Captive Honor

When he Awoke before dawn in his small room aboard the U.S.S. Oriskany, Al Stafford was having trouble breathing. He lay in his bunk for a few minutes, with his eyes open, telling himself that it was all right, that the tear that gripped him like a fist was nothing to worry about.

Stafford's sensation was the old feeling that comes to men in combat: the feeling that this would be the day, the feeling that your number was up. There was no specific reason to account for his dread. But then, there was every reason. The air war over North Vietnam had entered its deadliest phase in the summer of 1967, and American losses were reaching intolerable levels. In the first week of its deployment, the Oriskany's air group had lost ten of its 76 planes.

The target of this day's strike was a bridge a few miles south of Haiphong. Twenty A-4s would hit it, making it a fairly large strike. Stafford was on stand-by, so he briefed with the rest of the flight crews, then went up to the flight deck to sit in a fully armed jet, ready to take the place of any aircraft that developed mechanical problems.

While Stafford watched from the cockpit, one of the A-4s in front of him moved tentatively toward the catapults and then stopped. The canopy of the plane went up and he saw the pilot draw the flat of his hand across his throat. He was scrubbing the mission. The plane handlers pushed the crippled A-4 out of the way. Then one of them pointed to Stafford and motioned for him to take his A-4 up for launch. As he eased off the brakes and the plane started hesitantly forward, he glanced at the crippled plane. Its pilot, a man named John Roosen, looked at Stafford, shook his head and held up his hands helplessly. Stafford nodded back. It would be 20 years before they saw each other again.

•

The coast of North Vietnam showed green and mountainous 12,000 feet below the formation. Once they were over the beach, the land below spread out into an intricately gridded system of rice paddies, flat and orderly and pale green. The planes climbed. It helped to start your attack roll with as much extra altitude as possible. You could exchange altitude for speed when you had to dive to get away from the surface-to-air missiles, the SAMs. Over North Vietnam, speed was life.

Stafford's radio came alive. The squadron commander told the other pilots to close on him and prepare to roll in on the target, and they did it without thinking. The next sound Stafford heard was the chatter of his SAM warning device; a missile had been launched. Like a man flipping a coin or turning a card, he made a decision: He ignored the missile warning and stayed with the attack.

He saw one missile soar past him, trailing flame. It looked like a flying telephone pole, which was the way everyone described them. The second missile, the one that had been tracking him, struck his plane amidships, just behind the cockpit. The 300-pound war head exploded and cooked off the four tons of bombs he was carrying, along with 8000 pounds of jet fuel. His plane disappeared in a black-and-or- ange fireball.

Stafford regained consciousness 12,000 feet over North Vietnam at the moment his parachute opened below him. The force of the explosion had triggered the ejection seat, automatically deploying his parachute. A couple of panels in the chute were blown away, so he could see the green of the rice paddies through them. Then he fell past the parachute and began to oscillate below it. One leg was tangled in a suspension line and his flight suit was on fire, smoldering like burning bedding.

Stafford's first thought was, Well, now I know. Pilots always said you could finish a cruise only three ways--by being killed, being captured or going home. Now he knew.

He used his survival radio to make one last transmission: a call to the squadron commander. "Sorry, boss," Stafford said, "I'll see you after the war."

•

The peasants surrounded Stafford. While some held his arms, others cut his parachute, harness, boots and flight suit away. They tried to remove his wedding ring, but it was too tight, so one of the peasants began to saw on Stafford's finger with a rusty knife. He quickly worked the ring off his bleeding finger and handed it over.

•

It took 12 hours to reach Hanoi, some 50 miles from where Stafford had been captured. The truck came to a final stop inside the massive wall of Hoa Lo prison, an evil old compound of several buildings built by the French to house the prisoners of their defunct colonial regime. This was the Hanoi Hilton, a place of misery.

Stafford was led through the courtyard to a dreary stone building that was the inner circle of this particular hell, a place that POWs called the Green Knobby Room. The walls--painted a pale, sick shade that recalled pea soup or bile--were covered with rough acoustic tile designed to baffle the sound of screams. It was broken in spots from the impact of bodies hitting the walls. After an hour of interrogations and beatings, Stafford was left sitting on a stool, blindfolded, with his hands tied behind his back.

