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

  As a prisoner of war, George maintained a fierce devotion to his Catholic faith, reconciling his vitriolic wrath with Matthew 5:39. In the verse George had memorized at St. Benedict’s, Jesus had admonished, “Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” George reasoned that he had turned both cheeks more than once. He also drew strength from the biblical story of Abednego, Meshach, and Shadrach, the faithful triumvirate who were cast into Babylon’s fiery furnace for refusing to worship the idols of King Nebuchadnezzar. George aspired to emulate their bravery, and just as they had trusted God to save them from the flames, so George trusted the Lord to deliver him from the godless Communists of North Vietnam and Hỏa Lò Prison.

  George’s enemies may have hated him as much as he hated them. When they compared notes, they found he lied in every interrogation. If he told them one thing under pressure on Tuesday, he’d tell them something different on Saturday. One day, the Camp Authority received a package from Mr. and Mrs. John Coker of Linden, New Jersey. They called George to quiz. “You have a package from somebody,” they announced. “Where do your parents live?”

  George had already given them at least three bogus answers and said, “I don’t know, they move a lot.”

  “Is it possible they live in New Jersey?”

  “Yes, that’s possible,” George conceded. George never would have divulged his real hometown. The former New Jersey state wrestling champ maintained that the North Vietnamese had no damn business knowing anything beyond his name, rank, service number, and date of birth anyway. He believed that conditions could not get any worse, so cooperation had no upside. He persisted in answering his interrogators’ questions with lies until eventually they stopped asking.

  Less than two months after he arrived in Hanoi, the personal war between George Coker and North Vietnam escalated. The Camp Authority wanted statements, and George wouldn’t give them. On one late October morning, a guard woke George at 6:00 A.M. and posted the aviator against a plaster wall inside a room in the Office, one of the Zoo’s main cellblocks. The guard poked him in the ribs until he raised his hands above his head. He indicated George should remain thus. He stood at the wall, arms raised, until 6:00 P.M. George again spent the next day with his arms over his head, glaring at whichever guard sat nearby or looked in through the peephole. So it would continue, the guards promised, until he agreed to write.

  Once, when his guard left, George heard the call-up sequence coming through the far wall: “shave and a haircut.” He tapped back twice: “two bits.” He discovered that Jerry Denton occupied the neighboring cell. Jerry’s cell provided a view of the cellblock door, so the two navy flyers tapped until Jerry saw the guard returning. His warning thump sent George springing back to his spot, hands over his head. During the rare moments when guards would leave George unattended, the two would often resume their conversations.

  During his long days of standing, George wondered about a peculiar 4-foot-square hole in the floor. He finally learned its purpose when a guard told him, “When air raid comes, you get down there.”

  At his next opportunity, George tapped to Jerry, “Do you do anything special for an air raid?”

  Jerry tapped back, “I use my blanket.”

  The joke caught George entirely off guard, and he laughed for what seemed like hours, imagining Jerry—eighteen years his senior—uselessly sheltering himself beneath a threadbare blanket as bombs rained down upon the camp.

  At the outset of his ordeal, George had steeled himself for the physical contest. How could his legs—one of which had been injured in his ejection two months earlier—and his arms survive such duress? As the days began to pass, however, he realized the torture would test his mind more than his body. He learned to drift away mentally, to take his mind outside his physical being, away from the wall, away from the Zoo, away from North Vietnam. He thought about his family. He remembered church hymns and poems and recited them again and again. He offered elaborate silent prayers. He staged grand debates with himself about theology and life’s meaning. He did anything to distract his mind from the reality of his situation—standing against a wall for twelve hours each day, forever hungry, hands raised above his head by exhausted arms, weary legs shaking beneath him. Inevitably his mind would return to the present. Upon each return, he found his condition worse than ever. His sporadic communication with Jerry Denton provided his only pleasure.

  The battle of wills stretched into a second week, then into November and past Thanksgiving. Every day, the disbelief of the staff grew—if this bullheaded American would only write a simple statement, it would end—but the North Vietnamese knew that nobody could withstand such hardship indefinitely, and eventually George’s mind began to slip. Where once he could drift away for half-hour blocks, he could now only take himself away for a few minutes. He couldn’t think about surviving the next twelve hours or even the next hour. He had to concentrate on surviving the next sixty seconds, and then the next.

