We ate twice a day. A little rice and a little soup made from swamp weed that you would see growing out the window. It tasted a little bit like a very bad-tasting turnip green. Not too bitter, just sort of bland. You would get about a third of a bowl with a few of the greens, but mostly colored water. That was the standard fare.
Sometimes you would get a side dish of a tablespoon of turnips, cauliflower, or carrots that were kind of steamed. Once in a while, they might put a little pork fat in. If they had any chicken, they could chop it up, bones and all. You might get a smathering. But usually it was the pork fat, about the size of your thumbnail. A lot of guys couldn’t eat it. It wasn’t half clean. It would have hair on it. And it looked bad. So they would throw it away. My philosophy was that no matter what it is, no matter how bad it tastes, if it’s going to keep me alive, I’m going to eat it.
I ate it. I ate. I ate. I ate. If it was edible at all, I ate it.
Most of the time I would go to sleep hungry. For the first ten months I never saw a piece of bread. They could make good French bread, but by the time we saw it, it would be old and moldy. In spite of that, you’d eat it.
On their special occasions they would give you about a fourth of a cup of coffee. The Tet holiday, Christmas, and their independence day. A lot of the guys looked forward to that.
We would get two or three cigarettes a day. Some they call Vinh Binh. And of course we called them Done Beens.
I don’t smoke or use alcohol. And I was never much of a coffee drinker. The only thing I craved was ice cream. All the time. I wanted vanilla ice cream. Every day I thought of vanilla ice cream.
I think I lost 35 pounds, down from 155. But some of the guys who were shot down were just skeleton and bones because they couldn’t eat the food and, in some cases, they wouldn’t eat the food. There were guys who had weighed 190 pounds and were down to 100.
It gets pretty cold in North Vietnam in the winter months. And it’s terrible if you don’t have much clothing. We had two sets of prison clothes—shorts, pants, and shirt. But they would only let you wear one set at a time. The first winter I had no socks, just sandals made from rubber tires. And one blanket. The second winter they gave us a pair of socks and a second blanket. But it was still not enough to keep warm.
They wouldn’t let us move around much that first winter, too. I got a circulation problem. My feet and legs would swell up and itch and burn. It got so painful that I thought it might be better that I were dead rather than alive.
At about five-thirty in the morning we would hear them beat on those gongs. And the night shift would go home, and the day people would get up and go to work. We had to sit up. Then maybe around ten you might get to go outside to bathe from ice-cold well water or wash your clothes. They would give you just ten minutes. They issued you a toothbrush, a bar of homemade soap, and a little tube of toothpaste. The toothpaste had to last you four months, so you just took a tiny lick each day to catch the taste. And you had to relieve yourself in the cell. They had buckets for you to urinate and defecate in. We called them honey buckets. Sometimes the lids were half rusted out or fallen off. They would let you empty them once a day unless they didn’t like what you were doing or they couldn’t get the information out of you they wanted. Around nine at night the gongs would go off again, and you could sleep. But this little dingy light stayed on all night.
You had to keep track of time on your own. And the first couple of weeks, I just couldn’t put it all together. The interrogations and beatings came in cells where you couldn’t see out. You would get so beat out until you might sleep a few minutes and think you’d been asleep all night. But afterwards, you could keep the days together. Being somewhat accustomed to the Western way, Sunday was not a big workday for them. And then you knew a week had rolled around.
In the first few years they wouldn’t give us any reading material, and, of course, no mail. And they never let us learn their language, because they felt that we might hear too much. I only learned the words for “yes” and “no” and the words lai mau, meaning “come quick,” which would get the camp commander in an emergency.
They didn’t want us to communicate, because we could pass information and keep each other’s spirits up. Communicating was one of the quickest ways that you could get tortured.
In the first few days we knocked on walls and made signals if we saw each other. Morse code was too slow. So we put the alphabet in a five by five matrix. The first series of taps located the letter vertically, the next series horizontally. We combined J and K, or we would just use six straight taps for a K. Once in a while you would try to talk very low, but that was very hazardous.
They had a public-address system in the camp that they would pipe into the cell. They would read things in their behalf about the Communist way and downgrading the United States, blah, blah, blah, all the time. They would sanitize the broadcast they pumped to the GIs in the South. Whenever you heard something about how the war was going, my general philosophy was to turn it 180 degrees around and you might get close to the truth.
When Dr. King was assassinated, they called me in for interrogation to see if I would make a statement critical of the United States. I said no, I don’t know enough about it. They wanted all of us to make statements they could send abroad or make tapes they could play to the GIs. They wanted me to tell black soldiers not to fight because the United States is waging a war of genocide, using dark-skinned people against dark-skinned people. I would tell them no. This is not a black-white war. We’re in Vietnam trying to help the South Vietnamese. It is a matter of helping people who are your friends.
