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

  “Denton, you have seen more and read more, and you know more than I do,” Softsoap responded. “You can make argument that I cannot answer. But you must understand we never have security. We always fight. We have no unity. Under French there was no security, no law for Vietnamese. If Vietnamese woman raped, or peasant murdered by French, there would be nothing that could happen to those that did it. We had nothing but corruption … Now for the first time we have security. We do not have other things, but for the first time we have precious security.” Jerry noted tears in Softsoap’s eyes as the officer grasped his forearm and implored, “Do you understand that?”

  Softsoap’s statement touched Jerry and he felt genuine pity for his counterpart. Jerry believed most of his captors would have traded Hồ Chí Minh’s system for a new life in America if given the chance. However, while the end of torture helped those sympathies emerge, the North Vietnamese still confined the POWs to concrete cages, so the glimmers of compassion proved fleeting.

  The POWs speculated endlessly about what the changes meant. “They’re trying to change our treatment without actually endorsing the Geneva Convention,” guessed Sam Johnson.

  “Maybe,” said Jerry Denton. “I’m not sure what to think just yet.”

  “I think they are getting ready to move us all together,” said another inmate. “Maybe we are going to go back with the others at Hỏa Lò.”

  Jerry said, “I think we can do anything we want and get away with it now.”

  Confident that torture had at long last ceased, the men took advantage of their new freedoms. They couldn’t help but think the war’s end might be near and their banishment to this abominable place almost over. The return of Ron Storz only stoked those hopes. Shortly after Thanksgiving 1969, guards had transferred Ron to Jim Stockdale’s old Alcatraz cell, ending his three months’ convalescence in a quiz room outside the courtyard. He and Jim Mulligan, who now shared the small cellblock, tapped throughout each day, just as Ron had resolved to comm frequently with him from across the courtyard after CAG was taken away in January. That same week Ron returned, Jim had received a Thanksgiving package from Louise. It contained Life Savers and wool L.L.Bean slipper socks with leather bottoms, which he donned immediately. Jim had never received a more treasured present and told his friends of this small good fortune.

  “I’m freezing,” Ron tapped to Jim several days later. “I need the socks.”

  “I’ll leave them on the line,” Jim tapped back without hesitation. “Pick them up when you get your clothes.”

  After Ron had worn the socks, he tapped that he’d never received a better present. Jim just wished they’d help his mind as much as his feet.

  The prisoners wished they could restore their brother’s spirit and replenish his will to live, but Sam Johnson realized Ron had a long road to travel. From beneath his door Sam observed him walking to the cistern; he looked emaciated, and his face displayed a haunted gauntness. Ron still ignored Jerry Denton’s orders to gain weight. While he had told his compatriots he had resumed eating, they soon learned differently. Ron became too ill to empty his own latrine bucket, so guards assigned the duty to Jim Mulligan. When Jim dumped Ron’s bucket into the latrine, he poured out the previous day’s food rations, undisturbed as far as he could tell. Some still believed that Ron clung to his plan to go home emaciated, a testament to North Vietnam’s Geneva violations. He also told Sam Johnson that he feared the North Vietnamese would put him into the ropes again if he regained his strength. Maybe he suffered the compounding mental effects of solitary, depression, disease, and malnutrition that prevented him from thinking straight. Or perhaps he had other reasons he never shared. Whatever the causes may have been, his condition continued to deteriorate even as the camp environment improved. He seemed beyond help.

  19

  GBU

  On September 28, 1969, just weeks after her husband nearly bled out his life in Room Eighteen, Sybil met five other National League members at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. Together, the five wives and one father represented the U.S. Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marine Corps. The independent delegation of worried family members—they kept government involvement to a minimum—held a small press conference, then boarded a TWA flight to Paris using tickets donated by Reader’s Digest, one of the nation’s largest-circulation magazines at the time. Once in Paris, Sybil checked into the Intercontinental Hotel and dialed the Embassy of North Vietnam. She spoke with Xuân Oánh, temporary head of the North Vietnamese delegation.

  “Yes, Mrs. Stockdale,” he said. “We’ve heard about you and the government man with you.”

