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

  “Never happen,” agreed the optimist, Jerry Denton. “They won’t leave us here.”

  Everyone desperately hoped their two leaders were correct.

  * * *

  No image defined Tết quite like a photograph taken on February 1, 1968. On assignment in South Vietnam, Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams noticed South Vietnam’s national chief of police, Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, apprehending a suspected guerrilla on a Saigon street. Loan raised his pistol; Adams raised his camera. The police chief fired a bullet into the side of the suspect’s head; Adams snapped a photograph. The handcuffed man slumped to the street, dead. The next day, the image appeared in newspapers across the United States. The savagery shocked the nation.

  North Vietnam’s real victory came in Tết’s aftermath. Hanoi’s strategists had bet that when the war’s costs became too high, the American people would clamor for withdrawal; Tết proved them correct, precipitating a decided shift in America’s opinion about U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. President Johnson immediately declared the Communist campaign a “complete failure,” and militarily, his statement had credence, as U.S. and South Vietnamese troops did recover and repulse the offensive, inflicting heavy casualties. However, America didn’t buy Johnson’s claims this time. By March 1968, 78 percent of the U.S. public believed the war would lead nowhere. Calls for withdrawal became more widespread. In Tết, the administration and the public saw a long-discounted insurgency stage a campaign across the whole of South Vietnam. The United States had nearly 500,000 troops deployed to Southeast Asia, and an endless cycle of aircraft carriers constantly came and went from Yankee Station, yet somehow America had still not won.

  Newsman Walter Cronkite delivered a eulogy for the war in a February 1968 newscast. “To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” Indeed, America would spend the next five years trying to extricate itself.

  * * *

  On the long list of America’s Tết casualties was twenty-three-year-old Ronald Thompson, Sondra Rutledge’s first love. Vietnam might have already claimed her father, Howie—she hadn’t yet learned if he’d survived—and now it had certainly claimed her fiancé, Ron. She was devastated by Ron’s death but grew even more determined to advocate for the POWs still in Vietnam, one of whom she hoped was her father. That same year, Sondra’s Madison High School political science teacher began a lesson on propaganda. He started by turning off the overhead lights and showing footage of North Vietnamese defenders downing an American airplane. For all Sondra knew, it was her own father’s. That was just plain dumb and insensitive to do in a military community like San Diego, she thought. She and her good friend Joyce Kimball stood up; Joyce’s father, a navy pilot, had died in a crash. They walked out of the room, and the entire class followed them; everyone knew Sondra’s father was missing in action. Later that year, Sondra led a sit-in protest in the school courtyard after a journalism teacher encouraged students to speak out against the war. She and the other students took off their shoes and refused to budge, showing that students on all sides of the war issue could become activists. In the evenings, she still made local phone calls on behalf of the POWs.

  On June 3, 1968, Sondra rallied a group to picket Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy at San Diego’s airport. She feared that Kennedy, if elected, might pull out of Vietnam without securing release of the POWs. Armed with placards reading DON’T FORGET POWS, Sondra’s band of activists gathered at Lindbergh Field to meet the senator’s airplane. Before Senator Kennedy disembarked, however, the San Diego police hustled the protesters into a paddy wagon. They took them to a nearby police station and kept them in the vehicle until Kennedy left the airport. The police made Sondra walk back to her car at the airport lot. Two days after Sondra was silenced, so was the young senator, assassinated just five years after his older brother.

  In the aftermath of Tết and a narrow victory over primary challenger Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire, President Johnson decided not to seek a second nomination as the Democratic candidate. Even as he prepared to pass the Vietnam conflict to yet another U.S. president, he reiterated his hope for peace while also restating his commitment to South Vietnam’s struggle against Communist forces.

  Speaking from the Oval Office, he said, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president. But let men everywhere know … America stands ready tonight to seek an honorable peace—and stands ready to defend an honored cause—whatever the price, whatever the burden, whatever the sacrifice that duty may require.”

