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

  9

  SUPERMAN!

  Early in that summer of 1966, Jim Mulligan served as one of the ranking American officers at the Zoo, alongside Jerry Denton and Jim Stockdale. He ran the cellblock known as the Barn, and even though he’d only arrived in Hanoi three months earlier, in late March, he’d already become a problem case. The gruff New Englander had argued vociferously with the Camp Authority on behalf of his men, kicked doors when he heard Americans being beaten, and yelled at misbehaving guards. His abrasive methods, as much as his commander’s rank, signified to the North Vietnamese his role in the resistance. Accordingly, Rabbit called Jim Mulligan to a special quiz in late June, just before the Hanoi March. He entered the interrogation room, mindlessly rubbing his forearms, which were still healing from the gasoline-soaked ropes that had bound them during his initial trip to Hanoi. He sat down upon a small stool and faced Rabbit and a senior officer. The senior man announced a new program to reeducate the prisoners; Rabbit translated with enthusiasm.

  “It is time to make your choice,” Rabbit proclaimed. “A small group of you will understand [the reeducation program] and cooperate. They will receive good food and exercise, probably be released early. The vast majority will be in middle.”

  He explained those in the middle would try but fail to grasp the lessons because of their Western heritage. Nevertheless, the Camp Authority would show them leniency. They would release them when the war ended.

  “And we know a small minority will resist the program and lead others in resisting the program,” he said, almost sneering. Jim felt Rabbit meant his words for him in particular. “They will be cast off and kept in small cells alone, with bad food, no exercise. They will die here. It will be your choice.

  “Only you decide which group you will join,” he emphasized. “Do you understand?”

  Jim nodded.

  “Soon the program will begin over the radio of the camp. You must pay attention to what we tell you over the radio. You must study, you must learn, you must think of your own situation. Do you understand?”

  Jim said yes.

  Through Rabbit, the senior officer asked if Jim wanted coffee.

  “Yes, thank you,” he said, “but I cannot accept it for myself while the other Americans do not have any.”

  Rabbit replied, “In that case, all of you will get coffee tonight from him as his gift … You may return to your room, but remember it is up to you to make your own choice. The treatment you receive from us only depends on you.” That night, the POWs all enjoyed hot coffee. The program began the next day.

  * * *

  From its apparent inception at the Zoo that spring, the Make Your Choice campaign quickly spread to the other detention facilities. After the Hanoi March, it arrived at the Briar Patch, where the Camp Authority had assembled a particularly volatile group of troublemakers. One notable dissident was Air Force Captain George McKnight.

  Shortly after capturing McKnight in November 1965, the Camp Authority handed him a letter from his mother that implored her son to cooperate with his captors. His interrogators at Hỏa Lò thought the letter might help tame their combative new prisoner. When they showed him the letter, however, George ripped it apart. His attitude had not improved since. The former boxer had earned a reputation among POWs as having mastered giving guards the “fuck you” look.

  Before he deployed to Vietnam with the 602nd Special Operations Squadron, he had read a book entitled The Smoked Yank, published in 1888 by Colonel Melvin Grigsby, a U.S. soldier who had been captured by Confederate troops during the Civil War. Grigsby recounted his capture, the horrific conditions inside the infamous stockade at Andersonville, Georgia, and his daring escape through South Carolina. Colonel Grigsby was McKnight’s great-grandfather, making the story particularly memorable. A century later, George would find his experience as a POW in Vietnam worse and better, different and similar. By comparison, the stories of Andersonville almost made the camps around Hanoi seem humane. Intentionally or not, the Confederates subjected their POWs to torturous conditions, though they rarely employed the personal torture meted out by Pigeye. The prisoner death rate for Andersonville’s 45,000 cumulative inmates—nearly 30-in-100—far outpaced the 9-in-100 rate for the 725 known military prisoners held in North Vietnamese and NLF camps during the Vietnam War. (An unknown number of Americans did perish after their capture but before they officially entered the prison system, so nobody will ever know the exact number of POW deaths.) As inspiring as it was, however, Colonel Grigsby’s account had not prepared his great-grandson for what he would find at the Briar Patch.

