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

  “Why fool around with nonsense like that?” Jim shouted, referring to his small communication infraction. “Let’s get on with it. Let’s talk about ‘BACK US.’ ‘We all go home together.’ ‘No repent, no repay.’”

  Greasy wasn’t yet ready for the interrogation. He ignored the argument and tied a rope tightly around Jim’s neck. He handed the loose end to the guard.

  For half an hour, the guard beat the navy commander across the dirt courtyard and back again. Every time Jim fell, rocks, sticks, and scrub brush would add to his cuts and bruises. Prisoners in the cells surrounding the Little Vegas courtyard could only listen helplessly as they heard the blows. Covered in dirt and blood, Jim backed away from the hail of fists and boots until he hunkered against the wall of the Desert Inn. The guard pulled him into a standing position and delivered two powerful blows to each kidney, then aimed the capstone punch at Jim’s solar plexus. The punch emptied Jim’s lungs. He slumped to the ground, defeated. He spent the rest of the day lying in irons on the quiz room’s floor. His pain had no single source. It seemed to originate in every nerve and it consumed his body throughout the night.

  At 10:00 A.M. the next day, the Camp Authority began a formal interrogation and torture session with a panel of North Vietnamese military officials presiding. They hoped the event would yield a confession and at last break the leader of the American resistance. Guards hauled Jim across the Heartbreak courtyard and into Room Nineteen, the Knobby Room. There, he confronted a panel of six officers he’d never seen. To his rear stood several guards, each armed as if the debilitated commander might try to escape. Off to the side, Jim saw Pigeye and a lumbering apprentice known as Big Ugh. He knew it would be an unpleasant morning.

  “I have not been here long,” began the lead officer at the table, a senior man called Mao, “but I have heard a lot about you and it’s all bad. You have incited the other criminals to oppose the Camp Authority.”

  With that, Pigeye began the show with a hard slap to Jim’s jaw. He received hearty encouragement from his audience and brought out the ropes. Pigeye looped one length around Jim’s neck and under his injured left leg. Then he jerked the rope savagely, forcing Jim’s head down toward his left knee. The leg began to bow. Pigeye pulled harder and harder, viciously bending the leg in a direction it could not go. Everyone inside the room reacted to an audible pop. A new pain, a worse pain shot from Jim’s knee through his entire body. Pigeye had not only inflicted immediate hurt, he had crippled Jim for life. With nothing left and absolutely no prospects for relief, Jim gave up the fight.

  “I am a war criminal who has wreaked destruction on your country,” he testified mechanically after he had recovered. “I have violated the good treatment you have given me by urging others to oppose the camp authority. I confess my guilt and I beg the authority for mercy.”

  Pigeye had untied the ropes, but the acute throbbing hadn’t stopped. It emanated from his knee and half the other joints in his body. The interrogation had ended. The satisfied officers filed out as Jim lay on the floor, broken physically and, for the moment, spiritually. He would not leave the room for three weeks. A full month would pass before he regained his ability to stand. During those weeks, Greasy and Vy returned time and again to ply him for statements and information of every sort. Whenever Jim resisted—which still happened regularly—Pigeye and Big Ugh were called to employ their ropes. To increase their captive’s discomfort, the guards neglected to empty Jim’s honey bucket. With his bucket full, he would urinate through the crack under the door or defecate on the floor. He existed like a sick animal, writhing in its own waste, inhaling its own stench, having no control over its lot.

  For companionship, he had the countless bugs that thrived in the prison’s squalor. Ants crawled over his body, biting him at will. From his position on the filthy floor, he watched as the ants slowly devoured the carcass of a beetle nearby, its stiff legs and brittle belly facing up toward the ceiling. As the ants carried away the beetle’s remains, Jim couldn’t help but draw the parallel to his own plight, his body and spirit confined and slowly consumed by this awful place. His captors seemed too cruel to let him die, however. Unlike the beetle, he could find no escape.

