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

  As deckhands finished harnessing the Crusader to the catapult, Jim looked to his rearview mirror and admired the lean body of his aircraft. Behind the cockpit lay a monstrous turbojet engine that would send him racing through the sky faster than the speed of sound. Missiles hung beneath the plane’s swept-back wings. Quite literally, he sat perched on a rocket’s nose, about to join the fray. James Bond Stockdale—call sign 007—had never wanted to be anyplace else.

  The square-faced forty-one-year-old had wanted this job since his boyhood, when his father, a retired navy chief petty officer, had taken his seven-year-old son east from Abington, Illinois, to Annapolis, Maryland, to witness midshipmen on parade at the U.S. Naval Academy. He heard the drums. He felt the spirit of the storied institution in its eighty-five-year history, its revered graduates, its regimented students, its unmistakable purpose. Four years later, Jim’s father took him to see the celebrated polar explorer Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd deliver the 1935 graduation address at Iowa Wesleyan College. Fresh from an Antarctic expedition, Byrd had worn his service dress whites that day. The high-collared uniform, appointed with gold naval aviator’s wings and rows of ribbons across the left side of the chest, captivated young Jim. He promised himself that one day he, like this admiral and adventurer, would accomplish something great.

  Occasionally, a father’s dreams for his son coincide with his son’s own aspirations; this became the case for Vernon and Jim Stockdale. Father and son hoped that the academy would accept Jim into the brigade after he graduated high school. Jim’s father provided the encouragement, Jim did the work, and in June 1943 he joined the Class of 1947.

  Regular performance reports ushered him quickly up the ranks after graduation. The reports graded him on an extensive list of qualities related to running an organization and carrying out his duties as an officer. The navy had developed Jim into an exceptional aviator, but it had first taught him to lead men. Those lessons in leadership had in no way diminished his love of flight and of the open sky. By the time he had begun his present tour as squadron commander with Fighter Squadron 51—the Screaming Eagles—he had already excelled as an aviator and officer in the eighteen years since he entered the fleet. He’d even served as an instructor at the elite navy test pilot school at Naval Air Station (NAS) Patuxent River, Maryland.

  From the dark cockpit, his blue eyes watched for the catapult officer’s signals. Jim saw him spin his hand rapidly and pressed the throttle forward, feeling the Crusader’s engine strain against the catapult, which would soon accelerate his plane from a standstill to 150 knots. Those jarring three seconds of his flight would be the only ones when he’d relinquish control. Jim signaled the officer with his external lights, and moments later catapult and engine launched pilot and jet into the black void at deck’s end. Aloft, Jim climbed northwest toward the fight.

  Shortly after 9:00 P.M., he neared the sector the two destroyers were patrolling and descended through clouds and rain, firing several bursts from his four 20 mm cannons to ensure each barrel worked smoothly. According to reports coming through his radio, the two ships had identified contacts on their radar that the crew suspected were hostile torpedo boats.

  Once below cloud level, Jim spied two wakes glowing with phosphoresce on the dark sea; he traced them to Maddox and Turner Joy. He dropped lower, to 1,000 feet, darting over the waters around the ships, searching for the reported boats. He canvassed the entire area but saw nothing. Around 9:30 P.M., Maddox fired illuminating star shells to the east, where her radar had detected inbound contacts. Turner Joy began shelling with no results. Then a new cry went up: “Torpedo in the water!” During the next hour, the Maddox reported twenty-two enemy torpedoes, yet Turner Joy reported none. The ships maneuvered across the sea, zigzagging to avoid the feared torpedoes, firing at suspected targets that seemed to appear and disappear on their radars, and directing the aircraft overhead toward the same. The executive officer aboard Maddox observed Jim’s daring maneuvers and thought the aviator either insane or the finest pilot he’d ever seen.

