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

  “No, Ambassador Harriman,” Sybil thought, “I’m not sure I do realize the welfare of the men is uppermost in your mind; nor do I think you, of all people in this world, should be advocating early releases, which are a violation of the Code of Conduct.” Sybil wondered how the government could ignore a Code it had sworn its servicemen to uphold. Had she known of Jim’s BACK US and “No early release” directives—and what men suffered for disseminating and following them—she would have found Harriman’s suggestions even more offensive.

  The ambassador’s encouragement of more early releases left the POW wives aghast at the State Department’s lack of military understanding—not to mention State’s failure to make any substantive progress on properly freeing any prisoners or guaranteeing their Geneva rights. Sybil could hardly believe her country’s POW policy revolved around arbitrary North Vietnamese benevolence. She wanted Lyndon Johnson to publicly shame Hanoi for its violation of the Geneva Convention—and she wanted him to bring her husband home. She felt he should either decide to win the war by employing America’s full arsenal or withdraw after freeing the prisoners. More hesitation seemed only to assure more anguish for the POWs and their families, who all lived in limbo.

  With dwindling confidence in her government’s policies toward North Vietnam and its treatment of America’s POW/MIA families, Sybil began to compose the article that would at long last break from the military’s Keep Quiet policy; she started writing on the third anniversary of Jim’s shootdown. She shared the idea with her confidant at the Pentagon, Commander Bob Boroughs, who expressed concern that the article could jeopardize the clandestine communication between Jim and Naval Intelligence. Still, Sybil adamantly believed the POW/MIA community needed someone to take the first step across the line that the government had, in her opinion, so senselessly drawn. She reasoned that once she broke the taboo, others would make the leap from passivity to advocacy. Commander Boroughs tabled his objections; he knew Sybil had made her decision, and privately he seemed to believe it was the right course.

  She submitted her article to the Copley News Service, which owned The San Diego Union. They called several days later to ask if Sybil wanted to sell them the story. “Heavens no,” she said. “I just want to tell the world the truth about what’s happening to Jim.” Copley assigned a reporter to write an article about her story. The October 27, 1968, San Diego Union carried the reporter’s piece in section A, ending Sybil’s three years of silence. The article described North Vietnam’s Geneva violations, announced the role of the League of Families, and quoted Sybil as saying, “The North Vietnamese have shown me the only thing they respond to is world opinion. The world does not know of their negligences and they should know!” Sybil read over her words in bed that morning and wondered when the government would upbraid her for breaking their policy. When would her phone ring? As it turned out, she never heard a single word from the Pentagon, which was too preoccupied with military efforts to respond. With Johnson’s term winding down and the antiwar movement growing, the State Department and the rest of the Administration also remained silent.

  Louise Mulligan soon learned about the article. Like Sybil, she had lost faith in the government. Even though the Washington bureaucracy proved accessible—she could always speak with someone at the White House, Pentagon, or State Department—all their words and promises had done nothing for her Jim. In a meeting with Harriman, Louise shared her first letter from her husband, and the ambassador leaped to comments Jim made about receiving bananas, vitamins, oranges, meat, and vegetables—along with Piles Of Whole grain rice and Plenty Of Warm soup. Louise had figured out the hidden message and knew Jim received none of those things; Harriman missed the fiction. He did not think Jim playing “that famous game of solitaire” had any connection to solitary confinement; he thought Jim seemed fine. Louise rolled her eyes as her last bit of patience with the Johnson administration slipped away.

  Back at home in Virginia Beach, Louise rallied the other East Coast POW wives, and together they composed a letter to the Department of Defense announcing their decision to bring their cause to the public, shedding the Keep Quiet burden. That members of the rule-bound military world would break ranks showed the depth of their disillusionment with the government. The Pentagon offered no resistance, and the women now accepted responsibility should their publicity bring harm to their husbands. Louise spoke with her six boys about how their lives might change, how people might begin asking questions. She also told them that someone had to fight for their father and his friends. She recalled the references to solitude in his first letter; thinking of his isolation steeled her courage. Louise called a reporter from the Norfolk-based Virginian-Pilot, and he arrived in short order to hear her story.

