Defiant: The POWs Who Endured Vietnam's Most Infamous Prison, the Women Who Fought for Them, and the One Who Never Returned

by Alvin Townley

  Instead of exiting, however, President Johnson reaffirmed his country’s involvement in Vietnam. For nearly two decades, the United States had staked part of its Cold War credibility on this fight, and he would not abandon the cause now. In a speech that spring of 1965, Johnson said, “To withdraw from one battlefield means only to prepare for the next. We must say in Southeast Asia—as we did in Europe—in the words of the Bible: ‘Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.’” He concluded, “We will not be defeated.” Yet secretly Johnson had long harbored serious reservations. “It looks like to me that we’re getting into another Korea,” he confided to an aide the previous year. “I don’t think it’s worth fighting for and I don’t think we can get out. And it’s just the biggest damn mess that I ever saw.” Despite those worries, Johnson forged ahead and decided to send combat troops into South Vietnam.

  On March 9, Owl informed Shu that 3,500 U.S. Marines had landed at Đà Nẵng the day before. “We’re finally going to win this war,” Shu thought. “I’ll be home by Christmas.” Now more optimistic, Shu feigned interest in the lessons but never trusted his interrogator. Besides, an enemy gulag seemed the worst of all places to begin questioning his government.

  As March progressed, Owl returned to his interrogation. Shu’s training had taught him not to answer anything beyond the Big Four, but Owl’s questions came unrelentingly. Shu gradually began responding but deftly avoided providing any substantive answers, instead adopting a facade that he hoped would convince his enemy that they’d captured the most dimwitted aviator in the U.S. Navy. He told them his responsibility aboard ship extended only to tending pool tables. When they asked him about the most vulnerable spot on an F-8 Crusader, Shu pointed to a spot between his eyes; a bullet would kill the pilot. He figured that wouldn’t reveal anything new.

  Taking a different approach, the interrogators began asking about the economic status of the Shumaker family. Shu suspected blackmail and stonewalled. When they asked how many chickens his father owned, Shu couldn’t resist any longer. “Twelve,” he said. In reality, Shu’s father, Alvah, had earned a law degree at Harvard and ran a successful litigation practice—but Alvah’s education did not mean that the Shumakers had never worked a farm. In fact, the family lived on 250 acres in Pennsylvania with forty dairy cattle. They had four hundred chickens.

  Shu divulged none of that family history, and to his private amusement, his response satisfied the interrogators. He had begun to notice that they often appeared under pressure to deliver answers to their superiors. The quality and substance of the answers seemed less important, and so Shu slowly began talking, feeding the North Vietnamese a diet of falsehoods made all the more believable by his soft voice and mild, earnest manner.

  After that session, he returned to the solitude of Room Nineteen, amused by his performance. However, he soon realized—with horror and regret—that he’d broken the Code of Conduct. Though he’d lied, he’d given up more than the Big Four. He’d started down a dangerous path of compromise. Shu resolved to stonewall them thereafter.

  The interrogations—quizzes, as he thought of them—persisted, usually twice a day, over the following weeks. During one interrogation, Owl told Shu that North Vietnamese air defenses had downed thirty-five American aircraft in a single day. The report sounded preposterous, and initially Shu dismissed it. Then he returned to his cell, alone. He’d had no outside news for weeks now, and with little else to occupy his mind, he began turning over the statement, examining it from every perspective. He began to wonder. Could it have been possible? Were their defenses good enough to bring down thirty-five aircraft? If so, what did that mean for America’s prospects—and for his own?

  The dearth of information was an unexpected shock. At home and even aboard Coral Sea, news poured in from television programs, radio broadcasts, conversations, and firsthand experiences. Once in North Vietnam, that flow of trusted information ceased. All he heard was propaganda from interrogators; he supposed some statements might be partially true, he just couldn’t tell which ones. He would never wish a fellow aviator to meet his fate, yet he realized that new POWs offered the only trustworthy news sources—and he grew desperate to communicate with an American. Surely, he thought, repatriation would come soon. New POWs came sooner than any release.

