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

  Despite the purge, each newly arrived POW would soon hear a whisper or find a note in his rice that explained the BACK US guidelines. Eighty-two new aviators joined the colony between May 1 and mid-September 1967, and they all knew the orders came from a senior officer called CAG whom they’d never actually seen. With so many people knowing his edicts, Jim knew he would eventually find himself in real trouble. In August 1967, he finally did.

  * * *

  A young navy pilot, who had only recently joined the POW ranks, faced an interrogation and stubbornly refused to answer any questions about his background or mission. When interrogators asked why he wouldn’t respond, he cited the rules of his commanding officer. The interrogator blinked in apparent disbelief—there were no ranks among the prisoners! The Camp Authority held all power. The interrogator immediately summoned Cat, who oversaw the application of ropes and fists until the young man broke. He surrendered the rules and gave up Jim’s name. At last, Cat seemed to feel as if he had the evidence or proper cover he needed to go after the crippled, half-starved commander. By breaking Jim Stockdale, Cat aimed to decapitate the American resistance.

  Shortly after 8:00 P.M. one August night, Jim and Sam’s Thunderbird cell went dark. Lights went out in the hallway and along the exterior wall outside their window. Jim heard hushed voices and soft footsteps outside their door; he sensed the guards were waiting for him to whisper to the neighboring cells. Jim didn’t take the bait, and after a period of silence, the peephole flew open with a loud slap. A flashlight’s beam cut through the dark. A sharp command for silence followed. Seconds later, Rabbit stormed into the room. In the confusion, he and Jim collided. Rabbit sprawled backward into another guard.

  “You attack me!” Rabbit screamed. “You will be punished!”

  Rabbit slammed the door and left Jim and Sam to ponder their fate. Minutes later, the camp restored power and Rabbit reappeared. “Roll up, Đán,” he commanded. As Jim gathered his pitiful possessions, Rabbit said, “You are instigating a revolt! You and Sông”—Sam—“are threatening to overthrow the Vietnamese government. You are going to be punished.”

  The accusation astounded Sam. How could two starving prisoners with one good arm between them present any threat to the government of North Vietnam? It didn’t matter. Jim bid good luck to Sam and hobbled after Rabbit, who led him to the Mint, the worst cellblock of the entire Hanoi Hilton, not just the Little Vegas section. With Jim securely stowed in Cell Three of the Mint, Rabbit returned for Sam, pulling him out of Thunderbird and shoving him into the Mint’s Cell One. Several days later, unable to find any prisoner willing to occupy the Mint’s middle cell and spy on the nefarious duo, the Camp Authority moved Sam to the center cell and placed another agitator in his former end cell: Commander Howie Rutledge, who’d already logged one stay in the Mint for an earlier communication infraction. The guards locked all three troublemakers in leg irons. Not that it mattered—the cells were so small, the inmates could scarcely move anyway.

  Howie had not forgotten the stench of the Mint. Oppressive heat and humidity combined with the foul smell of the pigsty outside and honey buckets inside made Mint residents constantly fight their gag reflexes. If Howie stood in the cell’s center—that is, if he stood on the wooden bunk—only 6 inches of space separated each shoulder from the closest wall. When he lay down, his body nearly stretched the length of the floor. Howie couldn’t escape his physical surroundings—nearly two years in Hanoi had taught him this well—but he could control his mind. If he didn’t, he’d go mad. So like other POWs, Howie enforced order upon his existence. Each morning, he walked the six-step circuit around his cell, humming old spirituals, pausing after every fifth hymn to offer a prayer. He usually offered prayers for his children, his wife, and his mother. Then he’d recite scripture, those verses he could recall. Some verses he remembered accurately; others he cobbled together as best he could. Such improvised liturgy shepherded him through long days of isolation. Guards constantly patrolled the cellblock’s small vestibule, where they could hear telltale taps or open a door’s peephole at any moment. With only three cells to monitor, they made communication exceptionally risky.