  George McKnight (right), one of the toughest resistors among the American POWs.

  McKnight had arrived at the remote camp on April 21, 1966, but his nightmare wouldn’t truly begin until after the July 6 Hanoi March. That April, as a military truck carried him into the countryside, farther and farther from the community of POWs in the Hilton and the Zoo, George felt as if he were being driven off the map. The truck stopped 35 miles west of Hanoi, outside the village of Xóm Ấp Lô. He entered the secluded prison camp there and soon learned why the POWs had nicknamed the compound the Briar Patch. It had neither running water nor electricity, so bedtime came early. At sundown on his first night, George crawled under his mosquito net and tried to ignore the sounds of rats running through the cellblock. He drew some comfort from his netting, which at least kept bugs and vermin at bay—until the rodents began chewing through it. George heard softer noises, like those from insects, but he could see nothing in his pitch-black cell. He heard a guard approach and saw the beam of a flashlight beneath the door. When the door opened, the guard cast his beam inside, and George looked around in horror. The walls seemed to writhe in the light. Cockroaches covered them from floor to ceiling.

  Roaches terrorized him at night; the camp commander—nicknamed Frenchy for his accent—tormented him during the day. George, along with many other POWs, admired the commandant’s calm, handsome countenance, wavy dark hair, and charm, yet they soon came to fear his lightning-quick descents into violent hysteria. POWs at the Briar Patch considered him genuinely insane. In crazed fury, he’d scream at his captives over the camp loudspeakers. When they suffered his tirades in person, POWs noticed a burning madness in his eyes. Frenchy wanted to break Americans, and he did, keeping Hanoi’s propaganda engine supplied with forced confessions and antiwar statements. He reigned supreme in this remote camp, commanding a staff of thugs like the aptly nicknamed Slugger, who wound up guarding troublemakers like Ron Storz, Bob Shumaker, and George McKnight. The Briar Patch seemed to have become a repository for American and North Vietnamese hard-liners alike.

  * * *

  George quickly learned that no prisoner could escape the deliberate and effective demoralization that accompanied the Make Your Choice initiative. Interrogators began pressing Americans to choose the path of cooperation and lenient treatment or the path of resistance and punishment; they sought to separate the potentially cooperative from the stubbornly intransigent. The Camp Authority offered each prisoner what it claimed was a final opportunity to cooperate and avoid the limitless misery that guards and solitary confinement inflicted. Most chose resistance—punishment be damned—but the North Vietnamese did not make their choice easy.

  Those brave yet unfortunate Americans who continued to make what Frenchy considered the wrong choice found themselves beaten and put in solitary confinement. Even then they had to endure the screams of fellow POWs under torture and contend with Frenchy’s incessant drills—he feared imminent attacks and drilled his guards and prisoners constantly. He forced Americans to run up a nearby hill, dive into muddy air raid trenches, then crawl into individual boxes, where he’d lock them for hours while guards dug more air raid trenches beneath the bunks in the cellblocks. Worst of all, the POWs felt as if they had disappeared. At least in Hanoi they had felt positive U.S. intelligence knew their position. George worried that if he died out here—and that seemed quite likely under Frenchy�
��s administration—nobody would ever know.

  In late July, Frenchy prepared McKnight to make his final choice. For thirty-four nights, he cuffed George’s hands behind his back at sundown and shoved him into the 4-foot-deep air raid trench beneath his bed. There he stayed for the next twelve hours. His 6'2" frame barely fit the damp confines of what seemed like a grave. Worms and bugs crawled across his body, and mosquitoes feasted upon him. His immobilized hands could do nothing to help. The slightest itch became torture, and no amount of screaming or pleading would convince guards to exhume him before his twelve hours had expired. He passed each minute in blackness and near-silence. The dirt walls seemed to creep ever closer, and he desperately combated intense claustrophobia. During the day, he lay on his bed listening to the screams of fellow POWs and dreading sunset. When it came, guards forced him back into the trench.

