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

  On the evening of September 9, 1965, she had lain down for a short rest after putting her three youngest boys to bed. Sleep had come easily—unexpectedly so. Then voices from downstairs roused her from her light nap. She looked at the clock: 10:00 P.M. Why would someone call so late? She listened for a moment, orienting herself, identifying the voices—her best friend, her oldest son, and someone else. Then she walked downstairs. Her friend, Doyen Salsig, whose husband commanded the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga, met her on the way.

  “What are you doing here?” Sybil asked.

  Doyen pulled her friend close to deliver the news every wife feared. “There’s been a message,” Doyen said. “Jim is missing.”

  Sybil heard the words and her mind raced. “She’d said Jim was missing,” Sybil thought. “Missing! How could he be missing? It was impossible for a person to be missing. You couldn’t be missing if you were alive. You’d have to be somewhere in the world.”

  Sybil finally voiced her confused thoughts. “Missing?” she asked. “How can he be missing?”

  Gently, Doyen said, “His plane was shot down and they think he got out, but they’re not sure. There’s a chaplain downstairs telling Jimmy. He has all the details about what they know so far. His name is Parker. He’s a lieutenant.”

  Sybil, forty years old and eighteen years a navy wife, listened to the young chaplain’s voice tremble as he related the details. “Poor young man,” she thought as he stammered away. She wondered if he’d ever delivered news like this. The chaplain explained that roughly twenty-four hours earlier, over North Vietnam, another aircraft had seen Jim’s plane descending in flames. A parachute had deployed, but the radio beacon never activated, and Jim’s wingmen had not observed any signs of life on the ground. A violent ejection could have killed him as easily as ground fire aimed at his helpless figure as it hung beneath the chute. He might have survived the ejection and the descent only to be killed on the ground. Or perhaps the North Vietnamese had captured him and, at this very moment, had him locked inside a village jail. Nobody really knew. So the navy had classified Commander Jim Stockdale as missing in action.

  No tears came to Sybil’s eyes. No sobbing, no pleading, no crumpling to the floor, just the slow onset of shock. She began to tremble. Doyen brought her sherry; Lieutenant Parker excused himself.

  During all of this, fourteen-year-old Jimmy had disappeared to his room, escaping the formality of the chaplain, avoiding the sight of his shaking mother, who seemed momentarily at a loss. Before long, his mother descended the steps to his basement room. He lay on his bed, listening to music from the radio. Sybil rubbed his back, and they sat together quietly reflecting. Jimmy asked her if he still had a father. His mother searched her intuition but found no hint of her husband’s fate. At last, she bid Jimmy good night and climbed the stairs to her room. She fell into the half-empty bed, pondering when—if—Jim would share it with her again. She decided to pray, but wondered what for. For Jim to be alive? For him to escape? For her boys? For her own sake? She asked God to grant them all strength. She didn’t know what God, fate, or the North Vietnamese had in store, but Sybil knew that she and Jim would need more strength than either had called upon before.

  The next morning, she told her younger sons the news. She held eleven-year-old Sid in her arms until he could cry no more. She doubted five-year-old Stanford really understood; three-year-old Taylor certainly did not. After breakfast, the older boys went off to school, and Sybil contemplated her new life, feeling more asleep than awake as she fielded phone calls from officials and friends in the military community. She could at least take some comfort in previous briefings she’d received, in which the navy had assured wives that North Vietnam would treat prisoners well. Briefers had explained that as long as the families kept quiet, the men would receive good treatment.

  Sybil opted to believe Jim had survived, and she wanted him to come home to a strong wife and family. So she resolved not to drink away her sadness or spend her days crying and worrying. She endeavored to live with the uncertainty as best she could and make him proud. Her children resolved to do the same. Nothing touched Sybil more than little Stanford, who stopped her as she was washing clothes one day. “Mom,” he said earnestly. She looked down into his blue eyes, which so reminded her of his father’s. “I’m so sorry about Dad.”

  “Thank you, sweetheart,” Sybil said softly, wrapping him tightly in her arms.

