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

  The change began taking effect in December and finally reached Little Vegas around Christmastime. On the night of the twenty-sixth, Jerry Denton heard large numbers of camp personnel enter the Little Vegas courtyard. He pulled himself up to the barred window and looked out. “It must be some sort of move, Jim,” he called to his roommate, Jim Mulligan. “I can see the water girls and cooks moving dishes from the main area and taking them out to the main entrance towards Heartbreak Hotel.”

  The Alcatraz veterans heard guards enter their Stardust cellblock. The North Vietnamese threw open cell doors and issued the order, “Roll up!” The ten prisoners complied, each rolling his paltry belongings into his bamboo sleeping mat. The group trudged in single file toward the Heartbreak courtyard. Guards lined the path, but they showed no malice toward the captives. In fact, they seemed cheerful. When Jim Mulligan stumbled, a guard nicknamed Parrot reached out to steady him. “Go easy, Mun,” he said.

  They passed through the corridor adjacent to Heartbreak Hotel—those eight cells that held so many awful memories of their early days as POWs when they thought they’d return home by the following Christmas. Then they emerged into an unfamiliar section of Hỏa Lò: a ring of three long buildings that surrounded a sizable dusty courtyard spotted with thin trees.

  After a thorough shakedown in one of the smaller two buildings, the Alcatraz Gang walked through a barred gate and into Room Seven in the largest building, which bordered the courtyard on three sides. Much like the building’s other six rooms, Seven was a large open cell roughly 50 feet long by 20 feet wide and filled with more than forty grinning Americans. The Gang saw faces they hadn’t seen since past deployments or since training at Pensacola, Nellis, Kingsville, or Colorado Springs. They found their fellow longtime POWs, some of whom they’d only known as a knuckle on a shared wall or a fleeting glance in a previous cellblock. Howie Rutledge had spent the better part of five years all by himself. Only taps, flashes, and his faith had sustained him. Now he watched forty-six Americans smiling, embracing, laughing, and talking. He marveled at this turn of events—how once he had risked so much to send taps through a wall, perhaps just a sentence per day. He believed the Lord had seen him through the wilderness. Bombardier-navigator George Coker reunited with his pilot, Jack Fellowes, who apologized for losing their A-6 Intruder and condemning them to so many years in Hanoi. “No sweat,” George replied. When Fellowes had apologized before, just after their shootdown, Coker had told him they’d make it, and they had. Coker turned away from Fellowes, and Jim Stockdale and Jerry Denton embraced him. The two seniors had only seen Coker—Cagney, as Stockdale still called him—through the cracks of their Alcatraz cells, never in person. By this time, Jerry had forgiven George for fabricating orders to and from CAG while they were in Alcatraz. Bob Shumaker looked about and noticed that nobody could stop smiling, himself included. For the first time, the Alcatraz Gang could look upon each other, together, face-to-face.

  The Americans called their new home Camp Unity, in honor of Stockdale’s “Unity over Self” edict. As the initial euphoria of this grand reunion subsided, the Alcatraz survivors began asking about the one friend the North Vietnamese had forced them to leave behind. Nobody had any news about Ron Storz. Nobody had seen him. The Gang had let themselves hope that Ron might have survived, but in their hearts, they knew he probably had not. He did not appear in Camp Unity, and nobody else had seen him. They felt a wave of sadness as they realized their friend had almost certainly never left their secluded prison behind the Ministry of National Defense.

  That night, the reunited POWs could not think about sleep. Jerry Denton proposed a different way to spend the evening. “Hey, it’s still practically Christmas,” he said. “Why don’t we have a church service? Rutledge, help me out here.”

  With Howie thus conscripted, Robbie Risner volunteered himself and George Coker to quote scripture. “And Sam will sing, won’t you, Sam?” Jerry asked.

  Sam Johnson resisted, protesting, “Shirley won’t even let me sing in church when there are other voices to cover me up!”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Jerry said. “Just sing a Christmas carol.”

  In a gentle Texas tenor, Sam sang “Silent Night.” His voice choked with emotion—both the happiness of being together with these fellow survivors and the sadness of missing yet another Christmas at home. He wondered if he could make it past the first stanza. Mercifully, the residents of Room Seven came to his aid and joined their voices with his.

