Tennessee Patriot

by Lawrence, William P. , Rausa, Rosario

  As an aviator expected to fly over enemy country, I had trained at two of the Navy’s survival, escape, resistance, and evasion (SERE) schools. The first was during the Korean War at a complex set up at a city park in Alameda, California; the second, a far more sophisticated operation, in the mountains near Warner Springs, California, not far from San Diego. (Today, a second school is located near Naval Air Station Brunswick in Maine. The Air Force and Army have similar facilities.) Escape and evasion were, for the moment, out of the question. Survival and resistance, however, were achievable, and those challenges lay ahead. Whether I could succeed with those two elements, I did not honestly know. My immediate concern was to abide by the Department of Defense-sanctioned Code of Conduct.

  As I extricated myself from the rice paddy, a rifle was continuously aimed at my chest. In the periphery, people were gathering on the surrounding berms. I was the center of attraction and probably the first American most of them had ever encountered.

  I was marched toward a nearby hamlet, which was hardly more than a collection of hooches—small, wood-framed huts that looked as if a swift wind would blow them away. I was motioned into a side section of one of the huts, which turned out to be a pigpen occupied by a sow, who must have tipped the scales at no less than four hundred pounds. The sow eyed me curiously and, I judged, with a bit of indignation for crowding up her quarters. She seemed to be thinking, “What are you doing in my bedroom?”

  An hour or so passed, during which countless thoughts raced through my mind. Anne would be getting the news soon, then the kids, my parents, and the many friends with whom my life had been blessed. But mostly I thought about Anne. She’ll be all right, I thought. My transmission that I was OK in the chute would at least let her know I survived the ejection. She was a solid Navy wife, even with the worry and strain that accompanied marriage to a flyer.

  After a time, a man who seemed to have more authority than the others arrived and took me in custody. I was stripped of my harness, (my pistol had already been taken), my handheld radio, watch, boots, and flight suit, leaving me in my skivvies, barefoot. I had left my Naval Academy ring back in my stateroom, or that would have been raked off my finger. The man looked into my mouth, presumably to see if there was gold or silver in there. Fortunately, there wasn’t, otherwise I’d have had an immediate dental extraction.

  I was prodded into a run across the countryside, which took several minutes, until we arrived at a point on a dirt road, where I was loaded into the back of a truck. I was soon joined by Jim, and the truck headed north. When he and I tried to talk, we were struck with the butt of a rifle from one of the guards who accompanied the truck.

  Young kids seemed to be everywhere, laughing and cutting up as if our capture was a huge social event. The older people, however, gazed at us, most with genuine hatred in their eyes. They tried to hit us with sticks and stones.

  En route to what I was certain to be Hanoi, the truck stopped at an intermediate point, and I was roughly ushered into what seemed like a small guard station. Another member of the militia sat behind a table and placed a typewritten questionnaire before me. It was written in English, and he motioned me to fill it out. I refused. Under the Code of Conduct, I was not required to comply. I gave him my rank, serial number, and date of birth.

  The man put on a forlorn and disapproving expression, as if he’d gone through this before, but didn’t press the matter. “Maybe this is the way I’m going to be treated,” I said to myself. “They’re going to abide by the Geneva Convention after all.”

  Wrong.

  By the time we reached Hanoi, it was growing dark. The truck proceeded through a guarded entranceway in a walled structure into a courtyard area with various other separate buildings situated throughout the complex. This was unmistakably the Hoa Lo prison, which the American inmates had come to identify as the Hanoi Hilton. The basic sections of Hoa Lo were Little Vegas, also called Camp Vegas; Unity; Heartbreak Hotel; and New Guy Village. Many of the early prisoners were Air Force flyers who had trained at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, not far from Las Vegas. The familiarity of the casinos, coupled with the arrangement of separate compounds within the basic sections of the prison complex Hoa Lo complex, inspired the titles of those various compounds. For example, the compounds within Little Vegas included Stardust, Desert Inn, Mint, Thunderbird, Riviera, and Golden Nugget.