  Sybil truthfully assured him the man was simply the father of a marine POW, nothing more. Oánh said the embassy would call her if they decided to grant her request for a meeting. She repeated the hotel telephone number three times, and the line went dead. Each afternoon, Sybil stayed in her room, waiting for the phone to ring; others took morning and evening shifts. Every other day, she phoned Oánh, just to remind him. Finally, on Saturday, October 4, at 10:00 A.M., he called. He invited the delegation to four o’clock tea at the embassy that afternoon. Sybil spent the day rehearsing in the mirror and dry-heaving her nerves in the bathroom. As the meeting grew closer, she composed herself and donned the eighty-nine-dollar pink wool suit on which she’d splurged for the 1965 ceremony during which Jim had assumed command of Air Wing 16 aboard Oriskany.

  At 4:00 P.M., the six Americans arrived at the North Vietnamese Embassy and were seated at a low table across from four dark-haired North Vietnamese officials. Tension gripped the group; Sybil tried to break it by borrowing Xuân Oánh’s reading glasses. One by one, the family members each read aloud their requests for information about their husband or son. The North Vietnamese panel listened passively. Toward the end of the meeting, Sybil asked if every POW/MIA wife and mother needed to come to Paris seeking information. Giving their only direct response during the meeting, the North Vietnamese emphatically answered, “No.” They wanted no more attention called to this blemish on their reputation. The prisoner issue had suddenly become significantly more troublesome.

  Before his visitors departed, Oánh pulled a July 31 New York Times clipping from his pocket. It showed the picture of Sybil resting on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. He waved it and said, “We know all about you, Mrs. Stockdale. We know you are the founder of this movement in your country, and we want to tell you we think you should direct your questions to your own government.”

  Sybil rattled off the long list of contacts she’d made in the U.S. government, then handed the North Vietnamese letters from other military families; Oánh issued a notably vague promise to answer them by mail. Not wasting her opportunity, Sybil made a particularly personal and pointed inquiry. She asked for evidence that her husband no longer languished in solitary confinement. Oánh answered with stone-faced silence, and the meeting ended abruptly. Staffers showed the Americans a propaganda film, then served them tea and candy. Sybil wondered if the North Vietnamese served her the same candy Jim had written about in one of his early letters. As they exited the embassy, they met the international press, who carried their story to the world. The delegation explained that North Vietnam had promised—loosely—to study the problem and notify them of their findings. Until then, however, the families would exist in an anguishing and uncertain purgatory.

  * * *

  Later that fall, the Alcatraz squawk boxes carried more unsettling news. Hanoi Hannah reported 200,000 demonstrators had marched on Washington in October 1969 to protest the war. The following month, she reported that more than 250,000 had come to the American capital—the largest antiwar protest in U.S. history at that time. The prisoners in Alcatraz had no means of confirming or countering the news force-fed to them by the Camp Authority. To them, much of it sounded preposterous, yet the recordings played by interrogators and broadcast over the radio sounded so real. What was happening outside their cells? What was happening to their country? They had no
means of knowing for sure, but learning about the lack of diplomatic or military progress would not have heartened them.

  At home, public support of the war declined further. Americans held vigils and demonstrations, often called “moratoriums,” in cities across the country. John Lennon’s song “Give Peace a Chance” ranked among the most popular of the year. Nixon realized the war’s diminishing domestic backing further eroded his negotiating position. “The more divided we are at home, the less likely the enemy is to negotiate at Paris,” he explained to his constituents. However, as Lyndon Johnson had once said—only partly in jest—North Vietnam never had much incentive to negotiate. Now, unfortunately for Nixon, much of his war-weary nation just wanted to bring home its soldiers and forget about Vietnam. Pursuing his pledge of “peace with honor,” Nixon had coined the tongue-twister “Vietnamization” for his gradual transfer of military responsibility to the South Vietnamese army and the government in Saigon. In 1952, a young Richard Nixon had charged then-President Truman with losing China to Communism, as Truman had failed to stop the overthrow of Chiang Kai-shek’s pro-Western government by Mao Zedong’s Red Army. Now, President Nixon did not want to lose Vietnam in the same manner. He hoped to extricate U.S. forces while a non-Communist government still held power in Saigon. He banked that a U.S.-trained and U.S.-subsidized South Vietnamese army could repel the NLF and the North Vietnamese long enough for him to claim an honorable exit. Nixon did not want to be blamed if South Vietnam fell. Meanwhile, Americans wondered how many years this gradual withdrawal would take. More troops would die, but for what? And what would become of the prisoners?

