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

  “Get up,” he ordered. “Dress up!”

  Sam couldn’t move. His muscles had atrophied, and two guards had to drag him out of the Mint. Sam’s frail legs trailed across the Vegas courtyard as two North Vietnamese took him to the Riviera cellblock, where Jim Stockdale had spent the past weeks. Sam once again faced Chihuahua. The officer announced, “Stockdale has confessed.”

  “What are you talking about?” Sam answered, knowing that if Stockdale confessed to anything, the Camp Authority had tortured him.

  “He has confessed to everything you and he have been doing in this camp to instigate revolt and disobedience.”

  “If he has confessed to anything it is because you forced him, you made him,” Sam rejoined, watching Chihuahua’s temper rise. “He didn’t do anything voluntarily.”

  “That is not so. Here, see for yourself.” He placed the signed document in front of Sam, who studied it. The typed words said that CAG and his collaborators aimed to overthrow the government of North Vietnam; that they ran a pervasive communication network contrary to the regulations of the Camp Authority. A nearly illegible signature followed the type. “Please, God, let him be all right,” Sam thought. “Oh, God, help him.” He knew CAG must have suffered mightily as interrogators extracted the statement.

  “That may be his signature,” Sam told Chihuahua, “but I can tell from the way it’s written that it was forced from him.”

  “You must write your confession now,” Chihuahua responded.

  “You don’t need anything from me if you’ve got Stockdale’s,” Sam said in his calm southern drawl. “I’m not going to write anything. If you want anything from me, you’ll have to force me.”

  Sam watched Chihuahua’s anger flare. He marched around the desk and looked Sam in the face. “You are very obstinate,” he said, then paused before continuing. “This camp has decided you are to be killed. Go back to your cell!” The guards began to return him to the Mint, but Chihuahua stopped them. “Before you die,” he added, “the camp authorizes you to shower and shave.”

  Like a death row inmate about to eat his last meal, Sam stumbled into the Little Vegas bathhouse with his soap and razor. The flow of water over his filthy body made him forget about the death sentence, his second since arriving in North Vietnam. Even the tepid water felt divine as it washed away months of foulness. If the Camp Authority had fated him to die, at least he would meet his fate with some measure of cleanliness.

  Once he returned to his cell, he debated his future. His thoughts alternated between peace with death and mistrust of Chihuahua. He’d wished for death just days earlier, and if it came now, he could accept it. In a way, it would bring relief, allowing him to escape the horror of his captivity. Shortly after his shootdown, he’d entrusted his life to God. Now, at what might be the end, his faith did not waver. Sam was prepared for death—but the Camp Authority did not plan to kill Sam Johnson. They had concocted something even worse.

  13

  A HELLUVA STORY

  With the prisoner population continuing to grow, the North Vietnamese built new facilities to house their captives. One location satisfied two needs: additional cells and strategic protection. In the summer of 1967, they moved more than thirty downed airmen into makeshift cells around the Yên Phú thermal power plant, which sprawled across five blocks not far from central Hanoi and had become a target for U.S. air strikes. Uncharacteristically, they let journalists and the public know exactly where they held these Americans so the information would trickle back to the U.S. military. The prisoners began their service as human shields.

  They felt more like coal miners. When George McKnight arrived at the complex, he found himself in a small cellblock nicknamed Dirty Bird. Layers of coal dust rose from bins outside and blanketed the grounds, walls, floors, and often his own hair and skin. One inmate reported that the dust collected on his shoulders like black dandruff. George almost felt sorry for the Vietnamese families who’d previously made their homes in these rooms that the Camp Authority had converted to prison cells. At one time, Dirty Bird’s eight rooms had had sizable windows, but they’d been sealed with bricks for the prisoners. Without ventilation, the rooms became oppressively hot. After McKnight arrived in September, the guards occasionally paroled him to a row of open-air enclosures across the corridor. These cells—more like stable stalls—offered a slight reprieve during the suffocating afternoons.