As time passed, Stafford's awareness shifted away from his physical pain and the uncertainty of his situation and focused on a single sensation: He was thirsty. He spent three clays in the Green Knobby Room without water. At one point, he got down onto his knees and licked the floor where the tiles were joined, hoping that some water had accumulated there. When that failed, he tried licking damaged places on the wall, hoping that some water had sweated through. Death seemed a better option than living with his thirst.

On the last day of his interrogation, the door to the Green Knobby Room opened and three officers stepped in. Several guards accompanied them, carrying ropes and straps, some of which were stained with blood. Beginning at the shoulder, they wrapped Stafford's arms, carefully and patiently, tightening each loop until the rope would not take any more tension, then throwing another loop, lower. They repeated the process until his arms were circled with loops of rope, like ceremonial bracelets.

When he thought that the pain was as bad as it could be, the guards tied his arms together behind him, then, with a long rope, pulled them down toward his ankles, which were lashed together. He was being bent into a tight circle.

Because of the body-racking pain, he was passing out, then coming to and blacking out again. Without actually deciding to, he started answering the interrogators' questions. He talked about strikes that were planned against roads and bridges he had already bombed. He talked about people he had flown with years before, made up formations and methods of attack, trying desperately to make them sound convincing. They listened, took notes and did not stop him. He was willing, he realized, to do anything at all for a drink of water.

Finally, his interrogators seemed satisfied with his answers. "You have a good attitude, Stafford," one of them said. He gave Stafford a small cup of water. He drank it with pitiful, infantile gratitude.

•

Pain--from torture, from his shrapnel wounds, from his broken arm, collarbone and ribs--was not the worst element of Stafford's condition. Pain was bearable. The shame was worse. He had been broken; in a few days, he had been changed from a man who believed he could resist to death to a man who would tell his captors whatever they wanted to know for a drink of water. It was the deepest form of depression that he had ever known. He had sworn himself to standards and failed to live up to them. He had betrayed himself and his comrades.

The only way to be certain that he would not break again, Stafford decided, was to kill himself. So, using the few bits of clothing he'd been given--prison pajamas--and some of the gauze from his cast, he fashioned a noose, which he hung from the bars in the window of his cell. Then he stood on the concrete bunk and kicked. The force of the noose tightening broke up some of the crumbling mortar that anchored the bars around the window. He fell a foot and a half to the floor. He sat there in a heap, with plaster dust floating down on his head, thinking, You worthless piece of shit. You can't even do that right.

•

After a month alone in his void of pain, remorse and self-pity, Stafford was roused late one night by the guards. They took him to a waiting truck. The driver ran through the gears on his way out of the courtyard of Hoa Lo and into the streets of Hanoi. The drive lasted an hour or so, and when the truck pulled to a stop, the guards lifted Stafford to the ground. He was the newest prisoner in a place the captives called the Plantation.

He was led along a gravel path to a long shed with several doors. His sandals made a soft crunching sound as he walked, and the night air felt wonderfully clean after his foul, unventilated cell at Hoa Lo. He waited in front of a door, blinking, while his eyes adjusted and a guard swung the door open.

"Stafford," a guard said, "this is your new room."

(continued on page 138) Captive Honor (continued from page 90)

He stared into the cell, which was illuminated by a single bare bulb. Two men were standing in the room, some distance from the door.

"These are your new roommates. You must obey camp regulations or you will be punished."

The guard motioned for Stafford to step inside. He did, and the door closed firmly behind him. He was close enough now to make out the faces of the two other men. They were Americans.

Stafford embraced the first man he could reach.

•

They told one another, first, who they were. That meant, for aviators, what rank in which Service and what type of plane each flew. Bob Sawhill was an Air Force major, the pilot of an F-4. Tom Parrott, an Air Force captain, was not a pilot, actually, but an intelligence specialist who had gone along on the wrong mission. Each man told the story of his shoot-down; there was an odd pleasure in telling it, in being detached enough to describe it in detail.

Finally, they began to talk about their immediate situation. The conversation faltered and grew strained as each man tried to find a way to say the same thing.

"Listen, you two," Stafford said, "there's something I've got to tell you."

Two gaunt, unshaven faces looked blankly back at him from the shadows beneath the mosquito netting. He hesitated, then began.