  To sustain himself, Howie relied heavily upon his previous three weeks of happy cohabitation with air force Captain George McKnight in the Desert Inn. The stint together began with McKnight tossing shreds of toilet paper into the air like confetti and the two men toasting each other with their cups of water. By the end of three days, they both had sore throats from talking so much. George’s abiding faith had helped Howie remember the value of scripture and prayer. Prior to his weeks with George, Howie had spent 540 straight days in solitary confinement. He had not had a roommate since arriving in Hanoi in November of 1965, when he and Harry Jenkins earned the distinction of being the first senior officers to meet Pigeye. Whereas George McKnight had spent thirty-four days half-buried in his Briar Patch cell’s bomb shelter, Howie had spent twenty-eight days locked in the Zoo’s Outhouse, surrounded by darkness, insects, and human waste. By the time he had signed a statement—I am a Yankee imperialist aggressor—Howie could not even remember how many children he had.

  In fact, he and his high school sweetheart, Phyllis, had four, Sondra, Johnny, Peggy, and Barbara—all in Oklahoma, not sure whether he was dead or alive, and certainly not aware of what he actually faced. When Phyllis had turned eighteen, Howie broke navy regulations to marry her; rules forbade students from marrying before they’d graduated flight school, but Howie had avoided getting caught. As their life together progressed, aviation often took priority over family. Howie had become a fixture at the Officers’ Club—time he perhaps should have spent at home. During his days in Hanoi, regret preyed upon him. He lamented not spending more time with his family, and he resolved to do better when he returned. He also vowed to renew his faith. He grew up in a Southern Baptist family, but within months of marrying Phyllis, he had stopped attending church—“too busy,” he’d always say. In the Outhouse and Desert Inn, Howie crawled back to the Lord. Church became not a weekly event but an hourly one. In their shared Desert Inn cell, George McKnight helped oversee Howie’s spiritual reawakening and enabled him to reach back to his childhood to recall scripture, prayers, and hymns. Without the opportunity to renew his belief in God with George, he could not have endured the Mint.

  As he smelled the pigsty and sweated in the heat, he also pined for the less-religious aspects of the companionship he’d enjoyed with George. The two men had discovered the rare pleasure of cursing. Since most staff could not understand English, Howie and George expressed themselves by smiling kindly at guards while unleashing torrents of obscenity. It provided immense enjoyment and a rare sense of victory. Before long, though, both agreed their swearing had slipped out of hand, and they decided to spend a full week counting their curses. At week’s end, the cellmate with the fewest curses would win a banana. They didn’t have a banana, of course; they would have to steal one. As for the morality of stealing, Howie figured they were concentrating on cursing that week—lessons about thievery could come later.

  Suspecting the nature of their exchanges with guards, Bug called Howie to quiz. “You have been given very good treatment, very humane,” he told the prisoner. “Look, now you have a roommate. You should show gratitude and cooperative spirit.”

  Howie fired right back, “I spent a year and a half in solitary confinement before I got a roommate! That is the worst form of mental cruelty. Your government signed the Geneva Convention, yet you do not treat us as we are entitled to be treated, as prisoners of war. You are in violation of international law!” Bug did not appreciate the outburst. He soon separated Howie and George and hauled Howie back to the Mint.

  In his new cell, Howie started communicating with his neighbor, Sam Johnson. Unfortunately, a guard soon caught him with his ear to his cup, tapping on the wall. The guard cuffed Howie’s hands behind his back and locked him to his bed. For five days, he lay flat, cooking in the late summer heat. He sweated throu
gh his daily ration of water before noon. Successive hot days without bathing led to boils erupting on every part of his body; many oozed foul-smelling pus. Howie counted sixty that measured an inch or more.

  The boils tormented him relentlessly and robbed him of precious sleep, which offered his only escape from the wretched conditions. Curing the boils became an increasing priority in his daily prayers. He found himself in a constant state of misery that had no foreseeable end. Finally, as he wondered how he could survive any longer, a doctor administered antibiotics to kill the infections. The boils slowly began to heal.

  Howie Rutledge in training at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida, 1949.

