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

  Capen knew he’d receive four years’ worth of pent-up anger that evening, and after dinner he listened to the wives vent about the previous administration’s policies and actions—inaction, really—regarding their missing or captured husbands. One wife smashed a framed painting she said represented the air force’s commitment to taking care of its own. She gave the delegates the remnants, asking them to pass the pieces along to the Pentagon. When her turn came, Sybil explained that most families had received no mail in more than five months. They thought the government’s Keep Quiet policy had likely worsened the POWs’ situation. The wives believed that North Vietnamese officials felt no pressure and had no incentive to comply with the Geneva Convention. The assembled women let the new administration know they wanted a new policy. Dick Capen left determined to give them one.

  In Washington, Capen’s team collected intelligence about conditions in Hanoi from several agencies, including the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the National Security Agency, and the CIA, and began to grasp the unimaginable misery North Vietnam inflicted upon American POWs. They found encoded messages and carbon letters from POWs, like those sent by Bob Shumaker and Jim Stockdale. The agencies had decided not to disclose any of the intelligence for fear of compromising sources or causing the North Vietnamese to halt the flow of mail. Since the State Department was trying to negotiate an end to the conflict, they had discouraged releasing any facts that might offend North Vietnam and disrupt the peace talks, which were approaching the end of their first year having accomplished nothing. Capen’s team noted the lack of progress the State Department had made in negotiations and that prisoner mail—the families’ only mode of contact with prisoners—had virtually stopped even without revelation of the intelligence secrets concealed in letters.

  At a weekend retreat with Defense leadership, Secretary Laird reviewed Capen’s findings and agreed to publicize the information about prisoner mistreatment. New secretary of state William Rogers and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger both objected; Averell Harriman visited Laird personally to plead that Defense not release the information. They all worried that the North Vietnamese might walk away from negotiations or kill those prisoners whose conditions would corroborate the accusations. In the press package detailing North Vietnam’s Geneva Convention violations was a photograph of injured navy Lieutenant Commander John McCain, son of Admiral Jack McCain, Commander, Pacific Command. Capen met with McCain to explain the potential risks to his son; he would withhold the photograph at the admiral’s request. Admiral McCain replied, “You do what you have to do.”

  The Joint Chiefs of Staff, including Chief of Naval Operations Tom Moorer and General Earle Wheeler, the chairman, pushed for disclosure, overruling the State Department’s wishes. Still, the call ultimately fell to Laird, who was determined to help his captured servicemen and give their families hope. He decided the Pentagon would “Go Public,” as the campaign became known, with its findings and bring worldwide pressure to North Vietnam. The United States would no longer let Hanoi’s claims of lenient treatment go unchallenged. If Laird couldn’t bring his men home, he could at least inform the world of their struggle.

  On May 19, Sybil Stockdale received a call from two members of the Washington delegation—Frank Sieverts from State and Dick Capen from Defense. “Before you leave [to take your children to school] this morning,” Capen said, “we wanted you to know that here in Washington, in just a few minutes, the secretary of defense is going to do the thing you’ve been wanting him to do for so long. He’s going to publicly denounce the North Vietnamese for their treatment of our American prisoners and for their violation of the Geneva Convention. We know you’ve been working long and hard for this day, and we wanted you to be the first to know.”

  After nearly five years, the government abandoned its Keep Quiet policy. Sybil smiled, satisfied that the pressure brought by the wives had led to the policy change. She was particularly happy that the secretary happened to choose Hồ Chí Minh’s birthday for his announcement.

  That day, in a Pentagon briefing room, Secretary Laird called on North Vietnam to release U.S. POWs and to abide by the Geneva Convention. He left no question about his reasons or their offenses. “The North Vietnamese have claimed that they are treating our men humanely,” he said. “I am distressed by the fact that there is clear evidence that this is not the case. The United States Government has urged that the enemy respect the requirements of the Geneva Convention. This they have refused to do.” He turned the meeting over to Capen and questions erupted from the nearly one hundred members of the press in attendance.

  Laird’s bold declaration dealt a blow to Hanoi’s strategy of gaining sympathy by advertising their supposed humane treatment of POWs. Moreover, it reversed the diplomatic path the previous administration had so unsuccessfully pursued. The course correction earned the secretary a blistering phone call from Henry Kissinger, who still feared that the revelations would hinder his peace talks, but Laird and Capen believed their policy change would help the Americans in Hanoi. Nixon chose not to intervene.

  Capen became his department’s face for the POW/MIA families and would meet with more than five thousand family members during the coming years. He and Laird saw the community growing in influence, and within two years Laird would advise Nixon, “If the families should turn against the administration on the POW/MIA issue, we believe that general public support would also.” In the administration’s view, the wives were an asset, albeit a volatile one. In the wives’ view, the Department of Defense had at last begun to find its backbone. Less than one month after Laird’s salvo against Hanoi, Sybil received her first letter from Jim since January 1967. She’d spent sixteen months wondering whether her encrypted letters had condemned him, wondering if he were still alive. Now she knew he at least had survived.

