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

  In fact, Jerry had misidentified his problem; it wasn’t McKnight. Two weeks after Jerry began noticing discrepancies, George Coker tapped to McKnight and confessed that he’d grown tired of passing endless policy communiqués between Jerry and CAG; he thought the two seniors were debating theoretical points and often repeating themselves anyway. As time had worn on, he began truncating the messages. Then he ceased passing them altogether. After an appropriate amount of time had passed, he’d just fabricate a response from CAG to Jerry. Eventually, Coker had painted himself into a corner. Some answers required knowledge or experience beyond his twenty-four years, but if he posed the questions to Stockdale at this far-gone point, CAG would certainly notice Coker had been improvising. Coker asked Nels to arrange a private flashing session with CAG, which he did. Flashing code at an angle more difficult than Nels’s, Coker confessed to Stockdale. Stockdale nearly laughed out loud. He was thankful Coker could not see his smirking face as he disciplined Alcatraz’s youngest inmate, “[Don’t] ever try to come between Denton and me,” he flashed, doing his duty as CO. “We were in this outfit together before you were born!” In fact, they’d joined the Brigade of Midshipmen together the summer of Coker’s birth. When Jerry himself discovered the subterfuge, the back wall of the nine-cell building barked with serious threats of a court-martial. The words frightened Coker, but he chose to ignore Jerry for the time being. He figured they’d discuss it when they got out—if they got out.

  At present, Coker, Jerry, and the other inmates faced day after chilly day of overwhelming depression, alone in windowless cells, wearing leg irons for sixteen hours out of twenty-four. Minutes seemed to pass like hours. They focused on small gripes simply because there was nothing else to do. They’d lie on their mats, shivering under their thin blankets, wishing for spring, if not the beaches of California or Virginia. They had nothing to read, nothing to watch, and only Hanoi Hannah to hear. They would go days without using their voices.

  Monotony settled upon the Alcatraz camp like a fog, seeping into each cell to compound the thirst, hunger, aches, and fears of its occupant. It ate at their minds, their souls, and their will to live. It plagued their every minute, and despite their efforts to occupy themselves, boredom never was far away. As they had learned in previous stints in solitary, each man consciously had to fight off gloom and despair. Losing that battle meant losing one’s mind. Losing one’s mind meant death or a lifetime sentence to North Vietnam; nobody thought the North Vietnamese would return a prisoner who’d gone insane.

  The North Vietnamese did return some prisoners, however. In February 1968, Hanoi Hannah trumpeted the early release of three POWs; Cat had finally found volunteers for his Fink Release Program. He released them to two American peace activists on the sixteenth. When the speakers played farewell statements from the returnees, Jerry Denton wanted to cut their throats. At Alcatraz, morale plummeted and anger surged at the “slimies,” as the Eleven quickly labeled the deserters. The POWs who remained in Hanoi would never forgive them. They believed the men had broken the BACK US rules—we all go home together—and walked out on their brother POWs. The men in Alcatraz wondered what had happened to the American resistance, so strong just months ago in Little Vegas.

  At Alcatraz, weeks, days, hours, and minutes continued to drag by at a tortoise’s pace. Surviving each interminable cell-bound minute eventually proved as challenging as enduring Pigeye’s ropes. Each man developed methods of staving off insanity and keeping despondency at bay. Building houses became one widespread preoccupation, and the Alcatraz inmates would imagine constructing houses when they returned to America. They spent entire days—even weeks—meticulously designing floor plans and material lists for their new homes, calculating feet of lumber, number of bricks, square feet of tile, yards of piping, gallons of paint. Bob Shumaker badgered Sam Johnson and Ron Storz for specific building costs. George Coker built six houses. Wide verandas, screened against mosquitoes, surrounded a house in Key West where an air-conditioning system kept the tropical humidity at bay. He constructed a multilevel home on a sloping lot in Maine and built another house in Massachusetts with a deep cellar for wine and provisions for a long winter—were he not spending the season in Key West. The home in Maine took a particularly long time to finish; its rock chimney collapsed five times.