  By the time Turner Joy and Maddox ceased firing, the destroyers had sent more than three hundred rounds into the night. Inside his cockpit, Jim wondered what kind of circus he’d joined. While frenzied men aboard the ships had reported wakes, searchlights, muzzle flashes, torpedoes, and enemy boats, Jim had seen absolutely nothing. Perhaps unbeknown to the crew, the peculiar atmospheric conditions over the gulf were capable of causing false radar contacts, and the stormy murkiness of that August night—a radarman aboard USS Maddox called the night “darker than the hubs of hell”—had added to the confusion.

  Exhausted, irritated, and low on fuel, Jim winged home to Ticonderoga. He found the ship’s wake on the vast sea and lined up behind its distant runway of lights, which steadily grew larger in his view. He finessed his throttle and controls until he thundered over the carrier’s stern. His wheels squeaked onto the deck, and he felt his tailhook snag an arresting cable. When the jet had decelerated and stopped safely, he climbed out of the cockpit, still mulling the night’s strange turns.

  He walked into the ready room, and his squadron mates asked, “What the hell has been going on out there?”

  “Damned if I know,” Jim said. “It’s really a flap. The guy on the Maddox air control radio was giving blow-by-blow accounts … turning left, turning right, torpedoes to the right of us, torpedoes to the left of us—boom, boom, boom! I got right down there and shot at whatever they were shooting at.”

  “Did you see any boats?”

  “Not a one,” he answered. “No boats, no boat wakes, no ricochets off boats, no boat gunfire, no torpedo wakes.”

  After he filed his debrief, baffling reports from Maddox and Turner Joy began filtering into the ready room. The destroyer captains first claimed their guns had sunk or damaged several boats. Then they began to question their equipment and their men; they second-guessed the entire incident. No witness aboard either ship had definitively seen anything. Shortly after midnight, the commander of the two destroyers, Captain John Herrick, cabled a telling flash message that advised, “Review of action makes many recorded contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful. Freak weather effects and overeager sonarmen may have accounted for many reports. No actual visual sightings by Maddox. Suggest complete evaluation before any further actions.” When Jim learned of Herrick’s last communiqué, he tossed his helmet at the ceiling and stormed off to bed, annoyed that he’d just risked his life for absolutely nothing.

  Ever since Jim and his wingmen first dueled with and damaged three torpedo boats on August 2, President Lyndon Johnson saw conflict in the Gulf of Tonkin as an excuse to escalate U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Even as uncertain and conflicting accounts of what had transpired two nights later arrived in Washington, President Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara decided to retaliate for what they considered two North Vietnamese provocations: one on August 2 and one on August 4. In their living rooms, thirteen hours after the second incident, Americans watched their president condemn the attacks and announce the nation’s response. “[America’s] reply,” he said, “is being given as I speak to you tonight. Air action is now in execution against gunboats and certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam which have been used in these hostile operations.”

  As Johnson spoke, viewers could envision a deluge of bombs avenging the two reported attacks, when in fact the bombs had yet to fall. Jim Stockdale had been rousted out of his bunk only several hours earlier, as August 5 dawned on the waters off Vietnam, to lead the first wave of aircraft off Ticonderoga; the planes had launched less than an hour before Johnson’s speech. In a move that foreshadowed the disconnect that would persist between battlefield pilots and Washington strategists throughout the coming war, President Johnson announced the attacks before bombs had been dropped. His words helped alert the North Vietnamese to the American warplanes that were at that moment approaching their coastline, led by the skeptical yet duty-bound aviator who’d been involved in both G
ulf of Tonkin incidents.

  In the years following, the government never ascertained exactly what transpired on the Gulf of Tonkin that night of August 4, when the supposed second attack took place. For his part, Jim Stockdale maintained that he’d seen nothing but “black sea and American firepower.” Given the twenty-year collision course charted by Washington and Hanoi, however, if the August incident had not escalated the conflict, another incident almost certainly would have. Regardless, President Johnson used the episode to pass the Joint Resolution on Southeast Asia—widely known as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution—on August 7. The resolution, which passed unanimously in the U.S. House and almost so in the Senate, authorized the president to send combat forces into Vietnam without a declaration of war.

