Still, it was worth the risk, since communication was the foundation of any kind of resistance. The senior man had to get his orders out to everyone in the camp, and everyone had to be tied in; four men alone in a room were not part of a unified resistance. With something called the “tap code,” prisoners were able to communicate and establish an organization. Working together helped them overcome feelings of isolation and boredom, and ultimately enabled them to resist.
The principle of the tap code is ancient, at least as old as Greek civilization. In modern dress, it appears in Arthur Koestler's descriptions of life in the Soviet prison in his novel Darkness at Noon. POWs believed that it had been invented by an air force captain named Smitty Harris, who came up with it while he was in survival school and remembered it in Hoa Lo after he had been shot down. Although the POWs may have been wrong about the origins of the tap code, no group in history ever employed it more successfully or more enthusiastically. Learning the tap code was like getting a telephone: It opened a world.
The basis of the code is a grid that looks like this:
A B C D E
F G H I J
L M N O P
Q R S T U
V W X Y Z
The letter C could be substituted for K, and the code was read like the coordinates on a map—down and right. For example, the letter M would be three down and two across. To transmit an M through the wall, a prisoner would tap three times, pause, then tap twice.
Most men learned the code from a roommate, but it was possible to teach it through a wall to a man who was all alone and needed it worse than anyone. A man who knew the code would simply tap on the wall until he got a response. He might tap out the familiar rhythm of “Shave and a Haircut” until the man on the other side came back with “Two Bits.” Once that happened, they were in communication. Then the tedious business of teaching a language began, first using a more primitive system. The first man would tap once, pause, tap twice, pause, tap three times, pause … and so on, until he reached twenty-six. Then he would do it again. Eventually, the other man would understand that the twenty-six taps represented the alphabet. A was one, B was two, and so on.
When this had been established, a few messages would be transmitted. The men would exchange names, perhaps, and shootdown dates. It was exceedingly slow and tedious, but it established the link and the rudiments of the method. The next step was to tap out the message “Make a matrix.” That done, the newcomer was instructed to fill in the alphabet. In this way the first code was used to explain the much shorter, more efficient one.
At the Plantation, as well as the other camps, the walls were alive with the sounds of men urgently tapping out messages.
When it became clear to the men at the Plantation that they were not going home in return for an end to the bombing of Hanoi, they began trying to improve the physical conditions of their captivity. They would never be comfort-able—the cells were crowded and unventilated, and the men slept on boards and wore the same clothes day after day—but they could try to keep clean, and they could improvise several other ways to reduce their misery.
In Warehouse Four there was a lieutenant (j.g.) named Tom Hall who gained a reputation among his fellows as an especially gifted improviser. A farmboy from outside of Suffolk, Virginia, who had grown up learning how to doctor animals, fix cars, and make all of the endless repairs necessary to keep a farm running, he knew how to “make do.” After graduating from Virginia Tech, he had gone into the navy and learned to fly fighters. He had been stationed on the Bonhomme Richard, on Yankee Station, when his F-8 was hit by a SAM. He had gone to afterburner and pointed the plane toward the beach. Over the Gulf of Tonkin, safely out of reach of the patrol boats and fishing junks, he ejected. The rescue helicopter picked him up and flew him back to the carrier, whose captain was waiting to greet him. A photographer caught the moment, and the picture made the papers back in the States.
Like any pilot who has ejected, Hall was ordered to stand down for a day. The following morning, the weather was so bad over North Vietnam that no missions were flown from the ship. The next day Hall was flying again, and he caught another SAM. This time he bailed out near Hanoi—and the North Vietnamese got him. That was June 1966.
To the men who shared space with him in North Vietnam, Tom Hall was the perfect roommate. He knew how to be quiet, but when he talked, he always had something interesting to say. He told them stories about life back home on the farm, including one about how his family kept a hummingbird flying free in the house to keep the bugs down. The other pilots loved this story; the idea of a hummingbird in the house was somehow otherworldly.
Hall never got too high or too low. He maintained an even strain, as pilots say, and he looked after his comrades first and himself second. He didn't bitch and he didn't quit and he knew, by God, how to cope. It was Hall who figured out how to ease the problem of the drafty cells in the winter of 1968, when the men would wake up in the morning close to hypothermic and spend the first hour or two of the day trying to warm up. hats, he tapped through the wall. Use extra cloth or, better, a sock to make a hat. Stretch it until it fits over your head like a watch cap. You lose most of your body heat through your head, he explained, and this would help. The men tried it, and it did help. Nevertheless, it was cold, especially during the night.
MOSQUITO NETS, Hall tapped. When it is below forty outside, he explained, you do not need to guard against mosquitoes, but the net can be turned into a kind of insulation, like the fishnet material that Scandinavians use for underwear. Before you lie down to sleep, wrap your upper body in your mosquito net. Like the hats, the improvised underwear was a help. The men were not exactly warm, but they weren't chilled to the bone any longer.
Tom Hall improvised sewing needles from fish bones, or from pieces of wire picked up in the yard. The POWs could now mend their clothes, and they even amused themselves by learning to do a kind of needlepoint. The favorite pattern was, far and away, the American flag.