  Aero-engineer Bob Shumaker revisited his knowledge of science and mathematics to keep his mind active. Shu learned that CAG played piano, and the two musicians spent several weeks calculating frequency ratios between notes on the musical scale. They flashed complex calculations under their doors and across the courtyard until they found their answer: the twelfth root of two.

  Over time, Shu grew particularly interested in the concept of specific gravity—the ratio that compares the density of one substance to that of another. Shu scavenged various items for his experiments: a plastic button, an aluminum spoon, an iron nail. Then he rigged a balance by tying a string from his pajamas to the middle of a bamboo stick plucked from a broom. He tied a pebble to one end of the stick to act as the constant reference material and tied the test material to the other. He slid the test material toward the beam’s fulcrum until the contraption balanced. He measured the balance point along the stick. Then he immersed the test object in his pot of water and measured its volume based on displacement. Using his measurements of weight and displacement, he’d calculate the specific gravity for each sample. Shu made his bleak cell into a working laboratory of discovery and distraction.

  When he felt more sociable, Shu taught French to his neighbor, Sam Johnson, who proved an exceptional pupil. Almost every day, Shu tapped Sam five new words of French. When the Texan needed help with enunciation, Shu would tap out an English word that sounded like the French word under discussion. Sam absorbed every word, but after months of lessons, endless hours tapping a foreign language through the concrete wall, Shu reached the limits of his French vocabulary. Fortune interceded, and on a visit to the latrine, Shu found several pages ripped out of a French magazine; guards had used them as toilet paper. He collected the salvageable scraps, and their printed words became Sam’s lessons for another six months.

  Shu also gave more subversive lessons and taught Sam the classified code he’d learned in the United States, with which a small group of POWs had been encrypting their sporadic letters home. Very few men trained in the code were actually shot down, so once in Hanoi, Shu decided to share it with select other prisoners. As long as the POWs who did know the code were allowed to write, they’d secretly embed their letters home with prisoner names, the realities of their conditions, or whatever CAG ordered; occasionally they’d also receive letters from their wives that the government had encoded. CAG nicknamed the code Martini, and called Shu the “bartender” for the way he coordinated the efforts of several POWs to deliver hidden messages across multiple letters. When CAG or Shu was out of contact, Martini-trained POWs would send whatever they could.

  Like Shu, all the other Alcatraz inmates became teachers, tapping lessons in their area of expertise to one another, enriching each other’s minds even as their bodies wasted away. Neighbors became old friends, even closer than old friends. They shared secrets, hopes, fears. George McKnight could tell Jerry Denton or George Coker’s mood simply by the sound of his knuckles—sadness, joy, trepidation all rang clearly through the wall. Knowing each other so intimately, McKnight and Denton would often speed through conversations, guessing the next word being sent and often double-rapping through entire phrases. They knew each other that well.

  Perhaps because of these intimacies, siblinglike fights often erupted. McKnight and Coker scrapped like brothers through their shared wall, disagreeing on topics from sports to historical trivia to when they might go home. Heated academic arguments—truly unanswerable in a Hanoi jail cell—happened often, sometimes making the men of Alcatraz seem like a dysfunctional family at Thanksgiving dinner. The men often ended stalemates by placing bets—often wagering tacos—payable upon homecoming. Like
a group of Las Vegas bookmakers, the men managed their accounts meticulously.

  In his cell, Jim Mulligan focused on memories. He relived his time on Enterprise, and at NAS Jacksonville, family vacations, his wedding, college, school, and his childhood. Along the way, he regained friends he’d lost or long forgotten. He reached back to age two, when he recalled riding in a car with his grandparents down Route 110 to Salisbury Beach, Massachusetts. Seeing a stone planted in the ground, Jim asked, “Grandma, what’s that?”

  “That’s an Indian cemetery.”

