Defiant: The POWs Who Endured Vietnam's Most Infamous Prison, the Women Who Fought for Them, and the One Who Never Returned Read online

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  To the men of the Fourth Allied POW Wing and to the families who never forgot

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map of the Hanoi Hilton

  Map of Alcatraz

  Prologue: A Dark Place

  1. Black Sea and American Firepower

  2. Welcome to the Hanoi Hilton

  Photograph 1: Bob Shumaker

  Photograph 2: The Hanoi Hilton

  3. Dead or Alive?

  Photograph 3: Jane Denton

  4. I Submit

  Photograph 4: Harry Jenkins

  5. T-O-R-T-U-R-E

  Photograph 5: Jerry Denton

  6. My Dearest Syb

  7. Lord, I Just Need Your Help

  Photograph 6: Sam Johnson

  8. I Love a Parade

  Photograph 7: The Hanoi March

  9. Superman!

  Photograph 8: George McKnight

  Photograph 9: Nels Tanner

  10. Your Adoring Husband

  Photograph 10: Sybil Stockdale and sons

  11. BACK US

  12. A Snake You Can’t Kill

  Photograph 11: Howie Rutledge

  13. A Helluva Story

  Photograph 12: George Coker

  14. The Bad Camp

  Photograph 13: Alcatraz

  15. To Tell the World

  16. We Will Break You Now

  Photograph 14: Jim Mulligan

  Photograph 15: Ron Stortz

  17. Blackmail

  Photograph 16: Jim Stockdale

  18. The Captain of My Soul

  19. GBU

  Photograph 17: Nixon Press Conference

  20. Mayday!

  Photograph 18: Louise Mulligan

  21. O Say Can You See?

  22. Peace Is at Hand

  23. God Bless America

  Photograph 19: Jim Mulligan stepping into freedom

  Photograph 20: Jerry and Jane Denton

  Photograph 21: Bob Shumaker reunited with his family

  Photograph 22: CAG returns

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Photo Credits

  How to Use the Index

  Index

  Also by Alvin Townley

  About the Author

  Copyright

  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.

  —“Invictus,” William Ernest Henley

  PROLOGUE

  A DARK PLACE

  He could not forget the beetle, how it stopped moving, how it rolled onto its back, dead, its stiff legs pointed to the plaster ceiling, where a single burning bulb and a meat hook hung. By now, he knew the hook wasn’t intended for meat. Instead, it gave leverage to the ropes that forced him to talk, to sign confessions, to compromise the Code.

  Some of the ants crawling across his own beaten and prostrate body soon began marching down to the floor and toward the dead beetle. He watched them—just inches from his face—as they bored holes through its shell, devouring it. Soon a column of the tiny scavengers formed and carried the carcass away to an unknown grave in this godforsaken prison.

  After two years of interrogations, torture, and isolation, he felt just like the beetle. He lived in the same filth as the insects and vermin that inhabited the floor of Room Nineteen. He could still barely stand. The guard—Pigeye, the prisoners called him—had broken his knee again, rendering his left leg useless and leaving it twisted inward at a grotesque angle. Three weeks ago, they’d hauled him off the tile floor that he’d shared with the beetle and shoved him into a different cell. Now he spent the entire day wearing a tight blindfold across his eyes, hunched on the floor in his own waste. Mosquitoes and ants preyed freely upon him; he could fend off neither since tight iron cuffs bound his wrists behind his back. A guard removed the cuffs and blindfold once each day so he could eat the watery vegetable soup that barely sustained him. Sometimes the guards refastened the cuffs so tightly that the pain kept him from sleep, the one refuge from the horror of his imprisonment in North Vietnam. Jim Stockdale had no idea when or if this unbearable sentence would ever end, for him and for the other American pilots locked inside Hỏa Lò Prison, or, as they’d taken to calling it, the Hanoi Hilton.