  If Howie, Sam, and CAG had been in contact with the underground network humming outside their isolated corner of Hỏa Lò, they would have learned that boils afflicted nearly all the prisoners during the summer of 1967. Ever competitive and always desperate for entertainment, the POWs initiated a contest. With the help of cellmates—when available—they counted their boils and tapped their tallies through the walls. They learned that twenty to forty boils had erupted on the average body. One fair-skinned midwesterner ran away with the title; he counted 243.

  Sam Johnson’s boils numbered above average, but nobody outside the Mint could have known. The Camp Authority usually permitted the three residents to leave their cells only once a day—and only one by one—to visit the latrines just outside their cellblock, an excursion of less than forty steps. Such endless drudgery took its toll. Sam found it harder and harder to find refuge in God. He never saw other Americans. Days passed without him using his voice. He felt his mind slipping. In federal prison, regulations once limited a prisoner’s stay in solitary to nineteen consecutive days—a longer stay could have devastating long-term effects. Sam had passed that limit many times over by 1967. Six days would pass without his ever seeing the sun, which boarded windows effectively blocked. Once a week the guard might allow Sam and his two friends to leave the Mint—still only one at a time—and walk to the bath stalls in the Little Vegas courtyard. Only then could they see the daytime sky. They never saw stars.

  Unbeknown to Sam, his wife, Shirley, gazed at the stars on his behalf. On lonely nights back in Texas, she imagined her husband locked away in a Hanoi jail, behind walls and a roof that barred him from seeing the nighttime sky. She would step outside their Texas home and quietly look up toward the heavens and think of Sam, hoping that he had somehow survived. These peaceful moments became her daily gift to him; she could do little else.

  On the East Coast, Sandra Storz still waited for word from Ron. She lived near Pease Air Force Base in New Hampshire with her parents, who helped her raise her eight-year-old son and three-year-old daughter. In more than two years, Sandra had received no news from Hanoi or Washington regarding her husband’s death or capture; he was still missing. So the package that arrived on her birthday surprised her. On July 29, she opened a large envelope from the U.S. Air Force. Inside, she found a letter asking her to identify the captured pilot in the enclosed photograph from April 1965. It was Ron. Suddenly, she had a new reason to hope.

  In San Diego, Howie Rutledge’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Sondra, became one of the first POW family members to become a public advocate for American prisoners in Vietnam. She was as outspoken as her father, and government rules about POW families keeping quiet did not sit well with her. As the domestic antiwar movement gained momentum, she felt it was her duty to remind citizens that even if they opposed the war, they shouldn’t forget about the servicemen in Vietnam.

  The brother of Sondra’s close friend Virginia Nasmyth had been a POW since September 1966, and with the help of California congressman Bob Wilson, Sondra and Virginia set up a small office outside San Diego with two lamps, two phones, and two thick phone books. They started at A and began dialing numbers. When people answered, Sondra would say, “We’re just calling to remind you to remember our POWs and have concern for our prisoners in Vietnam.” Sometimes their calls would spark conversation, sometimes the young women would just receive a polite “thank you.” Only rarely did the line go dead. Night after night, the two high schoolers diligently made their calls, building public awareness and hoping their work would help America’s POWs.

  While Phyllis Rutledge would never become as outspoken as her daughter, she would join thirty-two other San Diego–area POW/MIA wives to form the League of Wives of American Vietnam Prisoners of War. By the end of 1967, the women had new stationery and a post office box. They went to work, sharing information and slivers of hope and commiserating with one another. They weren’t yet bucking their orders to say nothing publicly—the Keep Quiet policy the wives regarded with increasing contempt—but with Sybil Stockdale as its leader, this League of Wives began to call attention to America’s POW and MIA families. The group started to draw San Diego families together for support, press the government to release more information, and serve as an example for POW/MIA wives in other regions of the country. Their small band would grow and become part of a larger national movement, positioning these women to shape the entire world’s dialogue about American POWs—and eventually affect the policies of the North Vietnamese Camp Authority itself.