  We were ordered from the truck, and I was led into an orientation room, where a North Vietnamese officer, dressed in a uniform that was a slight improvement over that of the militiamen, sat behind a crude wooden desk flanked by two other officers. He fired a sequence of questions in English at me, and I responded to each with name, rank, serial number, and date of birth.

  “You are an air pirate!” he declared vehemently. “You are not a prisoner of war. The Geneva Convention does not apply to you.”

  “William P. Lawrence, commander, 410 443 3904, January 13, 1930,” I responded.

  “What was your target?” he demanded.

  I continued with my litany.

  “What type of aircraft were you flying? What targets did you plan to strike in the future?”

  I stood my ground and he, his. This fruitless exchange created a tense impasse, which I don’t think surprised my interrogator. He stood up abruptly and left the room. I stood there at attention in my skivvies, wondering what came next.

  Enter “Straps and Bar,” also known as “Pig Eye,” one of the more memorable, if intriguing, characters of my incarceration. Straps and Bar was a professional torturer. I was unaware of his sobriquet at the time, but I was about to learn in unassailable fashion how he earned it. I was also going to be deeply grateful to those “two-a-days” at Annapolis during preseason football practice.

  Straps and Bar was a medium-size Asian with noticeable muscle tone and a phlegmatic demeanor. In this same room over the next three days, I became very well acquainted with him, but purely in the physical sense. He never changed his stoic expression, never exhibited any emotion, including anger, and simply went about his business with the aplomb of an assembly-line worker in Detroit. He was an expert at inducing pain without maiming or killing. The North Vietnamese did not want us dead. In their eyes, we were valuable hostages. He put my legs in shackles affixed to a long, horizontal bar and pushed my head down to go underneath the bar. He then pulled my arms behind me, secured them with a strap, laced another strap tightly around my neck, and left me there, twisted like a pretzel, and in inexorable pain.

  This was a first in a series of contortions Straps and Bar engineered on my person. Over the next three days, I passed out several times. I distinctly remember blacking out when the strap around my neck cut off the blood flow to my brain. Expertly, the pressure of the strap was released before fatal damage was incurred. Periodically, an interrogator came into the room and fired questions at me. I believe I resisted as well as I could and don’t recall answering the questions to the interrogator’s liking. Indeed, recollections of this period remain dim in my memory, because I was in and out of consciousness throughout the three days. I don’t even remember having anything to eat or drink during this period.

  Primarily, the interrogators wanted to know what targets we were planning to hit. Having become a POW, I certainly had no knowledge of what was being planned back on the carrier. But the torture was taking its toll, and I was reaching a breaking point. I finally accepted the fact that I had to tell my captors something. So, I just started picking out the targets that would do the most damage to the Communists, such as the piers in Haiphong; the fighter base at Phuc Yen, north of Hanoi; and government headquarters in Hanoi.

  My captors seemed satisfied, even though my response had no validity. They backed off on the torture. I was quietly pleased, because I was very worried they might learn that I possessed highly classified knowledge about some of the systems used in electronic countermeasures. Most of this knowledge was acquired through my experience with the F-4 Phantom at Patuxent and in the fleet. In t
he end, the questions were very basic.

  In dark retrospect, I appreciated the professionalism of Straps and Bar. He could have made a mistake, gone too far, and did me in. I learned what it feels like for one human being to be totally subjugated to the will of another, and it was a terrifying experience.

  After my fellow POW, Capt. Jack Fellowes, was released in 1973, he told an interviewer that when he was shot down in 1966, he felt he would be a prisoner for only six months that the war would be concluded by then. Jack, one tough customer, persevered throughout captivity, despite his earlier prediction. My perspective was different and largely influenced by Gen. Paul Dewitt Adams. He had clearly feared that United States involvement in Vietnam would become a costly and lengthy quagmire. I had no doubt that he was right, and that I was in for a long, tough haul.

  Chapter Fourteen

  1,900 DAYS

  One of our most familiar and reassuring phrases, passed on liberally throughout imprisonment, was G - B - U. God Bless You. It helped.