  As condolence calls turned from a steady flow to a slow trickle, Jane, Sybil, and other wives of captured or missing airmen had to march on. Bills arrived in mailboxes, mortgage notes came due, and fatherless children needed their mothers’ attention, not to mention breakfast each morning and dinner each night. Sybil had to fight just to receive her husband’s paycheck. He wasn’t classified as killed, so she couldn’t receive any death benefits. Yet he was still missing, so what would the navy do with his pay? She called her navy contacts daily for two weeks, receiving only rote assurances that they would resolve the issue soon. On the last Friday of the month, with their mortgage payment almost due, Sybil lost her patience. “I’ve waited long enough!” she shouted at the base’s financial director. “I’ll give you until Monday to find out about that pay for me or I’m going to call the admiral in Washington who’s head of all navy personnel!” Two hours later, the base called to say that she’d receive Jim’s pay in time to meet the mortgage. After paying the bank, she began carefully saving as much as possible, knowing that if—God forbid—Jim never returned, she’d need far more than his benefits and pension to support her family.

  As September turned to October, Sybil received a phone call from Captain Bob Baldwin at the Pentagon. Jim’s old friend had come across a Soviet Pravda article written by a correspondent in North Vietnam. Baldwin read part of the article to Sybil: “[We saw] a tall, fair-haired, sturdy fellow [who] sat on a bench with his back leaning against the automobile. It was an American prisoner, Captain James B. Stackdel.”

  “That must be Jim,” she thought, although Jim wasn’t particularly tall and she couldn’t be sure. For months, she would cling to the faint hope provided by the article. As weeks and months passed without word from North Vietnam, her dread grew: Was her husband alive?

  * * *

  During 1965, the majority of the public backed the government’s actions in Vietnam. President Johnson had the tacit support of the press and Congress—he counted only ten senators, around seventy representatives, and a handful of journalists in the antiwar camp. In November 1965, however, signs of dissent started to emerge. Outside the Pentagon, 40 feet from Secretary McNamara’s office, a Quaker named Norman Morrison, a young father of three, lit himself on fire to protest U.S. involvement in Vietnam. At the month’s end, more than twenty thousand antiwar protesters marched on the White House. Trouble stirred within the Johnson Administration when General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, requested more troops. Westmoreland originally had estimated the war would require 275,000 U.S. troops in 1966. Now he increased the number to 410,000 and warned he’d need an additional 200,000 for 1967. The numbers shocked the president, but he forged ahead. While most Americans still backed escalation, some inside the government—including McNamara himself—began to quietly question the American mission. Can we win this war? they wondered. How will we get out?

  Each week more names were added to the rolls of the lost, missing, and captured, feeding the country’s emerging undercurrents of worry and doubt. By the end of 1965, more than 2,100 Americans had lost their lives in North and South Vietnam during the past two years. In the first two weeks of November, North Vietnam captured seven more U.S. aviators. At home, their families continued to prepare for Thanksgiving in oblivion—until the military sedan arrived. On November 13, fourteen-year-old Chris Jenkins saw it pulling into his driveway. He stopped washing his breakfast dishes and watched silently as the commanding officer of NAS Lemoore stepped out. A chaplain and the wife of Chris’s father’s second-in-command follo
wed him to the door. Chris knew they would tell him that his dad—Harry Jenkins, skipper of Attack Squadron 163—had been shot down or killed. If the commanding officer and chaplain had been delivering the news to another Squadron 163 family, his mother, Marj, would have filled out the triumvirate.

  The visitors knocked. Chris called from the kitchen, “Mom, the CO and chaplain are here with Mrs. Foster.” In the living room, Marj heard him and knew what their appearance meant. She opened the door and asked, “Is he dead or alive?”

  “Let’s come in and discuss this, Marj,” said the commanding officer gently.

  “No,” she said. “Is he dead or alive?”

  “Marj, let’s go inside,” he repeated.

  “Dead or alive?” she asked, blocking the doorway. He repeated the entreaty, and she again refused. “No,” she said. “Tell me.”

  “We think he’s alive,” the CO said. “He’s classified missing in action.”

