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

  Jerry refused, incredulous that after four years they wanted even more statements. Mickey Mouse ordered him to be taken to another room, where a guard positioned him against a wall and forced his arms above his head. If Jerry lowered them, the guard pushed them up again. If he needed additional incentive, the guard would prick his palm with a sharp nail. The drill lasted for two solid days. When Mickey Mouse returned on the third day, Jerry still refused to apologize. The guards locked irons around his ankles, then pulled his arms behind his back and cuffed his wrists. When a day of hauling his bound body across concrete floors proved ineffective, the staff employed a new method—one Jerry had never encountered before.

  A guard laced Jerry’s wrists and forearms together, then bent his torso forward, spreading his elbows so they squeezed over his bent knees. The insides of his arms pressed against the outsides of his calves and thighs, just below and above his knee joints; his knees nearly touched his cheeks. His thighs pressed on his chest, making his lungs strain to accommodate each breath. Pain coursed along his viciously bent spine, the tip of which now bore most of his weight as his feet were kept 12 inches off the ground on an overturned stool. Then the guards inserted the pole. This was new to him, but he soon realized it served as the linchpin for the torture rig. They snaked the bamboo shaft through the gaps between his elbows and knees, where it began cutting off circulation in his arms and legs. When his condition became unbearable, Jerry began to pass out. When he tipped over onto his side, however, the floor would knock the pole out of the rig. Pressure eased and circulation resumed. The restored circulation—the allodynia that Pigeye had used to such great effect—electrified his arms and legs, snapping him back to consciousness. He would return to blinding agony as pins and needles became daggers and knives. As Jerry grappled with the rig, Mickey Mouse flippantly said, “Denton, we will break you now.”

  Jerry soon passed out again, and six guards descended upon him, helping to revive him with kicks and punches. The guard nicknamed Jack Armstrong swung at Jerry as he lay hogtied and helpless on the ground. Jerry spat at him and lunged forward pathetically, attempting to head-butt him. Jerry saw tears of compassion in Jack Armstrong’s eyes, and he stared at the guard in wonderment as Jack left the room.

  Jerry battled the remaining guards and the rig for nearly eight hours. Maybe he could, just perhaps, outlast Mickey Mouse. He would endure; he would not apologize, but he could not win. After three excruciating cycles of passing out and then jolting back to consciousness, his arms had turned black. His spine wanted to crack. His lungs still struggled for each breath. He couldn’t help but scream. He would do anything to make it stop, even write an apology. He had reached his breaking point.

  The next day, he wrote a letter to Hồ Chí Minh. He apologized for bombing North Vietnam. He asked for forgiveness. Then guards hauled him—beaten, sore, feverish, and nearly unconscious—back to Cell Ten, where he collapsed onto his bamboo mat and did not move. It was December 23, 1968. The next day, the guards pulled Jerry from his cell, blindfolded him, and marched him to the Plantation. He wished he had been able to enjoy the walk. At the Plantation, a guard untied Jerry’s blindfold and led him into a banquet room, complete with champagne, a table of food, and Cat. The commandant of the North Vietnamese prison system beamed at Jerry.

  “Ah, Denton,” he said, “good to see you again. How are you?”

  Jerry couldn’t believe the question. He told Cat he’d been tortured. Cat ignored him and continued pleasantly, asking, “How are conditions?”

  “Terrible,” Jerry replied. “Can’t eat because of the torture.”

  Plowing ahead, Cat asked, “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “Only if you do it for everyone.”

  Cat grew angrier. “All right, Denton, eat that banana,” he said. He pointed to a nearby table’s spread.

  Jerry declined.

  “It will be good for you,” Cat insisted.

  “If everyone gets a banana, I will take it.”

  That did it. Cat screamed, “Shut mouth! You eat banana! That is an order!”

  Jerry didn’t flinch. Cat ordered him back to Alcatraz.

  * * *

  On Christmas morning 1968, Mickey Mouse called Jim Mulligan to quiz and presented him with three letters: one from Louise, one from his brother, and one from his parents. In three years, he had received only three letters from his wife, and he scurried back to his cell to feast on the words from home. As he read his letters again and again, he felt sorry for Harry Jenkins and Howie Rutledge. To the POWs’ knowledge, the North Vietnamese had yet to acknowledge that these two aviators remained alive. Consequently, the Camp Authority did not allow them to send mail, nor did Mickey Mouse let them read any letters sent by their families, who still hoped Harry and Howie were prisoners, not casualties.

