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

  The English-speaking Cat often chose to speak Vietnamese and use an interpreter, so through Eel, he asked, “Do you know any comical characters?”

  “Comical characters?” Nels asked. “Could you mean funny characters?”

  “You know what I mean! Comical characters!”

  Nels provided a list of comedic actors, but Cat cut him off. He was infuriated. Through an interpreting Eel he shouted, “You know what I mean! You know, Superman!”

  “Oh,” Nels replied. “You mean comic strips.”

  “No, I mean comical characters, Superman and Ben Casey, movie stars. Terry has told us all. He told us you are a liar!” Nels didn’t believe Terry had told them anything. “We have here a letter from the Communist Party of the United States,” Cat continued, waving a letter. “My friends in your country have written me and told me of your deceit!”

  For what seemed like hours, Nels sat on a stool and listened to Cat rant, with Eel translating. He was furious about Nels’s trick and incensed that his prisoner had embarrassed him, Rabbit, and North Vietnam. Cat’s anger didn’t seem to be abating, and Nels began to fear for his life. Then suddenly Cat left. Guards dragged the American to an unfamiliar section of Hỏa Lò. Life would become much worse for Nels Tanner.

  10

  YOUR ADORING HUSBAND

  In the autumn of 1966, Commander Bob Boroughs and two Naval Intelligence specialists visited Sybil Stockdale in Coronado. Sybil had discussed Boroughs’s proposal with her eldest son, Jimmy, who had echoed her own thoughts, saying, “Sounds like one of the only ways we’ll ever have to fight back.” With her son’s affirmation, Sybil agreed to involve her husband in intelligence gathering after Boroughs promised to reveal whatever Jim’s messages might contain. She knew her husband would have wanted her to participate since, as Jimmy observed, it would let him retaliate in some small measure. The intelligence officers visiting Sybil supplied his weapon: a Polaroid photograph. The photo showed a woman around the age of Jim’s mother wading on the beach in Coronado; Jim would instantly know it wasn’t his mother. If he immersed the photograph in water, the backing would peel off. Inside, he would find instructions to use in providing intelligence to the United States. Everything depended on Jim knowing to soak the picture.

  Sybil had to devise clues to plant in her accompanying letter—enough hints to make Jim think twice about her words and the photograph. She concocted a situation that would seem entirely plausible to censors but entirely absurd to Jim. Then Sybil devised the tip-off sentence, the line that told Jim to soak the photo. Once everyone agreed on the language, they tested the package—letter and Polaroid—with Jim and Sybil’s close friend Captain Budd Salsig. When he recognized the clue, they felt satisfied Jim would also. In the photograph’s hidden message, Naval Intelligence told Jim to begin any encoded replies with “Darling” and close them with “Your adoring husband.” Those were two phrases her fighter pilot of a husband would never otherwise use. All of this hinged on Hanoi giving the package to Jim. He’d only sent two letters in twelve months, and neither indicated he’d received anything from Sybil. Boroughs hoped a letter mailed in the fall might reach Jim as a gesture of Christmas charity.

  On October 9, 1966, Sybil Stockdale rode her bicycle along Coronado’s quiet streets to the U.S. Post Office. She stood before the mailbox and glanced over the letter one final time. In her excitement and apprehension, she had forgotten stamps. Embarrassed, she put stamps on the envelope, kissed it for luck, and started it on its long journey to Hanoi and her husband, whom she had just made a spy.

  * * *

  After eight months in Hanoi, Jim Mulligan had still not been permitted to contact his family, but he thought an officer nicknamed Lump might offer him a chance. The Massachusetts native had met Lump at the Zoo in early November 1966. Lump spoke English with a French accent and began his conversation with Mulligan by showing rare compassion. He observed Jim’s deteriorating physique and within a week had decreed that he should receive a banana and vitamins with his meals. The two men, both around forty years of age, talked of classical music and Boston. Although Jim knew little about the Boston Pops, or any classical music, for that matter, he let Lump believe otherwise and cultivated the relationship to his advantage. He let the conversation progress, hoping for a favor, an opening, a first chance to write home—a letter from loved ones. He wondered if his wife, Louise, and six boys even knew he had survived.

