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

  Hawk came for him that evening. The guard blindfolded Jim and led him through Little Vegas and into the kitchen, where Jim smelled cooks preparing another pitiful meal. His escort led him behind the kitchen, then up two steps. A door opened. Hawk untied the blindfold and pushed Jim into an apparently unused closet infested with cobwebs. He sat down in several inches of dust, and Hawk secured a set of leg irons. Then Hawk locked the door and left Jim feeling like the Camp Authority had sealed him in yet another tomb. He became the first American to experience this makeshift cell, which he nicknamed Calcutta, after the Black Hole of Calcutta, the Indian dungeon that allegedly suffocated more than 120 British prisoners of war in a single night.

  Inside the 3-by-6 closet, he contemplated his situation. They had the note. Its very existence could prove devastating. The Camp Authority had taken extraordinary measures to keep him quarantined, and they seemed to believe they had succeeded. The note would prove that he still plied the streams of communication that ran through the prison. Further, it would prove others collaborated. He thought back to the 1967 summer purge—the Stockdale Purge, as POWs still called it—that visited so much suffering upon so many, whether or not they had participated in the underground he ran from his Thunderbird cell. Remorse pressed on him heavily. Now this new note—a note that he had failed to hide—would unleash another round of terror.

  * * *

  The prisoners at Alcatraz remained unaware of CAG’s trials or whereabouts, but Hanoi Hannah brought other news from outside their insular colony. “The very best medical care is being given to our beloved leader,” Hannah announced to the inmates in late August, as Hồ Chí Minh’s heart began failing. “All Vietnam’s medical expertise is available to him. We are confident of his recovery.”

  “Yeah right,” Sam Johnson tapped with his one usable hand to Bob Shumaker, who still had an untreated fractured back. “We know what North Vietnam’s best medical care is all about.”

  “He’s a dead man,” Shu responded.

  Shu and Sam considered themselves fortunate still to be among the living. The Blue Book Purge had progressed at full throttle throughout the spring and summer of 1969, with guards brutalizing the Alcatraz POWs for more and more statements. Even Ron Storz had taken his share of beatings. Since they typically interrogated the prisoners in order of descending rank, by late August only Lieutenant (Junior Grade) George Coker—who often referred to himself as “the ensign,” the navy’s lowest rank—still remained untouched. For months, George had listened as higher-ranking officers were led out of their cells for long stints in torture rooms. When they returned, George would tremble as they tapped out their grim stories. He felt as if someone had tied him to a railroad trestle and made him watch a freight train approach. When the train hit Captain George McKnight, Coker knew he’d be next.

  He began withdrawing into himself, no longer tapping to others, searching for some last reservoir of internal strength to combat what was to come. Then, on August 25, the train arrived. A guard opened Coker’s cell and motioned him out. Terrified, he walked as bravely as he could out of the courtyard and into one of the stark quiz rooms in the alley. A team of guards awaited him. They worked on him for seven days, during which Coker got little sleep as they forced him to sit on a stool or concrete floor with his arms manacled behind his back. They also forced him to stand against the wall with his arms raised, which sparked hard memories of his two-month ordeal at the Zoo in 1966.

  On the eighth day, guards unbound his hands and left him in the quiz room. George looked about for ways to avoid cooperating. His spied a wooden desk. He pulled open the top drawer and shoved his right hand inside, then started slamming the drawer again and again. If he couldn’t write, he couldn’t sign a confession. When Mickey Mouse returned, he calmly assessed the damage and decided to bring in a tape recorder. “You bring that in here and I will destroy it!” George thundered. “You will have to kill me.” George surprised even himself with the outburst. He usually could control his temper around interrogators. He knew that acting out his frustration would just cause even more trouble.

  Mickey Mouse eventually made George use his uninjured left hand to write. George filled his statements with tip-off phrases and the outright lies he’d so often told to interrogators. When the officers deemed his writing unacceptable, guards stripped him naked and lashed him fifty times with a fan belt.

  George refused to break, but he knew he’d reached his limit. “I can only take one more day,” he admitted to himself. “I can’t last any longer.”