  During those hellish weeks, George thought often of a particularly influential priest at his high school. George had an unhappy childhood in Alaska, due in part to a particularly difficult relationship with his father. His grandfather served as his father figure until George left Alaska to attend Catholic preparatory school in Washington. As a freshman, George met a priest who mentored many students. He made an exceptionally strong impression on George through his faith and kindness. Through a combination of inspiration and discipline, he built the future pilot’s character and faith. Whenever George found himself in trouble inside a Hanoi quiz room or lonely in a trench, he retreated to the Lord and, even more so, to the memory of the priest. Imagining his reunion with his mentor when he returned home, he resolved to weather the present trial to make him proud, and he hoped that if he didn’t survive, the priest would know he’d died with his honor intact.

  The example of Ron Storz also sustained him. In the previous weeks, George had seen Ron sentenced to nearly identical punishment in an outdoor trench he passed on his daily walk to the latrine. When George shuffled by, Ron would lift one of the boards covering his pit and whisper “God bless America” or flash a thumbs-up with his manacled hands. When his own dark, dank walls threatened to break his resolve, George remembered Ron’s example and redoubled his effort.

  After thirty-four nights of confinement in the trench, however, George McKnight had been reduced to an animal that only wanted its suffering to end. Eventually he wrote the confession Frenchy demanded: He had maliciously bombed civilians and hospitals as he carried out a war of imperial aggression. He begged the Vietnamese people for forgiveness. He promised to make the right choice. Nobody could resist torture forever, as every prisoner discovered. Their adversaries had unlimited time and unlimited options; everyone could be broken eventually. As George bitterly wrote the propaganda, he fell back on his doctrine of “pain then brain.” When his body couldn’t take more abuse, George used his wits to carry on the fight. As he wrote his coerced statement calling for the war’s end, he inserted a sentence that began “The only reason the undersigned really expects this letter to be appreciated is…”

  Together, the first letters of the first seven words spelled “T-O-R-T-U-R-E.”

  He hoped that if the letter ever made it to the United States, someone would notice the code. If he ever made it home himself, he’d use his hidden message to prove he had only violated the Code of Conduct under extreme duress.

  Yet even after incorporating his hidden message, George believed he had failed miserably. He had broken the Code of Conduct, surrendered information, and written statements disloyal to the United States. In his own view, he had disgraced himself, his priest, and the air force. Back in his cell, he tapped to his neighbor, air force POW Jon Reynolds. He told him that he could never return to America; Reynolds shared his feeling and planned to flee to Canada if the North Vietnamese ever released him. McKnight suggested they then meet up in Australia or South Africa, where they could dwell in shameful exile.

  * * *

  Ron Storz proved no less intractable at the Briar Patch than he had at the Zoo. Above all things, Ron still hated to bow. He stubbornly refused to comply with the rule and received numerous beatings for it, often delivered by Frenchy with bamboo rods. Instead of becoming cowed after a year of captivity, Ron had only become more hateful and stubborn. He would concede nothing to interrogators, and at the end of each quiz, he’d emphasize that they’d made no progress. When an interrogator threatened him by saying, “Your fate is in our hands,” Ron shot back, “My fate is in God’s hands.”

  Even before arriving in Vietnam, Ron had aspired to become a minister after the war. Since boyhood, he always held a strong belief in God. The Camp Authority had—quite surprisingly—returned to him a silver cross and chain he’d received from an Episcopal minister in New York. He valued nothing more and always wore it. During one confrontation in the prison yard, a guard yanked the cross from Ron’s neck. Fury seized him and he grabbed the guard’s arm, ripping the cross out of his hand. A second guard reared back to swing a bamboo pole toward Ron, but he stepped toward the guard, blocked the pole, and shoved him back. Before the situation led to a full-out brawl, POW Wes Schierman jumped between the guards and Ron; everyone backed away from each other. Ron seethed. The stunned guards didn’t know how to respond. As punishment, Frenchy kept Ron on a stool for seven days, pressing for a confession and allowing him almost no sleep. Guards administered regular beatings with bamboo. During one interlude, Ron experienced the only kindness ever shown to him at the Briar Patch. A guard nicknamed Jim entered Ron’s interrogation room and found him off his stool, sprawled on the floor. Instead of kicking him and returning him to the stool, the guard adjusted Ron’s head and said gently, “Sleep, Storz.”