  * * *

  Oblivious to the stirrings of public concern for POWs and his wife’s role in spreading awareness, Jim Stockdale soldiered on in the Mint alongside Howie and Sam. The guards considered Jim the most dangerous criminal in their custody. When he stepped outside the shadows of the Mint, wobbling and squinting as his dilated pupils adjusted to the sunlight, guards adopted what he called the Ted Williams shift. Just as baseball teams would shift defensive postures when the great Red Sox slugger came to bat, the North Vietnamese blocked the other POWs from Jim’s influence by clearing the baths and all surrounding areas when they let him out of his cell. His only time outside the Mint—his walk to and from the Little Vegas baths—offered him few signs of other Americans.

  One day on the short walk to the bath, the guard gave him a razor and indicated he should shave. Jim welcomed the chance to clear his salt-and-pepper stubble—more salt than pepper now that he’d reached age forty-three—even though the dirty water and lack of shaving cream made the process distinctively uncomfortable. Afterward, as Jim left the stall and started for the Mint, the guard yanked him in the opposite direction, toward the Riviera cellblock and Cat’s quiz room. Jim entered the room warily and bowed slightly to a young interrogator named Vy who sat behind the desk. Vy informed Jim that visitors wanted to interview him. He warned that severe punishment would accompany any misbehavior. Jim said little. Before Vy dismissed his prisoner, he leaned across the table, beckoning Jim to move closer. In a hushed voice, he said something Jim would never forget. “You have made a lot of trouble for the general staff officer,” Vy warned, referring to Cat. “He is very, very angry. Criminals at camps miles away all know your rules. The general staff officer says that you have set back the Camp Authority two years.”

  Even as the guard blindfolded him for the excursion to the interview, Jim’s spirits soared. Vy had reaffirmed his purpose.

  Jim’s next battle took place at the Plantation, where Jerry Denton had blinked his T-O-R-T-U-R-E message the previous year. When guards unloaded him from the truck and removed his blindfold, Jim found Cat, Vy, and several men dressed in Western clothes: Russians seeking material for a novel. Jim gave them the minimum and did so hostilely, refusing to look at them. Instead, he fixed his eyes on Cat, glaring at him as he responded to the Russians’ questions. Cat spoke to Vy, who rose and walked around the table to Jim. He leaned over and whispered, “The general staff officer says you are to quit looking at him. You are not to look in his direction.”

  Jim mentally chalked up another small win.

  At last, the Russians gave Jim a chance to ask any questions. “Yes, I have a question,” he said, looking for an excuse to chat and to annoy Cat. “How are the Russian-U.S. track meets coming?”

  Jim saw befuddlement and irritation on eve
ry face at the table. In broken English, one Russian scoffed, “Do you mean sport?”

  “Yes,” Jim said. “I remember seeing a great track-and-field contest between the Soviet Union and the United States at the stadium of Stanford University in 1962. Are they still being held?”

  “No, they have been stopped because of the American imperialist war of aggression in Vietnam.”

  “What was the name of that great Russian high jumper of those years?” Jim asked, amusing himself and wondering when Cat would end the small talk.

  “Valeriy Brumel,” the Russian replied.

  “That’s all!” Cat broke in. “The conference is finished.”

  With several victories tallied that day, Jim returned to the Mint and relayed the day’s events to Sam and Howie; he was grateful for their presence on the other side of the wall. While the three couldn’t see each other, their secretive taps and whispers sustained them. For that short time, they at least had each other.

  One morning in early September, Jim leaned his cup against his cell wall and tapped the letters “GM” to Sam—short for “good morning.” Before Sam could respond, Jim heard a loud whoop from the alleyway outside the Mint. A guard had been peering through the window from the watchtower and caught him in the act. As Jim knew, the Camp Authority apparently needed to catch a prisoner breaking a rule before they could punish him. Now that they had caught Jim, he suspected torture—punishment, as the North Vietnamese called it—would soon come. Indeed, the guard came into the Mint and hastily unlocked Jim’s leg irons. He shoved him out of the cell and across the courtyard to Cat’s quiz room, tucked on the southern side of Little Vegas, just across from Stardust. Greasy met them and pushed Jim onto a floor covered with dirt, debris, and remnants of recent torture sessions. On went the blindfold and handcuffs.