Hall was also given credit for discovering that a man could use his sandals, which were cut from old rubber tires, as a toilet seat by laying them across the cold, sharp, dirt-encrusted edges of the bucket before he squatted. This, in the minds of many POWs, was the most inspired bit of improvisation in the entire war.
Another persistent, seemingly unsolvable problem at the Plantation was the rats. They were abundant and they were bold. You could chase them out of your cell during the day, but they returned at night. Men were frequently awakened by the pressure of small feet moving across their chests.
Using items that he scrounged—pieces of metal, string, and an empty tin can—Hall built a working mousetrap that kept his cell rat-free. He could not use the tap code to teach the other men how to build such a trap from odds and ends, but he could tell them how to improvise a substitute for plaster out of brick dust and water and use that to seal the rat holes. The other prisoners went to work plastering the holes, and for a while this worked as well as all of Hall's other ideas. But the rats were not pushovers. They began to gnaw their way through the weak plaster barricades, and soon the men had to struggle to replaster the holes faster than the rats could gnaw them open again.
Once more, Hall came through. The Vietnamese grew a kind of bell-shaped pepper, which the men ate with their rations. The pepper was fiercely hot, hotter than any jalapeño the Americans had ever eaten. It was possible to sneak one or two of these peppers out of the mess hall when you were on food detail, and Hall advised the other prisoners to plug the rat holes with them. Checking the holes a day or two later, the men noticed that the rats had tried gnawing through the new plugs but had given up before breaking through. The peppers were too hot even for them.
The rats remained a problem—there were no complete, unequivocal victories for the POWs—but Tom Hall had made it into a fight, and the POWs got their innings.
Housekeeping was humdrum stuff for men who flew supersonic fighters and were accustomed to turning their dirty uniforms
over to a laundry run by enlisted men. But it became vastly important at the Plantation and the other camps. The camp was dirty, and sanitation was nonexistent. Spiders, roaches, and flies were everywhere. One man tapped out a message designating the housefly as the national bird of North Vietnam. Keeping clean was important not only for its own sake but because it represented a challenge, however small. It wasn't the stuff of a fighter pilot's dreams, like shooting down a MiG, but under the circumstances it would do.
In their weakened condition, the POWs were prey to all sorts of infections and parasites. They worked hard at keeping their cells, their clothes, and themselves clean. Each man was issued a small bar of lye soap every week, and since it seemed to be almost as abundant as pumpkins, they washed their uniforms vigorously with it when they were taken out to bathe. But they still got sick. Medical lore was dredged up from memory and passed through the wall. When you had diarrhea, you should drink only the broth from your soup and leave any greens or meat it might contain. If you were constipated, you should eat whatever solids were in the soup and leave the liquid. It was not much, but it was a regimen and they followed it.
Boils were a constant, painful problem, as were abscessed teeth. One man remembered a doctor telling him an old piece of medical shorthand—“piss and pus must come out”—so he sneaked razor blades from the shower and used them to lance the boils and open the abscesses. It was painful and messy, but it seemed to work.
Many of the prisoners had been seriously injured when they ejected, and there was a lot of discussion through the wall about how to treat those injuries. What could you do about a broken bone that had not been set properly and was healing crooked?
Al Stafford—one of Stratton's roommates—had suffered a broken upper arm when he was blown out of his plane. The arm seemed to be mending, after a fashion, but he could not raise it to the level of his chest or move it laterally beyond an arc of about 30 degrees. He improvised slings and used his good arm for support, but this only increased the stiffness. He imagined himself returning home—whenever that day came—as a cripple.
Down the line of cells somewhere, another POW learned about Stafford's problem and tapped back that he should begin exercising the arm as much as possible to prevent muscle atrophy and to break up the deposits of calcium that were forming around the break. It was something he'd learned after a football injury.
This led to a debate within Stafford's cell about exercise in general. Should prisoners exert themselves? Dick Stratton, never a man for fitness regimes even before he was shot down, was against strenuous exercise programs. In Stafford's case, he thought it would merely aggravate the injury. As for the other men, he said exercise would burn calories, and they could not afford to waste a single BTU. They were on starvation rations; sit-ups and push-ups would only exhaust whatever small reserves they had. But Stratton was careful not to overexert his authority in this matter. He did not order the men not to exercise strenuously; he merely recommended against it. (Later, he began exercising himself.)
Stafford tried some simple flexing movements. How much worse, he asked himself, could it make his arm? So he would raise it, tentatively, until he reached the point where pain told him to stop. Then he would raise the arm another inch or two, stopping when he could hear something inside begin to tear. It sounded almost like a piece of paper gently ripping. Tears would fill his eyes and he would feel himself growing faint. He would lower his arm until the pain had passed and he had his breath. Then he would slowly raise the arm again, until he reached the same point, and then he would bite down on his back teeth and go another inch, and one more….