  By December, his mental escapes became more fleeting, and soon he couldn’t remember his family. He couldn’t recall his squadron mates or his voyage on the Constellation. For a time, he held on to the Catholic liturgy, but that, too, faded. As the weeks wore on, memories of sports and Scouting offered his only relief. On the field and mat at St. Benedict’s, he had learned not to quit—Benedict’s hates a quitter—but sports, too, eventually faded. Only the Scout Oath, the promise he recited every week as a boy, remained. Even as his prospects dwindled, the twenty-three-year-old forced himself—over and over—to repeat the first line of the oath: “On my honor, I will do my best.” He would not submit.

  On Christmas Eve 1966, the North Vietnamese called a truce. The victor slept for two straight days and emerged fortified for whatever lay in store.

  * * *

  When George Coker began his battle in Hanoi, only one future inmate of the infamous Alcatraz prison still eluded North Vietnam’s detention system: Tennessean Charles “Nels” Tanner. October 1966 found Nels aboard the USS Coral Sea, flying missions over North Vietnam from the carrier’s offshore post at Yankee Station in the South China Sea. Until age eighteen, Nels had never seen the ocean. Now, sixteen years later, it completely surrounded him.

  The Tanners hailed from the western Tennessee town of Covington, where rows of cotton stretched along two-lane roads, shared by tractors and cars alike. There, Totsie Tanner delivered her second son, Nels, in 1932. Nels loved the family’s rolling farmland, which they had settled generations before. At age eight, he met Sara Ann Sage. Thirteen years later, a justice of the peace married Nels and Sara Ann in Hernando, Mississippi. Nels was twenty-one; Sara Ann was eighteen. They paid for the ceremony and license with two dollars she had saved. Thankfully, Nels soon began receiving a navy paycheck, eventually accompanied by flight pay.

  In his cabin aboard Coral Sea, his thoughts turned to his upcoming flight. By October 1966, more than 350 planes had gone down over North Vietnam. While pilots still joked about the outmoded People’s Army of Vietnam, that army had learned to bring down U.S. aircraft quite effectively. It could happen to him. Writing letters home always helped banish those thoughts, so he sat down at his metal desk and, on a plain memo pad, wrote to his twelve-year-old daughter, Cyndi. In rough but careful cursive he shared news from his life aboard ship and expressed pride in her grades at school. He signed the note “Love, Daddy” and dated it “Wed Oct 5.”

  Four days later, before Cyndi received the letter, she watched her mother open the door to their La Jolla, California, home. Two navy commanders stood in the doorway. Sara Ann Tanner instantly knew something had happened to her husband. The officers explained that on October 9, Nels and Ross Terry, the radar intercept officer in the backseat of their stricken F-4 Phantom, had ejected over North Vietnam. Another aircraft reported their two parachutes drifting into a storm of small-arms fire. The navy had received no signals from the ground; the crew’s survival appeared doubtful.

  Cyndi’s mother called
her into the foyer and told her that her father had been shot down; the navy considered him missing in action. Sara Ann explained that his wingman had seen a parachute, but Cyndi heard nothing after the words “shot down.” She dashed between the men on the doorstep, across the lawn, and down the street, tears streaming down her face. She raced along the centerline, thinking she could run away, somehow make this not real. One of the officers who’d delivered the news found her and brought her home. Two days afterward, Commander Roger Boh, a former commanding officer and close friend of Cyndi’s father, took her to dinner and a movie for her thirteenth birthday. As it always did, the navy community came together to support a family in distress.

  Still, something had changed, perhaps permanently, in the household. An emptiness filled Cyndi, her mother, and her six-year-old brother. With so little information—and no word from Hanoi—they didn’t allow themselves much hope. What little hope they had, they kept to themselves, not wanting to hurt the others with useless conjecture. Within two months, the family returned to the Tennessee farming community of Covington, where Sara Ann could raise her children surrounded by their extended family, away from the memories in San Diego. In the small town, the Tanners found kindness but no real understanding. Most of Cyndi’s classmates thought her father was in the state penitentiary.

