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 more POWs arrived, the Camp Authority reshuffled Little Vegas. On May 21, they pulled Jim Mulligan into a quiz room where Jerry Denton joined him. Just seeing each other excited both men, who had spent most of their sentences without companionship. Both aviators sat down before Greasy, the junior officer currently administering Little Vegas. He announced, “The camp is very crowded with American prisoners. The camp commander permits you to live together. You must obey the regulations of the camp and not communicate.” The news stunned Jim and Jerry, but they were grateful. “Thank you,” Jim said, and they followed a guard to an 8-by-4-foot room with two stacked bunks in Stardust. For the first time since their arrival, they would live with another American. Mosquitoes filled the room and thick woven mats covered the window, but Jim offered a prayer of thanks and fell asleep contentedly after a real conversation, happy for companionship.

  Inside their room, Jim Mulligan soon discovered the downside of cohabitation. For months, dysentery and worms had given his digestive tract fits, but the pungency of his diarrhea affected only him. With Jerry in the room, Jim was embarrassed every time he used his bucket. “Hell, Jim,” Jerry said, “forget it; we’re lucky to be alive. All of Vietnam smells, not just this cell.”

  In their new arrangement, one of the men could communicate while the other cleared. Jim spent long stints on the floor, checking beneath the door for guards and flashing messages with his hand to the cell across the hall by moving his hand in and out of the light coming from under the door.

  At the same time, Jerry whispered through the mats covering the window and tapped to other Stardust cells. They soon established contact with an aviator from the Enterprise, Eugene “Red” McDaniel, who’d been shot down on May 19; Jerry knew McDaniel from Virginia Beach. Via neighboring POW Scotty Morgan, McDaniel briefed Jerry on the war’s progress.

  General William Westmoreland now had 448,000 troops at his disposal in South Vietnam. They were backed by a massive logistical system, an array of advanced aircraft, and stockpiles of modern and deadly munitions. Westmoreland pursued a search-and-destroy strategy that rapidly inserted well-supported U.S. fighting units throughout the countryside. The general used enemy body count as one measure of progress, and Communist casualties did pile up, but North Vietnam would pump 100,000 fresh troops into the South during 1967 and each year thereafter. “Born in the North to die in the South” became a frequently used expression among North Vietnamese. Efforts to win over peasants were also largely unsuccessful, and some cynical U.S. officers summarized the reality by saying, “Grab ’em by the balls, and their hearts and minds will follow.” Bombs and herbicides displaced thousands of farmers, pushing them into poverty and inadvertently creating support for the insurgency. So despite the mounting Communist casualties, the Americans made little real progress.

  Operation Rolling Thunder had now entered its twenty-sixth month, and bombs continued to rain on North Vietnam, but strategic targets like dikes, manufacturing centers, and urban areas remained largely off-limits. Johnson still wanted to avoid an all-out war in North Vietnam, which might upset relations with China and the Soviet Union. Aviators were growing tired of risking their lives for what they considered low-value missions like attacking roads, troops, and trucks. North Vietnam’s defenses continued to take their toll on American flyers, as McDaniel’s arrival attested. He was the 212th POW to arrive at the Hilton.

  McDaniel and Jerry’s conversation about the war stretched too long to avoid notice, in Jim Mulligan’s opinion. “Jerry!” Jim hissed. “Get off the goddamn wall!”

  Ravenous for new information, Jerry didn’t stop. McDaniel asked if Jerry knew Jim Mulligan. “Hell yes,” he said. “He’s lying on the deck clearing under the door for me right now.”

  “Tell Jim his wife is in Virginia Beach and knows he is a POW,” McDaniel said through Morgan. “Father Gallagher says they are all praying for him aboard Enterprise.”

  Then he told Jerry that his family was doing fine, particularly his son Billy. “Your son is burning up Little League,” McDaniel said.

  “Hot dog!” Jerry exclaimed, just as the cell peephole flew open. An angry guard accused Jerry of communicating. Minutes later, he returned, told Jerry to dress for quiz, and led him out of the cell. Jerry wouldn’t return for nine days. He spent the first several days with hands cuffed behind his back and ankles in leg irons, kneeling in a bathhouse stall, baking in the sun. Beatings, hunger, and grotesquely swollen ankles drove a doctor to order him inside Riviera, where he developed a high fever and spent several days and nights blindfolded, in rear cuffs, sitting on a stool. Every time he fell asleep, he’d wake up on the floor, a fresh bump on his head. On July 8, guards at last returned him to Stardust with Jim Mulligan.