  In a happier time, Jim was a lieutenant commander, fresh from deployment, taking graduate courses at Stanford University. One day in 1962, he ventured into the Philosophy Department. He heard a resonant voice say, “Can I help you?” The voice came from Philip Rhinelander, a Harvard-educated attorney and World War II navy veteran who taught “Philosophy 6: The Problems of Good and Evil.” Rhinelander had immediately liked the square-jawed graduate student and allowed him to join his class midterm, provided Jim report for weekly tutorials at his home. Thus Jim began a course of instruction that proved every bit as important to his survival as anything he learned in the navy. Philip Rhinelander introduced him to Job and Epictetus.

  The Old Testament tells of Job, a faithful and wealthy man in southern Israel. He has always honored the Lord and lived without sin, but Satan craftily challenges God that Job would forsake him if he lost his bounties. To prove Job’s devotion, God allows Satan to unleash a series of calamities upon this devout believer. When misfortune befalls Job, his friends urge him to forsake God, but Job refuses. He had accepted God’s blessings without question; he could accept his tragedies as well. Then, as the trials never seem to end, Job finally questions God. The Lord forcefully explains to Job that man must always stay faithful to God’s larger vision and trust that he plays a role in the Lord’s plan, a plan man can never fully comprehend. From that point, Job keeps faith, and in the end, God restores his blessings. While in Hỏa Lò, the story of Job helped Jim to stop wondering, “Why me?” He didn’t search for some past transgression that had caused his condition. Like Job, he would learn to trust in God.

  While Job taught Jim Stockdale to accept his fate, Epictetus showed him how to endure it. When Jim and Rhinelander said good-bye at the semester’s end, the professor gave his pupil a copy of the Enchiridion, a handbook for the teachings of Epictetus, a former slave in Ancient Greece who became a leading Stoic philosopher. “As a military man,” Rhinelander told Jim, “I think you’ll have a special interest in this. Frederick the Great never went on a campaign without a copy of this handbook in his kit.” As Jim would in North Vietnam, Epictetus had a knee shattered in battle and left untreated by his captors. The philosopher understood that a man’s most important and desperate struggles often lay inside himself, that physical discomfort could never equate to the deep, lasting emotional anguish brought on by a failure to fulfill one’s duty. Epictetus taught that to uphold his charge and avoid that inner misery, every man must play his role in life as best he can. He cannot choose his role, however. That responsibility lies elsewhere. In that sense, Jim understood that his own thoughts and actions posed the real danger. During his long days in prison, he divided his mind into two compartments, as Epictetus taught: one for things he could control and another for things beyond his power. He could always control his attitude, his opinions, his goals, and his actions. He could not control what Rabbit or Cat might do, when the war might end, or from where he would fight that war. Other powers dictated those things for him. In Hỏa Lò Prison, Jim found solace and strength in the lessons of Epictetus and Job. He accepted his circumstance yet resolved to fight on.

  He wasn’t always alone. His men endeavored to support their commanding officer during his hardest times. On one of the long days he spent on the floor, Jim heard a prisoner snapping his washcloth in the nearby bath area. He listened intently as the snaps spelled out G-B-U-J-S: “God bless you, Jim Stockdale.” The message reminded him of why he endured, why he resisted. Jim’s resolve stemmed not so much from faith or patriotism or family, but rather from his duty to his fellow POWs. The snapping rag, this message from his troops, rallied his spirits and readied him for his next match with Greasy and Vy.

  * * *

  In the weeks since the formal interrogation, the two officers
had continued to interrogate Jim in Room Nineteen. From their questions, he soon deduced that the authorities planned to piece together a picture of the American chain of command for a formal indictment. In particular, they wanted a list of the “central committee” in the Stockdale organization. Jim protested that no such committee existed. “I issued the orders,” he said. “They were carried out. The men to whom I addressed the orders had no choice but to obey them; that is military law.”