  Finally, the two men began talking of their families. Jim lowered his eyes sadly. He expressed his deep loneliness and his hope that he would be allowed a letter from home at Christmas; the prisoners knew the Camp Authority routinely withheld mail. Jim also wished he could send a letter to his wife. His appeal began as a charade, but real tears soon welled in his eyes. Lump listened sympathetically. Several days later, on November 16, the peephole in Jim’s door opened. Lump peered in and handed the commander three sheets of paper, a pen, and ink. He told Jim to write a draft, which he would then collect and submit for review.

  Jim would not waste his opportunity. As he poised pen above paper, he looked at his ghastly forearms, withered from hunger and scarred from the gas-soaked ropes that had bound him during his first days in captivity. God, how he longed to tell Louise everything—but those words would have to wait. He recalled his survival school instructor telling him that he would be smarter and better trained than his captors; he could outsmart them. With careful forethought, Jim began writing, “My darling wife and children, My captors are allowing me to write a letter home. BIG DEAL! I hope that it arrives before Christmas.”

  Then he continued, smartly, deliberately, carefully. He wrote, “If I had a deck of cards I could play that famous game of solitaire.” Then, he added, “Life is very much like the religious retreat I made a few years back only it is much more quiet here and I have more time for thinking and meditating.” From those clues, Jim knew Louise would understand that he spent his days alone. Then he passed along information about other Americans. “I get piles of whole grain rice, plenty of warm soup, and a pot of water, and now estimate my weight at 150 pounds,” he wrote. He’d included three sets of three words in which the first letters spelled out “POW,” and he’d almost perfectly estimated the number of men in captivity at 150; by year’s end, the exact number stood at 151. He also wrote, “Give my best to Father Gallagher. You know, he is some athlete, he got six hits out of seven at bats.” Father Gallagher was the chaplain on the Enterprise, and Jim hoped to convey that he had found six of seven downed aviators from the carrier. Then he mentioned a fictitious tennis match and commented on a squadron mate being “rough in missing his forehand shots”—Enterprise aviator Jim Ruffin was still missing. Importantly, he instructed his wife to give his love to Uncle Mark and Aunt Ginny, a reference to their friend Admiral Clarence A. “Mark” Hill, to whom he hoped Louise would pass his letter.

  Two days later, Lump returned with the original letter completely unedited. Jim had apparently included enough niceties to gain approval from the censors. He began recopying the letter on the official paper Lump supplied. Dusk had arrived when Lump opened the peephole to collect the finished letter. “Why do you have no light?” he asked.

  “Because one of the officers of the camp said that I had a bad attitude and must live in darkness,” Jim answered.

  The next morning, Lump would send a guard to reinstall the lightbulb. That night, Jim cried himself to sleep in the dark cell, the letter having stirred memories of a home he wondered if he’d ever see again.

  The following day, Lump granted Jim thirty additional minutes outside to bathe and wash his clothes. POWs cherished almost nothing more than time spent under the open sky, outside their cramped cells. Jim felt the sun on his pale skin and drew strength even from its faint winter warmth. He watched sparrows fly about the yard and thought of Matthew 10:29, which he’d memorized as part his Catholic upbringing: “Are not two Sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.”
God controlled all that transpired on earth—even something as insignificant as a bird falling from the sky. Certainly, Jim believed, God’s hand also guided him. He knew that the Lord had some divine purpose for sending him through this trying time. He prayed, “Lord, grant me increased faith … Please send me home to my family and my country a better man than when I came here. Thy Will be done. Amen.”

  * * *

  Before being shot down, Jim Mulligan had smoked more than two packs of cigarettes each day. He’d regularly burn through a pack before noon. When he arrived in Hanoi, he received only one or two smokes per day. When they realized he wouldn’t cooperate, the Camp Authority cut off his supply. That December, however, they offered him cigarettes again. “You are too poor,” he responded, “Give them to your army and people.” He’d decided not to reacquire the habit—and, out of spite, not to do anything his enemy suggested. The officers present in the quiz room overlooked his refusal, and Lump moved on to preparations for the impending Christmas holiday. “Where should the tree be placed?” he asked. Skeptically imagining what a North Vietnamese Christmas tree would look like, Jim suggested the far corner. Then Lump made his grand announcement: “We permit you on the occasion of Christmas to send a message over the radio to your family.”