  For four Christmases now, a pall had hung over the Rutledge and Jenkins families as they each gathered in their respective homes to mark another year of uncertainty and tried to find some cause for celebration. Like the Stockdales, Harry’s family had read an unconfirmed report in a Soviet Pravda article that he’d survived. The article described a particularly tall aviator arriving in Hanoi; Harry measured 6'5". Yet they’d received no confirmation from North Vietnam or the U.S. intelligence agencies. Howie’s family had likewise heard nothing, but this Christmas, as every Christmas, the best presents under the Rutledge tree had tags reading “Love, Daddy.”

  When brought in for a Christmas quiz, Howie brazenly asked for coffee and a ticket to Saigon. Mickey Mouse’s generosity did not extend that far. However, Nels Tanner, who was shot down in October 1966, finally received his first letter from home that Christmas. Bob Shumaker was permitted to spend much of the holiday playing chess with Sam Johnson. They’d fashioned boards out of mosquito nets, which had a distinct grid pattern in their weave. Using the makeshift boards and shreds of toilet paper or trash as game pieces, Shu and Sam spent hours tapping moves through the wall. Others soon made their own boards, and silence would settle over Alcatraz during matches, broken only by muffled shouts of surprise, anger, or “Checkmate!” Arguments sometimes erupted during the heated games, and once George McKnight pointedly tapped to Jerry Denton that he’d been a boxer; Jerry backed off. Perhaps in the holiday spirit, the guards didn’t crack down.

  That Christmas night, peace fell over the courtyard of Alcatraz. Inside the cells, solitary lightbulbs burned on indifferently. Sometime after Jim Mulligan had fallen asleep, Mickey Mouse ordered him up. The Camp Authority seemed to respect Jim’s faith, and he hoped Mickey Mouse might take him to a church service, as he had the previous Christmas. It would surely be another propaganda stunt, but the excursion might provide a chance to contact POWs in other camps. Whatever his destination or circumstances, he simply treasured any time outside his cell.

  Jim donned the red-and-pink-striped suit, and Mickey Mouse ushered his blindfolded prisoner into a waiting vehicle. Using the Vietnamese name the Camp Authority had assigned to Jim, Mickey Mouse said, “Mun, I take you to your Christmas celebration in the big Hanoi church of the Catholics.”

  For months, Jim had seen nothing beautiful, nothing inspirational. In his cell, he looked at dim, bare walls for at least twenty-three hours and forty minutes each day, often more. In quiz rooms, he saw stark walls, save occasional portraits of Hồ Chí Minh. When the guards removed Jim’s blindfold, he found himself inside what he’d later learn was St. Joseph’s Cathedral, staring at a painting of St. Francis kneeling at the cross. Above the cathedral’s altar rose gold arches and stained-glass panels, emitting a magnificent glow. He’d seen few sights so beautiful.

  Jim spied Cat escorting another POW to the nativity scene at the front of the church, near the main altar rail. The American locked eyes with Jim, then put his arm behind Cat’s back. The friendly gesture appalled Jim until he noticed the POW’s finger had begun to move in code, “Dick Stratton.” Jim watched Stratton, a pilot from the USS Ticonderoga, walk to the crèche and kneel.
With his prisoner occupied at the crib, Cat walked over to Jim Mulligan.

  Jim Mulligan at St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Hanoi, Christmas 1968.

  “How are you?” he asked.

  “I am well, thank you,” Jim answered. “May I kneel at the crib before Mass starts?”

  “Of course you may go there now,” Cat said, and Jim hustled toward the altar before Stratton left. Cameramen near the altar captured the scene of the North Vietnamese offering lenient treatment to American prisoners on their Christian holiday.

  Jim knelt beside his fellow aviator just as Stratton finished his prayer and began to rise. Jim grabbed the leg of his pants to stop him. Bowing his head and speaking as if he were deep in prayer, Jim told Stratton, “Eleven of us are one block north of the Plantation, in solitary and in irons. I’m Jim Mulligan. Rutledge, Jenkins, Johnson, Shumaker, Storz, Tanner, Coker, McKnight, Denton, and Stockdale are with me. We are okay.”

  Stratton quietly listened to Jim’s message, then left reverently. Likewise, Jim crossed himself and stood. When he turned around, he found Mickey Mouse glaring at him.