  Still his interrogators demanded names. Big Ugh wrapped ropes around his arms. Over CAG’s continuing refusals, his tormentors chanted, “Who? Who? Who?” The ropes squeezed and contorted their victim until he complied. After CAG at last uttered “bào cào,” he asked for a pencil, paper, and time. When he regained his abilities, he began writing, “James Stockdale. Jeremiah Denton. Harry Jenkins…” He listed POWs in order of rank until his list held 212 names.

  The extensive list astounded the staff. They had no idea that Jim—or any prisoner—had memorized the names of so many POWs; the detention system now held a total of more than 270. It reminded the Camp Authority that if a POW died in captivity, from causes natural or otherwise, Americans would know it, and one day reckoning might come. Jim’s long list also confounded the officials, who still insisted a central committee must exist. Jim did his best to explain, saying, “This is our organization. It is a lineal responsibility list. It is like a snake you can’t kill—the head will always grow back: Take me out and Denton will take over; take Denton out and Jenkins will fill in.”

  Still under pressure to identify a central committee, Jim looked down the list, past the names of navy commanders and air force lieutenant colonels, which were equivalent military ranks. When he reached the last of these senior officers, he drew a line. Everyone above the line, he explained, served on the central committee. That satisfied the cadre only temporarily. They came back, demanding more information about the senior leaders. CAG wrote statements that read like glowing performance reviews. “Jeremiah A. Denton, Jr., Comdr., USN, served under my command … has carried out all of my orders in a forthright manner, and thereby opposed the camp authority. He organized communications in his cellblock so as to execute my orders…”

  He continued praising Denton as well as Jenkins, Rutledge, and Mulligan; he reasoned the Camp Authority already knew these men were troublemakers, and by giving up their names, he could protect junior officers like Coker, McKnight, and Storz. The cadre wanted more.

  “You are obscure,” they charged. “You have not given details on what these people did, and when they did them.”

  “I would not know such details,” Jim answered. “I issued general orders. The details are up to my subordinates. That is our military custom.”

  The interrogators still demanded incriminating information. “You have not said which of these men has the capability of doing damage to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam,” they complained. To the end of his report on each senior man, CAG simply added, “He also has the capability to do damage to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.”

  “Now you must beg the mercy of the Vietnamese people,” they told him and presented a typed statement as an example. CAG wrote and signed a propaganda statement, interlacing oddly worded phrases like “I want to thank you for saving my life from death” to indicate his insincerity, and the matter seemed finished.

  Sometime around October 1, guards entered Room Nineteen, which had housed their arch criminal for the past three weeks. They lifted him from the floor and half walked, half dragged him back to Little Vegas. They shoved him into the first cell in Riviera. He fell face forward onto the hard floor and collapsed. A guard called Drut (“Turd” spelled backward) cuffed Jim’s hands behind him, then cinched on a blindfold. The guards left him alone, unable to see, unable to stand, barely able to sit upright. He could only move by sliding like a worm along the smooth concrete, which would soon be covered in his own filth. With his hands cuffed behind his back, he could not even swat at the mosquitoes. Nor could he send messages to other POWs. He had no idea when or if this existence would end. There in his dark Riviera cell, on the edges of the Little Vegas courtyard, Jim Stockdale became Job, seemingly forsaken by his country and his God. Drawing inspiration from the biblical story, Jim refused to abdicate faith in either. He humbly accepted his role and the reality of his present situation, yet he would never stop believing that he would ultimately triumph. He didn’t know how long he would remain in Hanoi and tried not to speculate; it was beyond his control. He locked those distracting thoughts away; they’d only divert the precious focus he needed to complete the task at hand: leading his men until they returned home, their honor intact. He readied himself for the worst and forced himself to recognize that his deplorable condition would not change until his captivity ended—either with a ticket home or with his death on the floor of Riviera One.

  Over in the Mint, Sam Johnson continued his own depressing existence. The only human voice Sam or Howie Rutledge heard came from the hostile guard who delivered two daily meals and escorted the captives 40 feet to the latrine. Every morning, slivers of daylight passed through the boards covering the high barred windows. Two spiders occupied the corners of the window, spinning intricate webs that, to Sam, became art. Each morning he gently tugged down the webs, carefully leaving the artists with a blank canvas so he could pass the next hours watching them weave new masterpieces. “Howie,” Sam whispered to his neighbor, “I got a construction job going on in here. It’s pretty interesting. Watch the spiders in your cell. It passes the time.”