  I WAS TRANSFERRED FROM HEARTBREAK HOTEL to Camp Vegas in the Thunderbird cell block, and in the days of misery that followed, I fought back the notion that I made a huge mistake when I continued the attack on the thermal power plant after my aircraft had been hit by what I presumed was a single 87-millimeter shell, fired by a marksman who was either incredibly skilled or unbelievably lucky. Had I allowed this really unanswerable question to linger in my mind, it might have had a devastating effect on my disposition, which was already being tested to the maximum. On top of this, I had to fight the realization that I would not be allowed contact with my family via letters.

  Had I turned back immediately upon being hit, I might have made it to the sea and friendly hands. But the Phantom was still flying, I had bombs on board, and I was the leader of the attack. I believed then as I do now that I would make the same decision again, not because it was the heroic thing to do, but because it was the right thing to do. Thus, I rid myself of the element of self-doubt that could have been mentally debilitating over the long haul. I didn’t want any “What ifs” pestering me in the long days ahead.

  So began my more than nineteen hundred days of captivity. We were fed two meals a day, one at 10 AM, the last at 4 PM, usually consisting of weak, unseasoned pumpkin soup and a small loaf of bread made from coarse brown flour, probably derived from some Russian, Chinese, or Eastern Bloc country. Occasionally, we’d get a handful of rice. These meals provided us seven hundred calories per day and was our steady diet up to six months before our release in 1973, when the cuisine improved, with more substantial food.

  I was extremely fortunate in that I experienced dysentery only two or three times while in prison. Others fared far worse. Each of us had to struggle to survive, employing every iota of the will to live. The absence of a proper diet was a continuing challenge. The other was communication. Hermits are rare in any society. Most of us are social animals and like to talk to one another, whether it’s in passing at the grocery store, at work, or on social occasions. When you are secluded, enclosed by four walls, and unable to talk to anyone but yourself, day in and day out, for hours on end, your mind grows weary and confused. The tendency to daydream and fantasize and to lapse into the “why me?” syndrome has to be fought.

  We devised a tap code, somewhat similar to Morse code, involving a sequence of taps spelling out the alphabet and, ultimately, words and sentences. This tap code has been well chronicled in numerous books. Suffice it to say our ability to communicate via this code literally saved us from a different kind of starvation—that of no contact with fellow detainees. We rapped knuckles on cell walls, coughed the code, even swept floors using the sound of the broom brushing concrete floors to send a message. Our ability to converse in this rudimentary yet clever fashion was essential to survival.

  I was installed in a one-person cell in the Thunderbird cell block. This began six months of solitary confinement. I was banged up after my three days with Straps and Bar and had very limited use of my limbs. It would actually be several months before they were back to a reasonably functional status. Turns out I had a fractured bone in my left shoulder, plus I had lost the feeling in the outside of my right leg.

  Crippled as I was, I was able to work myself over to the door of the cell, where I detected other POWs talking. From this, I learned that the senior officer in Thunderbird was Navy Commander (later Vice Admiral) Jim Stockdale, an old friend from test pilot days, who was shot down in September of 1965. I hadn’t learned the code yet, but I was able to get word to him piecemeal through various other POWs that I had seen his wife, Sybil, four months before at a change of command ceremony at Naval Air Station North Island, that she looked great, and that all four boys were doing fine. I also notified him that his name had appeared on the latest captain’s list and that he had been promoted to captain a year ahead of his Naval Academy class. I learned later this was a huge boost to him, because he hadn’t heard anything from his family but for a “carbon” letter from Sybil the previous December.

  The days and nights were long and lonely. Thank heaven for the tap code, which I was able to pick up rather quickly. It was a relatively simple system. Picture a matrix with twenty-five of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet (we left off the K and allowed C to stand for both letters). There were five lines of five letters each. Line one across was for A-E; line two, F-J; line three, L-P and so on. To send a word, we tapped once for line one, twice for line two (next line down), and so forth, then worked horizontally. The phrase “OK” would be tapped as follows: three taps for the third line down (which contains the O) then four taps to select O. Next, one tap for the first line and three taps for the third letter going from left to right. It was amazing how proficient we became with this simple system.