  Each day, Shu surveyed the courtyard from the crack beneath his door, hoping to see an American and establish contact; he felt certain other pilots would join him in Hỏa Lò. He eventually saw another POW regularly emptying his bucket—his honey pot—in the same bathhouse he used himself, one just off the courtyard. After dumping and scraping out his bucket, this new American would participate in the prison’s charade of personal hygiene by washing himself with the cold, less-than-clean water that trickled out of the latrine’s spigots. No inmate ever felt clean in Hỏa Lò Prison.

  While the bathhouse proved fairly useless for cleaning, it did offer rare minutes of privacy away from the guards. Shu devised the first of countless note-drop procedures he would use in the years to come. In Room Nineteen, he found an old ink spill in a desk drawer. He added water to the dried puddle and reconstituted enough ink to wet the end of a bamboo shard. He neatly tore a rectangular section of toilet paper and poised his pen above it. He paused and considered his words, then wrote, “Welcome to the Hanoi Hilton.”

  Thus one of the most famous nicknames in prison history came into being. During the coming years, hundreds of downed airmen would receive similar greetings when they arrived at Hỏa Lò. In time, the Vietnamese name became lost in the Western world, where people would simply refer to the prison as the Hanoi Hilton.

  The meticulous engineer needed to know if the drop had been successful, so he added a second sentence. Dipping the bamboo in the ink again, Shu wrote, “If you get note, scratch balls as you’re coming back.”

  The next day, May 15, 1965, he hid the note in his pants before his walk to the latrine. Once inside and out of view, he rolled the paper into what looked like a miniature cigarette, then tied it with a string from his clothes. He wiggled a loosened piece of concrete from the brick wall, revealing a small nook. He stashed the note and replaced the concrete, leaving a length of string exposed as a marker.

  Back in his room, Shu pressed his temple to the floor and peered under the door, training his eye on the path to the bathhouse, anxious to see if his plan worked; three months had passed since he’d last communicated with an American. Luckily, nobody had checked the latrine before the next POW entered. The prisoner’s guard remained outside, paying little attention. Five minutes later, the man came walking out of the bath, wildly scratching his crotch: He’d found the note. Shu had at last established friendly contact. When he returned to the latrine the next day, Shu found that the POW had used a burned matchstick to scratch a response: “Storz, Capt. USAF.”

  * * *

  Unlike most downed aviators who would arrive in Hanoi, thirty-one-year-old Air Force Captain Ronald E. Storz did not fly jets, or any other large aircraft, for that matter. He piloted a Cessna L-19 forward observation plane. On April 28, 1965, he had been flying low over Sông Bến Hải, the river which flowed along the DMZ. When ground fire disabled the plane’s engine, he was forced to make an emergency landing on the river’s north side. The North Vietnamese quickly took Ron into custody, and he became the eighth American aviator to arrive at the Hanoi Hilton.

  Ron’s parents had emigrated from Germany to the United States before World War II, and when America entered the war, Ron saw his father volunteer to serve in the U.S. Army, willing to take up arms against his own homeland because he believed passionately in America’s principles. The army rejected him, however, and he had to confront the public prejudice that came as his new country went to war against his old country. Max Storz lost his job, and to keep the family of seven fed, Ron’s mother worked as a maid. The government confiscated the family’s firearms; they stopped speaking German entirely. Yet their wartime experience never diminished their love of America, an
d they instilled that patriotism in their children.

  Before long, that passion for country drove eighteen-year-old Ron to enlist in the U.S. Air Force. He worked hard for three years and received his commission as an officer in 1954. By the fall of 1964, Ron had become a flight instructor. He and his wife, Sandra, had a five-year-old son and a newborn daughter. That autumn, between flying and being a father, Ron read two books about prisoners of war in World War II, one by a German, one by a Brit. Their stories of survival fascinated him, and as he read and reread the books, he contemplated what he would have done in their situations. In late fall, Ron learned a friend had been ordered to Vietnam and would miss the birth of his first child. Even though he knew it would mean an early separation from his own wife, son, and newborn daughter, Ron volunteered to take his place.

