tension. One of the other men in the room would say, “How'd you hit 'em today, Jerry?”

  “Not bad, I was two under when I made the turn, but I pushed my drive on fifteen, a long par five. Had to play safe out of the rough and double-bogeyed the hole. Then I three-putted seventeen from twelve feet out. Really blew it. So I was one over for the round.”

  “That's not bad.”

  “No, it was a good round. Great weather, too.”

  “So what about the handic
ap?”

  “I'm still sitting on a two.”

  “Little more time on the driving range and you'll be a scratch golfer.”

  “Putting green is more like it. That three-putt killed me.”

  There was only one limit to this kind of fantasizing: You had to know enough about the situation or the task to make it realistic. You could not simply decide you were going to be a professional golfer and imagine yourself in a playoff against Jack Nicklaus if you had never played a round in your life. But if you put yourself into a world that you did know and understand, and you took your time and forced your mind to follow the consequences of every single choice, you could create a world of almost tangible reality.

  It was an escape, but it was also a discipline. If you were a golfer and you played every day, you might feel yourself actually getting better. Though he had not seen blue water for two years, since the morning he last crossed the coast of Vietnam at twenty thousand feet, Al Stafford felt sure he was a better sailor than he had been when he was shot down. He knew so much more now. He had been through certain situations so many times in his mind that he now did the right thing automatically. It was like the time you spent in a flight simulator on the ground, which prepared you for situations you later encountered in the air.

  But even if it was a productive way to use long, empty stretches of time, it was still no substitute for the real thing. When it was too hot and he was too dispirited even to fantasize, Stafford wondered when he would see blue water and feel the wind again—or, in his worst moments, if he ever would.

  Along the row of cells in the Warehouse, men strained to keep busy, finding the solution in everything from a serious form of make-believe to the most elaborate improvisation. A man named Charles Plumb “played” music on the keyboard of a piano diagrammed in brick dust on the floor. He would patiently play the pieces he could remember, practicing until he got them right. Like Tom Hall, Plumb was an innovator. He had grown up in rural Kansas, where he had been an active Boy Scout and 4-H member. Like many boys his age, he had also fooled around with ham radios and had once sent away for a kit to build his own receiver. He remembered enough about it to try building one at the Plantation so he could listen to news from some source other than Radio Hanoi.

  The yard at the Plantation was littered with scrap and debris. On his way to a rare and welcome work detail, Plumb would walk in the typical prisoner fashion, head lowered and shuffling his feet dejectedly. Actually, he was looking for wire. He easily found enough for an aerial and a ground.

  During interrogations, prisoners used pencils to write out confessions or letters of apology to the camp commander. They routinely pressed too hard and broke the lead. While a guard was sharpening the pencil, the prisoner would sneak the small piece of broken lead into his clothing to smuggle back into his cell. An eighth of an inch of pencil lead set into a sliver of bamboo made a wonderful, highly prized writing instrument. The POWs would carefully hide their pencils against the possibility of a search. Being caught with a pencil brought punishment for breaking the rule against contraband. Worse, the pencil would be confiscated.

  For his radio, Plumb used one of these small pencil points as a detector, balancing it on the edges of two razor blades. For the antenna coil, he wrapped wire around a spool that he made from scrap wood, which he shaped by rubbing it against the rough wall of the cell. He built a capacitor from alternating sheets of waxed paper and aluminum foil smuggled from the kitchen or saved from cigarette packages.

  This left the earpiece, which required an electromagnet, diaphragm, and housing. A nail served for the electromagnet. The housing was an unused insulator stuck in the wall, probably dating back to the time the French built the camp. He had worked the insulator loose from the wall and was preparing to wrap the nail with fine wire when the guards conducted a search and confiscated all the parts to his radio. He was taken to the Big House, put in the ropes, and forced to write a letter of apology to the camp commander. He never heard the “Voice of America” on his little radio.

  While Plumb was busy with one of his projects, his roommate, Danny Glenn, concentrated on designing and building his dream house. Glenn had studied architecture at Oklahoma State before going into the navy and was shot down four days before Christmas 1966. At the Plantation he filled the hours working on the plans and blueprints for the house he promised himself he would build—exactly to his specifications, with exactly the materials he wanted—when he finally got out of North Vietnam and went home. In his cell, he would rough out the plans on the floor, carefully working out the dimensions and noting the placement of headers, joists, and studs. Then he would draw up his materials list, room by room. His lists were exhaustive and specific, down to the precise gauge of the electric wire. The blueprint of a room would stay on the floor for days, then weeks, while he made his corrections and pondered his decisions.