  “We have our belts and ropes,” Mickey Mouse emphasized to his prisoner, seeming to perceive George’s impending collapse. “You are going to do this. You think about this very seriously because tomorrow we whip you again.

  “And tomorrow,” he added, “you get one hundred.”

  George vowed to last as long as he could that next day but realized he would break by the afternoon. Once he’d again sat down before Mickey Mouse, ready for the day’s promised hundred lashes, his adversary pronounced, “You have a very, very bad attitude, and we will determine what we’re going to do with you.” Then nothing happened; Mickey Mouse returned George to his cell, where he tapped the news to his neighbors. The response baffled everyone. Something had changed.

  As he reflected on his strange salvation, George was filled with gratitude and respect for his fellow prisoners. If any one of them had broken just one day earlier, Mickey Mouse would have begun George’s interrogation one day sooner, and he, too, would have broken. He fully understood another reason each American endeavored to hold out as long as possible—to protect his fellow prisoners.

  That night, the Alcatraz inmates listened to sounds of mourning come through their speakers. They began to understand the abrupt end of George Coker’s session, as funeral music and eulogies played on the radio. Hồ Chí Minh had died. It was September 2, 1969. Just seven days later, Jim Stockdale would complete his fourth full year as a prisoner in North Vietnam.

  * * *

  The seventy-nine-year-old revolutionary’s death had spared George Coker, but it only gave a short reprieve to Jim Stockdale, who had been waiting anxiously in Calcutta as the Camp Authority debated his fate, his punishment for exchanging notes with Dave Hatcher. They had left him bound in Calcutta for several days, a treatment that seemed odd to Jim. After catching him red-handed, the Camp Authority typically would have sought its retribution quickly; something must have delayed his arraignment. Then, from guards’ comments and the camp speakers, he had deduced Hồ Chí Minh had died. In the darkness of Calcutta, he’d wondered what he’d have said to the Communist leader had he seen him on his deathbed. “Good-bye, you old bastard,” he thought.

  The morning of September 3, guards ended CAG’s brief stay in Calcutta and escorted him to Room Eighteen, so familiar to him after his three years and 359 days as a POW. He found Bug waiting, along with Hawk and another guard. Bug had apparently advanced in position since the POWs had met him upon their 1967 arrival in Little Vegas; his temperament had not improved. Bug charged CAG with several crimes, then ordered him to his knees.

  “I only have one knee,” Jim responded. “I’ll do the best I can.” With his stiff leg out to the side, he settled onto his right knee.

  “Who is McKinley?” Bug asked, Jim’s note in front of him. “We have no McKinley in this place.”

  “That’s a joke,” Jim explained. “I was writing about McKinley Nolan, the American soldier who deserted … and sends those tapes to the ‘Voice of Vietnam’ all the time. Don’t you know who I mean? Don’t you laugh at those tapes like we do?”

  The response didn’t satisfy Bug in the least. More questions came, and Jim evaded or bluntly refused to answer them. Bug beat him about the face with a 2-foot-long strip of rubber taken from a tire but went no further. Jim felt like he had faced the junior varsity squad; Rabbit and Pigeye would have had their answers in fifteen minutes. Instead, he and Bug debated the meanings of specific words in the confiscated
note. Bug continued trying to learn the real identity of McKinley Nolan, and Jim grew weary from the endless questions. By the afternoon, his knee ached miserably and his face bore cuts and bruises, but he had given up nothing of value. As the session wore on, Bug took occasional breaks and left the room. During those interludes, Hawk and the second guard would look the other way as Jim rolled onto his side to relieve his right knee. When they heard Bug returning, they would push Jim back into position and resume their stern demeanor. The long day ended with Bug having learned nothing. Jim had protected the note-drop procedure and Dave Hatcher’s identity.

  That night, a guard brought his bedroll to Room Eighteen. He loosely bound Jim with ropes, then watched the prisoner crawl onto the mat like an exhausted castaway climbing onto a life raft. Then Bug returned. The sight of Jim prostrate on the mat sent him into a rage. He yelled, “Đán! Đán! Get on your feet. You are not to rest! You will sit in that chair all night. You will contemplate your crimes against the Vietnamese people. These are bad days for us. Our beloved president is dead. You have seen nothing yet. Tomorrow you will give me details. You will see. Tomorrow is when we start; you will be brought down!”