  Johnson’s speech affirmed his commitment to both a free and democratic South Vietnam and lasting peace in the region. He halted bombing in North Vietnam except areas near the DMZ, where troops and supplies still coursed into the South. He announced that Ambassador-at-Large Averell Harriman would meet his North Vietnamese counterparts anytime, anyplace, to negotiate. Seizing the diplomatic opportunity they hoped Tết might precipitate, North Vietnam chose Paris in May. Since North Vietnam and its southern ally, the National Liberation Front, refused to recognize the government in Saigon, and South Vietnam refused to recognize the NLF, neither South Vietnam nor the NLF would participate directly in the talks. Responsibility for peace thus fell to diplomats from Washington and Hanoi. At the outset, the North Vietnamese demanded a complete halt to the bombing before serious talks began. The United States, however, wanted to prevent Hanoi from using a halt to regroup, as they’d done during previous bombing pauses. Both the United States and South Vietnam balked at the North’s insistence that the Communist NLF have a role in South Vietnam’s political future. So while Johnson may have recognized the need to negotiate, he tried to do so as the victor. Further delaying peace, Hồ Chí Minh and Lê Duẩn, one of the North Vietnamese leaders most committed to military victory, still believed that the longer they waited, the stronger their negotiating position would become. They would not give up their goal of a unified Vietnam and had little interest in giving back territory their forces had taken. Consequently, the final year of President Johnson’s term would yield little diplomatic progress while nearly 17,000 American soldiers died in Vietnam.

  * * *

  That spring of 1968 marked the Alcatraz Eleven’s fifth month in exile. Jim Mulligan watched the overcast winter skies become clearer each day during his morning walks to the latrine. As the tropical spring unfurled, his cell ceased functioning as a refrigerator and instead became a furnace. The sun claimed more and more time each day to bake the ground, buildings, and inmates trapped at Alcatraz. In the early morning, it began heating Jim Mulligan’s roof and his exposed wall. Then as it arched across the sky, it directed its rays on his cell door and its iron transom. Both quickly grew too hot to touch. From the roof tiles, door, metal plate, and walls, heat seeped into his cell and pressed upon him. It seared his lungs with each breath and began roasting him from the inside out. Like his comrades, Jim Mulligan spent his days lying on his mat, sweat soaking his body and drenching his thin boxer shorts, the only clothing he could bear wearing. Salty beads of sweat traced slowly down his face, and his two-quart ration of water—a guard filled his teapot twice each day—proved far from sufficient. As the cell grew hotter, he crouched by the narrow opening under the door to suck the slightly cooler air from outside.

  On May 26, he lay on his sweaty back and prayed for aid. “Lord, you’ve got to help me,” Jim pleaded. “I can’t stand it any longer, Lord. Lord, you’ve got to do something.” Seemingly in response, Jim heard the distant rumble of a thunderstorm. Inspired, he offered another plea, “Lord, make it rain, make it rain.” Before the day ended, the rain arrived, cooling the tiles and walls surrounding him and dispelling the heat. Locked in his cell, he could neither see the raindrop
s nor feel the winds, but he offered his gratitude nonetheless.

  “Thank you, Lord, thank you, Lord,” he repeated. “When I get out and tell this story someone will say, ‘It was just coincidence, the mere arrival of a fast-moving tropical cold front.’ But you and I know it was more than that. In my direst need I begged for your help and you answered me. Thank you, Lord.”

  Whether divinity interceded or not, Jim believed it had, and that proved the most important thing. As days of captivity ticked by, the Lord became a crucial member of the Alcatraz brotherhood.

  Unfortunately, the reprieve from the heat did not last. When June arrived, the summer of 1968 began in earnest. It proved no less brutal than the preceding one, which had plagued the residents of Little Vegas with so many boils. Enduring the heat in the Mint and the other Hỏa Lò cellblocks had proven difficult, but none of the POWs had experienced anything like the ovens of Alcatraz. The tile that covered Alcatraz’s two buildings soaked up the season’s heat and radiated it into the chambers below. The walls ensured none of the heat escaped.