"Ah . . . when they asked me questions and started working me over, I'm afraid I didn't do too well. I tried to hold out, but . . . well, shit, I just couldn't. They broke me." He felt the hot flush of shame all over again and looked down at the floor to avoid their eyes.

Finally, one of them spoke. "You, too?" he said. "Join the fucking club."

For three months, Stafford, Sawhill and Parrott left their cell only to bathe. They were awakened every morning by a gong, were fed pumpkin soup twice a day and were told when to lower their nets and go to bed on their boards and rice mats. They had no way of knowing how long this regimen would last. Within the space of a single thought, they could imagine six more months of it or 20 years.

•

During one of the routine shifts of cell assignments, Stafford ended up bunking with Richard Stratton. He was the senior ranking officer in the Plantation and one of the most celebrated, and controversial, figures of the war.

In one of their propaganda offensives, the North Vietnamese had decided to produce a confession from one of the captured "air pirates," who would acknowledge bombing civilian targets for the purpose of terrorizing the population. Stratton was the pilot they forced to confess. Inevitably, he did.

The confession was pieced together from several torture sessions. The final version was tape-recorded and played at a press conference for visiting journalists, including a photographer from Life magazine. When Stratton stepped out onto the stage and was told by one of his captors to bow, he did not merely nod his head politely and deferentially as he'd been told. Instead, he improvised a gesture that would show beyond any doubt that his confession was the result of torture, nothing more. He bowed deeply from the waist. Then he turned 90 degrees and bowed again. Another turn, another bow. And a fourth. Throughout this sequence of abject, mechanical bows, his remote and empty expression never changed. It was horrifying to those who witnessed the performance and to those who saw the photographs later in Life. He had turned the propaganda event into a disaster for his captors, and his ingenuity set a standard for his fellow prisoners.

Stratton had been a prisoner for a little more than a year now. It had been nine months since the shocking bowing performance, almost six since he had arrived at the Plantation. He was an old hand. So was his roommate Arv Chauncey, who had also been one of the first men imprisoned in the Plantation. Stafford was in good hands.

"Arv," Stratton said one day, "you get on the wall and see if you can find out who else is here. I want to know if I'm S.R.O. in the camp."

"Roger," Chauncey said, and stepped up close to the wall that was common with the next cell, knelt and began rapping it with his knuckle. After a minute or two, a softer rapping sound came through from the other side. Chauncey moved his lips like a child learning to read.

At all of the POW camps in North Vietnam, communication among prison cells was strictly forbidden. To try was to risk being thrown into solitary, locked in irons, hung in ropes or beaten. Still, it was worth the risk, since communication was the foundation of any kind of resistance.

To teach the system to Stafford, Stratton drew a box on the concrete floor, using a piece of chipped brick for chalk. He divided the box into smaller boxes and then wrote the letters of the alphabet in them. When he finished, the grid looked like this:

A B C D E

F G H I J

L M N O P

Q R S T U

V W X Y Z

The letter C was substituted for K, Stratton explained, and the code was read like the coordinates on a map--down and right. To transmit an M through the wall, then, a prisoner would tap three times, pause, then tap twice.

"You figure out what you want to say," Stratton explained, "then you get the attention of the guy on the other side of the wall and tap it through. It's slow at first, but you get to where it's almost as fast as talking. Chauncey, here, is a first-rate communicator. Smooth and fast. But it is hell on the knuckles."

Since Stratton was senior in the camp, the wall of his cell was alive with the sound of messages. In addition to acquiring the names of their fellow prisoners, which they memorized like a mantra, the men used the tap code to keep everyone informed when someone was taken from his cell up to the Big House for interrogation, which the POWs called quizzes. After the session was concluded, the rest of the camp would be told what the North Vietnamese were after and whether or not the man had been tortured.

One day a prisoner was taken from his cell for interrogation, and for days, Stafford and the others waited for him to return. When he was finally led out of the Big House, the man was plainly in bad shape. While he was still lying on the floor of his dark cell, too weak even to sit or to lie on his bunk, he heard a soft, steady tapping coming through the wall. Through a red blur (continued on page 170) Captive Honor (continued from page 138) of pain, he counted out the taps and translated them into letters, and then into words, putting it all into a message:

Research Proves that Ninety Nine Prcnt of Pows Jac off XX we need your help to make it one hundred prcnt XX

Years later, the man would say that that message had probably saved his sanity, if not his life.

