While the Code bound the POWs to follow the orders of their commanding officer, some of Jerry’s subordinates voiced their disagreement with his strict policy. They saw little need to risk physical harm when they could provide their captors completely innocuous or even fabricated information; besides, many were injured or ill and needed to recover, not invite more afflictions. They advocated playing each quiz by ear, being smart, and giving some information where it mattered little. If those tactics failed and the interrogators wanted something significant, then they would stop talking. They saw flexibility in their pledge “I am bound to give only name, rank, service number, and date of birth.” To Jerry, those compromises seemed dangerous and divisive—and would jeopardize all POWs. Ultimately, however, each man would have to square his actions in prison with his own conscience. Could a POW hold up his head proudly before his family and countrymen when he was finally repatriated? The common aspiration of returning with honor began spreading through the POW ranks.
* * *
During the last months of 1965, rations at the Zoo dwindled and men became dangerously thin. Hanoi’s winter lows, which typically only dipped into the fifties, proved sufficient to chill them severely; colds and respiratory ailments became common. Often, however, what the guards heard as sickly coughs or loud sneezes, Jerry and the POWs recognized as expressions like “Bullshit,” “Horse shit,” or “Fuck Ho!” POWs directed the latter message to Hồ Chí Minh. The disguised comments helped buoy lagging spirits.
Jerry spent those winter months in solitary confinement, and for the first time since his arrival, he faced real hunger. One day, he found his bowl of soup waiting outside his cell. It sat on the dirt, cold and collecting grit blown about by the wind. Jerry had once carefully picked debris out of his soup, but now the famished prisoner seized the bowl and gulped it down, neither examining nor caring what it contained. A group of civilians—Jerry guessed they were politicians—visited him during that time and found him huddled in his cell.
“Well, Denton,” one said, “do you know that you are eating shit?”
Jerry didn’t answer; he wondered if he was referring to the debris lacing his soup.
“So you want to continue eating shit?”
Jerry struggled to his feet and said, “Well, I hope there is some protein in it.”
The man nodded and said, “You should be reasonable, or you will continue to eat shit!”
By mid-November, Jerry estimated he weighed only 120 pounds, but his indeterminate sentence bothered him more than the weight loss or cold. His morale sank lower as the Hỏa Lò torture program spread to the Zoo. One day, he heard guards beating young Lieutenant Ed Davis in a neighboring cell. Jerry recalled young Davis tenderly crooning “Fly Me to the Moon” during easier times in New Guy Village—now this. When the beating ended, Davis used a nail to send tap code to Jerry, describing his pain and the ropes that still bound him. Davis tapped a final word: “agony.” Then Jerry listened to him writhe and scream on his floor. That night, the lieutenant gave a verbal biography to his interrogators, revealing his background, education, and military service. The next day, Jerry heard him sobbing and used a nail to send code asking Davis how he felt.
“Commander,” the lieutenant tapped back earnestly, “I’ve been doing some soul-searching. If I had it to do over again, maybe I could have just held out five minutes more.”
Jerry felt immeasurable pride in his men’s will to resist. On December 4, guards took Davis to another camp. Jerry could only hope he’d survive.
* * *
As torture became widespread, Jerry laid out new rules. “We will die before we give them classified military information,” he whispered down his cellblock. “[When they press for biographical information], take all you can. When you think you have reached the limit of your endurance, give them harmless and inaccurate information that you can remember and repeat if tortured again.”
With Pigeye busy at Hỏa Lò, however, less-effective heavies applied the duress at the Zoo. Statements could take several days or even weeks to obtain, and the POWs quickly learned to approach quizzes the way experienced gamblers approach Las Vegas poker tables; hating the dealer only clouded one’s judgment. Jerry tried to remain unemotional so he could outwit his opponents. If these aviators hated anything, they hated losing.