  “What’s an Indian cemetery?” Jim asked.

  He remembered her turning to his grandfather and saying, “Listen to him talk! He’s not even two.”

  Similarly, Jerry Denton conjured images of squadron mates, scanning his memory as if it were a yearbook. He began by recalling the names and faces of his fellow aviators and then classmates at the Naval Academy and at McGill Institute. Eventually, he found himself remembering his schoolmates all the way back to his first-grade class. When Jerry told CAG about his memories of grade school, CAG replied that he had experienced the same phenomenon. “We are regressing,” he flashed across the yard to Nels Tanner. “We’re going back to our childhoods.” Within months, Harry Jenkins could recollect the name and face of everyone with whom he’d ever shared a classroom. Nearly all the Alcatraz inmates discovered their long-term memory sharpening, even as other abilities dulled. They spent long days visualizing their entire lives.

  If a prisoner found his cell neither too hot nor too cold—a maddeningly rare occurrence—and if he had become well enough accustomed to sleeping on concrete while wearing leg irons and being tormented by the interminable lightbulb, nighttime might offer him relief from mental acrobatics and the misery of his situation. Too often, though, the men had trouble sleeping, forcing them to survive even more minutes of conscious solitude. When Jerry found himself awake at night, he turned to the gecko lizards that congregated on the ceiling around the lightbulb. The colony, led by a large male Jerry named Bullmoose, fed on insects attracted by the light. Jerry observed intently as the big male courted mates and produced offspring who would join the competition for the insects. The larger lizards could leap from one wall to the other, catching a mosquito in the process. Those young who lost the competition for food would grow weak and fall to the floor of Cell Ten. Jerry cared for them as long as he could by swatting mosquitoes with his bamboo fan and feeding the wounded insects to the weakest lizards, but he could not save them all. The dying geckos offered one more distraction from his bleak reality.

  Unfortunately for Jerry, the lizards showed little interest in the hundreds of flies that blanketed his walls and ceiling. Since the Camp Authority had placed him closest to the latrine, his cell hosted more flies than any other. The insects did at least present him with entertainment, and he occupied himself by killing flies when his interest in the geckos waned. Once, he counted 250 kills before he stopped.

  In Cell Two, Harry Jenkins found himself developing an enhanced sense of smell and hearing. The smells of the food placed on the table outside his door, the steps of guards’ sandals, the tiniest cough or softest tap from another American—none of these escaped Harry. He suspected his heightened sensory abilities connected him to other members of the animal kingdom, and he struck up a friendship with the mice of Alcatraz. He sacrificed crumbs from his own pitiful rations to buy the friendship of the only visitors he could host. The mice in his cell brightened many dark days.

  Harry also used his gifts to lift the spirits of other POWs. During one walk to the latrine, he scavenged a loose nail, which he clasped between his toe and sandal until he’d returned to his cell. Once inside, he concealed the new treasure inside the hem of his boxer shorts so guards wouldn’t discover it during a shakedown. That evening, Harry carefully laid his nail across the two exposed electrical wires that fed his bulb and speaker. Harry watched the nail spark, and his light went out—along with the other lights in Alcatraz. Harry had shorted the system. The guards replaced a fuse, and then Harry replaced the nail. Wires sparked, and Alcatraz went dark again. The eleven men enjoyed a relatively restful night in blissful darkness. The next day, the guards tested the system. With Harry’s nail stored again in his skivvies, the wires worked just fine. From then on, whenever someone had a particularly rough day, Harry would tap, “Don’t worry, I saw the phantom electrician in camp.” That night, he would short out the lights and all would sleep well. The baffled guards never did solve the recurrent problem.