  “You communicate, you communicate,” Mickey Mouse accused, keeping his voice low enough to avoid attention.

  “Oh, no,” Jim replied defensively. “I only pray to the Father on this Christmas celebration at the beautiful manger scene you have provided for me. Ask the men of your cameras that were filming as I prayed. They must know that I do not communicate. Ask them, they will tell you this is so.”

  Mickey Mouse either believed Jim or elected not to make a scene. Jim walked back toward the pews and observed several other Americans sitting by themselves or in pairs. After he’d taken his place, he heard someone enter the pew two aisles to his rear. He turned around and saw Jerry Coffee. When Jim had attended Mass the previous Christmas, he’d made brief contact with Coffee. At the time, he’d tried to send him a message about the eleven men in Alcatraz, but he was not certain what Coffee understood. He now had another chance, so Jim appealed to Mickey Mouse; he wanted to visit with his old friend. As Mickey Mouse wavered, Jim begged him to grant this harmless Christmas favor. He consented.

  Jim turned around and said, “Jerry Coffee, Merry Christmas. I’m Jim Mulligan. How’s your wife, Bea, and the children? I got a letter from Louise and my six sons. Did you get a letter? I am in the same state as last year. We are all okay. The eleven of us! Are you okay?”

  “Merry Christmas, Jim,” Coffee replied. “I’m fine. I got a letter, too. I got it okay.” Coffee winked, which Jim took to mean he understood the message about Alcatraz.

  “Enough, enough,” Mickey Mouse broke in. “You speak too much to your friend.”

  That ended Jim Mulligan’s Christmastime communication at the cathedral. He settled into his pew and focused on the service. He listened to the priest’s sermon, translated by Rabbit, who stood near the front. Jim struggled to hear the reverent words coming from the lips of the young officer responsible for so much ungodly suffering. At least, he thought, he could receive communion. He gave thanks.

  When Mass concluded, Mickey Mouse herded Jim into a waiting vehicle and drove him away from the beauty of the cathedral and back to the ugliness of Alcatraz. At the door of Cell Eleven, an angry Mickey Mouse turned on Jim and said, “Mun, tonight you have played the fool with me. You are a bad man. You violate the regulation of the camp. You communicate to your compatriots. You will be punished.”

  Jim really didn’t care. Dick Stratton now knew the identities and location of the Alcatraz prisoners, and Jim trusted Stratton would spread the word through the prison system. Besides, he had been able to worship on Christmas Day. Jim had always been a devout Catholic, and a year had passed since his last communion. He felt peace even as Mickey Mouse stormed off and a guard clamped Jim in irons for the night. The door slammed shut and he heard the lock engage. With that, Christmas 1968 at Alcatraz ended, and the worst was still to come.

  * * *

  As the year 1969 began, the eleven prisoners speculated about their homecoming. Everyone placed bets on their date of release from Hanoi. The winner would choose the location for the Alcatraz reunions. The losers would pay in tacos when, God willing, they got home. Optimistic Jim Mulligan picked June 1969. Other near-term predictions went tapping through cell walls and flashing across the courtyard. When Mulligan heard CAG’s estimate, he thought his commanding officer had lost his mind. He chose February 1973.

  “After the next [presidential] election,” CAG had tapped. “Then we’ll be going home and not before then.”

  On January 8, 1969, Jerry Denton finally received his punishment for the banana confrontation at the Plantation. In one of the quiz rooms outside the Alcatraz courtyard, Mickey Mouse inquired about Jerry’s Christmas Eve encounter with Cat. Jerry responded that he had simply abided by the Code of Conduct, which prohibited him from accepting special favors. Then the officer gave Jerry a new order: Read the North Vietnamese news to the camp. Jerry stubbornly refused, and Mickey Mouse put him back into the torture rig he’d faced before Christmas. Mickey Mouse also opened the room’s green shutters so other POWs could hear Jerry’s screams. For two awful days, they did. At last bested by the pole and ropes, Jerry submitted. When the guards untied the bindings, he convulsed grotesquely on the floor long enough and severely enough for the guards to summon a doctor. When the spasms subsided, Jerry read a North Vietnamese script into a tape recorder. The two days of agony had taken such a toll on him that his first tape bordered on incoherence. The next day, Softsoap had Jerry do additional takes until he judged one passable. Soon, the daily news came blaring over the speakers. Jerry’s deliberate mispronunciations drew laughs from his ten fellow inmates. The North Vietnamese turned off the recording and sent Jerry back to his cell.