  Jim pulled himself onto the chair, and Bug left, locking the French doors behind him. Jim speculated about the next day. “Tomorrow is the day,” he thought. “Another purge … My fault again. I don’t have a hint about what happened at Alcatraz after I left. How many of them died in the ropes trying to protect me? Why is it I who cause all the trouble … I’ve got to go on the offensive; I can’t just wait for the axe to fall and then be sorry about it. I’m right where I was last winter when Rabbit and Chihuahua went for the hat [to cover his partially shaved head]; I’ve got to do something. I have to stop that interrogation; I have to stop the flow. If it costs, it costs.”

  He looked around the room. He saw neither razor blades nor a stool—the implements he used to foil his interrogators during his last visit to Room Eighteen, more than five months earlier. His gaze fell upon the glass windows in the room’s doors. He stood up and turned off the light. He heard no sounds coming from the courtyard outside; he guessed most of the prison staff were still mourning Hồ Chí Minh. He dragged his leg irons to the French doors and shattered a pane of glass with the heel of his hand. Nobody seemed to hear. He picked a long shard of glass and carried it back to his chair. He found an artery in his left wrist and began hacking at it. Blood spurted forth. It ran down his hand and pooled on the floor as he stabbed again and again. Then he put the shard into his bloody left hand and hacked at his right wrist. As the blood poured out he wondered, “Is this the right thing?” He kept hacking. He wouldn’t let down his men. He was resolved to bleed out his life there in Room Eighteen—or at least show Cat how far he’d go. At all costs, he would avoid the inevitable confession after the next day’s torture. He knew the ropes could make him divulge the names of his correspondents and the secrets of their network. When he did, those men would bend and bleed, perhaps die. He would place the entire system in jeopardy. No, he would not talk. With this final act he would protect his men. Soon, Jim fainted, collapsing onto the cold, blood-splattered floor.

  Later that evening, he became aware of movement, voices. He slowly opened his eyes. As they refocused, he found guards and officers filling Room Eighteen. A doctor had bandaged his arms. Guards were stripping off his clothes and mopping the floor with them. Others poured water onto the floor and over the bloody American. Someone put a pair of clean shorts on Jim’s naked body. Then Bug began yelling at him, “How dare you do this? Why did you do this?” Jim did not answer. The room darkened, voices faded, and he passed out again.

  The next day, a considerably more composed Bug entered the room with two cups of hot tea. He offered one to his convalescent adversary. They sat across a table from one another, sipping from their cups. Bug asked, “What made you do that terrible thing?”

  CAG opened up. “I’m tired of being treated like an animal, being followed, questioned, hounded,” he boomed. “I’m a prisoner of war and I’m tired of being nagged to death.”

  Bug repeated his government’s unchanging position: Jim was a war criminal, not a POW. Then he changed subjects. That was the last time he ever mentioned the note or the American communication network.

  * * *

  At Alcatraz, the ten inmates wondered what changes—for better or worse—North Vietnam’s next leader would bring. They’d learned enough through interrogators and Hanoi Hannah to know the names of several party leaders, and they staged a contest to predict Hồ Chí Minh’s successor. Sam Johnson and Jerry Denton correctly picked Lê Duẩn, the general secretary of the Communist Party, who had effectively ruled alongside Hồ Chí Minh as secretary since 1960. As Hồ’s health declined, Lê Duẩn’s sway had increased even more, and his ascension dashed Nixon’s hopes for easier negotiations. Ever tenacious, Lê Duẩn would lead the party until his death in 1986.

  * * *

  As North Vietnam’s new leader, Lê Duẩn presided over a sweeping change in prisoner treatment. That fall, the Politburo issued a policy stating, “Although we do not consider the enemy pilots to be prisoners of war (POW), bound by the 1949 Geneva Convention on the treatment of POWs, we still apply the principles of this convention in our humanitarian policy.”