  On November 2, 1964, at the family’s home in New Hampshire, Ron knelt in front of his son, Mark, and pulled him close. Keeping with the long tradition of fathers leaving for war, he explained to his young son, “With me away, you’re going to have to take care of the family and be the man for your mother and your baby sister.” Mark would never forget how the penetrating yet soft blue eyes of his father looked at him that day. Ron left for Vietnam, thirty-one years old and promising to return soon. As Sandra watched him leave, she thought, “I’ll never see him again in this life.” She quickly dismissed the premonition; surely he’d be home within a year.

  * * *

  On June 6, Bob Shumaker was nearing his fourth month of isolation in Room Nineteen when Owl surprised him with paper and a pen. The Camp Authority was at last permitting him to write home. He wrote two pages to his young wife in clear cursive. He explained how he’d thought about their every experience, reliving even their disagreements, and how he treasured the time they’d had together.

  By good fortune, Shu was among a handful of aviators the U.S. military had clandestinely trained to use a cipher that remains classified to this day. It was, and is, intended precisely for situations such as captivity. Now, in his first letter home, he used his training to arrange his words and letters, encrypting the initials of confirmed POWs to inform U.S. intelligence whom the North Vietnamese held. Mentally composing the encrypted letter before writing it took tremendous focus, but in Room Nineteen, Shu had no distractions.

  By the time Shu had written his first letter, seven other prisoners had joined him and Ron Storz in the Hanoi Hilton. With other sections of the prison full of Vietnamese civilians or being otherwise utilized, the growing American population forced the North Vietnamese to end Bob Shumaker’s solitary imprisonment. After four months—133 days—of loneliness, Shu watched his door open to reveal an American POW. From behind, a guard nudged Captain Carlyle “Smitty” Harris, USAF, into the room, then closed the door. At the sight of each other, wide smiles broke across the two pilots’ haggard faces. Several minutes later, guards ushered in Lieutenant Phil Butler from the USS Midway. Air Force Lieutenant Bob Peel followed to round out the new foursome. Shu grinned at his roommates until his cheeks hurt. Together with other Americans for the first time since their shootdowns, the men talked for nearly three straight days.

  After the euphoria subsided, Butler told Shu about Operation Rolling Thunder, which President Johnson had launched in early March. He explained that the president intended the eight-week air offensive against North Vietnam to cut the insurgency’s lifelines without a costly ground campaign. The air operation had extended long past the eight-week mark; nobody saw an end in sight. More captives would arrive, and Shu suspected that the Camp Authority would separate Room Nineteen’s residents at the earliest opportunity. While he and his new roommates could converse safely in their shared room, camp policy strictly forbade communication elsewhere. Shu—the senior officer in Room Nineteen—knew they would need to exchange information covertly in the days ahead. Demonstrating exactly why the North Vietnamese would want to isolate their captives, the men of Room Nineteen collaborated and devised a plan to maintain contact.

  The foursome already knew Morse code, but that required sending and receiving short and long transmissions, called dots and dashes. Telegraph or signal lamp operators did this quite easily, but the men knew distinguishing between longs and shorts would prove difficult for prisoners tapping with their hands. Besides, the entire world used Morse code, including the North Vietnamese. Harris suggested an alternative. Back in the United States, he’d attended the Air Force Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) School and a course led in part by a former POW from the Korean War. During a coffee break, Harris had overheard him explain how prisoners in Korea used a code that the instructor called AFLQV, which stood for the first letter in each row of a five-by-five alphabetic grid. The phrase “American Football League Quid Victorious” served as a mnemonic to remember the grid. Harris explained that a combination of taps represented each letter of the English alphabet (except K, for which C substituted) and related to the letter’s position in the grid. A prisoner’s first set of taps represented the letter’s horizontal row. Then he’d pause briefly. His second set would denote the letter’s vertical column. The group decided that the code’s simple grid and the numerous ways one could transmit it suited the POWs’ situation in North Vietnam perfectly. The four men in Room Nineteen committed it to memory. In the conflict that was to come, few things would prove more valuable—not just to those four, but to every single American who would arrive at the Hanoi Hilton.