  With that, Marj stepped back to allow them in; Chris listened from the kitchen. Harry’s wingman had seen the commander’s A-4 Skyhawk aflame from cockpit to tail. It exploded the instant Harry ejected. When the wingman circled back, he saw Harry on the ground surrounded by North Vietnamese troops. The squadron’s pilots trained their guns around their besieged commander and, for a time, held off the swarming soldiers. The first rescue helicopter on scene went down; the second salvaged the crew from the first helicopter but did not reach Harry before the North Vietnamese. The captured aviator disappeared into the jungle as his squadron mates watched helplessly from on high.

  4

  I SUBMIT

  Harry Jenkins arrived at Hỏa Lò Prison at dawn on November 23, 1965, two days before Thanksgiving. He quickly found himself in Room Eighteen, sitting on a stool below a single lightbulb and a hook. Across from him sat a chain-smoking North Vietnamese officer who looked to be in his midforties; he spoke English well. The lieutenant colonel, dubbed Eagle by the other POWs, had read about Harry’s 132 missions over North Vietnam in Stars and Stripes, the U.S. military’s newspaper. He considered Harry a war criminal and paid no attention to his suggestion that the North Vietnamese must abide by the Geneva Convention.

  Still, Harry would offer nothing beyond his name, rank, service number, and date of birth. When Harry made his intractability clear, Eagle departed from the relatively benign interrogation routine that other POWs had experienced in the previous months. He had three guards take Harry to Room Nineteen, which Bob Shumaker had vacated in August. Since Shu’s five-month occupancy there, the North Vietnamese had added a rough coat of plaster to the walls that formed large globular knobs that would both increase the damage when a body collided with a wall and muffle screams and other sounds. Prisoners now called it the Knobby Room.

  Soon Harry watched as a short but powerfully built soldier joined him in the room. The man seemed around thirty-five or forty years of age and moved like a gymnast. His eyes appeared devoid of emotion. On his head, he wore a pith helmet covered in camouflage netting. Harry had become the first senior officer to meet Pigeye, the man who would extract more screams from the Americans in Hanoi than any other individual, but Harry did not yet know this guard’s nickname or what he was capable of.

  Under Pigeye’s direction, the guards sat Harry on the floor, his feet straight out in front of him. They placed his legs in a pair of antiquated irons with horseshoe-shaped loops that fit tightly around his ankles; a weighted closure bar rested across his shins. Just as they used the prison’s original French leg stocks, the North Vietnamese also used French leg irons that would prove too small for many Americans, especially a 6'5" figure like Harry. They became instruments of torture, not just confinement; they often stopped blood flow and cut into skin. After squeezing Harry’s ankles into the cuffs, Pigeye paused. Eagle gave Harry a final chance to answer a question about his father’s occupation. In Harry’s mind, disclosing that fact—as innocuous as it may have seemed—would violate the Code of Conduct and lead to progressively greater revelations. He refused to cooperate.

  On Eagle’s command, Pigeye yanked Harry’s arms behind his back. Employing aspects of a centuries-old torture technique known as strappado, Pigeye grabbed his victim’s wrists, wrapped them in rags to help prevent scarring, and began winding a rope around them, cinching it tighter and tighter. Next, the guards similarly wrapped his upper arms and tied ropes between them. They stuck their feet into Harry’s back for leverage as they ratcheted his arms ever closer together, bending his shoulders backward and bowing them toward each other. Harry felt as if his sternum would snap, his pectorals would tear away from his rib cage, and his shoulders would pop from their sockets. His upper arms and elbows nearly touched each other; he never imagined a human could achieve this position or feel this much pain. Harry craned his neck toward the right and saw shades of red, white, and purple covering his swelling hand. The ropes pulling his upper arms together conspired with the ropes binding his wrists to strangle circulation. His hands lost feeling; he felt sure he would lose them. Then Pigeye pushed his bound arms forward like a lever, driving his head between his outstretched thighs. No training, no briefing, no experience, no imagination had prepared Harry for such agony. The pain became a ferocious devil unleashed inside his body. He screamed. Then he passed out.