  * * *

  At Alcatraz, the summer of 1968 had passed hot and slow. An effeminate officer nicknamed Softsoap Fairy (alternately known as Slick) relieved Rat and ushered in a slightly more tolerable administration. Softsoap, as the POWs generally called him, wore fine clothes, had a solid command of English, and carried himself gracefully; he seemed to be an efficient administrator. Most important to the Alcatraz POWs, he instituted a ten-minute outdoor exercise period for each inmate; he also had guards erect a bamboo privacy screen around the bath area. The extra time outside their cells helped the prisoners—at least in some small measure—cope with the misery of the summer heat.

  During those months, the eleven men grew ever-closer to one another. Both the Camp Authority and their fellow POWs would consider them the most defined clan of prisoners in North Vietnam. Part of their unity came from their stoic leader, so determined and respected. The nine men in the large cellblock organized a special message for their commanding officer on September 9, 1968, the third anniversary of his arrival in North Vietnam. As his men scraped out their morning greetings at the latrine, CAG noticed a chain message, started by Howie Rutledge and continued by the others. By the time Jerry Denton had finished his cleaning duties, Jim Stockdale had received the entire message: “Here’s to CAG for three great years. We love you. We are with you to the end.” Jim would forever maintain that he never received a medal that meant more to him than that message.

  That fall, the hours of solitude spent locked inside Alcatraz’s windowless cells continued to add up. The rare quizzes the men had were fairly innocuous, largely meant to worry them. Once, Rabbit visited the camp and summoned Bob Shumaker to an interrogation room, asking his second-longest-serving prisoner, “What is this American feminist movement I hear about?”

  “That’s the way a woman wiggles when she walks,” Shu answered, managing to keep a straight face.

  Perhaps as retribution for the joke, Rabbit taunted him with the prospect of Lorraine’s infidelity; the Shumakers had now been separated for nearly four years. “Do you think your wife is remaining true to you?” Rabbit asked.

  Shu calmly answered, “By now, she’s probably run off and married the ice man.”

  Rabbit flipped through his translation dictionary, looking up the term “ice man.” “My,” he said, “you Americans have a strange sense of humor.”

  Short sessions like these aside, the North Vietnamese simply let these eleven stalwarts rot. In some moments, the POWs would have traded the temporary pain of the ropes for the isolation of their cells. Soon, they’d realize those wishes.

  Hanoi Hannah added to their gloom by reporting news of the peace negotiations from Hanoi’s perspective. She claimed that President Johnson realized his country could never defeat the people of Vietnam and now desperately sought peace. On November 1, 1968, she brought word that America had halted all bombing of North Vietnam. Johnson’s move—a goodwill gesture, as he saw it—meant no new American captives would flow into the detention system, and thus neither would trustworthy news from the States; the Camp Authority still only sporadically distributed letters from home. The Alcatraz POWs recognized that even if they could interact with other prisoners, nobody would have any recent news. It was as if a drippin
g faucet had stopped. At the announcement, Sam Johnson’s fears compounded. He saw his country checking its vast airpower, seemingly unwilling to win the war—and perhaps unwilling to free the POWs. In early November, Hannah announced that Richard Nixon had defeated Hubert Humphrey in the presidential election. Sam believed the president-elect would draw a tougher line. The Camp Authority anticipated the same and toughened its own stance.

  * * *

  With a new man in the White House and a new secretary of defense, many POW families saw an opportunity for change. They hoped this new administration would respond to the plight of U.S. prisoners in Vietnam and their families at home. Sybil Stockdale wrote California governor Ronald Reagan, hoping he’d serve as her emissary to the new administration, but Reagan’s staff refused to schedule an appointment. Livid, Sybil dispatched a biting telegram to his office. The next week, Governor Reagan called her directly; she would never forget first hearing his resonant voice. When the two had finished their conversation, he had promised to pass Sybil’s message to President-elect Nixon. For the first time since her long ordeal began, Sybil felt that a politician genuinely cared. The phone call renewed her spirits. She hoped 1969 would bring progress.

