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 Christmas Day, Pigeye again called Jim Stockdale from his cell and led him across the courtyard to a carpeted ceremonial room. When Jim entered the room on his crutches, he saw Rabbit alongside the senior officer he’d upset earlier that month. Major Nguyễn Văn Bài—known to the POWs as Cat—directed the entire American detention program. In contrast to most guards, he wore well-pressed uniforms or fashionable suits; the slender, well-read forty-year-old claimed to have taught university courses before coming to Hỏa Lò. He spoke French and, when he chose to, English. That day he wore a new-looking suit and waited at a table with a tea service spread before him.

  “Stockdale,” he said, using Jim’s English name instead of Đán, as the North Vietnamese usually called him. “You and I are the same age, we are both lifelong military officers, we both have sons the same age. But we are from different social systems. There is a wall between us which will always be there … but you and I must try to see through it. We must join together and bring this imperialist war to an end. Together we can do much to bring that about. You must help me make the other criminals realize that it is in their interest as well as ours to stop the war. You will help me. You do not realize it now but you will.”

  As Cat continued, Jim realized this canny operator recognized him as a leader among the Americans and hoped he would help convince the other POWs to cooperate with the North Vietnamese propaganda program. He broke into a cold sweat.

  When Cat finished, he handed Jim the first letter from home he had seen since his capture. Jim was sure it was just one of many that Sybil had sent but the Camp Authority had chosen not to deliver. Cat then sent him back to his cell, saying, “Now go back to your room and think about what I have told you, Stockdale. You are very old and you are not well. You must think of yourself. You must think of the family that wrote you that letter. You must help me end this war.”

  Back in his cell, Jim let his crutches fall to the ground and vaulted himself onto his slab to read the letter. “Dearest Jim,” the October 3 letter began. “It is early morning here and the world is waiting for the sun to rise. The world seems very special in these moments before dawn. It seems to be pausing and waiting to hear birds begin to sing.” Jim drank in the reassurance of his wife’s words as he read how she loved him, how she had hope for his swift return. He learned all was well at home. The next day, Rabbit allowed Jim to write his first letter back.

  In early January, Cat requested that Jim return his favor. Pigeye escorted him into a room in New Guy Village that he’d not seen before, though he noticed the number “18” by the door. Inside, a table covered with blue cloth sat in the room’s center. He saw a meat hook hanging from the ceiling. Rabbit entered, scowling. “It has been decided that you must write to your government and explain to them the true story of the Vietnamese people’s willingness to fight for four, eight, twelve years to defeat you imperialist aggressors,” he said. “You must recommend to your government that this illegal and immoral war must be stopped.”

  Rabbit slid paper and pen across the table to Jim and ordered him to another cell in New Guy Village to compose his letter. Jim was relieved Rabbit hadn’t somehow discovered what he considered his great secret—his role in the Gulf of Tonkin incident. He knew that if Rabbit had learned that he’d witnessed no torpedo boats attacking American destroyers that night of August 4, 1964, he’d be tortured and forced to write out that admission, suggesting that President Johnson finagled himself the power to wage war in Southeast Asia based on an event that never happened; Jim had been an eyewitness. The fear of being made to expose that secret had weighed on Jim from the moment he fell onto North Vietnamese soil.

  Back in the cell, Jim wrote nothing. Instead, he recalled the words his father spoke when he left his son at the Naval Academy, two decades ago, “Do your best to be the best midshipman here.” Jim resolved not to write, a fact Rabbit discovered when he returned late that evening. He walked into the cell, looked at the blank paper, and said, “You will learn.” Thirty minutes later, Jim, Rabbit, Pigeye, and an officer nicknamed Mickey Mouse assembled in Room Eighteen; Mickey Mouse would soon assume command of Hỏa Lò Prison. Jim saw that Pigeye held a long metal rod, leg irons, and a coil of hemp rope.

  “You are insolent and obdurate,” Rabbit said. “This is your last chance. Write the paper.”

  Jim shook his head.