  “Yeah,” responded Howie. “And you can eat ’em, too. It’s pure protein. Not bad. Try some.” The idea proved tempting, but Sam could never eat his only companions.

  By late summer 1967, Sam had withered from 190 pounds to barely 130. He could see the outlines of his bones against his skin. He had no energy and spent his days lying still, trying to conserve the few calories his body could digest from his diet of watery vegetable soup and occasional pieces of fat. The less he moved, however, the tighter depression and despair gripped him. Mental fatigue gained parity with hunger in his list of tormentors. He began slowly to lose his mind.

  In August, a guard summoned him to quiz with Chihuahua. “You are in very great trouble, Sông,” the little political officer said. “We are very angry with you. Your collaboration with Stockdale is going to make things very bad for you … Your attitude is very bad. You cannot afford to continue in this manner. You are already in very great trouble.”

  Chihuahua’s charge utterly perplexed Sam. He thought to himself, “I’m sweating and starving to death in a tiny cell, completely cut off from everyone, and I’m in great trouble?” Sam remained stoic and nonchalant, but his mind strained to imagine what sins he’d apparently committed—or how the North Vietnamese could punish him any further. He lived in a sweltering, almost suffocating box, befriended only by spiders, preyed upon by insects. Guards had boarded his window. He slept on a bamboo mat laid on a dirty bunk. His broken shoulders and arm had healed slowly and poorly. Hunger constantly gnawed at him and weakened him more each day. The renewed vigilance of the Mint’s guards had effectively ended communication between him and Howie Rutledge; he had no contact with other prisoners. Like every other POW, he had no idea if he’d ever leave. What trouble could he possibly cause, and how could it get worse?

  “You are to be punished,” Chihuahua pronounced. “You must be put in leg stocks. Probably you will be locked in them for the rest of your imprisonment.”

  With his best effort, Sam acted as if he didn’t care. His reaction infuriated Chihuahua, who accompanied Sam and a guard detail back to the Mint. They pushed him into his cell and pulled him to a sitting position, with his legs stretched out in front of him. They set his ankles in the open stocks and swung the top closed. The bindings fit tightly around his ankles and pressed into his skin. Chihuahua surveyed the rig and warned the guards not to unlock the stocks, no matter what Sam might say. Then they left Sam alone.


  He could either lie flat on his back or sit up with his legs straight in front of him. The tight stocks and chafing around his ankles made any significant movement challenging, although he forced himself to do straight-legged sit-ups on occasion until the discomfort in his ankles and his emaciated hips drove him to stop. Before the month ended, pus seeped from infected cuts around his ankles. Days stretched on without end, one after another. Sometimes, he lay still, neither feeling nor seeing. He didn’t even swat at the mosquitoes and insects that played on his clammy skin. At other times, moments of claustrophobic panic seized him. He clawed at himself in a desperate yet futile rage. He never bathed; he disgusted himself. Days passed with slow indifference, one by one, until he had spent seventy-four days in the stocks. On the evening of that seventy-fourth day, he had nothing left: no spirit, no strength, no will, no hope. He fell asleep thinking, “It would be okay if I never woke up again.”

  That night a storm raced through Hanoi. Its winds ripped the boards off Sam’s window. Fresh rain blew inside, and he began praying fervently, inspired by the tempest outside. Morning found a clear sky over Hỏa Lò Prison, and daylight spilled into his cell for the first time in more than two months. He felt peace. He recalled Lamentations 3:22–23, which he learned as a boy: “It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.” The morning restored his hope, and Sam once again believed he would survive. Later that day, a guard entered the cell and unlocked the stocks. The metal bar swung up to reveal deep, bloodied indentations around his ankles. Sam reached to massage them. The guard hit him with a rifle.