  The pair lived in relative peace, although in oppressive heat, for the next month. Then one day in August, Jim heard a guard open the peephole on their Stardust cell door. He saw the face of a guard nicknamed Pimples, who motioned for Jim to approach. When Jim walked over and leaned toward the open peephole, Pimples spit in his face. Jim didn’t hesitate for a second and hawked a glob of phlegm into the guard’s right eye.

  “You son of a bitch!” Jim yelled.

  “What’s wrong, Jim?” Jerry asked, hearing the shout.

  “Pimples got me up and spit in my face, so I got him back right in the eye.”

  “Jim, it’s time to take a crap, whether you have to or not, because they’re going to come back and punish us. They’ll be here in minutes; the comm purge”—the campwide communication crackdown—“must be on good. Pimples didn’t come here to do that; he was sent here.”

  They both used their bucket; they figured they’d be in stocks soon, which made bowel movements much trickier. Thirty minutes later, just as Jim finished his business, guards arrived and locked the two friends in stocks, as expected, Jerry on the top bunk, Jim on the bottom. One night soon thereafter, the guards placed their shared latrine bucket out of reach. Jim heard Jerry wake up and moan, “Jim, I have to piss so bad I can’t stand it.” With the bucket out of reach, Jim drank the last drops of water in his cup and handed it up to Jerry.

  “Use this,” he said. “It’s the only thing I can reach. Besides, I don’t want to get wet down here.”

  When the guards first clamped them in stocks, Jerry Denton had counted the days until September 2, which marked Vietnam’s National Day; he knew the independence celebration often included pardons. “We’ll be out in twenty-five days,” he predicted.

  “Oh, I don’t think it will be that long,” Jim replied.

  “Yep, it’ll be that long,” Jerry had said. He turned out to be correct.

  * * *

  Late in the summer of 1967, Cat decided it was finally time to destroy the American resistance in Little Vegas, and the Camp Authority began to target Jim Stockdale and his network. To counter his directives, they needed to find out what they were and how they spread through the cellblocks, and to quash the POWs’ organization, they needed to neutralize its leader. During one quiz, Cat sauntered around the table to Sam Johnson, leered at him, and hissed, “We will make a domestic animal out of Stockdale.” Sam sensed the Camp Authority’s fury as well as Cat’s fear—the American resistance was confounding his plan, his orders, to harness POWs for Hanoi’s purposes. Like detectives building a case, the Camp Authority began extracting information about the communication network from POWs. Unlike in Western investigations, however, these suspects had no rights and their interrogators had no limits. During 1967, many POWs experienced what they would recall as the worst summer of their lives; for eleven, that summer would be a prelude to their stay in Alcatraz.

  On August 6, guards pulled Nels Tanner from his hole in the Mint. At quiz, Rabbit told him, “Now you will pay for your Clark Kent and Ben Casey crimes. You will act the part of Clark Kent and Ben Casey in a movie to help our effort.”

  “No, I won’t,” Nels said.

  Rabbit called Pigeye, who arrived with nylon straps. Pigeye pulled Nels’s
sleeves down his arms to prevent the straps from cutting his skin or leaving other marks. He spoke soothingly in Vietnamese as he wrapped the lengths around Nels. While Nels did not understand the language, he imagined Pigeye told him he would hurt very badly but only for a short while. Pigeye and Nels both knew nobody could resist for long when he’d received orders to break a prisoner fully. Pigeye began, and his tortured captive soon agreed to play the role.

  Rabbit pressed his advantage. “You must reveal your organization,” he declared to Nels. “You must tell who is in charge. You must tell his policies and how he communicates them.”

  When Nels didn’t respond, Rabbit grew angry and shouted, “We know it is Stockdale! You must admit it. You must tell us his policies and how they are communicated.”

  Nels still refused to give up CAG, and Rabbit sought a lesser victory, torturing Nels to confess he communicated with his neighbor in the Mint. “You have communicated with the man in the next cell,” Rabbit said. “Admit it! You have talked with him, in the next cell!”