•

Looming over every action the POWs took when dealing with the North Vietnamese was a group of difficult questions: How far should they push their resistance? What should a man expect from himself and his comrades? What was the limit?

Well, Stratton said at first, resist "as long as you can." This was refined later to "as long as is prudent." And, finally, "to the point of serious or permanent injury." It was always a subjective evaluation, but the rule was: Don't make it too easy for them or too hard on yourself. As important as it was to hold out, it was perhaps even more vital for a man to gather his strength after he had been broken and get back on the team. When a man came back from interrogation, it was crucial that he tell his fellow POWs what he had said. He would keep faith with his fellow prisoners. Jeremiah Denton, a prisoner in another camp, gave it a name: bouncing back. The alternative was a disintegration of unity and morale. It was either bounce back or every man for himself.

•

Not every POW in the Plantation was willing to obey Stratton's orders or to live by the bounce-back doctrine, and the North Vietnamese were quick to exploit the exceptions. Prisoners who did not bother with even a pretense of resistance were separated from the others. They were fitted for clothes to replace their prison pajamas. They were taken out of the prison from time to time to inspect bomb damage and meet with wounded North Vietnamese. They were indoctrinated, repeatedly, in the North Vietnamese line about the war. Eventually, the men were told the reason for this extra attention: They were going to be sent home.

This was inexcusable to the other POWs. While it had been necessary to be flexible about how much a man would be required to suffer before he went beyond name, rank, serial number and date of birth, there was no question when special favors and parole were offered. There was simply no reason to accept either. Stratton began writing a formal military order, using toilet paper, ink made from brick dust and a bamboo sliver sharpened on the rough concrete floor for a pen. It addressed the questions of early release, specifically, and the duties of an American prisoner of war, in general. The plan was to smuggle this "official" document into the cell where the early-release prisoners were held. All that was needed was a courier. Everyone in Stratton's unit volunteered.

The prisoners concealed the little bundle of paper by tying it to the courier's genitals, a place their body-shy captors were loath to inspect. Every time one of them left the cell for camp details, he tied on the order and waited for his chance.

"Son of a bitch, but this thing gets heavy," Stafford would say when he came back to the cell.

"Yeah, but look at it as exercise. Just think what it does for your physique," his cellmate would reply.

One day, when the normal lethargy of the camp seemed a little worse than usual, Stafford saw his chance. He was on the way to the mess hall to spend the morning making coal balls, cooking briquettes prisoners fashioned from coal dust and water. His guard was paying no attention to the American wearing droopy pajamas who shuffled along dispiritedly ahead of him. All the while, Stafford tried to focus his attention on the cell where the early releases were held, just a few more steps ahead of him. He took a quick, furtive look over his shoulder, saw his guard smoking and talking, and reached inside his pajamas and untied the string.

When he was next to the cell window, he raised his good arm high enough to reach the sill and, like a basketball player tapping back a missed shot, flicked his wrist and let the package fall from his hand. He tensed for the impact of a rifle butt aimed from behind. Nobody raised a hand.

For the next four hours, Stafford made coal balls with trembling fingers. Whenever the guard moved or spoke to another guard in the yard, his stomach twisted into a knot. He did not relax until he had been led back across the yard and returned to his cell. When the door was closed and locked behind him, he broke into a smile, gave a thumbs up and said, "Mission accomplished."

The other men in the cell smiled back and pounded him on his shoulders and back, being careful to stay away from the injured spots. "Goddamn, Al, baby. Way to go, man. Shit-hot job."

Typical of the war in Vietnam, Stafford's successful mission yielded small and ambiguous results. Some of the men who had read the order were persuaded to turn down early release, but the North Vietnamese found replacements for them. But by succeeding, Stafford had "rescued" one or two men who were vacillating and, more important, he had done something. It stiffened the resolve and raised the spirits of the other men in the Plantation. It allowed them to feel that they were still resisting and that the war, no matter how hopeless it looked, was still going on.

•

A week before Christmas 1972, the POWs in Hoa Lo were awakened in the middle of the night by waves of B-52 bombers flying high over the city. For more than a week, the city burned and the walls of the old prison trembled. Inside, men cheered and the guards did not try to quiet them.