  Each man in Alcatraz found his own way to fight, to pass time, to find purpose, to organize his day so he could maintain some modicum of control over his existence. On some afternoons, Jim Stockdale would hear the guard approaching with leg irons, realize 4:00 P.M. had arrived, and think, “I’ve been up since 6:00 A.M. doing these things and I haven’t had a second to myself all day!” Yet no degree of mental discipline, no amount of creativity, no conversation—tapped, flashed, or brushed—could alter the fundamental reality of imprisonment at Alcatraz: at least twenty-three hours and forty minutes of each day locked inside foul cells, without seeing another American, often without speaking, week after week, month after month. They did not know when it would end. They all wondered, “How can this still be happening?”

  15

  TO TELL THE WORLD

  “Why do you want to fight against the just cause of Vietnam?” Hanoi Hannah asked American GIs on January 30, 1968; it was Tết, the Vietnamese New Year. “You can see you are losing. Lay down your arms! Refuse to fight! Demand to be taken home, now! Today! Do you want to die in a foreign land, eight thousand miles from your home?”

  As the broadcasts droned on, the POWs at Alcatraz learned that North Vietnam and the Việtcộng had staged coordinated attacks throughout the South around Tết. In fact, North Vietnamese generals had planned much of their Tết Offensive at the Ministry of National Defense, just across the street from Alcatraz. According to Hannah, the People’s Army and the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (Việtcộng) had routed the Americans, the South Vietnamese army, and the puppet regime in Saigon. Reality differed somewhat. Indeed, seventy thousand Communist troops had violated the traditional three-day holiday truce between all parties and staged attacks across the countryside, in countless towns and, most startlingly, many of South Vietnam’s major cities. A small unit breached the U.S. Embassy, rockets attacked the American base at Cam Ranh Bay, and General Westmoreland’s own headquarters came under fire. In the United States, televisions broadcast scenes from across Vietnam: firefights, wounded soldiers, a faltering American mission. Ultimately, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces recovered from the surprise attack and effectively beat back the surge, but American casualties topped 20,000, with more than 5,000 killed from January through March of 1968. Insurgent losses were many times higher, yet the Communists accepted prices Americans would refuse to pay.

  In the days immediately following Tết, the Camp Authority covered the walls of one Alcatraz quiz room with photographs from the offensive. A young sergeant walked the POWs along the walls, showing them images of victorious Communist forces, burned ruins in Saigon, and defeated Americans. Other photos showed images from the United States itself: peace marches, protests, and student rallies. Sam Johnson tried not to believe the pictures.

  “What do you think?” asked the sergeant.

  “I don’t know,” Sam answered.

  “Look around you,” he said, “You can see we are winning the war. How can you think the war will not be over soon? The United States will retreat and go home, and we will be the winners.”

  Rabbit visited during the same week and happily cast even more doubt into the minds of the Alcatraz Eleven. “Our just cause is winning,” he gloated to Sam during a quiz. “Now you can see!”

  “What do you mean?” Sam asked.

  “You have seen proof!” Rabbit exclaimed. “Our photos, our radio! The United States has given up and will lose the war in Vietnam!”

  “I
cannot believe your photos or your radio.”

  “The bombing has stopped,” Rabbit said. “Your country has deserted you. You will never go home. You have been left here to die.”

  “I can’t believe that,” Sam said. If he let himself believe that, he’d crack in a week—but months had passed since he’d last heard an American jet over Hanoi or wailing air raid sirens. Somewhere deep inside, he worried Rabbit might be telling the truth.

  “You will see,” Rabbit said with disturbing finality. “We are right.” He sent Sam back to his concrete box, which now felt a little more like a tomb.

  During the short walk back, Sam told himself that Rabbit and Hanoi Hannah were lying, as they had before. Without any information to the contrary, however, he wondered what had transpired in South Vietnam and what it meant for the men in Alcatraz. How many more years would they spend in their claustrophobic cells? Would the war ever end? Their government wouldn’t abandon them, would it?

  Locked inside Cell Three, Sam found the walls alive with discussion. Rabbit had lectured many of the POWs that day, and everyone had an opinion. “The U.S. will never give up on us,” CAG flashed to Nels, who sent his message up and down the long cellblock.