  Ron’s reprieve did not last. Frenchy soon returned him to the stool and completed the weeklong treatment; he nearly killed Ron with his combination of stool, bamboo, and ropes. After seven days, Frenchy threw an utterly spent Ron Storz into a cell with Schierman, his partner from the Hanoi March. Schierman began nursing Ron back to health. When he pulled up Ron’s sleeve, he found his arm had turned green. He discovered infected boils caused by the camp’s filth and their own poor hygiene. He suggested they call a medic.

  “No,” Ron said, “I’ve decided I’m going to leave them. If it kills me, maybe the V will back off and stop torturing all of us.”

  Ron believed God had sent him into North Vietnam for a purpose, and in a den of wolves he had become shepherd to this flock of brother POWs. While Wes admired Ron’s devotion, he dissuaded his friend from sacrificing his life to an infection. Ron eventually relented and let his cellmate treat his boils. Wes washed Ron’s arm with the hot water guards provided daily—out of necessity, not courtesy. Given the camp’s remoteness, guards had to purify water by boiling it. POWs nearest the fire, like Wes and Ron, got the hottest water. The water drew up the infections inside the boils, and Wes popped them with bamboo slivers. Then he squeezed out repulsively large amounts of white pus. With the pus gone, he saw congealed green plugs inside the boils. POWs always had long fingernails, and he used his to fish out what looked like a cigarette filter from each of Ron’s boils. Wes shouted, “Bào cào,” and Frenchy soon appeared. Instead of flying into his usual rage, he looked at Ron’s arms and grunted. He returned with a medic, who applied ointment, then used a piece of broken bottle glass to grind an antibiotic sulfa pill. He sprinkled the powder into the wounds, then wrapped Ron’s arm in a bandage, which would remain, as POWs’ bandages usually did, until it rotted off. Slowly, Ron began to recover as he prepared for the next inevitable round of torture.

  * * *

  As George McKnight and Ron Storz slogged through the summer of 1966, new prisoners continued joining the population at the Hilton. On August 22, 1966, bombardier-navigator George Coker became the 121st arrival, having ejected from his crippled A-6 Intruder less than a month after turning twenty-three. George would become one of the youngest airmen taken captive during the war. Within weeks of his appearance in Hanoi, the North Vietnamese likely wished he’d stayed with his doomed
aircraft. Perhaps only Ron Storz hated his captors with as much ferocity as George Coker. George and Ron’s defiance antagonized the North Vietnamese to an extent the Camp Authority may have never anticipated. From the moment they first mistreated him—which was almost immediately—George hated the North Vietnamese, and he hated them more with each ratchet of his cuffs, each blow to his body. He vowed never to cooperate in any manner, for any reason. His torturers and the camp officials became his mortal enemies; he wanted nothing more than to kill them. George would describe himself as “two inches taller than Napoleon.” He actually measured shorter, but his small size did not hinder his quick ascension up the Camp Authority’s list of incorrigibles.

  At an early age, George Coker learned fear. On a walk in downtown San Diego, his older siblings let their six-year-old brother fall behind. He became lost and terribly afraid. He would never forget the incident. He had night terrors and for the rest of his life would harbor a fear of getting lost. Yet despite his fear, he had hitchhiked from New Jersey to Seattle during college. He also feared heights, yet he chose to fly. For his entire life, George had stared fear in the eye and beaten it.

  Nothing had ever scared him more than Father Joe, one of his teachers at St. Benedict’s Preparatory School in Newark, New Jersey. Once, George used a poetry assignment to ridicule the priest. After reading George’s submission, Father Joe stalked down the aisle toward George’s desk. George saw something hideous in the glowering face and massive figure, but he checked his fear and mustered the courage to stare down the priest. When he reached George’s desk, Father Joe backhanded him across the face, then grabbed him by the neck and belt. He strode to the door and tossed his student through its large glass window. With a tremendous shattering of glass, George flew out of the classroom and landed in the hallway. He couldn’t have been happier: He was on one side of the door and Father Joe was on the other. The experience had showed him that he could confront fear—even taunt those whom he feared—and survive.