After a couple of weeks, he noticed that the arc of mobility had grown by a couple of degrees. So he massaged the arm and kept on. He set goals: Get the arm loose enough that he could use it to drink a cup of water; then enough that he could touch the top of his head. Every day he worked the arm until he could hear that sound of tearing paper and he was on the edge of passing out. The other men in the cell would look away while he was exercising. Now and then, one would say, “How's the arm, Al?”
“Better. Lots better. I can touch my nose.”
“That's great, man. Really great. Hang in there.”
Other prisoners, desperate for some kind of physical activity, began doing calisthenics. This was tricky, since the sounds of a man running in place or counting off push-ups would alert guards. They would open the cell's little Judas window, wave a finger at the man, and tell him to stop. If he was caught repeatedly, he might be taken up to the headquarters building, which the POWs called the Big House, for interrogation and punishment. Prisoners were to sit quietly in their cells, eat their two bowls of soup a day, come out for a bath and a shave once a week, and otherwise do nothing.
So prisoners who wanted to do calisthenics had to depend on the “clearing system.” Along the line of cells, men would watch—and if a guard approached, they would bang on the walls hard enough to alert everyone along the line. When a heavy thud sounded along the wall, men would scramble up from the floor to sit on their bunks with their hands folded in their laps, like subdued children waiting silently in church for services to begin. Between the warning thuds, they did their push-ups and their sit-ups and kept meticulous records of their repetitions. Scores were tapped through the wall, and competitions inevitably followed.
The sit-up count reached into the thousands. A man would fold his blanket into the shape of an exercise mat, get down on his back on the floor, and begin knocking them out with the easy rhythm of a metronome—up and back, up and back, up and back … breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out…. Soon the steady, repetitious flexing of his own body would shut out everything else, and he would be alert to nothing except movement and the possible thump from a man in another cell, clearing. Up and down … six hundred, six hundred one … two … Time seemed to slide by when a man was doing his sit-ups. And when he finished, or had to quit, he would feel an overall exhaustion that seemed so much better than the angry tension that grew tighter and tighter inside, like a rope being slowly twisted, when he simply sat on his bunk, hands folded in his lap, waiting for time to pass, feeling his life go by, leaving behind it a trail of … nothing.
For some men, calisthenics were insufficient. After thousands of push-ups, tens of thousands of sit-ups, miles of running in place, they wanted something more challenging. For some reason, it seemed essential to start lifting weights.
There were, of course, no weights available, and nothing in the cells even came close. The sawhorses and pallet beds were too big and cumbersome. The only other things in the cells were the buckets. So the physical-fitness fanatics began curling buckets full of human waste to develop their arms. Some days the buckets were heavy and some days they were light. They always stank, but that seemed less and less important to men who had learned to share space with rats and sit on those buckets with absolutely no privacy. They did their curls, concentrating to make the lifting motion smooth and fluid so the contents of the buckets would not slop around too much inside or spill over the edges.
Years later, when he was home, one of the men went to a movie about weight lifting and bodybuilding. The movie was Pumping Iron, and it occurred to him that hour after hour, day after day, for almost six years of his life, what he had been doing was pumping shit. It seemed the perfect description.
It was not enough to work on housekeeping, health, and fitness. Even after you had done all you could to keep the cell and yourself clean, exercised until you were exhausted, and taken your turn tapping or clearing, there were still long empty stretches of time that had to be filled. Somehow, you had to keep your mind occupied; otherwise you would dwell on your situation and sink into a swamp of self-pity. The POWs found they had more resources than they could have imagined for keeping themselves diverted. It came down to discovering what they already knew.
Stafford was on the wall one day when someone from the next cell tapped out a riddle. “You are on a path,” the message rea
d, “and you come to a place where the path goes off in two directions. There is a guard at the head of each new path. If you take one path, you will meet certain death. If you take the other path, you will live. One guard always lies and the other always tells the truth. You do not know which is which, and you may ask only one question of one of them. What is the question that will allow you to proceed safely?”
It took a long time for the man in the next cell to tap out that message. It took much longer—months, in fact—for Stafford, who had never been good at math and logic and the other empirical disciplines, to mull over the answer. But this was the point. When one of his roommates, who knew the answer, tried to coach him, Stafford said, “No, goddammit. Don't ruin it. I'll get it.”
Like virtually all of the prisoners, Stafford finally gave up and asked someone to tell him the answer—which was simplicity itself. You ask either guard, “If I ask the other guard which is the road to safety, what will he tell me?” And then you take the opposite path. This was the best of many brainteasers that went through the wall.
Killing time was not an altogether new experience for the aviators. They had always had time on their hands while waiting to fly, especially in the days before the war. One way of killing time had been with card games that could be put down before takeoff and resumed when the planes were back down. Readyroom and alert-room bridge games could last for weeks. It took some resourcefulness, however, to get a rubber going in prison when all four players were in different and not always adjacent cells.
First you needed cards. The Vietnamese were not handing any out. Although they were included in Red Cross and other packages sent to the POWs, these were not distributed until very late in the war. So the POWs had to make the cards. Toilet paper was available. A quill could be made from broom straw, ink from ashes and water. The cards were made small so they could be easily concealed.
The Cold War Page 46