  Twisted by Pigeye’s ropes, Nels finally submitted. Afterward he collapsed on his bed and tapped to that neighbor, Jerry Coffee. “Oh, God, Jerry,” he tapped, “I’m so sorry! They worked me over with ropes. Made me say how I knew Stockdale’s policies. I told ’em from you … I’m so sorry, Jerry! I wish I could have been stronger.”

  Coffee understood what torture could do, and he forgave Nels immediately. Soon he would face the same questions as the Camp Authority ruthlessly pursued the American leader.

  In a different room, five guards tried to coerce Bob Shumaker into appearing in the same propaganda film. The film, eventually released under the title Pilots in Pajamas, was produced by an East German documentary crew interested in making Communist propaganda and reinforcing North Vietnam’s image as a benevolent captor. Using a large hook in the ceiling, the guards hoisted Shu into the air by his wrists, which they had tied behind his back. Shu couldn’t believe his shoulders could handle the strain. He quit worrying about his shoulders when the guards used an iron bar to shove a rag down his throat to silence his screams, nearly suffocating him. The torture session left him coughing blood, bruised, and unable to walk; he crawled back to his cell. He thought he’d avoided participating in the film, but the director simply assigned Shu the role of a badly injured pilot. With no more strength to resist, he played the part.

  Shu’s resistance did, in fact, foil the filmmakers’ original plans. The final script of Pilots in Pajamas noted, “Lieutenant-Commander Shumaker also refused to speak [to us]. We certainly would have liked to become acquainted with this pilot’s pilot. Because after all Shumaker, before being sent to Vietnam, was a back-up man in the American Astronaut group. But we know why he refused. His camp commander told us. Upon capture Schumaker [sic] fell down on his knees and cried for his life. We understand: The man is ashamed of himself.” Shu, who could barely swallow after his torture session, would have offered a different explanation.

  After being tortured throughout the brutal summer of 1967, Shu almost envied pilots who had lost their lives at shootdown. Most of those in CAG’s inner circle found themselves wishing for death on at least one occasion during that horrific summer as interrogators and their henchmen plied them for propaganda, information, and confessions. Yet Pigeye wouldn’t let them die. He waited for them to confess, to write, to read, to perform. To give up Jim Stockdale.

  * * *

  Air Force Captain Ron Storz spent much of the summer in Thunderbird, serving CAG devotedly by passing along his policies and never neglecting an opportunity to defy their captors. He consequently attracted special attention from the Camp Authority and became another victim of the 1967 Stockdale Purge, as POWs called the campaign. By late August, Cat and Rabbit had begun torturing Jim’s suspected closest confidants to learn more about the network and to build their case against him. They slowly began to isolate him by removing these accomplices from Thunderbird.

  Ron Storz and George McKnight were put in a Desert Inn cell along with two other uncooperatives, Georgia-born marine aviator Orson Swindle and air force Captain Wes Schierman. When Swindle found himself together with Ron and George, he said, “Look, you guys, I’ve heard about you and I just can’t tell you how much I admire you. But I’ve got to tell you something: I betrayed you up here. I gave them a statement and didn’t take torture for it.” He had tears in his eyes as he spoke. Swindle had endured ferocious beatings and rope sessions en route to Hanoi and had been starved and sleep-deprived upon his arrival. When Pigeye showed him the ropes, he’d submitted, too weak to take more.

  “Orson,” Ron said, “don’t worry about that.”

  “Hell,” George McKnight responded, “you’re looking at the Ernest Hemingway of North Vietnam. When those bastards have you in the ropes, you’re going to write!”

  Orson laughed and felt better. Now the foursome faced the Camp Authority together.

  Throughout his imprisonment, Ron Storz had loathed bowing to guards. He’d perfected giving only the slightest bend or nod possible, and from time to time he would simply not comply. That August, he rallied his three roommates to his cause. They all refused to bow. After several days, Greasy, the supervisor of Little Vegas, had had enough. He ordered his guards to begin taunting the four POWs early on the afternoon of August 21. Then he led the guards into the cell that night to deliver the real retribution. The squad locked each American in stocks, Ron and George on the top bunks and Swindle and Schierman on the bottom ones. They started on Ron, gagging him, tying him with rope, and administering a savage beating. A guard stuffed a rag down Ron’s throat with a sheath knife to muffle his cries. The guards worked themselves into a manic frenzy. The blows fell harder. George began yelling on his friend’s behalf, crying, “He’s no more guilty than I am! If you punish him, you must punish me!” The guards climbed up to his top bunk and rammed a rag down George’s throat as well. Then they jumped on his stomach like two men on a trampoline. From their bunks below, Schierman and Swindle realized that if the abdominal trauma didn’t kill him, the rag would. George had begun to suffocate. “Stop! You’re going to kill him!” they shouted. “Stop it! Torture! Torture! Torture!”

