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

  * * *

  In Stardust, the Camp Authority corralled ten of its worst offenders, men identified as leaders, subversives, and general rabble-rousers. They were Commanders Stockdale, Denton, Jenkins, Rutledge, and Mulligan, along with Major Sam Johnson, Lieutenant Commander Bob Shumaker, Air Force Captains George McKnight and Ron Storz, and twenty-three-year-old troublemaker Lieutenant (Junior Grade) George Coker, whom CAG took to calling Cagney. Three months later, an eleventh troublesome POW—Lieutenant Commander Nels Tanner—would join these ten problem cases and for the first time, the men who would become known as the Alcatraz Eleven would be together under a single roof.

  The move into Little Vegas ushered in a period of relatively mild treatment and slightly more food. Optimists like Jerry Denton attributed this leniency to North Vietnamese plans to send them home; extra rations were fattening them up for repatriation. Realists like Jim Stockdale expected another long season in Hanoi.

  Shortly after their arrival, Sam Johnson noticed workers wiring each cell with a speaker. He felt a pit in his stomach; he’d escaped the Zoo but not Hanoi Hannah. Sure enough, Hannah could soon be heard everywhere, providing the latest news and antiwar propaganda, grating on the nerves of Sam and every other POW forced to listen. Some days prisoners endured broadcasts for up to five hours, wincing as American antiwar activists uttered critical statements similar to ones POWs had made only under torture; the baffled prisoners wondered what had gone wrong at home. Hannah rested only on Sundays, when classical music or the high-pitched singing of North Vietnamese children was substituted.

  The Camp Authority still played statements made by POWs, albeit with less frequency. While some POWs did provide laughs—one referred to Hồ Chí Minh as “Horseshit Minh” throughout a reading—Jim Stockdale saw the danger in POWs reading propaganda of any type. He realized the men needed rules and a common understanding of how to follow the Code of Conduct in the face of an adversary who disregarded the Geneva Convention.

  So Jim helped the Americans regroup. Since Robbie Risner remained quarantined in New Guy Village, Jim took command, aiming to bind his men together in their opposition to the Camp Authority and set community standards by which they could live. Disagreement still surfaced about how strictly men should adhere to the Code of Conduct, as the prisoners had found dogmatic obedience to the Code unrealistic, if not impossible. Jim realized they needed practical guidance—and a shared understanding of right and wrong—that fit their new circumstances. Only then could they feel the sense of unity that shared sacrifice would create.

  At the week’s end, Cat summoned Jim to quiz. He found Cat and Rabbit waiting in a room just off Little Vegas. “My officer has told me of the impolite manner in which you and your four cronies behaved the night you were brought to this place,” Cat began, referring to their encounter with Bug. “You and those with you that night are establishing yourselves as the blackest criminals in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and you have been separated.

  “Let me warn you,” he continued, “do not tamper with our work with the other criminals. Things can go very bad for you very quickly. I can have you made into a domestic animal, if necessary. But I do not want to do that. I think you have a certain understanding of the world that could make you a force for peace. Do you have any other requests?”

  “Yes,” CAG answered. “I have been alone for a year and a half. I want a cellmate.”

  “We will study,” Cat answered. “It will depend on your attitude. Obey camp regulations. Do not communicate. Go.”

  Apparently, Cat soon decided sequestering Stockdale’s band together in Stardust only allowed them to collaborate more, so he redistributed some of them throughout the buildings of Little Vegas. The Camp Authority moved Jim out of Stardust and into a chilly, dusty cell in Thunderbird, where a recent arrival, young Navy Lieutenant Dan Glenn, became his cellmate. They moved Ron Storz to the same cellblock. In his Thunderbird cell, Number Six in the building’s western section, Jim formulated his new doctrine. Limping around his room, he considered the challenge of writing fair and simple rules for applying the broadly written Code of Conduct to their daily lives. How could the Americans, as a unified group, defeat Cat’s programs? How could Jim fashion rules that all POWs could physically and mentally uphold? With Pigeye nearby and many POWs sick or injured, could everyone realistically avoid disclosing more than the Big Four?