Once they found out they couldn’t get anything out of me on the racial front, they would harass me a little harder than my white comrades. They would call me a lackey and an Uncle Tom and say, “You suck your brother’s liver. You drink your brother’s blood.”
My personal feeling is that black people have problems and still have problems in America. But I never told them that, because I had no intention of helping them to defeat us. We deal with our problems within our own country. Some people just do not live up to the great ideals our country stands for. And some blacks don’t take advantage of the privileges and opportunities we have. Although black people are kind of behind the power curtain, we have just as much claim to this country as any white man. America is the black man’s best hope.
We decided not to see any American delegations that came to Hanoi, except if we were trying to get something out. We knew the North Vietnamese were using American sympathizers like Jane Fonda to promote their cause, and all it would do is prolong the war. We hated to see it happen.
The North Vietnamese would only allow you to say certain things to the delegations. You couldn’t tell it like it was. And most of the guys who actually saw delegations were tortured into doing it. Some let it be known they were tortured by sending a signal when their pictures were taken. When that was found out, they were beaten and denied food.
I heard that a few prisoners met the delegations or made statements because they were promised sex with a young girl.
I’m sure they selected the interrogators and guards very carefully. They didn’t just take anybody off the street. They were well indoctrinated and very disciplined. When they were told to harass or lay off the prisoner, they could turn it on and off like a light switch. You could tell some really didn’t have a desire to really put the screws to you. But others seemed to enjoy it, and you could see they really wanted to get to you if they were told to leave you alone. No one ever tried to help us or be kind to us either. They were afraid of the repercussions.
We never were allowed to learn the Vietnamese names of these people, so we would give them names. We gave a few fairly decent names like the Chief, the Professor. But normally we used animal names because of the way they looked or how they acted. Dog, Cat, Rat, and Rabbit. Rat actually looked like a rat.
Rabbit was an interrogator. He thought he was pretty smart. He was very unfeeling.
He enjoyed torture. And when I refused to speak against my country because of the way blacks are treated, he would get my rations cut or keep me from washing up.
Early on, Ho Chi Minh put the word out that if you capture Americans—he called us air pirates—don’t kill them but make them suffer. So up to the time he died in September of 1969, we were treated pretty rough. But they didn’t kill us unless they overstepped their bounds on a few cases of torture. By 1969, though, the word had gotten around the world that we were being treated very badly. So the powers that took over after Ho Chi Minh’s death decided they were going to improve our treatment. So around Christmas we started to get more food and our first packages and letters from home. Of course, the packages were unwrapped by the guards, and they kept the games, the reading materials, and some of the good food items. All that was left in my first package was a toothbrush, a little candy, some cookies, and a few cheeses. And they had chopped the cookies into crumbs.
My wife, Carol, and I had a close-knit family. It was one of my constant concerns. In my primary petitions to God, I asked Him to take care of them. When I left, my son was approaching four, and my daughter was almost one. I handled most of the bills and made the decisions. When I found out I was going to Thailand for a year, we made plans for Carol to take care of things for a year.
I did not tell her that I was flying combat missions. So when the Air Force people came to her house saying I was missing in action, she just went out of it. For weeks her face and hands would swell up, and she had to stay on tranquilizers. And she stayed in a state of limbo for three years, because when my plane went down, the fighter cover said they had saw only two chutes. They assumed them to be the pilot and navigator.
Carol kinda had the feeling that I was okay even though there was no word. Our families are very religious. My aunt told her she had a vision that showed that I was actually okay. Carol’s mother said she had a dream, and she saw me in a prison cell, talked to me a little bit, and I said, “I’m all right.” And there was a blind man in the neighborhood whom people had a lot of faith in because he was very religious. He told Carol not to worry, that I was coming back.
My father died in 1968 without seeing me again. But the family said that before he passed, he told them somebody from France came to see him and said I was okay. The North Vietnamese always tried to get information about your background to pass to their contacts in Europe. Then they wanted the contacts to try to influence your family to take antiwar stands that would help their cause. The contacts would promise we would get good treatment if they made the statements. But my father said nothing.
But Carol didn’t know for sure that I was alive until 1969. The Air Force showed her pictures taken of me in the camp, and she said, “My goodness, I’d recognize that guy anywhere.” The pictures were taken for propaganda purposes at Easter and Christmas. They would let some of us get together to read Scripture and sing a few songs to show how good they treated American prisoners. We gained some benefit, because it was one of the few times we could pass information and keep morale up.
After United States forces raided the Son Tay prison camp in 1970, security got a lot tighter. The guards were fully geared with grenades and everything. And the interrogators said if there was an indication of another raid going on, we will kill every one of you. And I believe they would have.
They knew that the United States probably knew where the camps were located, so they would mount a lot of their antiaircraft guns close to the prisons, some on the prison walls. They figured that the United States planes wouldn’t get them. But even from the first, when I was shot down, our planes would come in and hit close by. Many times those cell walls would rattle, and plaster would fall from the ceiling. I never was afraid, because I always felt that we needed to keep the pressures on them or we could sit there forever.