  For the first time since they entered captivity, the Americans sang together and worshipped the God to whom so many had turned so often. George Coker, Robbie Risner, and Howie Rutledge were leading the final “amens” of the service when the room’s main door suddenly swung open. “No authorize!” yelled several guards as they stormed into the room. “No authorize! Be quiet!”

  The squad pushed Coker, Risner, and Rutledge back into the crowd. “Not allowed!” admonished an officer, reminding them of the camp policy restricting worship and assembly. Once the officer and the guards left, the POWs laid out their bamboo mats on the cold concrete, head to head, shoulder to shoulder. They fell asleep in Room Seven, thankful they were at long last together and wholly undeterred by the Camp Authority’s attempt at discipline.

  If the Alcatraz veterans were a football team’s starting offense, the men of Room Seven rounded out the Super Bowl roster. Intentionally or by coincidence, the Camp Authority had assembled many of its worst troublemakers in this room. Locked up along with the rogues of Alcatraz were Bud Day and John Dramesi, who’d both attempted daring escapes; John McCain, the admiral’s son who had refused offers of early release; venerable Korean War ace Robbie Risner; Billy Lawrence, who had led resistors at the Hilton in the absence of Stockdale and Denton; and a host of other long-serving reprobates who had waged their own personal wars against the Camp Authority. Room Seven’s senior ranking officer, Lieutenant Colonel Vern Ligon, USAF, was serving his second tour as a prisoner of war; he had already survived thirteen months in Nazi Stalag Luft 1 during World War II. Ligon had entered captivity in late 1967, and although he’d had less experience than the early arrivals at battling the Camp Authority, his rank gave him command of the more than 350 men in Camp Unity. Robbie Risner, Jim Stockdale, and Jerry Denton formed his senior leadership team. Collectively, the POWs called them the Four Wise Men.

  Life improved markedly for the men in Unity as group imprisonment replaced solitary confinement. The men finally had open space inside where they could move around freely. Breezes wafted through large barred windows; bricks and boards no longer blocked the sunlight. A large raised sleeping platform covered much of the floor in the rooms; each night, men crowded onto it. The close quarters sometimes led to short tempers, but nobody missed the small cells of past years.

  For the first time since they arrived in Hanoi nearly six years ago, the men no longer had to use their cursed honey buckets. Instead, they had a pair of concrete latrines, which unfortunately gave off an equally vicious odor. In the summer, a man could as easily breathe in flies as air. Still, the new facilities far outclassed the buckets. Prisoners were also allowed to take baths more frequently. Most importantly, the men could see, touch, and converse with fellow Americans. During their first days together, many men scarcely slept as years of pent-up conversations continued through the night.

  In Room Seven, veteran POWs began readjusting to having daily contact with other people. Clinical psychologists could not have designed a more effective reacclimation process for men who’d endured long stints alone; they learned how to coexist again. In solitary, these men had rarely needed to consider anyone else. The “G2,” as Room Seven’s residents called former boxer George McKnight and former wrestler George Coker, had particular trouble sharing their new space. One day, when a POW told Coker to put his cup elsewhere, the two nearly came to blows. On another occasion, McKnight set his bowl down on the floor and a fellow POW advised him, “You can’t put that here.” McKnight checked his
fists but confronted a situation his mind could barely grasp. The G2 and the other POWs gradually adjusted to sharing space with others.

  * * *

  Perhaps predictably, it took this roomful of hard-liners less than two months to begin pushing their newfound privileges. Tapped as chaplain by Robbie Risner, George Coker began assembling Room Seven for church services on Sundays, defying the Camp Authority’s rule against assembly. A guard promptly reported the first gathering to Bug, who reminded the POWs that the Camp Authority forbade meetings of any kind. “How would you like to go back to the 1967 treatment?” he threatened. The officer had, in effect, challenged the practice of religion. These military men, many of whom had relied so heavily on faith to survive the preceding years, considered religious freedom a right, not a privilege. In Jim Stockdale’s mind, the North Vietnamese had thrown down a gauntlet.