  The resolution showed, for the first time, concern for prisoners’ health, living conditions, and ability to worship together. It stipulated that prisoners could send one postcard per month and receive one package every two months. It also stated, “From now until 1970, [we will] gradually allow the American enemy pilots that we are holding in secret to contact their families via postcards.” In time, that would mean the world for the Jenkins, Johnson, and Rutledge families. The directive even noted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was considering allowing Red Cross visits.

  It appeared that America’s POW/MIA families had achieved a major goal, less than twelve months after Sybil Stockdale first broke the Keep Quiet policy that had silenced families for more than three years. The fast-growing National League of Families had wanted to bring worldwide pressure to Hanoi, and they’d succeeded. When the Department of Defense also went public with intelligence, the pressure increased, and North Vietnam at last seemed to respond, perhaps using the change in leaders as the pretense for a more internationally acceptable detention program. The battered men in Alcatraz desperately needed the new policies; they’d begun to doubt how much longer they could hold on.

  In the first harbinger of change, Softsoap again traded posts with Mickey Mouse, something all inmates saw as positive, and he began instituting the gentler regime. When a guard caught Jerry Denton communicating the following month, Jerry earned an audience with the returned commandant. “Denton, you have been caught communicating,” Softsoap declared. “You know what has happened before.”

  “Yes,” Jerry answered.

  “I am going to surprise,” Softsoap said happily. “This time you will not be punish. We still have regulation and you have broken it, and I will criticize you for it. But as long as I am in authority, there will be no more punishment for communicating.”

  Jerry nearly cried. Back in the cellblock, the POWs speculated about the change; as usual, Harry Jenkins thought it a good sign. Still, nobody wanted to test the guards. The next day, however, one caught Jerry communicating again. When Softsoap simply lectured him in response, the men of Alcatraz began to believe. Softsoap asked Jerry how he could improve conditions, and while he didn’t grant the navy commander’s request for a Ping-Pong table, he did institute a third meal each day. Later that week, when guards made their morning rounds, they brought with them hot loaves of bread. Sam Johnson said a prayer of thanks as that first warm loaf filled his shrunken stomach. Throughout much of their imprisonment—and all their time at Alcatraz—the prisoners had only received two meals each day; neither had ever filled their bellies. Accompanying the bread was a daily teapot of hot water. When a guard also gave Jerry a woven basket, Jerry made a confused e
xpression. The guard said, “Tea,” then hugged himself to convey that the basket would insulate the tea. In addition, the cobra baskets, as Americans called them, proved excellent hiding places for all manner of contraband.

  In another positive move, guards received permission to have prisoners help with yard upkeep. With a bamboo broom, prisoners—often Bob Shumaker—would spend hours thoroughly sweeping the dirt courtyard. Shu became the anchorman for Alcatraz, sweeping efficiently in code, broadcasting news or opinions to his fellow inmates.

  Even more change was afoot. One morning a guard came to Sam Johnson’s cell. “You may walk outside today,” he said as he unlocked Sam’s leg irons. Sam stretched and then cautiously ventured outside. The guard motioned toward the center of the courtyard. Swinging his arms, Sam stepped forward and spent the next minutes striding freely around the warm yard. For the first time since he had arrived in Hanoi, he could take steps without a gun barrel or a jailer’s hands pressed upon him. He looked at the buildings of Hanoi visible above the wall; he listened to the noises and traffic outside. Then he looked at their primitive camp with its pigsty. It seemed to him that time in Alcatraz had stopped ages ago and never started again.

  A few weeks later, the prison took a leap forward when guards built a fire in the courtyard to heat water in a large cauldron. That day, each man received hot water for his bath. When the warm water poured over his body, Sam Johnson felt pure joy for the first time in many years. His last warm shower had been at Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base in April of 1966, more than three years earlier.

  * * *

  The relationship between opposing commanding officers also changed. Jerry and Softsoap began to engage in more broad-ranging discussions during quizzes. During one particular session, the two discussed the politics and history of North Vietnam. Jerry acknowledged that by siding with French colonialism, Western powers had pushed Hồ Chí Minh toward Russia and China. “But,” Jerry said, “what I can’t understand is the Communist suppression of political, religious, and press freedoms.”