  * * *

  Several months after Sybil returned from Paris, the North Vietnamese began requiring that all future prisoner correspondence be sent on small, standardized, six-line forms via the Committee of Liaison with Families of Servicemen Detained in North Vietnam (COLIAFAM), an independent group led by American antiwar activist Cora Weiss. In return, Hanoi would give prisoner mail to COLIAFAM for distribution to families in the United States. The prisoners would use the same six-line, postcard-sized forms. Some speculated that the North Vietnamese had deduced prisoners were using long multipage letters to send home encoded information, names of prisoners in particular.

  When she heard about the change, Sybil immediately called Bob Boroughs, who’d continued at the Pentagon after the change in administration. “Why doesn’t the State Department insist on a more proper channel?” she asked, rather indignant that she’d have to rely on an antiwar activist who kept such close relations with the people holding her husband in leg irons for sixteen hours per day.

  “I’m not sure someone over there at State didn’t suggest this idea you object to,” Boroughs said. “As much as I hate it, though, you’ve got to send your letters through them. It may improve chances of getting our stuff through to your husband.”

  Indeed, the volume of mail received by families would nearly triple in 1970.

  Despite the Go Public campaign launched by Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird and his deputy, Dick Capen, the wives still questioned the White House’s commitment to the prisoners. If Nixon’s Vietnamization transferred ownership of the war to South Vietnam and America withdrew before forcing a treaty with the North, would Hanoi ever release them? Shortly before Thanksgiving, Sybil arranged an interview with Channel 6, the ABC affiliate in San Diego, and decided to use the opportunity to get a firm, supportive statement from the president, who still had not personally engaged the POW/MIA issue. In preparation, she called the White House and asked to speak with three presidential advisers whose names she’d picked up in magazines. The operator reported each one as out of the office. Sybil left messages, but none called back. Shortly before her interview, she dialed the White House and again asked for Deputy Assistant to the President Alexander Butterfield. The operator reported he was still unavailable.

  “For crying out loud,” Sybil shouted. “What are you doing around there, having a fire drill? I have to go on ABC-TV in thirty minutes, and I want some assurance the White House is even aware of the POW issue.”

  A new voice suddenly came on the line. “This is Alex Butterfield, Mrs. Stockdale,” it said. “I can assure you the president is very concerned about the prisoner issue.”

  “Well, how close are you to him so you know that?” Sybil asked.

  “I sit fifteen feet from his desk,” Butterfield said, “and I give you my word he is doing everything he can about the situation.”

  “Well, he needs to do something publicly,” Sybil fired right back. “We aren’t going to wait forever. I have to go now or I’ll be late for the program. You tell him what I said.”

  * * *

  On December 8, just seven days after the government held its first military draft lottery, Frank Sieverts at the State Department invited Sybil to the White House for a reception and press conference with the president. Louise Mulligan received a similar invitation, and the two allies met in Washington for the event. On the morning of December 12, Louise fastened a miniature pair of gold naval aviator’s wings to her lapel—the same wings Jim had given her when he proposed. In a neighboring room, Sybil again donned the pink wool suit she’d worn in Paris. These two leaders, along with twenty-three other POW/MIA family members, rode a bus to meet President and Mrs. Nixon. After the initial reception, Louise, Sybil, and three other wives joined the president in the Oval Office before the formal press conference began. In their private moments, Sybil handed the president a letter expressing the wives’ concern with his Vietnamization policy. “Many of us are concerned that the gradual de-escalation of the war in Vietnam may leave the future of our prisoners in limbo simply because there may be no specific end to the war,” the letter read. “We must ensure that the prisoner situation is carefully considered at each step in your program for the withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam.” The wives believed that the Vietnamization policy benefited Nixon politically but that North Vietnam would never free their husbands without signing a treaty that ended the war or at least linked a U.S. withdrawal to prisoner release.