  The leadership in Camp Unity decided to stage a showdown on Sunday, February 7, 1971. Anticipating the morning worship, Bug led a detachment of guards into the courtyard. The squad assembled by the gate of Room Seven as the POW choir, Bob Shumaker among them, began the service. The room’s youngest occupant, twenty-seven-year-old George Coker, recited scripture and delivered the homily. When George finished, Howie Rutledge stepped to the forefront and began reciting the 101st Psalm, “I will sing of your love and justice; to you, O Lord, I will sing praise.” By this time, three guards had stepped into the room. George Coker saw the explosive combination of fear and anger in their eyes as they glared at the three leaders while nervously watching the crowd of worshippers that surrounded them. “No talk! Be quiet! No authorize!” the guards shouted as they brandished their bayoneted rifles. The congregants ignored them. When Howie finished his psalm, Robbie Risner delivered the benediction with Hawk standing before him, shouting at him to stop.

  After Risner dismissed the assembly, three guards came for George, Howie, and him. They grabbed the lay leaders roughly and hustled them out the gate at bayonet point. As they passed Bug, he sneered and told them, “Now you will see that my hands are not tied!”

  The guards lined the three offenders up along the sidewalk outside the room, 10 feet apart, their backs to the building, their faces toward the guards. Then from inside, they heard singing. Air Force Major Bud Day had begun an unmistakable song, “O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light…”

  Prisoners had not heard “The Star-Spangled Banner” sung aloud since their captivity began. Tears came to many eyes as every voice in Room Seven rose with Day’s. The men grasped the bars on the high windows and pulled themselves up so their voices would carry across the courtyard. POWs in other rooms began singing along. The chorus swelled even as guards rushed into the rooms, crying, “No authorize! No authorize! Quiet! No singing! Down! Get down! No window!”

  The prisoners just kept singing.

  Like the flag that had flown over Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor during the War of 1812, they, too, had survived a fierce siege. They carried scars from savage interrogations during which they’d hoped for death. Hunger, rats, mosquitoes, brutal beatings, broken bones, dysentery, fanatical guards, thirst, heat, cold, torture, and isolation had all failed to break them permanently. After battling through the pain, they had proven their resilience time and again in the Zoo, the Briar Patch, the Plantation, the streets of Hanoi, Room Eighteen, and Little Vegas. Ten of them had lived through the hell of Alcatraz. On this day, with this song, they told each other and all of North Vietnam that they had endured the worst; they would survive the rest. On that Sunday morning, the words of America’s national anthem carried over the walls of Hỏa Lò Prison and spilled into the North Vietnamese capital for all to hear. The men who sang it would never forget the triumph of that moment.

  The men for whom they sang it—Robbie Risner, Howie Rutledge, and George Coker—would never forget it either. Bug led the three instigators out of Camp Unity and back to Heartbreak Hotel, where their long sentences had first begun. With a chorus of three hundred voices singing the anthem for them, Robbie Risner felt 9 feet tall. George Coker, on the other hand, felt 9 inches tall. He feared his return to Heartbreak signaled a return to the old times—the beatings, the isolation. He readied himself for another hard stint alone. Indeed, the easy days had ended for the three celebrants. They found the conditions in Heartbreak’s Cell Four unimproved since the mid-1960s. Guards clamped two men to the narrow bunks, and the third got the floor, which proved as filthy as ever. They weren’t beaten, although they would have accepted blows for the satisfaction of leading the day’s service. Once settled, they heard more noise coming through the wall that separated their cell from Room Seven in Camp Unity.

  The POWs had begun to sing again, moving on to “God Bless America,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “America the Beautiful,” “California, Here I Come,” and “The Eyes of Texas.” George, Howie, and Robbie could hear what the guards and the people of Hanoi heard: a stockade full of Americans singing together as loudly as they could in triumphant protest. The North Vietnamese turned on the courtyard loudspeaker, hoping to drown out the singing with music of their own. The prisoners just sang louder.

  When the men tired of singing, a chant began. In collegiate tradition, the men of Room Seven shouted, “This is Building Number Seven, Number Seven, Number Seven. This is Building Number Seven, where the hell is Six?” Building Six picked up the chant and challenged Building Five, which in turn challenged Building Four. The chant circled the courtyard, making its way through all the Big Rooms, as the Camp Unity cellblocks were often called, until it ended at Building One. The walls reverberated with the noise. Jerry Denton smiled as he listened to his men releasing the frustration of a long and brutal incarceration. Their captors had locked them behind bars, walls, and doors, but still the North Vietnamese had lost control. For a time, the guards stood by, yelling and banging on gates to no avail, not knowing how to quell the Church Riot of 1971.