  The iron bar clanged to the floor and Pigeye sprang toward Jim, felling him with a hard blow to the head. Pigeye beat him soundly before employing the rope trick, wrapping Jim’s body with cords and drawing them tight. Then he yanked Jim’s arms behind him, eliciting a scream as his unhealed left shoulder reacted. Another guard locked Jim’s ankles in cuffs attached to the long bar and slid the cuffs apart, forcing Jim into a spread-eagle position. Pigeye kept pulling on the ropes and then hopped barefoot onto Jim’s back, pressing Jim’s face toward the floor as he pulled his victim's arms higher. Rabbit shouted, “Down, down!” and Pigeye pressed harder. Jim yelled and screamed—maybe someone would hear him—then a guard shoved a rag in his mouth. The pain intensified. Rabbit pulled out the rag and shouted into his ear, “Keep silent, keep silent!” Pain, claustrophobia, and the futility of resistance coursed through Jim Stockdale as he fought the ropes. Through the fog of agony and confusion, he again became aware of Rabbit’s voice.

  “Do you submit?” he was asking. “Are you ready to comply?”

  “Yes,” Jim managed. “I submit.”

  When his hand had sufficiently recovered from the ropes, he sloppily wrote out Rabbit’s letter to the “U.S. Foreign Secretary of State,” decrying America’s unjust war and extolling the virtue of the Vietnamese people, their cause, and their humane and lenient treatment of POWs. Pigeye collected the letter and returned Jim to his cell, where the beaten commander laid down his crutches and sat dejectedly on the bed slab. He could not sleep that night. He understood what Jenkins and Rutledge had undergone and how they felt afterward. Pigeye and Rabbit had broken the POW leader just as they’d broken so many of the sixty-six Americans now in Hanoi. How to live this down? Jim wondered. What to do now?

  5

  T-O-R-T-U-R-E

  That same fall of 1965, a truck carried Bob Shumaker out of Hỏa Lò Prison—the Hanoi Hilton—his dungeon for the previous seven months. It drove him to a remote camp in the countryside where the North Vietnamese held him for three uneventful weeks. Then guards loaded him into another truck, blindfolded him, and sent him back toward the capital. He rode down country roads alongside other silent POWs until their convoy rolled onto the smoother streets of a city. Urban hubbub replaced rural quiet, and Bob guessed he’d returned to Hanoi. When the trip ended, guards cleared the prisoners from the truck and ushered them inside a compound. Shu immediately smelled something foul. He heard the rustling of livestock, and the scratching of chickens. He trudged along dirt pathways until guards pushed him through a doorway and down a hushed corridor. They shoved him inside a room and removed his blindfold. He saw Smitty Harris looking back at him.

  As soon as their door closed, the two men heard taps coming through the wall. They recognized the code they’d practiced in Room Nineteen. They tapped back and quickly learned they had arrived at a facility opened that summer, 5 miles southwest of the Hanoi Hilton and known to the North Vietnamese as Cu Loc. The Americans there called it the Zoo. The incoming taps explained that the odor Shu’d detected outside came from Lake Fester, a swimming pool filled with garbage, dirty water, and small fish that guards raised for food. At least eight buildings surrounded the pool and had received nicknames like Barn, Stable, Pig Sty, and Chicken Coop, which reflected the compound’s menagerie. POWs had nicknamed other buildings the Auditorium, Pool Hall, Office, and Garage. Shu had landed in the Office. He and Harris found their cell filled with dust; trash littered the hall outside. Their room smelled musty; they heard others smelled worse. Odors from their latrine buckets and unshowered bodies soon added to the room’s aroma, which they only escaped during a daily f
ifteen minutes of exercise and when they bathed once every four days. During the remaining hours of each week, Shu tried to communicate or keep his mind occupied as he paced the small cell—a walk POWs derisively called the Hanoi Shuffle.

  To pass time, Shu fashioned a piano for his roommate. On a 2-foot-long piece of toilet paper, Shu used a burned match to draw several octaves of keys. A guitarist himself, Shu wrote out music across a longer piece. Harris happily played the keyboard during the day, and the two men envisioned how the live performance might sound. Each night, they used improvised plugs to conceal the rolled piano and music inside a hole in the wall. One day, Shu and Harris tapped to Ev Alvarez in the neighboring cell, asking, “How you feel, Alvy?”

  “Bad,” Hanoi’s first POW responded. “Must be that time of the month.”

  “Cheer up,” Harris sent. “I’ll play you a tune.”