  Jim carefully developed his policy and created a memorable acronym. With his cellmate watching for guards, he whispered the new orders under his door or out his window, where the words would drift to the next window or be heard by POWs in the courtyard. “BACK US,” he began, then explained the doctrine behind the acronym. Across the hallway, Ron Storz picked up CAG’s whispers and passed them along to others. As Ron liked communicating, his cellmate Wes Schierman spent much of his time peering beneath the cell door, monitoring the hallway for telltale shadows that heralded a guard’s approach; since guards often wore sandals, they could approach in virtual silence. Until Schierman whispered, “Stop!” Ron would pass along the BACK US directives, becoming the first link in a chain that would hold the American POWs together.

  Bow: Don’t bow in public. Prisoners should resist bowing to anyone outside of prison. The Camp Authority required POWs to bow to them inside the camps, but Jim thought reversing that policy would only bring needless reprimand and hardship. He recognized that the North Vietnamese would not, however, beat them before the world’s cameras and risk smudging their carefully crafted image as humane captors.

  Air: Stay off the air. No prisoner should read anything over the camp speakers or on North Vietnamese radio or television, nor should any prisoner tape-record propaganda statements. He set a minimum price of one week in irons—that is, a POW must endure a week in irons or undergo some equivalent punishment before making any statements.

  Crime: Admit no crimes. Every American, if forced to make a statement following torture, should avoid using the word “crime.” In part, this would blunt propaganda that reached the outside world, and it might also encumber North Vietnamese prosecutors in any war crime tribunals. Foremost, Jim wanted POWs to remember they were soldiers, not criminals.

  Kiss: Don’t kiss up or kiss them good-bye. POWs should show no gratitude to the Camp Authority or attempt to curry favor. Nor should they kiss them good-bye, as the saying went, when they left Vietnam. Jim did not want POWs reconciling with their captors at homecoming. The Camp Authority had treated the POWs atrociously. The world should know it, and the prisoners should not forget it.

  Unity over Self. The POWs must remain united against the Camp Authority. To CAG, nothing was more important than supporting the man in the next cell, and beyond him, every member of the POW community. The Americans had to toe the same line, and face the same consequences, in order to uphold their Code, support their fellow soldiers, and preserve their unified battle line. The Camp Authority knew that playing to prisoner self-interests could undermine their cohesion; the POWs could not let that happen.

  * * *

  From Thunderbird, a corps of willing lieutenants—such men as Sam Johnson, Ron Storz, and George Coker—helped disperse CAG’s orders to POWs throughout Little Vegas, often sending code across the courtyard, sometimes window to window, by using hand signals. They also stashed notes in bowls of rice or in the bathhouse. Fortunately for the resistance, the Camp Authority used some Little Vegas cells as temporary holding places for recent arrivals. These new POWs would quickly learn Jim’s orders and then carry them to such facilities as the Zoo, Sơn Tây, and the Plantation. The BACK US code soon united POWs across the prison system.

  Questions about the policy often returned from CAG’s troops, making their way back to his cell by whispers, taps, and notes. He and other seniors clarified that POWs were allowed to break the BACK US principles—that is, they should submit—before torture claimed their lives or sanity. When they had to give in, they should collect themselves and try again, like a boxer rising up from the
canvas. Everyone was told to plan and memorize a false story before going to quiz so interrogators couldn’t catch their lies months later. Nobody should discuss other prisoners; doing so might contradict the fabrications of fellow POWs. CAG also reminded his subordinates throughout the system that the Code obligated every senior officer to step up and lead. Like the values and duty that first drew these men to the military, the BACK US directives endowed a POW’s life with purpose. They restored his spirit. Once again, he had a standard to uphold, a goal to achieve, a reason to fight.