  As he idled in a stall one day, locked in place with handcuffs, he discovered a sliver of wire within his reach. He used it to pick the lock on his cuffs. For several minutes, he just enjoyed the simple freedom. Then he couldn’t resist standing up and peeking cautiously down the walkway outside. He found it deserted. Trusting providence and following his own sense of daring, he ventured out and walked quietly along the corridor. He found an American slumbering away in another stall. McKnight began shaking what appeared to be a young James Cagney. Startled, twenty-four-year-old George Coker woke up and saw 6'2" McKnight looming before him. Coker, still groggy, thought he saw an angel.

  Soon, the two men began talking of escape. Dirty Bird presented a unique situation. The guards wanted U.S. reconnaissance to report POWs near the power plant, so they made Coker and McKnight carry buckets or empty milk jugs on regular and very public excursions to fetch water from a spigot several blocks away. To accomplish this, they shouldered a long pole from which hung the buckets. They tapped the pole gently as they walked, sending code to each other right under their escorts’ noses. Along the route, the POWs spotted the steel structure of a bridge not far from the prison. Coker had served as bombardier-navigator and had spent hours studying the layout of Hanoi. He remembered enough to know they were looking at the Long Biên Bridge—formerly known as the Paul Doumer Bridge—which spanned the Red River. The river, he recalled, flowed from China, through Hanoi, and into the Gulf of Tonkin.

  Typically, POWs never knew their location within Hanoi, but now McKnight and Coker did. They knew how to reach the river, which could provide a viable escape route. Further, since Coker and McKnight were the sole inhabitants of their cellblock, the Camp Authority couldn’t charge other POWs with conspiracy. Even with those unique advantages, they had to consider any scheme to escape from Hanoi a long shot—but the two companions had nothing to lose.

  George Coker, whose daring fifteen-mile escape attempt assured his sentence to Alcatraz.

  “Look, this prison is a house of cards,” Coker said to McKnight, trying to instigate the escape. “We could get out of here real easy.”

  Skeptically, McKnight replied, “Yeah, then what?”

  “We go down there to the Doumer Bridge,” Coker explained. “The river has to be running through there. We get to the river, swim down the Red River at night, get to the coast, steal a boat, and sail out there. I know where the carriers are and the flight patterns, and we’ll go out there and get rescued.”

  To the older McKnight, the scheme sounded far-fetched. He couldn’t foresee how they would ever make it out of Hanoi, let alone reach the Gulf of Tonkin. How would they make it to the river? Where would they find food? How would they avoid the peasants who traveled the river and fished its banks? How would they signal the fleet? McKnight pondered these questions during the coming days as the two debated the idea. A year as a POW had not affected Coker’s determination, and he had a ready answer to each objection McKnight raised. Even so, he wasn’t convincing McKnight. In fact, he never did.

  McKnight never believed an escape attempt would work, but he knew that never trying would haunt him. He pictured himself returning home and having to confess, “I thought it couldn’t be done, so we never tried.” He considered himself better than that. Besides, escape ran in his family.

  From the day in 1864 when George McKnight’s great-grandfather Melvin Grigsby marched through the palisades of Georgia’s Andersonville prison, he thought of little but daily survival and escape from the crowded plain that would claim more than 12,000 Union soldiers. Fortunately, when Confede
rate guards uncovered his first tunneling operation, they didn’t catch Grigsby in the tunnel, and he avoided the progressive series of three punishments meted out by the guards: hanging by thumbs, languishing in leg and arm stocks, and finally joining the chain gang, where each weak and starving member had to drag a cannonball wherever he went. His next attempt came months later, after being transferred to Florence, South Carolina. As the Confederate guards assembled Andersonville arrivals at the Florence train station, Grigsby washed himself and donned white pants and a clean shirt he’d acquired. As the column of dirty Union captives marched toward the new camp just outside the city, Grigsby slyly fell out and simply became a local, blending in and sharing his views on the new Yankee prisoners. He surreptitiously faded into the background as the column moved on without him. Then he struck out for the coast. Along the way, his Virginia and Kentucky ancestry made him virtually indistinguishable from South Carolinians. His great-grandson would have much more difficulty blending into the local citizenry of Vietnam.