  At the end of the day, Shu and Harris tapped to Alvarez, “Did you like our music?”

  “Not bad for ragtime,” Alvarez tapped back. They all needed the laugh.

  The two musicians enjoyed their time together until a guard forgot to lock their cell door and Shu accidentally leaned against it, spilling into the hallway. He and Harris contemplated making a run for it but decided to stay put. Shu might as well have run. The Camp Authority accused him of trying to escape and moved him to a room inside the old theater known as the Auditorium. They left him in absolute blackness. Shu could not see his own hands as he felt his way around the room’s edges, brushing away spiderwebs. He heard the scurrying of rats and insects; he smelled human waste somewhere in the room. Days passed. No light appeared. The smell and crushing loneliness both grew more unbearable. His only human contact came when a guard emptied his latrine bucket and brought him his miserable ration of food, much of which he forfeited due to a fast-developing case of dysentery. His honey bucket would overflow with waste and vomit, attracting more rats and adding to the squalor. After days without light, he began suffering vertigo, spells of dizziness that sent him spinning and crashing into the floor, where he would retch again, unable to prevent himself from worsening the conditions in that awful, pitch-black room where he seemed destined to die. He had no idea whether the Camp Authority had condemned him to spend days, months, or even years there. His captors gave no indication of his fate. In the end, he stayed there for nearly three weeks, puzzling over this alarming change in Hanoi’s detention program. If the North Vietnamese treated the Americans this inhumanely, would they ever allow them to return home to tell the tale?

  After sentencing Shu to the darkness of the Auditorium, the Camp Authority also relocated his roommate Smitty Harris. Ron Storz, the first POW Shu had contacted in Hanoi, filled the vacancy in their old Office cell. On the other side of one of the cell’s walls, Ron found Robbie Risner, the most senior POW in Hanoi. Although Risner would not become one of the eleven troublemakers who would, in two years, be exiled to the prison nicknamed Alcatraz, most everyone recognized his wise leadership and will to resist. Ron Storz, who was destined to join that special clan at Alcatraz, would try speaking to him through a vent, but Risner could never understand him. Frustrated, Ron reverted to tapping and asked, “Have you tried boring a hole through the wall yet?”

  In fact, Risner had discovered a loose rod about 2 feet in length and half an inch in diameter. He had tried to drill through his wall with it, but a double row of bricks had stymied his effort each time. He suggested Ron search his drainage grate and fashion his own drill. Ron stuck his hand into the drain and grabbed hold of a metal rod. He began pulling and twisting, hoping to break it free before a guard caught him. He succeeded and began drilling away from his side of the brick-and-plaster wall. By that afternoon, he’d bored a hole through the mortar to Risner’s cell.

  “I’m really down in the mouth,” Ron told Risner once they could understand one another. “I have nothing. They have taken everything away from me. They took my shoes, my flying suit, and everything I possessed. They even took my glasses. I don’t have a single thing.”

  “Ron,” Risner replied, “I don’t think we really have lost everything.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “According to the Bible, we are sons of God,” Risner said. “Everything out there in the courtyard, all the buildings and the whole shooting match, belongs to God. Since we are children of God, you might say that all belongs to us, too.”

  “Let me think about it, and I’ll call you back,” Ron said. After some time, the junior officer called back to Risner. “I really feel a lot better,” he said. “In fact, every time I get to thinking about it, I have to laugh.”

  “What do you mean?” Risner asked.

  Ron exclaimed, “I am just loaning it to them!”

  Since the moment of his capture, Ron Storz had loathed the North Vietnamese. He hated them for taking his liberty, and he fiercely defended the little control he still had. He refused to bow or stand at attention for the guards, as the camp rules stipulated. To him, it would have symbolized the United States submitting to Communism. One day, he refused to stand at attention when guards entered his cell, and they began poking his legs with a bayonet, trying to force his feet together. Afterward, he spoke to Risner about the confrontation. “They cut my legs with a bayonet, trying to make me put my feet together,” he explained. “I am just not going to do it.”

  “Ron, I’m afraid we don’t have the power to combat them by physical force,” Risner said. “I believe I would reconsider. Then, if we decide differently, we all should resist simultaneously. With only you resisting while everybody else is doing it, you are bound to lose.” Risner knew that if he had told Ron to stand firm, he would have resisted until it killed him. In that first year of imprisonment, Risner and other seniors recognized that Ron Storz had more mettle than most.