  The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the military escalation that followed led the United States into a long war—one never officially declared—that would drastically affect millions of Vietnamese and American lives. It was a war that would leave Jim Stockdale and hundreds of other U.S. servicemen languishing in North Vietnamese prisons, some without their families’ knowledge, while their country became ensnared in a long, costly conflict originally meant to end in quick victory.

  2

  WELCOME TO THE HANOI HILTON

  On December 7, 1964, Lieutenant Commander Bob Shumaker thundered westward across the California coastline in his F-8 Crusader, the sun rising at his back. Spread throughout the clear sky around him was Fighter Squadron 154—the Black Knights—and beyond them the rest of the USS Coral Sea’s air wing. With a thrill of excitement, these aviators winged over blue waters toward a Western Pacific deployment. Thirty miles offshore, the aircraft converged on the carrier, their home for the next seven months. Bob flew along the carrier’s starboard side, then peeled off into the landing pattern. Once the ship’s arresting wires trapped his Crusader, he stepped out of his cockpit and onto the flight deck, rejoining the brotherhood of men at sea. For the next several months, he would spend most of each day within 100 yards of his fellow aviators. He and his squadron mates would become inseparable, sharing a ready room, staterooms, heads, and wardroom dining tables. He would miss home, as would they all, but at sea he did his job, he served his country. Bob would choose no other life, no other company. His education and smarts rivaled those of any Ivy League graduate or Wall Street financier, men who could see their families each night, who possessed considerably more substantial means, and whose chances of dying on the job hovered around nil. In the navy, though, Bob had found a code by which to live. He and his shipmates heard a call to duty and they answered, volunteering despite the risks and hardships of aviation. They also craved the rush of adrenaline the way their white-collar counterparts needed their morning coffee. Thus drawn by the adventure of the open sea and sky, the Coral Sea’s fraternity of aviators willed the great ship westward into sunset after sunset, toward the test they all sought, in the air against the enemy.

  After he landed his Crusader on the deck that December morning, Bob walked below and settled himself into his small, shared stateroom. He laid his light 5'10" frame on the narrow bunk and contemplated the wife and newborn son he’d left in San Diego. He’d married Lorraine Shaw less than a year before. At twenty-nine and with subtle freckles, he’d looked nearly as young as the twenty-one-year-old Canadian schoolteacher he’d met on her first trip to California, less than two years earlier. Their cross-continent romance budded so quickly and quietly that when Lorraine told her mother that she planned to get married, Rose Shaw had asked, “To whom?”

  Lorraine began her service as a navy wife in Monterey, California, in January 1964, while her new husband finished his master’s degree in aero-electronics at the Naval Postgraduate School. The scientific discipline suited Bob Shumaker perfectly. The numbers, formulas, and logarithms of the world simply lined up clearly in the mind of the bright-eyed, soft-spoken Pennsylvanian. He solved complex equations like a high schooler handling simple addition; he’d graduated eighth out of 681 in the Naval Academy Class of 1956. By the time he earned his diploma and received his officer’s commission, his classmates and nearly everyone else called him Shu. Six years later, the same summer he met Lorraine, NASA selected the distinguished graduate for the Apollo astronaut pipeline. He made the cuts from the original list of nine thousand applicants to the thirty-four finalists. Then doctors uncovered some enlarged nodes in his chest, remnants of a long-ago bout with mononucleosis. Shu considered it inconsequential; NASA’s physicians did not.

  Disappointed but not discouraged, Shu returned to Monterey and earned his master’s degree in June 1964. Then he received orders for NAS Miramar, so Shu and Lorraine packed their scant belongings and drove down the California coast via U.S. Route 1. Once they’d settled in San Diego, Lorraine gave birth to Grant Shumaker on November 13, 1964—three months after the August Gulf of Tonkin incident had escalated America’s involvement in Southeast Asia. At the birth of his first son, Shu felt the excitement of fatherhood along with the responsibility of raising a child he considered a gift from above. He deployed aboard the Coral Sea just one month later.