They also hated latrine duty, and Jerry Denton loathed it more than most. The infection caused by his first stint in Hỏa Lò’s draconian leg stocks had never fully subsided. Nearly four months after the incident, his blood-and-pus-covered foot still stung every time he took a step, and the guards at the Zoo picked a period of particularly ugly inflammation to assign Jerry a most unpleasant duty. Each night, prisoners placed their full latrine buckets outside their cells for selected inmates to collect and consolidate into several larger pails. The waste from the Zoo’s fifty-six residents made its way from each cellblock to the edge of a field, where one POW would carry roughly twenty buckets of human slop 50 yards to a dump, two at a time. On this night, the guards had tapped Jerry as the anchor man in the relay. Limping to the dump, struggling with two heavy buckets, Jerry stepped on a sharp rock that felt like a knife in his foot. The indignity of the task had already infuriated him; the pain stoked him even more. When he returned from the dump, he stepped on yet another rock. He’d had enough. Thoroughly pissed off, he threw down the two empty pails and yelled in French, “Fini, fini!”
The supervising guard patted his pistol and gestured for Jerry to pick up the buckets. Jerry glared at him and yelled, “Bullshit!” He stormed across the Zoo’s grounds, straight past a startled second guard, and back to his cell. He slammed his door shut. Minutes later, he heard someone discreetly close the lock. The following day, doctors finally treated his infection.
By April 20, 1966, Jerry’s leadership and general stubbornness—particularly his persistent refusal to sign a confession admitting his crimes—had earned him a visit with Pigeye in Room Nineteen of the Hanoi Hilton. Inside, Jerry watched the practiced torturer efficiently stack two four-legged stools, one on top of the other. Then Pigeye helped Jerry to the top of the stack, a precarious 5 feet above the tile floor and annoyingly close to the single lightbulb that lit the room. Cuffs bound his hands behind his back. Then Pigeye left.
Hours passed. Nobody entered the room. Jerry sat balanced atop the stools, staring straight ahead. More hours passed. Discomfort began growing in his legs and back, increasing by the minute. Eventually, Jerry noticed he had to urinate. His pride would not allow him to soil himself, so he deftly collapsed the stools while managing to land feet first. He looked around for a bucket, a pot, something he could use to relieve himself. He saw nothing. Then he noticed the chest-level peephole in the door and dragged one of the stools to the threshold. Since cuffs still locked his hands behind his back, he opened the peephole with his nose. He stepped onto the stool, pulled his pants down from behind, and urinated into the courtyard. Fortunately, no guards passed by. Thus relieved, he confronted the challenge of re-creating his previous position. Stacking the stools and climbing on top of them proved impossible to accomplish by himself, so he scraped his cheek against the knobby plaster wall, scattered the stools, and staged an accident. When Pigeye returned to check on his prisoner, he made no mention of the puddle outside. He silently stacked the stools once again and returned Jerry to his perch.
The setup prevented Jerry from sleeping, forcing him to endure the burning bulb throughout the first night and the second day. He was offered neither food nor water. The hours passed with excruciating slowness, and Jerry’s mind began suffering as much as his body. Sometime during the second night, the plaster knobs on the walls became faces. Jerry’s weary eyes and sleep-deprived brain conspired to render devils and angels from them. The devils screamed; the angels sang. Jerry realized his companions were hallucinations, so he held tightly to one coherent and driving thought: He would choose death from starvation over writing a confession.
Somehow, he struggled th
rough that second night atop the stools. Then he forced himself to ignore the cries of his empty belly throughout the third day. Still, he could not sleep. On the third night, he received a visit from Rabbit, the English-speaking political officer Jim Stockdale had met in December. Rabbit seemed to hope that this slow torture and sleep deprivation had softened his cagey prisoner. Perhaps Jerry Denton would see the wisdom in compromise.
“I tell you man to man, Denton,” Rabbit said, playing the good-cop role of which he seemed fond, “they are going to torture you tomorrow if you do not write a confession. I know you will not give in to starvation. I have told them that. They will hurt you very badly. Maybe they will kill you.”
For the first time, Jerry heard a North Vietnamese officer say “torture.” Prior to Rabbit’s slip they’d always referred to their techniques as “punishment.” Regardless, Jerry held his ground; he would not write.