  “If God had wanted you to fly, He’d have given you wings,” Clistie Jenkins had once told her four boys. Only one listened, while two became air force pilots and Harry became a naval aviator. He had never aspired to do anything else. His father’s floral business served the White House, and young Harry saw Franklin Delano Roosevelt often as he delivered flowers to the Executive Mansion. On those trips, he also met a decorated naval attaché, and he forgot any other future career he had entertained. He wanted to fly for the navy. On Saturdays, thirteen-year-old Harry would often visit NAS Anacostia, just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. He became a weekend fixture, and eventually a young aviator approached him and said, “I see you here a lot.”

  “I want to be a pilot,” he replied.

  “You do?” remarked the young officer. “You sure? Have you ever been flying?”

  Harry hadn’t.

  “Then how do you know you want to be a pilot?”

  “I know I want to be a pilot like I know my name,” Harry said.

  “Well, you want to go for a ride?”

  The aviator gave the teenager a helmet and flight suit and told him to keep his helmet on and not to speak to anyone as they walked from the hangar to an airplane. Minutes later, Harry was soaring over the nation’s capital. He kept his stomach despite the plane’s twists and dives, and when they returned to the hangar, the young pilot said, “If you’re convinced this is something you want to do, bring me fifty cents each Saturday and I’ll teach you to fly.”

  In the following months, Harry did extra chores and sold Liberty magazines at ten cents per issue so he could afford lessons. He had his first solo flight on his fourteenth birthday. The pilot rode alongside him, relaying Harry’s calls to the tower but never touching the controls. As a present for his birthday, his instructor returned all the fifty-cent fees Harry had paid him.

  As a high school senior, Harry turned down an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy, instead enlisting in the Naval Aviation Cadet program at the University of South Carolina. There, he’d receive his degree, his officer’s commission, and his wings within four years instead of the usual six or more; he didn’t want to miss World War II. Much to his disappointment, the war ended before he earned his gold wings. He would forever maintain that the Japanese capitulated because they heard he was coming.

  By 1965, he commanded an attack squadron at war, a post many still consider the pinnacle of an aviator’s career. Harry set a fine example as skipper of Attack Squadron 163—the Saints—aboard the USS Oriskany. He flew his share of undesirable missions, including tanker duty and stand-by. Always competitive, he made sure to stay at least one trap (a successful carrier landing) and one mission ahead of
everyone else. He built a reputation as one of the most daring pilots on the ship. When the time for his change of command drew near—when the executive officer (XO) would take over the squadron and Harry would take command of a full air wing—Harry joked to his XO, “I’m having too much fun being squadron skipper. Why don’t you go find your own squadron somewhere else?” Several weeks later, on November 13, 1965, the squawk box in the Saints’ ready room grimly promoted the XO. “Your boss is down,” it announced.

  Harry still fumed that he got bagged. As he parachuted into North Vietnam, he thought, “Boy, God, you messed this up. No way I deserved this.” He always thought the other guy would get shot down—the guy who flew too slow, who didn’t have the skills, who didn’t have the right stuff. Not him, not an attack squadron commander, not an aviator with 132 successful missions behind him. No, aviation should not have led him here to Hanoi, to Room Nineteen, to this medieval torturer.

  Harry Jenkins, commanding officer of Attack Squadron 163—the Saints—aboard the USS Oriskany.

  When he came to, the aches he found radiating from his every joint reminded him that it most definitely had.

  * * *

  Pigeye stripped him of his pride and showed him a side of military aviation he’d never considered. Harry sat on the cold floor, bound by rope, angry at fate, and seething at the men who did this to him. He soon lost the capacity for anger; pain consumed him. Yet he refused to divulge anything more than required by the Code of Conduct. So Pigeye ran another rope around Harry’s bound wrists, which were still behind his back. He tossed the rope over the meat hook in the ceiling and yanked Harry’s arms skyward, jerking his entire body off the floor. Harry shrieked. He prayed fervently for death, which he preferred to breaking the Code. He longed for the relief that his last heartbeat would bring, but death would not come. Harry passed out a second time.