  McKnight and Coker estimated the trip to the coast would take seven days. Both considered escape a long shot at best, suicidal at worst, but they were tired of being tortured and wasting away in filthy cells so far from home. As the war dragged on, escape seemed like the only way they might ever return. Above all, Article III of the Code of Conduct demanded that they make the attempt, even against long odds.

  They’d need the cover of night, so they’d first have to unlock the cells where they slept. The simple locking mechanisms in Dirty Bird consisted of two iron pins, each a half inch in diameter with a loop at one end. The jailers had fastened one pin to the outside door frame so the iron loop at its head extended in front of the cell door, hovering over the loop of a perpendicular pin, which they had driven through the 2-inch thick door in place of a traditional handle. A simple metal hook or padlock would drop through the two loops, locking the pins together and trapping the prisoner in his cell. The jailers had driven the second pin through the cell door and pounded the protruding end into the back of the door with a hammer, effectively locking the pin in place. The would-be escapees scavenged sharp, pencil-sized pieces of metal that they employed as chisels and began digging into the wood around the ends of the pins. Eventually, they each freed the bent end so they could straighten the pins. Then they dug into the wood around the pins themselves. Once they sufficiently loosened the pins from the back, they could slide them out as they opened their doors inward. A padlock would still conjoin the heads of the two pins, but the second pin would no longer hold the door. The prisoners could simply walk out. On October 12, 1967—Columbus Day back in America—they decided to go.

  After the guards finished one of their late-evening rounds, the escape began. The two conspirators placed trash they’d collected during the preceding days on their sleeping mats, then covered the rubbish with their blankets. In the dim light, a guard would think the prisoner still slumbered away on his mat. Coker and McKnight wanted to put as much distance as possible between themselves and Dirty Bird before the authorities discovered they were missing.

  They both picked their handcuffs, and George Coker opened his cell door, gently pulling the door away from the lock, feeding the pin through the dug-out hole. The cell door silently pulled clear of the pin and left it dangling from its mate, now joined by a useless padlock. Coker stepped cautiously into the corridor and pulled the door closed, reinserting the pin and jamming it fast. As planned, he then knocked on McKnight’s door, and the air force captain repeated the procedure. As McKnight knelt in the dark hallway and relocked his door from the outside, Coker’s hand suddenly clenched his shoulder. Startled, he looked around and saw Coker, eyes wide and index finger pressed against his lips. He pointed to the hallway’s end, where a guard had just walked into the latrine. They froze and watched him walk back into the guards’ quarters. His eyes never shifted to the right or left. Had the guard proven more alert, the escape would have been short-lived. With the guard gone, Coker relaxed his grip and both men breathed again. They began creeping along the compound’s interior walls, staying in the shadows until they climbed onto a roof.

  Since the architects had originally designed Dirty Bird as part of a power plant, not a jail, its walls aimed to keep people out, not in. Consequently, the pair made a relatively easy exit. Workers had piled crates and equipment alongside the buildings and walls, so climbing to the rooftop proved simple. After a short, soft-footed walk along the roof, they hopped onto another inner wall, climbed down a stack of boxes, and raced across a final stretch of ground to the outer wall. They scrambled up a mound of dirt and debris, swung over the wall, and dropped onto the street. From the time they’d arrived in Dirty Bird, it had taken Coker and McKnight less than three weeks to escape.

  On the street, nothing stirred. They took a collective breath and began darting from cover to cover, navigating their way toward the river. They snuck along streets to the upper bank of the river and its floodplain. They slipped down a mud slope into the marshy bottomland where they could hide in the shadows. As the two airmen crept through the paddies and marsh grass, scaling small dykes along the way, McKnight turned to Coker and said, “You know, George, someday you’re going to have a helluva story to tell your grandkids.”

  “Right,” Coker whispered back, “but first we gotta live long enough to have kids!”