  The forty-three-year-old navy commander could still remember better days; they hadn’t yet taken his memories from him. He recalled being a young man and wanting more than anything to attend the United States Naval Academy; he remembered the pride of joining its Brigade of Midshipmen in 1943. Recollections of Annapolis, of flight training, of long deployments with good friends helped comfort him while he lay on that prison floor. He thought often of his family, of time at home in San Diego with his wife, Sybil, and their four boys, happily playing piano together before he deployed. Back then he had felt in control of his world. He provided for his family, ensured his sons were becoming strong young men, and, with confidence, watched his career progress toward admiral. At sea aboard the USS Oriskany, he’d felt a similar control over the men and planes in the air wing he commanded, the powerful jets he piloted, and nearly everything he surveyed from his cockpit.

  He remembered flying imperiously over the paddies and jungles of North Vietnam, this nation of peasants who still farmed with oxen, who fought in sandals, and whose weaponry, he thought, would never down a pilot like him in an airplane like an A-4 Skyhawk. Yet they’d bagged him. He’d pulled out of a perfect low-level run over the rural district of Tĩnh Gia and watched his shower of explosives dance across a row of boxcars filled with supplies for Communist guerrillas in South Vietnam. Then he’d headed straight for the clouds. Before he could reach them, a string of 57 mm shells ripped into the Skyhawk’s starboard side. In the cockpit, he’d felt impervious to the dangers of battlefields below; the hits shattered that sense of invincibility.

  The plane pitched down, and all control slipped away. Jim was yanked forward into his shoulder harness, then slammed back into the seat as the Skyhawk plummeted toward the ground. As he struggled with the controls, he spied the blue sea just 3 miles away. If he could hold the plane together for a few more seconds, he could reach the Gulf of Tonkin, where he’d eject and rescuers could fish him from the waves.

  Instead, the Skyhawk continued its dive, which would inevitably end in a fiery crash. Jim had only seconds to escape. He tried in vain to lift his arms against the g-forces to reach the overhead ejection ring. With the ground growing larger in his windshield, he grasped the alternate ejection handle between his legs and pulled. The jet’s canopy shot off and the seat rocketed Jim out of the aircraft. He registered pain as he tumbled through the sky. By the time his parachute deployed, he knew he’d been injured, but he couldn’t process it. Only seconds separated him from the ground, and he spent them hoping that the bullets slicing away at his parachute would miss his helpless body. The chute drifted closer to the trees, and its canopy snagged a
limb, leaving him suspended just above the main thoroughfare in a small village. Still hanging in his harness, he watched as a mob of townspeople began running toward him.

  He released the latches on his harness and dropped onto the muddy street. A surge of villagers knocked him down and began pummeling him with fists, clubs, or whatever they had, hitting wherever they found an opening. Someone knocked him hard on the head. Above the din, he could hear a distant whistle—a police officer, salvation from the relentless bludgeoning. The crowd stepped back, still encircling him menacingly. Under direction from the constable, several boys stepped forward and began cutting away Jim’s clothes—his flight suit, his T-shirt, the red polka-dot boxers Sybil had bought him during his last shore leave. The officer pointed at Jim’s leg, and for the first time, he looked at his body. The ejection had completely shattered his left knee; the leg was now bent 60 degrees to the side. He tried to move his left arm; it didn’t respond. Jim had forgotten to grab his right wrist with his left hand as he pulled the ejection lever. Consequently, his left arm had flailed freely during his exit from the cockpit, doing untold damage to his shoulder, which seemed dislocated if not shattered. He thought the force of the exit had also broken his back.

  He heard jets overhead, and his spirits momentarily rose. Then he saw villagers concealing the parachute that would have caught their attention or at least indicated that Jim had landed safely. Now, nobody would know if he had survived—not his wingmen, not his squadron, not his government, not his wife, not his four boys. Nobody.

  As the mob dragged Jim through the street—naked, bloodied, crippled, and humiliated—he steeled himself for what would come. He knew it would get much worse.

  Still, he’d never imagined anything as horrible as the floor of this cell. Nearly eight hundred days had passed since he’d involuntarily parachuted into North Vietnam, and he saw no prospect of release. He wondered if he would exist like this, a maimed, blinded animal, for the rest of his life.