  Soon, however, troops with tear gas and bayonets arrived to put the celebration to rest. Prison guards opened the barred gates of each large room, and the soldiers charged in, fully dressed in combat gear. They backed the POWs against the wall, pressing their bayonets against men’s stomachs. The camp finally went silent.

  The following day, Sam Johnson heard rumors that the Camp Authority planned to punish Room Seven for instigating the riot. Sure enough, a Vietnamese voice came over the camp speakers to announce, “No wash.” No bathing for one day.

  “Big deal,” Sam said with a laugh. Considering the infrequency of baths in the preceding years, they could certainly hack one day’s restriction. For the most part, the Camp Authority had lost its teeth. Bug did reserve some harsher sanctions for Jim Stockdale, Jerry Denton, and Vern Ligon, whom he deemed jointly responsible for the Sunday rebellion. His detail rounded them up and marched them into Building Zero, a separate cellblock that was subdivided into smaller two- and three-person cells. Guards tossed the three leaders into a two-bunk cell and locked Jim’s left leg and Vern’s right leg together in a single pair of leg stocks, forcing them to share a bunk. Jerry received his own bunk and his own pair of stocks. “Well, I guess we just can’t stand prosperity,” Jim Stockdale remarked. The threesome would be locked in stocks for thirty-eight days.

  Perhaps most dishearteningly, their honey buckets returned. The trio spent the next five weeks flat on their backs, legs locked in place, using the bucket when they needed it. The men’s primary entertainment came as Jim and Vern, who shared a bunk, engaged in comical exchanges as they answered nature’s call in close quarters.

  “Excuse me,” one would say to the other.

  “Certainly,” the other would reply in exaggerated fashion.

  “Sorry about that,” the offender would repeat.

  “Don’t give it another thought.”

  At one point, Jim Stockdale realized they were actually having fun. Even as they were locked in stocks, they could at least laugh. The present situation in Hỏa Lò differed in almost every way f
rom the early years. The Camp Authority had ceased torture, restrained vicious guards, and—at times—even improved rations. In this new environment, the Alcatraz men found a stint in stocks bearable, even easy by comparison. Camp Unity marked a new chapter in their imprisonment, and that winter of 1971, the prisoners found themselves in the communal detention camp many had imagined when they first arrived in Hanoi years ago. Instead, they had spent up to five years in conditions worse than they ever could have imagined.

  * * *

  The Church Riot soon brought new freedoms. After Bug had locked up the ringleaders, the Camp Authority gave the POWs the right of limited assembly. “Camp authorize church service on Sunday for fifteen minutes,” a North Vietnamese officer announced over the loudspeaker. “Can have choir and sing, but for fifteen minutes—no more!”

  The Camp Authority had backed down. In this triumph, Sam Johnson saw God’s hand and gave thanks. “We’re prisoners in a hostile land, raising a ruckus and pushing for our demands—they could take us all out and shoot us if they wanted to,” he prayed, “but you’ve intervened again. Thank you, Lord.”

  Not all celebrations involved prayer, although many POWs offered their own. The fresh victory inspired the senior officers remaining in Room Seven to organize a secular celebration to mark the sixth anniversary of Bob Shumaker’s capture, February 11. In all of American military history, only naval aviator Ev Alvarez (taken in August 1964) and Green Beret Jim Thompson (captured by the Việtcộng in March 1964)—both of whom were being held elsewhere in Hanoi—had served longer sentences as prisoners of war. Fellow naval officers led Shu’s celebration and roasted him with a mix of true and utterly fabricated stories from his past. As a memento, the men presented Shu with an oversized medal of tin and toilet paper. Room Seven grew as raucous as the Cubi Point Officers’ Club on a Saturday night in the Philippines. Like many good parties, Shu’s anniversary came with a hangover. The next day, new Room Seven leaders Jim Mulligan and Harry Jenkins found themselves forced to join Jim Stockdale, Jerry Denton, and Vern Ligon in Building Zero. Orson Swindle, a leader in Room Six, quipped about Room Seven, “Damn, you’d have to get in line to get in trouble in that crowd!”