A Story of the Fifth Longest Held POW in US History

On 12 February 1973, after nearly eight years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, I became a free man. Although I still had to serve a couple of years at stateside hospitals to salvage a badly wounded leg, my new quarters seemed princely compared to my squalid prison cells. Furloughed from the Navy hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, and facing a long, solitary drive to my parents’ home in New Jersey, I decided to bring a tape recorder along and recount my experiences while the memories were still fresh. Maybe someday I would write a book. I knew I had a unique vantage point and a story to tell. As the fourth U.S. pilot shot down in North Vietnam, I was one of the oldest of the old-timers among the POWs. During my captivity, the number of Americans killed in the war grew from sixty to nearly sixty thousand, and the treatment of POWs shifted from neglectful to brutal to halfway humane. Moreover, of the nearly six hundred Americans held prisoner in North Vietnam, I may have had the widest range of experiences: 1) I sustained serious injuries and endured horrific medical care, which caused me to walk with crutches for nearly eight years; 2) I was the senior man in the Cuban Program and the first to be tortured by the mysterious Caucasian known as Fidel; 3) Because my injured leg made me particularly vulnerable to torture, I had to resist the enemy through guile, rather than confrontation, which led some of my fellow POWs to misinterpret my polite façad e as a sign of weakness; 4) During the early, difficult years, when the high-ranking POWs were isolated, I was one of ten or twelve mid-level officers with daily responsibility for leading many of the men; 5) After the senior officers joined the majority of the POWs in late 1970, their chaotic leadership caused our treatment to worsen, and the improvements the mid-grade officers had worked for years to attain went down the drain (either the senior officers misjudged the reason for the improved treatment or they were unable to adjust to it, but chaos resulted from their actions); 6) I served on the panel that conducted the only court martial of a POW in North Vietnam; 7) I prevented my men from taking drastic action against some POWs who were improperly slated for early release after collaborating with the enemy; and 8) I was the first POW to be released from North Vietnam after the signing of the Paris peace accords. Although my book contains familiar POW lore, including torture, leg irons, and tap codes, the prison routine serves merely as a backdrop for the clashes and tenderness, competition and compassion, pettiness and sacrifices of ordinary men who survived a remarkable ordeal. My aim is to show us as we really were, with our foibles as well as our strengths. We weren’t as heroic as we wished – or in some cases claimed – to be, but most of us did the best we could, and our whole story deserves to be heard. I believe that my perspective will help complete the record and that my experience could help future POWs to survive.