  By June, high temperatures averaged around 90 degrees Fahrenheit, with humidity levels to match. POWs estimated temperatures inside the cells at more than 110 degrees, even hotter than summer days they’d experienced on runways at NAS El Centro in the California desert. Sweat, body odor, honey bucket, and heat combined to make each breath nauseating. The men sat motionless in their cells as sweat trickled from under their matted hair, down their brows, ears, and necks. Streams meandered down their backs and chests. Long-term dehydration eroded the POWs’ minds and bodies. Night brought only slight relief, as the walls radiated heat long after sundown. Worst of all, the inmates knew no relief would come until fall.

  Jerry Denton realized the men in his cellblock needed relief sooner than that. If something didn’t change, the POWs would have survived their ejections, years in Hỏa Lò’s dismal cells, and countless torture sessions only to be broiled to death. He finally struck upon a plan. He and CAG placed the men on a gradual hunger strike; they each took slightly less food each day and claimed they’d become too hot to eat. Thus, they avoided a direct challenge to Rat. The next time Jerry saw a guard, he requested an audience with the camp commander. With Rat curious about the men’s waning appetites, Jerry got his hearing.

  A guard escorted him up the steps near Cell One and through the courtyard gate. He was turned left and guided along the narrow stucco quiz building behind the small cell block. The guard led him through one of its three doors to a small room with a concrete floor. A single lightbulb burned overhead, and green shutters covered a window that overlooked the rear of Jim Mulligan and CAG’s cells.

  Rat was seated behind a desk, waiting for him. When he’d taken his seat, Jerry said to Rat, “I want to congratulate you on carrying through on the excruciating treatment and putting us to a slow death by heat.”

  “No, Denton,” Rat responded. “I did not know conditions were that bad. Our orders are to keep you isolated and in irons. We have no orders to kill you. We will study.”

  * * *

  The appearance of Cat on June 19, 1968, hastened the Camp Authority’s assessment. Cat still commanded the entire North Vietnamese prisoner detention program. When CAG saw him through his peephole, he frantically tapped to Jim Mulligan, “That’s the Cat.” As part of Cat’s tour, Rat arranged an interview with Jim Mulligan, who, like the others, had taken to refusing food.

  “Why do you not eat?” Rat asked when the interview began.

  “I am not well,” Jim replied. Rat translated for Cat, even though he understood English.

  “Where are you sick?” Cat asked.

  In answer, Jim stood up and took off his shirt. The officials gawked at his pasty, emaciated torso. All muscle had disappeared. Nearly every bone showed through his skin. “You are impolite,” said Cat, switching to English. “Put on your clothes. I will punish you for your bad attitude.”

  “You can’t punish me any more than you punish me now,” Mulligan shot back. “I am more dead than alive. You keep me in the leg irons and you do not give me fresh air and I am dying here. I am lonesome for my family. I get no mail. I do not care what you do any more. I am sick and I am dying … It is too hot and I need fresh air.”

  The outburst surprised the officers, but Cat maintained his composure and leveled a soft question at Jim, asking about his family.

  “I miss my wife and six sons,” he answered. “On July 1 it is the birthday of my wife.”

  “If you eat your food the Camp Authority may have for you a letter on the birthday of your wife,” Cat said. “Will you try to eat for me your meal today?”

  Jim issued a halfhearted answer, and Rat ordered him back to the sauna of Cell Eleven. Jim bowed and shuffled off, purposely looking even more lethargic than he felt. Within the hour, Cat and Rat entered the courtyard with a chubby supply officer nicknamed Piggy in tow. Piggy opened Jim’s door and winced at the wall of blistering air that hit him. He braced himself on the door and immediately jerked his hand away from the scalding iron and wood. Jim smiled and pointed to the iron-plated transom, which registered an even higher temperature. Piggy hustled off to talk with Cat and Rat. Later that day, work crews entered the courtyard and began covering the roofs with palm leaves and planting vines along the buildings, creating shade to combat the sun. Most importantly, the workers detached the metal plates covering the transoms above each cell door. Rusted screws slowed the work, but within two days, each cell had some protection from the rays above and an airway to vent the heat. The conditions remained oppressive, and the POWs would still suffer through a long summer, but at least they could now breathe.