  About two hours after they escaped their cells, they arrived at the Long Biên Bridge. Hanoi’s most prominent span practically glowed with floodlights and torches as crews repaired damage from the latest rounds of U.S. bombs. The light fell on the marsh at the river’s edge, which the escapees would have to cross. Fortunately, the workers’ attention never strayed from the bridge. Nobody heard the crackling of reeds or soft splashes below. Nobody noticed the two fugitives creeping through the grass, sneaking across the mudflat, and slipping into the river.

  The escaped prisoners stripped down to their underwear and tied their wrists together with cords they’d taken from a clothesline. Thus conjoined, they eased themselves into the faster current and headed south down the Red River, toward the Pacific Ocean, the U.S. fleet, and sweet freedom. As they swam away from Hanoi center, the sounds of the city faded, as did the lights. George Coker forgot the chill of the river and gazed up at stars he had not seen since he stood on the deck of the USS Constellation, fourteen months earlier. For a moment, life became peaceful. The river carried little traffic at such a late hour, so the two men swam with cautious optimism for 15 miles. Six hours after they entered the water, dawn began to break. The sudden transformation of the sky reminded McKnight of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Mandalay.”

  On the road to Mandalay,

  Where the flyin’-fishes play,

  An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ’crost the Bay.

  Dawn on the Red River indeed came up like thunder. One minute, night covered the river. The next, the sun raced into the sky. Activity along the banks increased. Skiffs began plying the currents; fishermen began casting lines and nets into the water to catch their morning meal. The conspicuous swimmers struck out for a deserted section of riverbank. They floated along the bank until they spied a washed-out hole where they could spend the day; they’d wait for nightfall to resume their journey. Exhausted, they pulled themselves from the river and slithered into their hiding place. They found it more cramped than the smallest cells in Little Vegas, but they could hear birds, smell the river, and see open sky above them. They forgot about their fatigue and hunger. For a moment, they had found freedom, of a sort.

  Around nine o’clock, George Coker turned to his partner and calmly said, “Well, that’s it.”

  “What do you mean, ‘That’s it?’” McKnight asked in a whisper.

  Coker pointed upward. McKnight followed his friend’s hand and saw an elderly Vietnamese man peering down at them, his eyes as wide and surprised as McKnight’s own. The man hurried to tell others, and minutes later, locals had surrounded the skinny, wet Caucasians with farm t
ools and rifles. They put their hands on their heads; their great escape had ended. It was Friday the thirteenth, a date both escapees would forever consider particularly unlucky.

  They quickly realized the peasants had absolutely no idea who they were. Nobody spoke the same language. They had nothing to identify them as airmen; villagers just saw two wet, scrawny Europeans in skivvies and T-shirts who’d washed up on the bank. The armed villagers led them to a nearby town, where an even-keeled English-speaking official began to question them. His eyes grew wide when his two captives confessed to escaping from Hanoi; they’d been caught, so neither saw any point in lying. The official listened patiently to their story, seeming more intrigued than angry. He produced a map and asked the Americans to trace their route. “Ah, that’s quite a long way,” he said. “Twenty-four kilometers!” The 15-mile adventure genuinely fascinated him.

  Soon enough, a much less fascinated army officer arrived to escort the pair back to Hanoi, where they passed through the concrete archway of Hỏa Lò Prison, with its carved French appellation, Maison Centrale. Guards threw them into New Guy Village and locked their ankles in irons. Beyond that, however, they were not directly punished for their stunt. In separate interrogations, they told their agreed-upon story: how they unlocked their handcuffs, how they opened their cells, and how they crept through the streets to the river. They hoped that making it clear that they acted with no outside help would mean the Camp Authority would refrain from torturing them for names of collaborators.

  When the interrogator asked him why he had tried to escape, George McKnight gave two answers. First, he explained that escape offered the only honorable option since he had surmised the North Vietnamese had aimed to kill him. Second, he argued, “Every soldier has a responsibility to escape capture by the enemy. Even you have that obligation, don’t you?”