  3

  DEAD OR ALIVE?

  In July, Bob Shumaker noticed a new POW shuffling to and from the bathhouse in New Guy Village, as the prisoners in Room Nineteen had taken to calling the four cells, two main rooms, and courtyard near Hỏa Lò’s southeast corner. The new captive wore the red-and pink-striped pajamalike uniform that had begun to replace the oxfords and khakis issued to the initial wave of prisoners. The Americans called the striped outfits their “clown suits.” As the new POW crossed the courtyard, he heard a soft voice call from Room Nineteen, “Go fishing.” In the privacy of the bathhouse, he searched the drain and noticed a matchstick lying over the metal grate. When he picked it up, he found a dangling note attached. It bore the words, “If you read this, spit as you depart the latrine door.” Bob Shumaker had established contact with Commander Jeremiah Denton, Naval Academy Class of 1947. He was the thirteenth American to arrive at Hỏa Lò Prison and the new highest-ranking U.S. officer in Hanoi.

  Shu found Jerry’s first reply shocking. Jerry had used a wetted burned matchstick to scribble a note explaining that the North Vietnamese had put him in leg irons; he stashed it in the bathhouse nook. “What the hell for?” Shu asked in his next drop. He had heard interrogators threaten POWs with harsh treatment, but Shu hadn’t realized they actually went through with it. He wondered how a captive could have brought such punishment upon himself. He would learn the answer as he came to discover the defiance of Jerry Denton.

  * * *

  Thirty-seven years before he arrived in Hanoi, Jerry Denton received his first airplane as a gift for his third birthday. His father, a hotel manager, presented him with a blue-and-gold airplane on wheels, which he rode around the Fisher Hotel in El Paso, Texas, where his family lived. He thought little more of the navy or of aviation until he saw the 1937 film Navy Blue and Gold. As he watched actors Lionel Barrymore and Jimmy Stewart navigate a football season at the U.S. Naval Academy, he realized the navy—and its academy—might help him rise above his parents’ station and provide him a path to success. As a high school senior—and as quarterback of McGill Institute’s football team, captain of its baseball and basketball teams, and its “Most Popular” student—he sought the required nomination to the academy from his U.S. representative. He did not receive a response.

  With his dream hostage to bureaucracy, he enrolled at Spring Hill College, where his freshman class elected him president. The following year, he still hadn’t heard from Annapolis and decided to enter navy boot camp. One day, his commanding officer called him off the field
and into his office. “Denton,” he boomed, “you’re going to Bancroft Hall!” The words meant nothing to Jerry until the officer explained that Bancroft Hall housed the Brigade of Midshipmen at the Naval Academy. Midshipman Denton walked onto the Yard in June of 1943, along with Jim Stockdale of Abingdon, Illinois, and Jimmy Carter of Plains, Georgia.

  Jerry forsook Navy football so he could devote his weekends to courting his Mobile sweetheart, Jane Maury, who attended Mary Washington College in Virginia. They were married in the Naval Academy Chapel the day after he graduated. The couple left the chapel and walked beneath the Arch of Sabers, six swords held aloft by Jerry’s classmates. The ceremony initiated Jane into a world where she would see her husband excel as an officer and an aviator. Like so many others, Jerry was led to aviation by his unrelenting competitiveness and high aspirations. In the fleet’s new Grumman A-6 Intruder, he would find status, freedom, and invincibility. All that ended on July 18, 1965.

  Just two days before taking command of Attack Squadron 75—the Sunday Punchers—aboard the USS Independence, Jerry worked the throttle to ease his aircraft onto the catapult located at the ship’s waist. He looked to his right, past his bombardier-navigator, Bill Tschudy, and toward the ship’s island, marked with a large white “62,” signifying Independence’s place as the navy’s sixty-second aircraft carrier. A dark-suited civilian emerged from the island, a small delegation trailing him; Jerry knew it was Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. The visiting secretary made his way through the heat and noise of the flight deck toward Jerry’s plane. When McNamara arrived planeside to observe the launch, Jerry began his final preflight sequence, wondering if McNamara’s visit portended a successful mission.