  On that last morning together, Lorraine and infant Grant had driven him to the hangar of Fighter Squadron 154. When they arrived, Shu had quickly exited the car; he’d told Lorraine a long good-bye would be too difficult. The car door closed with a metallic thud, and Shu walked off toward his duty. Lorraine and Grant suddenly found themselves alone in an unfamiliar city. At age twenty-two, Lorraine began her first real tour as a navy wife. Hers would last longer than that of any other wife in U.S. Navy history.

  Since the August 5, 1964, raid led by Jim Stockdale, America’s carrier air forces had stayed out of North Vietnam. President Johnson had promised his constituents, “We are not about to send American boys 9,000 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” Yet by 1965 more than 20,000 U.S. soldiers were serving in South Vietnam as “military advisers”—troops technically designated for training or support, not combat. On February 7, Communist guerrillas killed eight of these American advisers and wounded more than one hundred during an attack on the U.S. base at Camp Holloway, deep in the interior of South Vietnam. President Johnson found himself caught between the fear of this conflict escalating into outright war and provoking North Vietnam’s Chinese and Soviet allies on the one hand, and the fear of hawkish opponents impugning his anti-Communist commitment on the other. Embarking on a middle course of gradual escalation that would mark his prosecution of the war, Johnson immediately ordered U.S. forces to execute Operation Flaming Dart, a very limited reprisal against North Vietnam, which he viewed as sponsoring the attacks. Undeterred by Flaming Dart, the guerrillas bombed U.S. barracks in Quy Nhơn three days later, killing twenty-three military personnel. Johnson responded with a larger operation, Flaming Dart II, which commenced on February 11.

  The Coral Sea had taken up her post off the coast of North Vietnam in January of 1965, and on the day Flaming Dart II began, Bob Shumaker arrived in his squadron’s ready room for a combat briefing. He found himself and three other Black Knights tasked with escorting a single reconnaissance plane on a mission over Đồng Hới, a town just north of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) that separated North and South Vietnam. Shu felt uneasy about the assignment, which he felt needlessly risked four pilots for the sake of one reconnaissance plane that needed no escort. Nevertheless, with the frustrated resignation that would become familiar to American airmen during this new war, he sat through his preflight briefing and then returned to his stateroom. There, he quietly placed his gold wedding band and his USNA ’56 class ring in his desk safe. He locked away those memories of home and, with firm resolution, walked down the passageway and climbed the ladder to the flight deck. When Shu stepped into the cockpit of his waiting plane—number 403—his crew chief had no doubt he’d see his pilot return.

  Less than an hour later, Shu’s jet streaked low over North Vietnam at 2,000 feet. Suddenly, the plane shuddered, rolled upside down,
and dove for the ground. Shu toggled his radio, intending to report “403, mayday, I’m hit!”

  He managed “Four-zero” then ran out of time. He yanked the ejection handles. Small charges blew the canopy off the jet, and the ejection seat shot him into the sky. His chute opened at what he estimated was 35 feet above the ground. Had he waited to complete his mayday call before ejecting, he would have crashed with his plane.

  As it was, he spent less than five seconds in the air. The ground rushed up to him and he tried to execute the roll landing he’d learned in training, but the low-altitude ejection made it impossible and he hit the earth hard on his tailbone. Slowly, he recovered from the shock of his ejection and assessed his surroundings. He’d landed in a deserted field of scrub and waist-high grass. In the roughly ten seconds from the moment his Crusader took the hit until he landed, he had instinctively followed his training. On the ground, his first conscious thought developed. A life insurance salesman had visited the Shumaker home in California shortly before Bob deployed. The man had offered the family additional coverage. Shu declined. There on the ground in North Vietnam, he wished he’d bought it.