  Jim’s mind filled with images of ropes binding his arms, of Pigeye cutting them off that first conscious night in Hanoi. He remembered what it had cost to make that first tape and how despondent he’d felt afterward. Never again, he’d resolved. “I can’t do that,” he said nervously, expecting torture. His heartbeat quickened; his hands began to sweat.

  “Why cannot you do this?” Lump asked. “Some of your compatriots have already sent the Christmas message to their families. They will be played over the Voice of Vietnam and you yourself will hear them over the radio of the camp … If you send a message over the radio the authorities of the camp may give you a letter from your family on the occasion of Christmas.”

  Jim desperately wanted a letter from his family; he hadn’t received one since he arrived. He wouldn’t be party to blackmail, however, and Jerry Denton’s order barring recorded statements was still law. “No,” Jim answered. “I am too sad about my family. I cannot send a message over the radio.” Lump eventually gave up.

  On Christmas Eve, Jim went to quiz with Lump and Fox, the Zoo’s commandant. After politely enduring a lecture about the history and kindness of the Vietnamese people, Jim asked hopefully, “Will I get a letter from my wife?”

  “If your wife writes, the camp authorities will give you the letter,” Lump replied.

  “Bullshit,” Jim thought, but he bowed politely and returned to his cell. There, he composed a Christmas greeting, which he sent via tap code to the eighteen men living in the cells of the Zoo’s Pool Hall. He tapped, “Remember at Christmas as we celebrate the rebirth of Christ that upon our release, we also will be born again into a free world, better men than when we came here. God bless! Happy Christmas!” He went to sleep, still longing for his family and for a proper Catholic service, and thinking his barren room seemed very much like that barren manger in Bethlehem.

  * * *

  The North Vietnamese permitted several prisoners to write home during the 1966 Christmas season, and in Virginia Beach, Louise Mulligan watched as other wives joyfully reported news from their husbands in Hanoi. She did her best to celebrate with those lucky families, but she longed to hear from her Jim. At least, she thought, North Vietnam had released Jim’s photograph that summer. Other wives still wondered about the fate of their husbands. By the end of 1966, Cat had granted only 47 of 151 prisoners the privilege of writing home.

  At last, the U.S Post Office in Jacksonville, Florida, forwarded an envelope postmarked Hanoi to the Mulligans’ new home in Virginia Beach. Louise and her six boys—now aged three to fifteen—couldn’t have imagined a better Christmas present. They read and reread the words their father had written with Lump’s permission in November. The four pages would have to sustain them for twelve more months until his next letter arrived.

  Louise’s upbringing in Lawrence, Massachusetts, had prepared her well for the hard times she now faced. Her parents both worked in the local mills during the Great Depression. Their divorce only added to the family’s hardships. Louise, like her future husband, Jim, had lived in tenement housing. Jim wore his toughness near the surface, while Louise kept hers cloaked. Even so, as Louise assumed command of her family in 1966, nobody could mistake her iron determination. She would fight for Jim and hold her family together.

  As she watched news reports of Operation Rolling Thunder passing the eighteen-month mark, however, she admitted to herself that the likelihood of a near-term homecoming was dim for her husband and the other U.S. airmen in Hanoi. Aircraft had dropped roughly 500,000 tons of bombs onto the North with little apparent effect on Hanoi’s leaders. In the South, America had 385,000 troops deployed and, to date, had suffered more than 8,000 casualties. Yet South Vietnam seemed bogged in turmoil, America seemed no closer to victory, and both casualty and budget concerns began to percolate at home. Still, the majority of Johnson’s constituents supported the war. The president maintained that more bombs and the influx of military aid would eventually drive North Vietnam to the negotiating table. He would not cease bombing as a precondition to peace talks, as Hanoi had insisted. Nor would he acquiesce to North Vietnam’s demand that the NLF have some role in South Vietnam’s future. Johnson would not, under any circumstances, accept a Communist influence in Saigon. On the other side, Hồ Chí Minh, Prime Minister Phạm Văn Đồng, and Vietnamese Communist Party general secretary Lê Duẩn proved equally stubborn. Confident in eventual victory, they hunkered down to outlast the United States and its fragile ally in Saigon. The stalemate dragged into 1967, and the more than 150 U.S. POWs faced another year in Hanoi. At home, their wives dutifully soldiered on, continuing to keep quiet.