  Within months, though she wouldn’t know it, prison conditions in Hanoi would begin improving.

  * * *

  The month after Laird’s announcement, Sybil and another POW wife, Karen Butler, flew to Los Angeles to meet with Look magazine. The Pentagon’s May announcement had shed light on the general prisoner-of-war issue, but League of Families members believed the home-front angle still needed more attention. Unfortunately, Look’s West Coast editor seemed less than receptive to a story about POW/MIA families. Sybil’s morale, so high in May, began to slide. “I’m crazy to try to tell the world the truth about all this,” she thought. “These people don’t care, and I’m never going to be able to get through to them.”

  As they stood up to leave, the two women told the editor to contact the League secretary in San Diego should he change his mind. “You have an organization?” he asked, suddenly more interested. They told him about the League, and he decided the group’s campaign would in fact make a good story. Reinvigorated, Sybil called Louise Mulligan in Virginia Beach to discuss ideas about expanding the League’s national presence; the two had no way of knowing their husbands had spent the entirety of 1968 living just 5 feet from each other. Bob Boroughs at the Pentagon also weighed in, suggesting to Sybil Stockdale that a national organization could garner more attention than a disparate network of groups or individuals. By the fall of 1969, the groups comprising the League of Families were beginning to call themselves the National League; they would formally change to that name the next year. The organization had twenty-four regional coordinators and 350 members on its mailing list. Sybil Stockdale served as national coordinator. Led by Sybil, Louise, and members like Jane Denton, Evelyn Grubb, Maureen Dunn, and Phyllis Galanti, the organization aimed to pressure the military for more information about POWs and MIAs, to make everyone in America aware of the POW/MIA issue, and to encourage fellow wives and family members to become advocates for their husbands and sons.

  The American press joined the battle as well. When the lead North Vietnamese delegate at the stalled Paris Peace Talks stated that Hanoi would not release a list of prisoners until the United St
ates withdrew from Vietnam, The Washington Post called his stance “retrograde.” The New York Times covered the efforts of these women on behalf of their husbands, running a photograph of Sybil sitting on the Capitol steps after a day of lobbying Congress; the wives were at last beginning to garner the attention of the country’s politicians. CBS Morning News interviewed Sybil in early August, and Good Housekeeping planned a fall feature on the National League. Sybil spoke with the Today show’s producers, and they seemed intrigued by the idea of POW/MIA families confronting the North Vietnamese in Paris. She began plotting. By the end of summer 1969, the National League had begun to win over Washington and America. Paris was next.

  18

  THE CAPTAIN OF MY SOUL

  Toward the end of that same summer, Jim Stockdale’s long exile in Room Five, behind the door he and Pigeye had fashioned in March, came to an end. The sound of Jim’s distinct gait echoed across the Little Vegas courtyard once again as he hobbled between his new cell in the Mint and the washrooms of the Sands. When some long-serving POWs heard his stiff-legged step, they knew CAG had returned from God-knows-where, having overcome God-knows-what. During one of his walks to the latrine, the camp speakers played the “Bob and Ed Show,” as POWs had taken to calling the broadcasts made by two senior POWs. They both had decided to oppose the war and regularly delivered antiwar propaganda over the camp network. The broadcasts infuriated Jim; they violated his BACK US edict, which prohibited statements on the air without taking torture—and the broadcasts were terrible for morale. As he walked he rattled his bucket: “BS.” He heard someone coughing a response in one of the Vegas cell blocks. He registered four coughs, then two: “R” for “Roger.” The POWs agreed with Jim’s assessment.

  Removing the infectious Alcatraz Eleven from the general prison population in October of 1967 had, to an extent, achieved the Camp Authority’s goals. They capitalized on the leadership purge by isolating the remaining seniors, which caused some junior officers to begin accepting the special favors that accompanied compliance. Strict crackdowns on communication and a constant shuffling of prisoners in and out of the Hilton also hindered the regeneration of an organized opposition.

  One POW who arrived shortly after the Eleven’s exile reported he didn’t hear an American voice in Thunderbird for five weeks. The Camp Authority had cracked down, and many POWs were afraid to gamble—and the usual players weren’t there to cast the dice; they were locked in Alcatraz.

  When Jim Stockdale arrived in Bath Six one August day, he looked at the protruding end of a wire that attached a ceiling tile to the rafters. The wire bent northward, indicating a new note awaited him from POW Dave Hatcher, one of his only correspondents. Jim’s heart leapt, but he kept calm and casually checked behind him to ensure a guard wasn’t watching. Clear, he reached under the sink and parted the cobwebs that concealed an empty toothpaste tube. He pulled a piece of rough toilet paper from the tube and tucked it away in his pajama pants.

  Jim’s guard Hawk dutifully frisked him for notes and other contraband before and after his baths, since that time presented his one opportunity to communicate with other prisoners, but Jim had learned to circumvent this measure. He observed that Hawk possessed a country boy’s modesty and would not watch Jim bathe naked, nor would he frisk Jim’s crotch. That gave Jim all the cover he needed.