  By early January, five other San Diego wives had written articles about the plight of POW/MIA families. Following the plans Sybil and Louise hatched that previous summer, the East and West Coast organizations continued transitioning from support groups to leagues of advocacy, from regional entities to one with national scope. The League of Families, or simply “the League,” now also had member groups from across the country, including one organized in Texas by Sam Johnson’s wife, Shirley. Leaders like Louise Mulligan spent entire days talking via telephone to activists throughout the country, sharing information, encouragement, and ideas. Together, these independent but coordinated groups pressured the military, government, and every other possible source for information and began educating Americans about the Geneva Convention. They flooded elected officials and news media with POW-related news and encouraged POW/MIA families to become activists and educators, telling their story to communities and press across the country.

  In Virginia Beach, the local junior chamber of commerce contacted Jane Denton, requesting that she speak about the POWs at their monthly dinner. Not wanting to appear by herself, she immediately called Janie Tschudy, the wife of Jerry’s bombardier-navigator. Together the two POW wives shared the information they’d kept to themselves for so long. They explained how the North Vietnamese had held and tortured their husbands for more than three years and how many families had received no word about whether their downed pilot had survived. Janie joked later that they’d ruined the members’ evening; their stories were met with utterly shocked faces. Most audience members were unaware of U.S. POWs in Southeast Asia, and the stories of maltreatment startled them. Afterward, the members passed a hat for donations to help with the growing postage and telephone expenses the wives had been footing. Not one to solicit or accept money, Jane laughed and said, “If Jerry could see me now…” She knew he’d be proud.

  The League organized a nationwide telegram-writing campaign in the days before the presidential inauguration, and on January 20, 1969, more than two thousand telegrams concerning the POW/MIA issue landed in the White House. President Nixon took office facing a community of families his administration could neither ignore nor silence. The new president responded to several families, informing them that he shared their concern and that “the subject of [prisoner] release and welfare will have an urgent priority in our talks in Paris.” He would also share his concern with his new secretary of defense. Having proven they could mobilize America’s military families and grab Washington’s attention, the coalescing national network began distributing materials to the public, providing instructions for cabling the North Vietnamese delegation at the Paris Peace Talks to inquire about America’s captive and missing servicemen. Members of the League courageously defied their government’s Keep Quiet policy and raised their voices, hoping Washington and the world would listen.

  * * *

  Away from the national stage, the Alcatraz families weathered the storms of life, the misfortunes, large and small, that befall most families in one way or another; these families just faced them without a husband or father. A family of seven had to weather more storms than most, and the close of the decade saw Jane Denton struggle with her oldest boys—four headstrong young men cut from their father’s cloth. They were aged twelve to eighteen at the time of their father’s shootdown in 1965. The youngest, Madeleine, Michael, and Mary—who called themselves the “M Society”—ranged from one to eight.

  With her husband already in Hanoi, Jane had no interest in seeing another Denton deployed to Vietnam, but her eldest son, Jerry, had joined the army and earned his pilot’s wings; his best friend, Billy McFarland, became a helicopter crew chief. Jane loved both dearly and wanted neither to go. Since Jerry already had a relative in theater, army policy kept him stateside. Billy went, however, and the news of his death in South Vietnam struck Jane and her son hard. Two months later, in June 1969, Jerry sat his mother down on the couch at Watergate Lane. “Mom,” he said, “I need to go; it’s my duty. I’m requesting deployment to Vietnam.” Jane didn’t want him to go, but she understood. The next month, she saw her oldest son off to war just as she’d watched her husband leave three years before. She prayed both would return.