  Fortunately, both Nels and his radar intercept officer had survived the hit and the subsequent ejection. Then, through some combination of prayers and luck, the pair had drifted safely through the flak. When Nels’s feet touched the ground, the last of the men fated to become the Alcatraz Eleven had arrived in North Vietnam.

  Two days after he lost his aircraft, Nels arrived at Hỏa Lò Prison and entered a room marked with the number “19.” Nels had memorized a portion of the Geneva Convention, which he quoted to the officer present.

  “You are quite right,” the officer said, seemingly impressed, “but we don’t intend to ever abide by any of it!”

  Minutes later, Nels watched a short but powerfully built man enter the room. He wore a pith helmet covered with camouflage netting; he carried a coil of rope and manacles. Pigeye, who handled the torture at the Hilton, clamped the manacles on Nels’s wrists and used a wrench to fasten them. He used the rope to lace up Nels’s arms, then jerked them back so suddenly and violently that Nels heard cartilage and bone pop. Pigeye soon had Nels consumed by pain. During the ensuing interrogation, a North Vietnamese MiG pilot stepped into the room. He claimed that he’d downed Nels’s F-4 two days earlier. The officers behind the table demanded that Nels agree. When he didn’t, Pigeye drew the ropes tighter. Despite the torturer’s methods, Nels never would agree that the MiG had downed his plane—he refused to grant the enemy pilot any credit or his interrogators any satisfaction. The pilot left, and the session continued, the interrogators moving on to other questions.

  After they’d completed their initial interrogations of Nels and Ross Terry, the North Vietnamese locked them together in Heartbreak Hotel. The guard set Nels’s right ankle in one side of the stocks affixed to his bed slab. Then he handcuffed Nels and fastened one wrist in the other side of the stocks, pulling his torso forward into a horribly uncomfortable position. The guards arranged Terry in the same manner.

  The two men spent the next several nights thus contorted. When nature called, they maneuvered themselves as best they could to use their buckets. If they could not, they would wallow in their own waste. During the days, they agonized in separate quiz rooms at the hands of torturers and interrogators. The officers checked off their list of information for the Hanoi Hilton’s guest register. Nels realized death would provide the only escape—the only way to avoid surrendering—and after the sessions, he began to contemplate suicide. He found a sharp piece of iron in his Heartbreak cell, but since torture had virtually paralyzed his arms, he couldn’t even grab the shank, let alone use it to slash his wrists. Soon interrogators began seeking confessions that their government could use to inflame their citizenry, the kind of confessions Nels feared they could use in a war crimes tribunal. He clung to the Code of Conduct and fought like a cornered tiger, but nobody ever bested Pigeye’s methods.

  The torturer laid Nels on his stomach and tied a rope between his feet and neck. If Nels let his feet fall, the rope would choke him. Then Pigeye applied nylon straps taken from captured parachutes. The green straps improved upon the traditional ropes he regularly used; they proved stronger and could induce compliance more quickly. Because of this method, some POWs would begin calling Pigeye “Old Straps and Bars.” Pigeye went to work with his tools, methodically dislocating Nels’s shoulders until Nels gave in and provided a propaganda statement, incapable of bearing the pain any longer. Even after enduring such torture, he viewed himself as a failure. Both he and Terry believed they’d broken the Code; they’d made disloyal statements. The two aviators felt utterly shamed when they returned to Heartbreak Hotel after first crossing that line. They had failed their country and their fellow prisoners. They had faced a challenge and proven unable to meet it. Then a POW in a neighboring cell relayed a message from Robbie Risner that helped to restore their self-respect. Risner had said, “We have all broken. Now blow smoke up their ass.”

  Nels considered writing the confession Cat and Rabbit wanted, but he couldn’t write. His hands and arms were still paralyzed. His arms hung uselessly at his sides, much like those of Sam Johnson. Ross Terry would have to feed Nels for weeks.