From 1968 on, they would give you bits and pieces about the peace negotiations. When the bombings picked up in 1972 and the presidential campaign was going on, we thought something was going to happen. One of the provisions in the Paris Accords in 1973 was that the prisoners would be notified. So a few days after the peace agreements were signed, we were called out in a formation, and they announced we would be released soon.
You would think that everybody would have jumped up and down, and said, “Oh, happy days.” Nothing. Not a sound.
To me it was a feeling of relief. But I wasn’t convinced until we were actually out of there. We just knew we were going to get out after the Tet Offensive because they were getting their ears beat off. And when the incursion took place in Cambodia, we thought so, too.
The North Vietnamese agreed to let American C-141 airplanes into Gia Long airport to pick us up. When I got on the plane, I still thought the Communists could change their minds or the engine might not go. It wasn’t until wheels up that I said, “Whoooo, man. We made it.”
It was February 12, 1973. Six years, six months, and twenty-three days after my capture.
I think they had some candy and some sodas on the plane. When we got to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, we went through the chow hall and, boy, we just tore up the ice cream.
I landed at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C. The first thing I said to Carol was, “I made it back.” She was so excited she just screamed.
Carol did a beautiful job of keeping me alive in the children’s minds. When I would put the finger on the son, he responded because he kinda remembered the old days. But the daughter, it was a real trial because she never had a concept of just what a dad does. I guess she supposed that I would be a sugar daddy.
I guess most of us were shocked by how some things had changed. The explicit sex in movies. The openness about homosexuality. The attitude of doing your own thing. The fancy colored pants and wide belts for men. And the high prices!
We really hated that we missed the hot pants and miniskirts.
For the first couple of years I kept having dreams that you were just about to be released and for some reason you couldn’t find your pants or your jacket, and you weren’t allowed to leave until you did. But you never could find them. Or one of the interrogators would take you back. Or you would be free, but you would know that in a week you had to go back.
When I was first captured, I was really praying fervently that the Lord would get me and my fellow prisoners out of there right away.
I kinda grew up in the church. At the age of twelve, I accepted Christ. I was a churchgoer and tried to live right. I had a pretty strong faith at the time I was captured. But one of the things I had to deal with was, Lord, why am I here? Why do you do this to me when I’ve been trying to do right all this time?
One month passed. Two months passed. Six months passed. A year passed. Old McDaniel’s still sitting here, still praying.
After two years, I have to look at this situation. Is the Lord listening to what I’m saying? I am suffering, and nothing’s happening. So I had to reconcile myself that it just might be that I’m not to go back in the flesh, alive, to the United States. Then I had a lot more peace of mind, and I was able to continue then to cause that faith to grow.
It says in St. Paul and Romans that if we are children of God, we are not exempted from the trials and tribulations. He’s going to give us the strength to go through them. That’s in 1 Corinthians 10:23. So I said even if they take my mortal life, I’m still okay. I never did lose faith.
One of the real pluses from that experience was that I’m a lot closer to God. And a lot of things that might scare a lot of other people in terms of dangers, I can just walk right on through without backing away, shying away, or making compromises that really should not be made.
I’ve been there.
Sergeant Major
Edgar A. Huff
Gadsden, Alabama
Sergeant Major
1st Military Police Battalion
May 1967–July 1968
III Marine Amphibious Force
October 1970–April 1971
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U.S. Marine Corps
Danang
We had a grand time. My retirement party on my two-and-one-half-acre home here in Hubert, North Carolina, just down the road from Camp Lejeune. That was 1 October ’72. We had some 750 people here on this lawn. All types of people. There was a 12-piece orchestra on the lawn. We had all the barbecue pits going. Four hogs on the spit. My soul pot was in operation with chicken stew. I heard they drank somewhere in the neighborhood of ten barrels of Tom Collins and martinis. The party was supposed to last from three o’clock until six. Apparently they forgot the time, because the last folks left the next morning. I never been to a ball like that in my life. I couldn’t stand but one retirement, I’m sure.
When I retired, I had been sergeant major longer than anyone on duty at the time in all the services. I was the senior enlisted man in the whole United States Armed Forces. I could look back to becoming the first black sergeant major in the Marine Corps, serving 19 different generals, and being sergeant major to General Cushman three times, including Vietnam, when it was the largest Marine force ever assembled. After I made sergeant major, it was 12 years before the Marines made another black one.
I guess I heard from two thirds of the generals on active duty at the time I retired, all the way to Okinawa and Japan. General Cushman called me his strong right arm, and President Nixon sent me greetings. But Alabama was somethin’. They made me honorary mayor of my hometown, Gadsden, and gave me the key to the city. Governor Wallace sent his representative, the commander of the National Guard of the state of Alabama, and called to tell me how proud he was of my career and how it stands as an example for others to follow.
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