  Lying under his mosquito net at night, Plumb frequently was awakened by his cell mate's voice.

  “Hey, Charlie?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You asleep?”

  “No.”

  “Listen, if I'm bothering you …”

  “That's okay. What is it?”

  “Well, you know that upstairs bathroom, the little one at the head of the stairs?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, I've been thinking about it, and I've decided to go with Mexican tile. What do you think?”

  “I think it would look real good.”

  “You sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “It's not too fancy?”

  “No. I'd say Mexican tile would be just right.”

  “Well, what about the color?”

  “Hell, I don't know.”

  “I was thinking green. That dark green like you see on sports cars. British racing green, they call it.”

  “I think that would look real good.”

  “Okay, Charlie. Thanks a lot.”

  “Sure.”

  “Good night.”

  In the morning Glenn would go to his blueprints and materials list and write in green Mexican tile for the upstairs bathroom. Then he would check the dimensions and do the arithmetic to calculate just how many three-inch squares he would need and where he would need to cut to fit. He would memorize as much as he could and make notes in tiny script on a piece of paper from a cigarette package, using one of the contraband pencil points or an improvised pen. Then he would fold the sheet into the smallest possible square and hide it in a crack in the wall, erase the schematic of the room he'd been working on, and start another.

  That night, after the mosquito nets were down, he would say softly, “Charlie, I'm thinking about paneling that family room downstairs. What do you think … ?”

  Nearly ten years later, after he had come home and started a new life, Plumb got a call at his home in Kansas.

  “Charlie, this is Danny Glenn.”

  “Yeah, Danny, how you doing?”

  “Good. How about you?”

  “Real good. What's up?”

  “Charlie, I want you to come see me. There's something I want to show you.”

  “Well … all right. Where are you?”

  “Oklahoma. Let me tell you how to get here.”

  Plumb wrote down the directions, and said he would drive down that weekend.

  “Great, Charlie. Can't wait to see you.”

  Plumb followed the directions, and when he made the last of several turns, the one that would take him up to the driveway where he was to turn in, he saw the house. It was the very same house that he had heard described a thousand times and had helped design while his roommate scratched out the plans and prints on the floor of their cell. He stopped the car and studied the house for a long time. It was unbelievable, like something from a dream.

  “Hey, Charlie, come on in. Let me show you around.”

  Everything was there in exact detail. Plumb could walk around the house as if he had lived there all his life. When he came to th
e end of a hall and opened a door, he knew exactly what would be on the other side, knew where every bathroom was and what kind of tile would be on the floor. Nothing was out of place, and nothing had been changed from the way this house was planned, all those years ago.

  “It's beautiful,” he said. “I can't believe you got everything just right.”

  “Oh, it was a bitch, let me tell you. They'd stopped making a lot of the materials I had in mind when I designed this baby. I had to go to salvage yards and warehouses all across the Southwest to find some of this stuff. But, by God, I wasn't going to compromise. I had too much invested—you know what I mean.”

  Plumb understood.

  EPILOGUE

  Events continued to move at their Asian snail's pace. In November 1970, Special Forces rescuers, hoping to pluck out a large number of POWs, landed by helicopter at the Son Tay prison camp, the place known as Hope. There were enough Vietnamese (and perhaps some Soviet advisers) for a brisk firefight, but no American POWs: They had been removed after monsoons flooded some of the buildings and fouled the wells. “The raid,” Norman writes, “plainly rattled the North Vietnamese…. The country immediately went on alert, as though a full-scale invasion might be next. Certainly a resumption of the air war was likely, or perhaps another, more determined attack aimed at freeing the POWs. In a way, these few hundred men had suddenly become the focus of the entire war, on both sides.”

  POWs were moved by truck from various camps to the Hanoi Hilton, deemed to be safer. Between thirty and fifty men were confined in eleven concrete rooms, each the size of a basketball court. Two more years passed. It was, in its way, an unusual interval. Men, summoning nearly forgotten skills and specialties, began to teach classes without books, beginning in the morning after cleanup and lasting all day. They taught higher math, Spanish, German, international relations, history, psychology, American and British literature, thermodynamics, and automobile mechanics. There were electives in meat cutting from a former butcher's assistant, beekeeping from a man who had grown up on a farm, wine appreciation from an officer who had been stationed in Europe. Someone even taught a course in classical music, humming or whistling the opening bars of symphonies. In one of the rooms, a POW directed a glee club. If a teacher was at a loss for, say, the date of the Battle of Waterloo, he would resort to tapping on the wall: Someone among the hundreds in the Hanoi Hilton would know the answer.