“Denton, my government will probably not even use the confession,” Rabbit reasoned. “Maybe no one will ever read it. My government knows that it is humiliating for you to write a confession, even if the confession is forced and not credible. They hope the suffering will cause you to act more reasonable, but they will probably not publicize your confession. You have everything to gain and nothing to lose if you write. Your treatment will greatly improve; you will even get a roommate. Aren’t you lonely after ten months alone?”
In fact, Jerry felt desperately lonely. His refusal to cooperate had earned him three hundred days without any caring contact other than taps through a wall and occasional whispers. He wanted to lay eyes on an American perhaps more than he wanted to eat or sleep. Yet Jerry would not allow Rabbit to sway him. The young officer sighed and said, “We will allow you to rest sometime tonight. You have until morning to change your mind.”
Rabbit had offered Jerry a way out, but Jerry would not grasp a branch offered by an enemy. What Rabbit might have seen as senseless and stubborn, Jerry considered a principled obligation under the Code of Conduct to which he clung like a drowning man clings to a lifeline. It gave some small sense of order to Jerry’s otherwise out-of-control world.
Soon, Pigeye arrived to escort Jerry to Cell One in New Guy Village, the cellblock where he had begun his ordeal those ten months earlier. Rabbit appeared four hours later, offering him crackers and tea. Jerry refused what he thought would be his last meal. Once he was resigned to death, his fear evaporated. No punishment for communication could top his recent treatment—or what the North Vietnamese had surely already planned for the next day—so he pulled himself to the barred window and brazenly called out, not caring if guards heard him. He hoped to find another POW nearby. He found Jim Stockdale in Cell Three.
“I’m going in there to die,” Jerry confided to his old Annapolis classmate. He didn’t think he’d survive his impending rendezvous with Room Eighteen. For a long time, the two commanders talked with each another about the coming day. Jerry sincerely believed that the Camp Authority would kill him when they attempted to extract a statement; he had resolved not to give them one. Whispering out his window to CAG, Jerry said, “Tell [Jane] I love her, but that I want her to remarry.” He also explained the Catholic concept of martyrdom and wondered aloud if God might consider this a religious battle—a faithful Christian facing down godless Communists. That night, with CAG listening, he prepared himself for an honorable death.
Pigeye retrieved Jerry the next morning and brought him to Room Eighteen. He cuffed Jerry’s wrists behind him, then began pounding Jerry’s face and body with his fists. Jerry tried to take the blows without emotion, without falling, but he could not. The punches sent him spinning around the room and tumbling to the floor again and again. Another guard would drag him to his feet and Pigeye would simply resume the beating. Every punch and every drop of blood that flowed from his nose fueled Jerry’s anger and resolve.
He caught his breath as Pigeye repositioned him on the floor. He noticed rope in Pigeye’s arms as the torturer pulled down his subject’s sleeves. Jerry knew what would come and planned to lose his arms before his honor. The two guards began lacing his upper arms with rope, digging their feet into Jerry’s back to pull the ropes tight against the muscle and bone.
The tightening ropes quickly cut off circulation to his lower arms and hands. Starved for oxygen, his muscles tried desperately to keep cells alive by converting stored sugars and starches to acids, creating a condition Pigeye would soon use to great effect. Pigeye and the other guard began cinching Jerry’s upper arms closer together. His shoulders began to strain; his sternum seemed likely to crack. His chest bowed backward almost unbelievably—the terrible sensation surpassed anything he’d known. He wanted it to stop, but Pigeye had more. The guards worked Jerry’s bound upper arms closer together, until his elbows touched. Excruciating pain shot from his arms until they became numb. At that point, Pigeye loosened the ropes. Jerry’s arteries rushed blood back into his starved lower arms. The built-up acids in the strangled tissue poisoned the reawakened nerve endings, creating a condition called allodynia and making Jerry feel a blinding pins-and-needles sensation.