  * * *

  When they’d first arrived, most POWs had believed their stay would last less than six months. Surely, they thought, their government would negotiate their release or quickly win the war. Instead, Jim Stockdale—CAG—now faced his second lonely Christmas in solitary confinement. To mark the occasion, the Camp Authority gave him a letter from Sybil, the value of which they never realized.

  Since June 1966, Jim Stockdale and Sam Johnson had lived at the Zoo, adjacent to one another in solitary cells and largely isolated from the camp’s communication chain. Jim at least enjoyed a relatively spacious three-bed cell, and the wall between his cell and Sam’s hummed with taps. The former air force Thunderbird and the former navy test pilot amused themselves by signing off in the evenings with abbreviated phrases like “GN ST” for “Good night, sleep tight” and “DLTBBB” for “Don’t let the bed bugs bite.” However, humor and friendship could not prevent the onset of depression. At Christmastime, melancholy and despondency rolled into the cells like a thick fog.

  Holidays—birthdays and Christmas in particular—were the hardest times to endure. On these days, Jim could not help recalling memories of home and family. He knew there was a fifteen-hour time difference between Hanoi and Coronado, and he pictured what his family might be doing without him at each minute. He knew they could not fathom the extent of his tribulations. They didn’t know the torture he endured for them, for his country, and they might never find out. He bore the burden of fighting this battle alone. If he died, who would know? Those thoughts plagued him that Christmas Eve, until he at last managed to fall asleep on his hard wooden bunk. The cell’s infernal lightbulb would burn throughout the night so guards could monitor him through the door’s peephole.

  Shortly after he’d fallen asleep, a guard burst into the cell and summoned him to a late-evening quiz. Jim soon sat in an interrogation room across from an officer he’d never seen before. When he observed the man’s bulging eyes, long neck, and high cheekbones, he realized that Sam Johnson had described such a man; Jim guessed he sat across from Chihuahua. Stockdale had prepared himself
for one of the propaganda-laced holiday speeches for which the Camp Authority was known, and Chihuahua did not disappoint.

  “On the occasion of your religious holiday, in accordance with the humane and lenient treatment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, you are provided sweets,” the political officer began. “Did you notice the ashtray on the table? Our artisan fashioned it from the wreckage of a war criminal’s F-105 Thunderchief. Your imperialist air pirate was brought down by our brilliant gunners in Nghệ An Province. It was the fifteen-hundredth American aggressor aircraft to be destroyed by our people.”

  Jim tried to discern the accuracy of those figures. He doubted them strongly, but in the absence of reliable information, they troubled him. As Jerry Denton had told the world in his televised interview, the POWs lacked access to any news other than that reported by Radio Hanoi, suspect statements from the Camp Authority, and tidbits provided by new captives. Jim offered no reaction to Chihuahua’s statement.

  “In honor of your religious holiday, we also offer you a banana,” the officer continued. Jim grabbed the proffered fruit, peeled it, and devoured it.

  Chihuahua then reached into a desk drawer and produced an envelope. As Jim reached for it, bright lights flashed on behind him; a movie camera began to whir. Chihuahua produced a microphone and said, “In accordance with the humane and lenient policy of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, on this occasion of Christmas, my government presents you these letters from your wife—one from last September and one from last October. Also, here are two photographs—one of your wife and children, and one of your mother.” Jim had fallen victim to a staged propaganda stunt, but he snatched the letters and photos the way a greedy child might grab a chocolate bar.

  “What do you have to say about your Christmas letters and photographs?” Chihuahua asked, sticking the microphone in Jim’s face. Jim looked at the Polaroid photo of an older woman standing in the surf. Before he could think, Jim blurted out, “That’s not my mother!”