  Unable to face another day of torture, Nels hatched a plan one evening. “Ross,” Nels said, “if we give them a lot of phony names and ridiculous incidents, maybe they won’t catch it. Maybe they’ll accept it and leave us alone.”

  That next day, Nels and Terry sat defeated across from their tormentors, wishing they were anywhere but that quiz room. Cat explained what he needed and walked out. Rabbit directed Terry to write and rewrite statements with his own barely functional right hand until Rabbit felt the time had arrived to tape-record them. The two airmen read their scripts into a microphone, then received criticism from Rabbit, often for mispronouncing words in order to indicate their insincerity. Then they’d read again, still hoping to slip in one clue or another. Rabbit had a solid command of modern English, so he caught most of their distortions and hidden clues. He only missed one thing.

  In Nels’s statement, he had testified, “During the briefings [aboard Coral Sea] I was sick at the thought of dropping such horrible weapons as fragmentation bombs, CBU, and napalm on innocent people. I was afraid to disobey so I went to fly my missions. Some pilots had refused to fly. I remember Lieutenant Commander Ben Casey of VHA-2 and Lieutenant Clark Kent of VAW-11 who refused to fly their missions on the first day we got to Vietnam. They were court-martialed on the ship and discharged most dishonorably.”

  Rabbit paid no heed to the seemingly normal names Ben Casey and Clark Kent and failed to notice the hidden subterfuge. At the time, Ben Casey was a popular television medical drama, and Clark Kent was the hero’s alter ego in The Adventures of Superman. The North Vietnamese released the letters, and Cat then sent Nels and Terry for an interview with a Japanese television journalist. At the interview, they pounced upon a spread of food set before them. They indulged as if the North Vietnamese were starving them—that proved a simple act considering their measly diet of soup and sewer greens, as they called the mysterious stringy vegetables. The journalist politely waited as the two famished men stuffed their mouths with bananas, cookies, and so much coffee that it trickled onto their chins. When he realized the orgy wouldn’t stop, the journalist proceeded. The POWs answered questions with their mouths full, but they followed the script, and Rabbit seemed happy as he watched from a nearby seat.

  Nels Tanner, author of the incendiary Superman confession.

  In Covington, the Tanner family was watching the nightly news together when suddenly grainy footage of two unidentified Americans—being interviewed with their mouths full of food—played across the screen. Having received no additional information from Wa
shington or Hanoi about their husband and father, they were shocked when they recognized one of the unidentified Americans as Nels. By God, he had survived! Joy rushed into the void that had been their lives. After seeing Nels alive, they believed that his country grit would give him the edge to survive. His family never realized how hard he’d have to fight.

  * * *

  For several months, Nels received no indication that anyone had noticed his message. He assumed his Ben Casey–Clark Kent statement had either gone unnoticed or never reached the West. Cat had him moved to the Zoo, and he settled into life as a POW in North Vietnam. Then the April 14, 1967, issue of Time magazine delivered a special report on American prisoners in Southeast Asia. One article discussed North Vietnam’s use of POWs for propaganda. It mentioned Nels’s statement, noting, “One artful dodger who beat the system was Lieut. Commander Charles Tanner, 34, from Covington, Tenn., who solemnly declared that two fellow pilots on the U.S.S. Coral Sea refused to fly their missions, were court-martialed and dishonorably discharged. The officers’ names, subsequently trumpeted by Hanoi: Lieut. Commander Ben Casey and Lieut. Clark Kent.”

  The people and press in the United States found the joke highly amusing, but Hanoi lost face internationally. On April 16, 1967, a cadre of agitated guards burst into Nels’s cell at the Zoo and dragged him to a waiting truck. He soon found himself back in Hỏa Lò, sitting before a panel of officers that included Cat and Rabbit. Another officer, nicknamed Eel, asked Nels to list Hollywood stars. When Nels asked for clarification, Eel shouted, “Just name some! Write down names of all movie stars you can think of.”

  Nels, not knowing that his confession had received worldwide attention, wrote a long list of names but omitted Ben Casey and Clark Kent.