  The guards turned their fury on the men locked onto the lower bunks. By this time, other POWs had joined the commotion, yelling and banging on their cell doors in protest. For another half hour, the guards continued their frenzied beatings. When one realized the rag had nearly killed George, he pulled it out. George gagged as his starved lungs sucked in oxygen. The melee lasted until the prisoners simply had nothing left; they could only manage weak grunts as fists and feet pummeled them.

  Around 10:00 P.M., the guards herded the foursome into the Little Vegas bathhouse. They put them in leg irons, then tied them in contorted positions with ropes. They left the four men to face North Vietnam’s mosquitoes. As the insects assaulted their bodies, faces, ears, and nostrils, they could do nothing but futilely puff bursts of air at the tiny assailants. The mosquitoes feasted on their victims for the next two days. Afterward, the interrogators brought the four battered men to quiz rooms and tortured them for information about Jim Stockdale and the network.

  Ron Storz spent the following days recovering on the floor of the Tết Room, an unoccupied utility room between Stardust and the Desert Inn, named in honor of the Vietnamese New Year. He brazenly communicated with occupants of cells that shared common walls; he reported that guards had broken several of his ribs but that he was coping. When a guard caught Ron tapping, he hogtied him. Furious that the North Vietnamese still refused to treat him according to the Geneva Convention, Ron began the first American hunger strike in Hỏa Lò. The Camp Authority relented after three days, likely because they knew that if Ron starved to death, the remaining POWs could hold them accountable when the war ended. With the hunger strike, Ron had discovered his signature method of resistance, his way to influence an otherwise uncontrollable situation.

  The staff soon returned Ron to Thunderbird an
d instructed him to spy and report on “the two black criminals, Stockdale and Johnson.” After several days, the Camp Authority gave him a pen and paper to write an indictment of his commanding officer. Simmering with hatred and defiance, Ron took the pen and jammed it into his left arm.

  12

  A SNAKE YOU CAN’T KILL

  Shortly before the Camp Authority tried in vain to enlist Ron as a spy, Jim Stockdale had been moved down the hallway from Thunderbird Six West to Thunderbird Six East, a larger room in the eastern portion of the cellblock, adjacent to the latrine that separated Thunderbird from the Mint. The navy commander had resigned himself to another stay in solitary when he heard keys rattle in the lock. The door opened, and guards shoved in a stooped, skinny prisoner. Jim grinned, recognizing his friend Sam Johnson. He smothered him in a bear hug before Sam could put down his bedroll and honey bucket. They regarded each other through stinging tears. Jim took in Sam’s sallow cheeks and thin frame; his shoulders still hung limply by his sides. Sam saw that Jim’s hair was graying rapidly, although it remained as thick as ever, and his tired face made him look twice his age. At least they were together.

  The two cellmates immediately began turning their room into a communication hub. Since they shared no walls with other cells, the two whispered directives under their door or out their window, where their voices would carry along the narrow space between Thunderbird and the outer north wall. They’d also use burned matches to write messages on toilet paper, often using dots as code, and hide the notes in bowls of rice being distributed to other inmates or stash them in hiding spots in the bath stalls. Prisoners repeated their orders and distributed their notes throughout Hỏa Lò. Since the Camp Authority still used Little Vegas—Thunderbird in particular—as a temporary facility for new arrivals, Jim and Sam always had new POWs to educate. Their system hummed along until late summer, when the Camp Authority began removing conspirators from Thunderbird. Sam and Jim would listen helplessly as guards rushed into the cellblock and marched out suspects. Slowly, Thunderbird emptied, cell by cell. Jim and Sam became more isolated and more worried. Increasingly, they had to communicate with others via the bath stalls. One would watch for guards while one carefully hid notes or whispered to neighboring bathers. Riskier still, Sam and Jim sometimes whispered loudly down the Thunderbird hallway, hoping to contact prisoners sequestered on the western end.