Jerry did not submit. Now sweating from the effort, Pigeye placed a long concrete-filled iron bar across his captive’s ankles. The two guards slipped off their sandals and balanced themselves on the bar barefoot, rolling it along Jerry’s legs. Pigeye occasionally paused and gazed into Jerry’s eyes to gauge his lucidity. “Okay?” he asked.
Jerry spat back, “Okay,” and the guards continued rolling the bar across his shins. Next they grabbed the cuffs that still bound Jerry’s arms behind his back. They lifted his arms skyward, nearly tearing the muscles around Jerry’s shoulder sockets. They alternated between these methods until their victim began crying uncontrollably. He prayed to black out—he wished for the relief it would bring—but Pigeye would not allow him the luxury of escape. He knew how to keep prisoners lucid enough to experience unabated pain; he’d take them to the brink of passing out, then ease up. When Jerry closed his eyes and feigned unconsciousness, Pigeye just lifted his eyelids and grinned.
Jerry eventually reached a point where instinct began overpowering conscious thought. Pain consumed his mind. He would do anything to end this agony. Conscious only of his desire to escape the present, he whispered, “Bào cào, bào cào,” the Vietnamese words for “to report” or “to submit,” which the Camp Authority required POWs to use. Jerry capitulated. Then Pigeye let him pass out.
* * *
He awoke on the floor of Heartbreak Cell Eight. He watched water from the room’s pipe mix with blood and flow down his naked body and into the drain. Pigeye stood over him and ordered him to wash. Back in Room Eighteen, Mickey Mouse awaited the broken prisoner. When Pigeye had seated Jerry before him, Mickey Mouse asked, “Now, Denton, you are ready to write a confession of your crimes against the Vietnamese people—and make a tape recording of it?” Jerry nodded. Guards produced a notebook and closed Jerry’s hand around a pen. He tried to write as Mickey Mouse dictated. The torture session had so addled his brain that he only traced slow spirals across the paper. He could not even repeat Mickey Mouse’s words—“heinous crimes … Yankee imperialists … aggressors”—into a tape recorder.
After a night of rest, he again sat before his interrogator, pen in hand. He wrote his confession. Then, with hot coffee warming his throat, he managed to repeat the words aloud into a tape recorder. He described “vicious, revolting crimes [against] the innocent people and civilian buildings of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam.” Then he praised “the brave and determined workers of an antiaircraft battery [who] shot down my aircraft” and “the kindness of heart of the Vietnamese government and people.” When the interrogators had finished with him, Jerry shuffled back to his cell, defeated and despondent.
For three nights after that April 1966 torture session, Mickey Mouse discussed the war with Jerry. The persistence he showed in attempting to make Jerry understand the North Vietnamese perspective mystified the American commander.
Did he really think a forty-year-old academy-educated navy veteran who had been imprisoned and tortured for ten months would buy his line? He didn’t understand Mickey Mouse’s tactics or the urgency he displayed in making his arguments. Then Jerry went to visit Cat.
“Denton,” began Cat, “you are going to meet with some members of the press. Use your head, Denton. This interview is very important. Be polite and do what you are told. Remember what punishment you have received in the past. I need not say more.”
“I’ll be polite, but that’s all,” grumbled Jerry.
Cat returned the captive to his holding cell in New Guy Village. Once the cell door closed, Jerry agonized about whether he should take more torture before submitting to the interview. However, he knew he had still not recovered from his bouts with the stools and Pigeye’s ropes. This was a losing battle. He prayed to God. Then he sought counsel from his neighbor, Robbie Risner, whom the Camp Authority still kept in New Guy Village. The two men prayed and debated throughout the night. Risner suggested Jerry stop subjecting himself to torture and just try to neutralize the interview by not giving up any real propaganda.
“I’ll go,” Jerry finally decided, “and blow it wide open.” He would not parrot Cat’s Communist line; he would state the truth.
* * *
Defiant: The POWs Who Endured Vietnam's Most Infamous Prison, the Women Who Fought for Them, and the One Who Never Returned Page 9