  “They want us to write letters asking Hồ Chí Minh for amnesty,” Jerry tapped, referring to what he’d been told in his session. “If they’re working on some kind of release, they can’t just turn us loose without losing face. They have to have some kind of justification, some kind of admission of guilt. Then Uncle Hồ can forgive us. Don’t make it easy for them. Hold out as long as you can.”

  Mickey Mouse seemed momentarily to retreat from his goal of obtaining apologies and instead just had Softsoap try to convince Jim Mulligan to read the news, noting how his friend Jerry had already complied. The crusty Irish Catholic fired back, “Bullshit. You tortured him badly, and if you want me to read, you’ll have to torture me the same way.” Apparently, Softsoap and Mickey Mouse decided the difficulty of making these diehards cooperate was not worth any gain from broadcasting their words. Thus ended the short-lived reading campaign of 1969.

  Quiet reigned over Alcatraz for the next three weeks. Then, late on the night of January 24, 1969, the intestinal worms breeding inside Harry Jenkins began causing severe cramping in his abdomen. He asked guards for morphine. They refused, so he asked them to shoot him. They refused again. The pain grew and Harry began shouting, “Bào cào, bào cào!” Sad Sack, the lone guard on duty, callously told him, “No bào cào,” and ordered him to sleep. The command incensed Harry. His raised voice—and the expletives he began employing—caught the attention of the other inmates. His neighbor, Sam Johnson, heard a guard enter Harry’s cell. Then he heard a rifle collide with flesh and bone.

  “They’re beating him,” Sam thought with horror. “He’s sick and asking for a doctor and they’re beating him!”

  He put his mouth to the crack in his door and shouted, “Bào cào! Bào cào!”

  Rousted from sleep, the other prisoners waddled to their doors wearing their leg irons. They stood there, each in his separate cell, banging against his windowless door while shouting, “Bào cào!” A riot had erupted in Alcatraz.

  Sad Sack rushed to Jim Mulligan’s cell, which was just yards away from Harry’s. Jim’s peephole flew open and the guard’s face appeared. “No bào cào!” he screamed. “No bào cào!”

  Enraged and defiant, Jim callously screamed back, “B�
�o cào! Get a doctor! There’s a sick guy over there.”

  “No bào cào!”

  “Yeah, bào cào,” Jim bellowed. “Bào cào! Get a doctor you lazy son of a…”

  Sad Sack pounded on Jim’s door with his rifle, sending a loud echo pulsing into the cell, but Jim just kept yelling. Before long the prisoners heard more guards arrive in the courtyard, and they received assurances that Harry would see a doctor, which he soon did.

  Many of the Alcatraz men later considered this their finest hour. They had united as one against the Camp Authority and risen up on behalf of a fellow POW, and they had won. They remained locked in their cells, hungry, skinny, clad in threadbare pajamas, tortured, and injured, but they had still been victorious.

  Despite this victory, Alcatraz’s commanding American officer had seen enough. CAG had long since lost his tolerance for the North Vietnamese keeping his men in leg irons, in solitary, on a starvation diet, and without adequate clothing in the middle of winter when so many were already unhealthy or sick. The next morning, as soon as the sun lit the compound, Jim flashed under his door to Nels Tanner, ordering a hunger strike. “Everybody goes to the food pot when we are taken out to get our rations,” he sent. “But nobody takes any food for three days.”

  The prisoners of Alcatraz first defied the Camp Authority at their morning meal. With a furious staff watching, they defied them again that afternoon. One by one, they walked to the table but refused to take food. Their termerity reminded CAG of a line from Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, “A certain readiness to perish is not so very rare, but it is seldom that you meet men whose souls, steeled in the impenetrable armour of resolution, are ready to fight a losing battle to the last.”

  Before daybreak on the following morning, a guard violently opened Jim Stockdale’s door. A detail waited outside as Jim followed orders to gather up his belongings. One man grabbed his roll while another bound his wrists with wire. Someone tightened a blindfold around his eyes and pushed him out of the cell. From beneath doors and through peepholes, ten pairs of American eyes watched the aging fighter pilot hobble across the yard, swinging his stiff leg. Mickey Mouse seemed to consider Jim Stockdale dangerous even in this state; he had assigned five men to guard him.