  Soon after workers pried the iron plate from Jim Mulligan’s cell, a guard delivered a plate of rice, seaweed soup, and a banana. Jim ended his hunger strike, gulping down every scrap in the relative cool of his cell; he guessed the temperature had fallen nearer 100. On July 1, Cat kept his promise and gave him a letter from Louise.

  * * *

  As peace negotiations began in Paris that spring of 1968, Sybil Stockdale prepared for her annual migration to Sunset Beach in Connecticut. Before she departed Coronado, another military wife suggested she meet with Louise Mulligan. Mirroring military hierarchy, leadership roles on the homefront fell to the wives of senior officers. Thus Sybil led San Diego’s League of Wives and Louise essentially led the less-formalized POW wives on the East Coast, although she would never have claimed that position. That summer, Sybil drove from Connecticut down to Virginia Beach for dinner with Louise, and the two POW wives sat down to what would be a momentous meal. Sybil shared ideas about mobilizing clergy and other public figures on behalf of the POWs, a tack that would give the wives more activist roles; no longer would they just provide each other with emotional support. They discussed the need to comply with the government’s Keep Quiet policy, but the two headstrong women recognized that someone else had to take initiative considering Harriman and Johnson’s lack of progress. Both women recognized the need for a national organization. By the dinner’s end, it was agreed that Louise would formalize the POW movement on the East Coast and coordinate operations with the League of Wives on the West Coast. Together they would operate under the umbrella of the League of Families of American Prisoners of War and Missing. Sybil’s League of Wives, Louise’s network, and other small groups would begin using the common League of Families name, even as they retained their independence and, for the moment, remained primarily regional organizations.

  Louise first needed to identify all the POW/MIA wives—from every branch of the military—living in the greater Norfolk area, but the navy, army, and air force refused to release any names. Not to be deterred, Louise and other local wives in her network soon learned that the Department of Defense had obtained foreign footage of POWs and was showing the reels at NAS Oceana; Defense had invited nearby army and air force wives and family members to help identify individual prisoners. Nobody had invited the navy wives, so they simply showed up. They
met their air force and army counterparts and welcomed them to their sisterhood.

  By the fall, Sybil had become fully convinced that government diplomats either could not or would not act to help the POWs. Her tolerance for the Keep Quiet policy had ended when Ambassador Harriman welcomed the early release of three more POWs in August. As Sybil and most members of the military community saw it, agreeing to selective early release violated the Code of Conduct. Their men had pledged—sworn—to accept no parole or special favors; their orders stated they should come home in order of shootdown. Future U.S. senator Lieutenant Commander John McCain—shot down in the same month that the Eleven arrived at Alcatraz—had resisted intense pressure from Cat to accept early release that very summer. Cat had hoped for a publicity victory by releasing the badly injured son of the newly installed commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, Admiral Jack McCain, but the young McCain flatly refused to accept Cat’s offer. As punishment, guards beat him for four straight days and extracted a confession. Like McCain, other men had accepted punishment and deprivation rather than the favor of early release. The POW wives and their incarcerated husbands alike were galled by those who went home before their fellow prisoners.

  In early September, Sybil read a San Diego Union article entitled “Red Brainwash Teams Work on U.S. Pilots,” which described treatment of U.S. POWs. She immediately sent a pointed telegram to Ambassador-at-Large Averell Harriman, demanding to know how he would protect her husband and other POWs against these Geneva violations. In response, Harriman cabled, “Dear Mrs. Stockdale … North Vietnamese representatives here have indicated to me that the release last month of three pilots was a gesture of good will. I have urged them to give serious consideration to further releases, including those pilots that have been held the longest time, and those that have been injured. I am sure you realize that the welfare and early release of our men held prisoner continues to be upper-most in my mind. Sincerely, W. Averell Harriman.”