  After that incident had passed, Ron and Risner returned to their task of riddling the walls of the Office with holes. Like a pair of carpenter bees, they bored holes between their own cells, then from their cells to others. They’d then pass along instructions to other POWs about how to drill their own; sometimes they’d pass along tools, too. Each new hole brought the gifts of verbal conversation and the sight of another American. POWs would stand back from their holes so that their neighbors could simply see them. For men in solitary confinement, just glimpsing another captive lifted their morale for days.

  As a result of the holes, communication began to hum between cells inside the Office and then spread throughout the Zoo. A prison bureaucracy developed, and Ron and Risner became central to its function. At great risk, Ron would transcribe new directives from Risner onto toilet paper and send them to other sections of the Office by pushing them through holes. To communicate with the broader camp, he’d stash notes in common areas such as the bathhouse. When prisoners transferred to other buildings and camps, Risner’s directives went with them. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before a guard caught Ron breaking the Camp Authority’s cardinal rule of no communication.

  Unless a cellmate or nearby prisoner acted as lookout, inmates had little, if any, warning before a guard slid back a peephole cover or flung open a cell door. They lived under the constant threat of interruption and discovery. So it happened that on October 24, 1965, a guard burst into Ron’s room unannounced and found him transcribing two contraband notes. The guard confiscated the two sheets of tissue that served as paper. One listed POW names. The other contained directives such as “gather all string, nails and wire; save whatever soap or medicine you get; familiarize yourself with any possible escape routes; become acquainted with the guards.” It also included a map of the Zoo and Robbie Risner’s name.

  Ron lunged toward the guard and ripped the nearest document from his hand and stuffed it into his own mouth, fending off the incensed guard until he had swallowed the pulp. The guard ran off with the other sheet, and Ron went to the wall he shared with Risner. He sent the emergency signal—one heavy thump—and Robbie came to their hole. “They searched and found e
verything,” Ron said. “I ate the list of names, but they got the policies. Get rid of anything you don’t want them to find.” They both promised to deny everything under interrogation.

  Before anyone questioned Ron, the guards put him in isolation for three days and nights as punishment for consumption of evidence and, because of the map, for planning an escape. He had no company, no food, no water, no sleeping mat, no blanket, and no mosquito net. He suffered terribly, perhaps from the mosquitoes most of all. When the North Vietnamese finally interrogated him, they told him Risner had confessed and given up Ron. He knew they were lying and held fast. The North Vietnamese had also told Risner that Ron had confessed and implicated him. Risner caught their lie; he knew Ron would have died before he implicated someone else. The guards exhorted both men to sign confessions and admit to their criminal acts, but they refrained from outright torture. The two air force men refused, and the guards eventually returned them to their adjacent cells, where they resumed tapping.

  “Remember, I’ll never confess to anything,” Risner sent.

  “Roger, I won’t either,” tapped Ron. “God bless you.”

  With those three closing words, communicated with three letters, “G-B-U,” Ron sent his commanding officer a message much deeper than it might appear. GBU had become the sign-off phrase of choice for POWs, and its meaning extended beyond “May God bless you.” It also meant “I know you’ve been tortured, I understand your situation, and I know what you’re going through.” It told a brother POW “I know it’s not easy, but we’ll make it” and “Remember you’re not alone; we’re all pulling for you.” Four years later, “GBU” would also be the last message Ron Storz would ever receive from a fellow American.

  * * *

  By the winter of 1966, the Camp Authority had returned Robbie Risner to the Hanoi Hilton, where he began a long stint in isolation. Leadership fell to Jerry Denton at the Zoo. If the North Vietnamese had hoped that removing Risner would weaken resistance, his successor would disappoint them. When Jerry took command as the new senior ranking officer at the Zoo, he broadcast his hardline stance vis-à-vis the Code of Conduct. POWs should not give written or tape-recorded statements during their frequent and often brutal quizzes. They should concede absolutely nothing beyond the Big Four unless the North Vietnamese forced it out of them, as yielding anything else without taking torture made POWs vulnerable to exploitation and violated the Code of Conduct.