  When time came for the press conference, Louise, Sybil, and the others lined up beside President Nixon in the Roosevelt Room. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the president began. “I have the very great honor to present in this room today five of the most courageous women I have had the privilege to meet in my life.” These wives stood by the president as he told their story, and the public saw their fear, felt their painful uncertainty, and—regardless of the listener’s position on the war itself—realized how North Vietnam was upturning these innocent lives. During 1969, Nixon had noticed the nation’s growing support for these women, and while he did seem genuinely concerned about their plight, he also recognized the political advantage in the POW issue. From that day forward, with the encouragement of Secretary Laird, Nixon calculated the reactions of America’s POW/MIA families in his plans for Vietnam.

  The president concluded his statement and left the room while the wives fielded questions from reporters and shared their stories. Their personal trials had become America’s battle, as the nation was reminded about the heart-wrenching situation these families confronted. The public learned more about the Geneva Convention and renewed their calls for the enemy to honor it. At long last, these brave women had convinced the president to stop allowing North Vietnam to flout the rules of war.

  When the wives had answered the last question, they filed toward the door. Sybil stopped short and turned around. “Merry Christmas!” she said to the press corps. Then the women walked out of the Roosevelt Room, confident but feeling a twinge of sadness. Sybil and Louise both faced a fifth Christmas without their husbands.

  * * *

  As Louise and Sybil were preparing for their meeting at the White House, Frenchy, the notoriously volatile commandant of the Briar Patch, assumed command of Alcatraz. The Camp Authority had placed him back in charge of some of the POWs who’d experienced his most brutal methods, like Ron Storz and Geo
rge McKnight, whom he’d sentenced to slit trenches for so many hours during the summer of 1966. He never had time to implement his brutal tactics at Alcatraz, however. It seemed a move was afoot.

  National League of Families White House press conference with President Richard Nixon, December 1969. Louise Mulligan and Sybil Stockdale are second and third from the left.

  “You’re all moving out of here,” Ron Storz loudly told Jerry one early December day on his way to the latrine; by this time, Ron no longer even bothered to communicate surreptitiously. “The guards told me they are sending you out. But I’m not going.”

  “Of course you’re coming with us,” Jerry Denton said. “We’re not letting you stay here by yourself.”

  “It will only be worse if I leave,” he replied. “Besides, it’s all a bluff. It’s a trick to try and get me to eat, but I’m onto them. If they do move us, they will never let me be with you. They’ll separate us.”

  “That won’t happen, Ron,” Sam Johnson chimed in through his transom. “Things have changed some. Can’t you feel that it’s different now? We’ll all be together.”

  When Jerry met Softsoap at quiz, he demanded, “If we are going to move, you must make Storz go with us.”

  “You are not going to move,” Softsoap answered. “No need to worry about it.”

  Several days later, Jerry revisited the subject and got a different response. “You may move,” Softsoap said. “It is not certain. But your Storz may do as he likes.” The Camp Authority had given Ron the unprecedented choice of choosing his future. Sadly, Ron seemed determined to remain at Alcatraz even if his nine compatriots relocated.

  On December 9, a guard thrust open the door to George Coker’s cell and told him to roll up his belongings into his sleeping mat. Along the cellblock, other prisoners were ordered to do the same. The long-awaited move had come. Frenchy personally delivered the order to Ron, who recoiled at seeing his bitter adversary and refused to roll up anything. Instead, he began yelling at Frenchy. Nobody could clearly hear the exchange, but one could imagine Ron’s reaction to seeing the man who inflicted so much abuse upon him during the Make Your Choice campaign. Ultimately, Ron’s refusal to choose the cooperative path had led him to Alcatraz. Now, Frenchy stepped back from Ron’s avalanche of angry words and simply locked Ron back inside Cell Thirteen.