  * * *

  After Cat discovered his Superman stunt, Nels Tanner was transferred to Stardust. He arrived on April 16, 1967, meeting for the first time many of the men with whom he’d face Alcatraz. After a month’s stay in Stardust, guards moved Nels to a section of the Hanoi Hilton that few Americans had seen: the Mint. French architects had called this corner of Hỏa Lò le cachot—the dungeon. Nels was led out of Stardust and into the Vegas courtyard, north past the Desert Inn, and back inside through a large doorway in the courtyard’s corner. Guards pushed him through two more doorways, into the recesses of the cellblock. He found three cells there and surmised they were used for problematic prisoners like himself. The guards thrust him into a narrow stall that measured roughly 3 feet by 7 feet. A crude wooden bed protruded 2 feet from the wall, leaving him only an alley of flooring 6 feet long and 1 foot wide. Wooden leg stocks were affixed to the bed’s end, for use should isolation in the miserable cell prove insufficient torment by itself. The cell’s window opened above the pigsty that occupied the northeast corner of the walkway between the interior and exterior walls of Hỏa Lò. Twice each week, the camp butcher slaughtered some of the pigs there. The animals squealed out their life just feet from the cell’s window, and the acrid smells of death and intestines wafted into the Mint. Each slaughter reminded inmates that their status rated only marginally higher than that of the pigs. The window also offered Nels a glimpse of the sky, and he could hear pedestrians on Phố Hai Bà Trưng, just beyond the prison’s exterior wall. If he’d had a rock, he could have easily tossed it into the street, where the sound of happy voices reminded him how life was passing him by.

  Locked away in the Mint, Nels wondered why the guards hadn’t just shot him. He concluded that since the world knew he lived, killing him would ruin North Vietnam’s guise of humane treatment. What the prison staff did do, however, proved almost worse. First, they slapped him into tight-fitting cuffs that immediately chafed his wrists. Always resourceful, Nels improved his situation by picking the lock on the handcuffs with a piece of copper wire he found on the room’s floor, but he could not escape the torment of the leg irons. The guards had placed his ankles in iron horseshoes secured with a weighted metal rod. His ankles would bear the 15 pounds continuously for 123 days. The Camp Authority forced no other prisoner to live in irons for so long. Vigilant guards effectively stifled his communication, and Nels could only tap sporadically with prisoners who occupied the neighboring two cells; he was never allowed a trip to the bathhouse. He usually felt alone, except for bugs and rats.

  Nels soon had difficulty deciding what he feared more: the isolation of his cell or daily beatings in the interrogation rooms. His only escape from either was the five minutes it took for him to empty his waste bucket in the latrine each day. When the guards would drag him out of the Mint, out of the Little Vegas section of the camp, and into Room Eighteen or Nineteen in New Guy Village, a series of officials would berate and abuse him without mercy. The cycle repeated every day from April into May and then into June: solitary misery in the Mint followed by agony at quiz. The routine never relented. Nels pleaded for it to stop. He had written an apology, what more did the Camp Authority want?

  “Apology?” responded an officer one day. “Apology! You have embarrassed my government so much, there is no apology enough, and there is no punishment enough for you!”

  So despite his pleading, the guards worked on Nels for the rest of the day. That night, they returned him to the confines of the Mint. Once the guards left, Nels tapped the wall five times: “shave-and-a-haircut.” His neighbor, naval aviator Jerry Coffee, responded with: “two bits.”

  “I tell you, Jerry,” Nels commed, “as I bobbled back across the courtyard to the Mint here, I held my head a ’lil higher. The asshole couldn’t have paid me a nicer compliment.”

  * * *

  Even with the American leadership together in Little Vegas, winter and spring of 1967 had passed without major altercations between the Camp Authority and the POWs. Then in May, Rabbit’s voice came over the speakers. Jim listened to him recite familiar rhetoric, commanding the pilots to atone for their crimes and extolling the magnanimity of North Vietnam. “You are criminals,” Rabbit said. “You must work for us. You must pay for your keep. You have obligations to the DRV. You must atone for your crimes and thereby enjoy the historic lenience and generosity of the Vietnamese people.” Rabbit went on, saying they must reject the influence of those individuals who continued to incite resistance. CAG took that line personally. Toward the end of his speech, Rabbit issued a chilling admonition. He told the prisoners that the Camp Authority was preparing a special place for the “darkest criminals, who persist in inciting the other criminals to oppose the Camp Authority.” In time, Jim and ten others would call that place home.