  To her further distress, at 2:00 A.M. one morning later that same year, Jane received a phone call from her third-born, Jimmy. Earlier that night, he had borrowed his roommate’s motorcycle and promptly wrecked it on a wooded stretch of road near Elon College in North Carolina. Paramedics found him and sped him to the hospital, where two doctors struggled to remove the smashed helmet from his head. Three days later, the navy had him transported to the Portsmouth Naval Hospital, where he spent five weeks in a body cast. Her son’s crash offered Jane one more reminder of her boys’ mortality. Jane needed her husband at home, as did her children. Perhaps, they hoped, the coming year would see his return.

  On the far coast, Phyllis Rutledge had taken her family to Mission Bay, just north of San Diego, to celebrate Independence Day the previous year. The family was sitting at a picnic table talking about the night’s coming fireworks when they heard somebody scream, “Get him out!”

  They charged down to the shoreline where a boy had just laid fifteen-year-old Johnny Rutledge on the shore; he’d been injured diving into the bay. He was conscious but limp. Phyllis saw blood running from his head. Paramedics arrived shortly, and Phyllis and her three daughters tailed the ambulance to the hospital. As nurses shaved Johnny’s head, his sister Sondra held his hand. He looked down and said, “I can’t feel your hand.”

  Hours later, doctors explained that he’d broken his neck and probably crushed his spinal cord. Phyllis had to decide then and there whether doctors should perform surgery, which extended the hope of healing but carried a real possibility of death. She’d once relied on Howie to make such heavy decisions, but two and a half years of being on her own had taught her self-reliance. She decided to operate. Fortunately, Johnny survived the surgery, but he never regained feeling; he’d be paralyzed for life. In the coming weeks, his nine- and ten-year-old sisters did their nightly homework at the hospital; his mother hardly left his side. Johnny feared that his father wouldn’t be able to look at him again. Phyllis just hoped Howie would return; how could she bear any more of this alone?

  16

  WE WILL BREAK YOU NOW

  After the U.S. presidential election, Mickey Mouse, the hard-nosed former commander of Hỏa Lò who’d prepped Jerry Denton for his 1966 television interview, replaced Softsoap as commandant of Alcatraz, although Softsoap remained on the camp’s staff. Mickey Mouse’s arrival heralded a bitter winter.

  Early on a mid-December morning. George McKnight woke up and began the ritual he had kept for fourteen months. First, he accepted that Hanoi, Hỏa Lò, the Briar Patch, and Alcatraz ha
d not all been part of some nightmare. Then he tapped to his neighbors. Jerry had scarcely tapped back when they heard a victorious hoot erupt from the empty cell between them. A guard sprang out, shouting, “You communicate, you communicate!”

  A chill shot through Jerry’s body. The game had suddenly changed. For months, the Camp Authority had tacitly allowed communication inside Alcatraz. Now, under Mickey Mouse, they’d assigned more guards to the courtyard and had apparently revived the edict prohibiting communication, which previously the North Vietnamese used as a favorite pretense to torture prisoners for propaganda statements. Jerry and George sensed higher authorities had handed down new orders to the administrators at Alcatraz: The government wanted more propaganda, and their little camp would be forced to produce it.

  The guards came first for George McKnight. After a severe beating in one of the camp’s quiz rooms, George spent thirty-six hours hunched forward with his elbows tied to his knees, receiving intermittent beatings. He finally agreed to write an apology for communicating. After he composed the apology, the guards administered the treatment twice more, yielding two verbal statements, which the interrogators tape recorded. After more than a hundred hours of duress and deprivation, guards hauled him, nearly incapacitated, back to his cell. The others heard George collapse heavily. After several moments of silence, he slowly tapped, “Purge. I say no comm.” His brothers could hear the pain in his taps and realized the Camp Authority had instituted another crackdown.

  Jerry Denton tapped back to McKnight, “Keep the volume up and if you get caught, you tell them that I ordered you to do it.”

  From across the yard, Stockdale flashed, “It looks like we’re going to take it on the chin, one by one. So let’s go in and take it on the chin.”

  Jerry took it next. “You have been caught communicating,” Mickey Mouse said when Jerry had been dragged into the interrogation room. “You must apologize. You must write letter to President Hồ Chí Minh and apologize for your crimes.”