  The night of October 25, 1967, found him lying on his floor as usual, inhaling the room’s stench—his stench—almost oblivious to the mosquitoes that feasted upon him, when suddenly he heard a key turning in his cell door and guards entered his squalid world. They removed his blindfold and cuffs; they ordered him to roll up his bamboo sleeping mat and gather his few belongings. They helped him to his feet and motioned for him to follow. He hobbled along after them, swinging his left leg outward with each painful stride, trying to maintain his balance.

  A guard blindfolded him again for a short ride in a jeep; about eight blocks, he estimated. The blindfold remained fixed in place when the jeep parked and the guards led him toward the sound of a gate opening. He heard voices below him; he guessed there were stairs ahead. He felt for the first step with his stiff leg, found it, and swung his body down to it carefully. He felt for the next step but lost his balance and toppled headfirst, landing in a heap. His drinking cup noisily clattered down the stairs after him. Several hands pulled him to his feet and ushered him to his right. He sensed light, and the hands shoved him toward it. When guards took off his blindfold, he found himself in a dimly lit, windowless concrete box, approximately 9 feet long by 4 feet wide. Another guard entered and clapped 15-pound irons around his ankles, then locked the door and left the prisoner alone.

  When Jim surmised nobody was coming back, he picked up his enameled cup and placed its rim against the wall. He pressed his ear against its bottom and with his free hand sent five taps through the wall, rhythmically sounding out “shave and a haircut.”

  He heard two taps from the other side, completing the classic jingle. “Two bits.”

  With his knuckles working like a woodpecker’s bill, he sent a sequence of two taps, then five; four taps, then three. “JS,” for Jim Stockdale.

  In reply, he heard two taps, then five; three taps, then two. Interpreting the taps as fast as telegraph operators once translated Morse code, he knew that navy commander Jim Mulligan, “JM,” occupied the adjacent cell.

  During his nineteen months of imprisonment, Mulligan had earned a reputation similar to Stockdale’s. He took a hard line against the Camp Authority, refusing to cooperate in any manner—at least until Pigeye used his ropes. Mulligan had helped Stockdale run the camp’s underground resistance and had suffered for it, but the beatings and solitary confinement never deterred him. The Camp Authority considered him a leader and therefore a problem.

  Now the prison commandant—known as Cat—had locked these two troublemakers away together, along with other prisoners that Stockdale and Mulligan heard shuffling into nearby cells during the night. The next morning they would discover nine other American stalwarts imprisoned with them: senior officers Jeremiah Denton, Harry Jenkins, and Howie Rutledge; troublemakers Sam Johnson, Bob Shumaker, and Nels Tanner; and young antagonists George Coker, George McKnight, and Ron Storz.

  Stockdale remembered Rabbit, one of Cat’s underlings, issuing a threat over the Hanoi Hilton’s speaker network several months earlier. In shrill tones, he’d denounced the leaders of the American resistance and promised he was preparing “a dark place” for the “darkest criminals who persist in inciting the other criminals to oppose the Camp Authority.”

  The Camp Authority, he knew, saw him as the ringleader of those “criminals.” He feared he and his most loyal lieutenants had now been brought to that dark place, a dungeon designed to break their bodies and crush their souls, meant to punish and neutralize the eleven POWs Cat considered the most subversive.

  Jim Stockdale and his ten compatriots had arrived at Alcatraz.

  1

  BLACK SEA AND AMERICAN FIREPOWER

  Even at 43,000 tons and nearly three football fields in length, the USS Ticonderoga rolled with the swells of the South China Sea. She had cruised the waters of the Pacific Ocean for more than twenty years now, surviving a 1945 kamikaze attack off Taiwan and steaming victoriously into Tokyo Bay six months later. In the summer of 1964, Ticonderoga had deployed to monitor a new conflict in Asia—one between Communist North Vietnam and the American-allied government in the South. Should the growing unrest finally draw America into war, she would respond with her force of more than fifty modern aircraft.

  The carrier’s flight deck resembled the busiest of airports, as if the substantial traffic and activity at O’Hare or LaGuardia were compressed onto a 2-acre expanse of concrete surrounded by a 52-foot cliff. Idle planes sat chained mere feet away from the ship’s narrow landing strip. In between aircraft recoveries, taxiing jets laden with fuel and bombs jockeyed toward the two forward catapults that sent aircraft screaming off the bow, bathing everything behind them with heat, noise, and thick exhaust. Among the jet blasts and spinning propellers scurried men in grease-smudged pants and shirts of every color. Some lugged heavy chains, others pushed carts of ordnance, all shared a common mission.