  At one point I was moved to a cell that had a common wall with another cell wherein resided U.S. Air Force lieutenant Ron Maston. Ron and I had an active exchange of information via the tap code, which we exercised with increasing proficiency.

  I slept on a bare wooden bunk in debilitating heat. I developed bad sores on my scalp, although my broken shoulder was healing. The overriding ambiance of our prison life was characterized by the unending filth and rats. It took a while to realize that the standard of hygiene in the prison camp was hardly different from what the general population in Hanoi experienced. Once, I was spread out with my head close to the slight gap between the bottom of my wooden cell door and the cement floor. I was trying to see what I could see and endeavoring to transmit a message. I had left a chunk of brown bread on my bunk, and when I turned back from the door I was startled to see a foot-long rat nibbling at the bread. I shooed him away, but I knew he or his pals would be back. I’d never seen a rat as big as that one.

  We had rudimentary medical care; a North Vietnamese “corpsman” had some medicines. I was extremely lucky to never have gotten really sick during captivity. But I did contract a viral infection in my left eye. I was taken to the corpsman, who used a big needle to give me an injection of penicillin. I was allergic to this medication in large doses, but that’s what I got. My eye got better, but I traded that for a really bad rash. I cannot stress enough how valuable it was that I was in top physical condition when I was shot down. Those POWs who were less fit physically had a huge strike against them at the outset. In some cases, because of the dreary and continuing poor conditions, dysentery became commonplace, and malaise set in, seriously eroding the all-important will to survive.

  I was in solitary confinement through the summer and was periodically moved from one seven-foot-square cell to another. The furnishings were inevitably the same—a slab for a bed and a bucket for human waste.

  We communicated well in Thunderbird for that first month, but almost suddenly, “conversation” was ceased. Apparently, the camp commander perceived that the courageous Jim Stockdale had established some sort of network through which he could put out orders to fellow POWs who were subordinate in rank.

  The guards removed a
dozen prisoners who they believed were at the heart of the network and segregated them in another section of the prison complex called Alcatraz. From July to October there were virtually no communications.

  One day I looked out through the bars of the small glassless window of my cell, a forbidden practice, and caught a glimpse of Byron Fuller, a Naval Academy classmate. He had been injured and was being helped along by a fellow POW, Wayne Waddel, of the Air Force, assigned to him by the North Vietnamese as Fuller’s nurse.

  Another time when I surreptitiously peeked out the window, I was caught by a guard. For punishment, I was placed in leg stocks, iron shackles rigged at one end of the wooden bunk. I could raise up and my arms were free. But being secured to that slab and unable to move about was terribly demoralizing. The immobility, the heat—which led to the eruption of sores all over my body, not to mention a relentless armada of flies and mosquitoes—the inability to communicate with anyone, not to mention the absence of letters from home, or the opportunity to send one myself, and the inexorable discomfort took their toll. I was two months into captivity and I felt myself growing despondent. I recognized this as a danger point, as if I were lowering deeper and deeper into a darkening well. It was very easy to feel sorry for myself. In retrospect, this was the lowest point of my tour in the Hanoi Hilton. Fortunately, I never completely slipped off into the abyss.

  In October, an escalation of the bombing resulted in an influx of prisoners. Several times a day air raid sirens wailed across Hanoi, announcing the arrival of American bombers. As more and more aircraft flew into the dangerous skies, more and more aviators were shot down, increasing the POW population. This became an ironic blessing for me, because I was let out of the stocks. To my unfathomable relief, I was placed in a cell with three newly arrived flyers, one of them another classmate, Cdr. Chuck Gillespie, commanding officer of Fighter Squadron 151, flying F-4 Phantoms. POWs Bryon Fuller, Al Brady, Jim Mehl, and now Gillespie were fellow classmates at the Academy. Also, there were Lt. Col. Tom Kirk, U.S. Air Force, and Lt. Cdr. Verlyne “Red” Daniels, U.S. Navy. Being with other human beings was an emotional lift, a feeling unlike any other I’d experienced in my relatively brief lifetime.