  After the guard returned him to his cell in the Mint, he took out the note and unfolded it gingerly. He settled down on his honey bucket as he did so. If a guard should open the door or the peephole, he would have to drop the paper into the bucket’s mess. With one eye on the peephole and an ear listening for approaching footsteps, he began reading. Dave Hatcher and his Stardust roommate, Jerry Coffee, had penned four lines of poetry with pencil lead stolen from a quiz room. Jim instantly recognized the words as the closing stanza of the poem “Invictus:”

  It matters not how strait the gate,

  How charged with punishments the scroll,

  I am the master of my fate:

  I am the captain of my soul.

  Inspired by these lines, Jim recalled the poem’s preceding three stanzas, drawing strength from their words. The English poet William Ernest Henley had written “Invictus” in 1875 as he recovered from surgery, but now the poem seemed intended solely for the Americans in Hanoi, the men in Alcatraz, and their bloodied leader.

  In late August 1969, he received another note from Hatcher. Hatcher knew the Camp Authority had disconnected the speakers in the Mint, so he sent CAG a long note summarizing farewell statements read over the prison radio by two of the three POWs who’d accepted early release that month, the third grouping of three prisoners to participate in the Fink Release Program. Only one of these most recent three, young Doug Hegdahl, had left with the blessing of the acting POW leaders at his camp.

  In 1967, at age nineteen, Seaman Hegdahl had fallen overboard the cruiser USS Canberra and been captured in the Gulf of Tonkin by North Vietnamese fishermen. When he arrived at the Plantation, he convincingly played the fool with his interrogators. His youth, enlisted rank, and apparently dim wit made him a candidate for early release; the Camp Authority viewed Hegdahl as a potential patsy and an opportunity to demonstrate their leniency. Senior POWs sensed that possibility and commissioned the sailor to memorize the names of all known American POWs. They ordered him to accept early release, if offered. By August 1969, Hegdahl had learned 256 names and had been offered his freedom. When the North Vietnamese released him into the hands of a peace delegation that month, he carried those names home to America and publicly confirmed the allegations of POW mistreatment made by the Pentagon in May. His revelation of flagrant Geneva violations outraged the public and added to the international pressure on Hanoi to improve conditions. Once he gave his initial testimony, Hegdahl visited numerous families and bases, including NAS Miramar in San Diego. There, young Sondra Rutledge approached him and asked, “Do you know the name Rutledge?”

  Hegdahl looked at her and said, “Howie.” Her hope swelled even as the government remained silent. Hegdahl’s names also gave comfort, but not confirmation, to the Johnson, Storz, and Jenkins households; they still had heard nothing from their loved ones directly.

  * * *

  Back in the Mint, Jim finished reading Hatcher’s note, which he’d signed “McKinley Nolan.” The actual Nolan, an army private, had either defected or been taken captive in South Vietnam in 1967; he often recorded propaganda that the North Vietnamese broadcast to their POWs. Jim shredded the note and placed the remnants into his bucket. He usually replied to Hatcher using strings from his pajamas, into which he would laboriously tie small knots that corresponded with tap code; he considered it his version of Braille. Responding to this most recent note, however, Jim decided to use toothpaste, a broken sliver of plastic, and brown toilet paper. He dipped the plastic into the toothpaste and began to write, “Dear McKinley…” He ranted about the Fink Release Program, which in his isolation, he’d been less able to combat; he thanked Hatcher for serving as his bridge to the camp. He carefully completed his reply and began to sign it “Chester,” the alias he’d begun using for prison correspondence; the name was inspired by Gunsmoke sidekick Chester Goode, who, like Jim, had a stiff leg. All of a sudden, from behind him, a Vietnamese voice calmly inquired, “What are you doing?”

  Jim’s hand froze. He turned around to see a guard nicknamed the Kid peering through the door’s peephole. Jim maintained his composure, although he silently berated himself for not hearing the guard’s approach. He answered, “Just looking at these old letters from my wife the Camp Authority lets me keep in my cell.” He had spread old letters across his bunk to help disguise his task.

  “No,” said the Kid. “I mean what are you writing? I was watching your arm move.”

  The Kid ordered him to the wall, and Jim complied, even as he repeated his original answer. The Kid then called for the turnkey, Hawk. When he looked away, Jim tossed the toothpaste tube into the corner. Then he returned to the bed to st
raighten the papers before Hawk arrived with the key. As he shifted about the piles, he slyly palmed his note and hid it in his crotch. By the time Hawk and the Kid entered the cell, Jim had raised his arms above his head, while fervently hoping the note stayed put. Hawk frisked Jim, then ordered him out of the cell so he could begin a search. Jim stood against the corridor wall; the note began slipping down the inside of his thigh. When Hawk had upturned the room and found no contraband, he frisked Jim again. Then Jim stepped back toward his cell, attempting to keep his bony thighs pressed together against the note. He noticed an expression on Hawk’s face that registered both amusement and pity. Then it turned to surprise as the note fluttered out from Jim’s pajama leg and landed on the floor. Hawk snatched the note and ran out of the Mint; the Kid followed after locking Jim’s cell behind him. Helpless, Jim waited for the hammer to fall.