  Commander Jim Stockdale landed amid this chaos on August 4, 1964. He taxied to a stop, shut down the engine of his Vought F-8 Crusader, and climbed out of its single-seat cockpit. He stepped down the ladder to the deck and gazed west into the sunset. Then he watched distant lightning flicker to the north, over the Gulf of Tonkin. Hungry after a long day of patrols, he headed below deck for dinner, away from the noise and commotion.

  The ship’s wardroom was testament to the adage that if a navy man gave his life for his country, he’d die clean and well fed. Stewards served dishes of hot food to officers seated at linen-covered tables. A mess officer made sure everyone maintained decorum. If an aviator had already flown his missions for the day, as Jim had, a hot shower might follow the evening meal. Later, each would fall asleep in shared staterooms. Squadron commanders—known as skippers—like Stockdale often rated a room to themselves. Regardless of their rank or roots, these naval aviators—most of whom had yet to see age thirty-five, and many younger than thirty—shared a certain confidence.

  That armor was forged by surviving flight after flight and beating the grim statistics of midcentury military av
iation. At the outset of flight training, many instructors warned students that their aircraft would try to kill them. Many planes succeeded. In 1956 alone, naval aviation lost 776 aircraft and 535 lives. One study gave career aviators a 23 percent chance of dying in a crash. Another offered even odds that they’d eject before they retired, an unpleasant prospect given the severe injuries pilots often sustained when blasted out of their cockpits and into an unforgiving airstream. Then the pilot could only hope his parachute would open correctly and prevent a tragic freefall.

  Yet despite these risks, a certain breed of man still volunteered, men who believed they could meet any challenge and hungered for the chance to prove it. Jim Stockdale knew too many who’d died amid smashed metal and hot-burning wreckage, but he believed that he would avoid that fate; he would return. Through a combination of heavenly grace, raw talent, and navy training, he controlled his airplane and his destiny. Those that perished had made some mistake, had committed some error, had not lived up to the standard. Stepping into a jet cockpit on the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier required trust in self and machine as well as a belief in the former’s dominance over the latter. He, just like everyone else in the wardroom, thought he could control the uncontrollable.

  After dinner, Jim retired to Fighter Squadron 51’s briefing room, where fewer rules of etiquette applied. These rooms were the domain of the ship’s aviators and seemed like both an office and a fraternity house. In the room’s red lighting, Jim relaxed as pilots often do—by talking about flying. Suddenly, he heard propellers turning on the flight deck: A-1 Skyraiders. Just as he began wondering why Ticonderoga had decided to launch aircraft at this late hour, an officer from the ship’s Combat Information Center opened the ready room door and asked Jim, “Are they ready to go?”

  He explained that two U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin expected an imminent attack from North Vietnamese torpedo boats; the American ships were presenting a show of force as they gathered intelligence. Two days earlier, Jim had defended one of these destroyers, the Maddox, from three such boats, firing the navy’s first shots in the escalating conflict with North Vietnam. This evening, Ticonderoga again received orders to scramble her Combat Air Patrol—the two Crusaders from Jim’s squadron that remained armed, manned, and ready on catapults 1 and 2. Jim knew both CAP pilots were relatively inexperienced, and this mission’s sensitive nature called for a veteran. Jim had the cooler head of a senior officer and the fresh experience of his recent attack on the torpedo boats. Besides, he didn’t want to miss a fight. So he buckled his survival gear over his flight suit, grabbed his helmet, and climbed the ladder to the flight deck. He opened the metal hatch and stepped out into the din and darkness of nighttime flight operations. Toward the bow, Jim saw swarms of men wearing reflective coats and holding lighted wands to direct the launch of his squadron’s two aircraft. He dashed across the darkened flight deck to the closest Crusader, climbed to the cockpit, and relieved its startled pilot. “Unstrap and get out,” Jim ordered. “I’m getting in!”