  Then Rabbit announced his government’s new early release policy. “Those who repent, [who] show true repentance in actions as well as words, will be permitted to go home even before the war is over,” he said. In Jim’s opinion, Rabbit had fired a direct shot at the Code of Conduct and the Unity over Self tenet of the BACK US guidelines. With his offer, Rabbit might divide the POWs, encouraging them to compete against one another to secure a ticket home—perhaps by turning each other in or issuing propaganda statements. Jim wouldn’t tolerate it. Like an opposing party responding to the president’s State of the Union address, he immediately sent his rebuttal through the network. He dubbed Rabbit’s offer the FRP—Fink Release Program. “No early release,” he ordered. “We all go home together.”

  The next day, the Camp Authority began conducting short quizzes that POWs called attitude checks. The sessions did not involve torture but rather let the interrogators gauge the mindsets of their captives. When one POW returned from a session, he let Jim know that the Camp Authority planned to partition POWs into three categories: “the willings, the partial-willings, and the diehards.” That was how they would identify candidates for early release.

  One day, as 1967’s spring turned to summer, a guard opened Jim’s cell and signaled that he needed his long-sleeved quiz suit. Under escort, he hobbled across the Little Vegas courtyard to Cat’s private quiz room. Cat and the Camp Authority knew Jim led the POWs, but they could never officially recognize that fact; their regulations forbade prisoner communication and organization. Acknowledging the existence of the American underground would mean admitting their personal failure to crush it. At this meeting, Cat extended what he perhaps considered an olive branch. He slyly suggested that the men could escape the heat of their cells, enjoy fresh air, and have more bath water if they would help Hanoi’s citizenry clean up the debris created by U.S. bombing. Would Jim, just this once, announce this opportunity over the radio?

  Jim would not read over the air, had no interest in helping the people of Hanoi, and suspected a propaganda stunt. He pictured the headlines in world papers: “American prisoners of war go to the aid of North Vietnamese patriots as Yank bombs rain on the city of Hanoi.” He envisioned five cameras for every shovelful of dirt. “No,” he said. “I will not.”

  Jim’s response must have disappointed Cat, but it seemed not to surprise him. “Well, I am sorry,” Cat said with some resignation. “I just want you to remember that I gave you a chance to do something good for your fellows, under my own auspices.”

  During the guards’ noon siesta, after Jim had been sent back to his cell, he lay on the concrete floor, appreciating its coolness. He heard so
meone whistle “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” the all-clear signal, and he began whispering a new directive under the door, “No repent; no repay; do not work in town.” His words had already spread throughout Little Vegas by whispers, taps, and notes when a North Vietnamese voice came through the speakers that evening, inviting prisoners to work in Hanoi. “Criminals will be given an opportunity to atone for their crimes in a meaningful way,” the speaker announced. “They will be allowed to help the Vietnamese people clean up the debris of bomb damage. Work parties are to start among volunteers and the work will afford you the opportunity of fresh air and exercise. A bath will be available to each volunteer after returning from the bomb-site area. You will be approached individually.” For the next week, the Camp Authority tried to find cooperative recruits. Not a single POW agreed.

  * * *

  Outside Hỏa Lò Prison, Operation Rolling Thunder entered its third summer. On the occasion of Hồ Chí Minh’s seventy-seventh birthday—May 19, 1967—the North Vietnamese captured eleven downed naval aviators, adding overcrowding to the many problems in Little Vegas. The POWs knew the swelling numbers of new prisoners meant an escalated bombing pace—a tidbit that restored some hope even as it led to less food and more crowded conditions. Harry Jenkins, one of the POWs confined in Little Vegas, considered the raids a good sign; the United States would finally make Hanoi submit. Naturally good-spirited and renowned for his sense of humor, Harry pronounced most everything a good sign. If another year passed without release, he had one year less to wait for repatriation. More torture meant that U.S. battlefield success required more propaganda. Every piece of fruit signaled homecoming, every bombing halt indicated peace. Harry’s unflagging positive spin inspired even the most despondent of prisoners. While he offered encouragement to others, Harry suspected—correctly—that North Vietnam had still not released his name as captured; he’d never been allowed to write a letter to his family. He secretly believed they would never send him home.