The Christmas bombings, as they came to be called, remain controversial. Pointless and barbaric according to one view; necessary and overdue, to another.

Among the POWs, then and much later, the feeling was that the bombing ensured that they would all go home when the peace papers were signed. Before the bombings, they were hostages and represented an asset of sorts. But if they could be used as a pretext for military action--for more B-52 raids--then they were not worth any possible ransom.

Stafford and the other men--being kept in a camp far from Hanoi--knew nothing of this. They had not been told about the Christmas raids or about the signing of the treaty. They celebrated the new year--1973--and did their best to keep warm and occupied. Then, one night, the guards began putting them in formation according to some new system, as if it were the first day of boot camp.

"Hey, you know what?" one man said. "They're lining us up in order of shoot-down. This time, I believe we are going home."

•

On the morning of their scheduled release, the men were fed breakfast and then loaded onto buses and driven to the airport in Hanoi. They formed ranks and were marched over to tables manned by officers from North Vietnam and the United States. Stafford's name was read off a roster and he stepped forward. The North Vietnamese put a check by his name and the Americans did the same. Custody had changed hands.

It took an hour, perhaps, to complete the transfer. When the paperwork and other formalities had been concluded, the cargo ramps were raised into place, sealing the planes, and the engines were brought up to full power. One by one, the big planes taxied out onto the runway and took off.

Stafford felt like he was holding his breath while the plane built speed. Then the wheels left the ground and were retracted. He could see the coast and the Gulf of Tonkin, just the way it had appeared five and a half years earlier on the morning when he had waked in the grip of that bad feeling. At that moment, he felt that he had at last accomplished his mission.

As the big plane crossed the coast line, Stafford and all the men around him began cheering and laughing with unrestrained joy. They were free.

•

Captain Robert Mitchell, a Navy flight surgeon, organized a study of the Navy and Marine POWs immediately after they returned from Vietnam. Every man was given a complete physical, as well as a battery of tests and several interviews with a psychiatrist. Each was also assigned a counterpart who was as close to him as possible in age, physical characteristics and experience--excluding the years of imprisonment. These men were to be given the same annual examinations and tests. The data, it was hoped, would yield useful information about the long-term effects of captivity.

Fifteen years after the program was started, Captain Mitchell had discovered some interesting, even startling, facts. First, the men who returned were in surprisingly good health, considering. They suffered the lingering effects of many untreated injuries, but otherwise, their general health was better than that of the men in the comparison group, especially in the cardiovascular field; the ex-POWs had fewer heart attacks, which could be accounted to the fact that they seldom ate any red meat or other high-cholesterol food. Furthermore, they did not seem to suffer from any lingering emotional problems that could be traced to their captivity. They experienced the same frustrations and anxieties as the men in the comparison group and, in fact, showed a slightly better ability to deal with stress--something else they had picked up in Vietnam.

There had been very few long-term psychiatric problems. One of the POWs had been institutionalized, and there was one suicide. A few, such as Stafford, had suffered bouts of depression, but the numbers were not out of line. The experience, grim as it had been, had not ruined these men for life. They had truly bounced back.

•

Every three years, former POWs come from all over the country to socialize and remember for a weekend. Al Stafford drove to Washington, D.C., in June of 1987 for one of these reunions.

During a cocktail party on the first evening, he was standing off from the crowd, looking for a familiar face, when someone shouted his name, ran across the room and leaped into his arms. For a moment, Stafford did not know who the man was. "Al, baby," he shouted. "God, it's great to see you, man. I've been worrying about you for twenty years."

It was John Roosen, the man whose place Stafford had taken in the Alpha strike on the day he was shot down.

"Goddamn, man. Great to see you."

"You too, John."

"Al,.listen, you understand, don't you? I mean, there was no way I could have flown that bird that day. It was just pouring hydraulic fluid."

"For Christ's sake, John."

"No, I'm serious. Tell me you understand. It's been on my mind for twenty years."

"I understand. What do you think I am?"

"Al, man. I think you are the greatest."

"'When they started working me over, I tried to hold out, but, shit, I just couldn't. They broke me.'"

"Research proves Ninety Nine prcnt of pows Jac off XX we need your help to make it one hundred"