It’s an awful thing, solitary. It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment. Having no one else to rely on, to share confidences with, to seek counsel from, you begin to doubt your judgment and your courage. But you eventually adjust to solitary, as you can to almost any hardship, by devising various methods to keep your mind off your troubles and greedily grasping any opportunity for human contact.
The first few weeks are the hardest. The onset of despair is immediate, and it is a formidable foe. You have to fight it with any means necessary, all the while trying to bridle the methods you devise to combat loneliness and prevent them from robbing your senses.
I tried to memorize the names of POWs, the names and personal details of guards and interrogators, and the details of my environment. I devised other memory games to keep my faculties sound. For days I tried to remember the names of all the pilots in my squadron and our sister squadron. I also prayed more often and more fervently than I ever had as a free man.
Many prisoners spent their hours exercising their minds by concentrating on an academic discipline or hobby they were proficient in. I knew men who mentally designed buildings and airplanes. I knew others who spent days and weeks working out complicated math formulas. I reconstructed from memory books and movies I had once enjoyed. I tried to compose books and plays of my own, often acting out sequences in the quiet solitude of my cell. Anyone who had observed my amateur theatrics might have challenged the exercise’s beneficial effect on my mental stability.
I had to carefully guard against my fantasies becoming so consuming that they took me permanently to a place in my mind from which I might fail to return. On several occasions I became terribly annoyed when a guard entered my cell to take me to the bath or to bring me my food and disrupted some flight of fantasy where the imagined comforts were so attractive that I could not easily bear to be deprived of them. Sadly, I knew of a few men in prison who had grown so content in their imaginary worlds that they preferred solitary confinement and turned down the offer of a roommate. Eventually, they stopped communicating with the rest of us.
For long stretches of every day, I would watch the activities in camp through a crack in my door, grateful to witness any unusual or amusing moment that broke the usual monotony of prison administration. As I began to settle into my routine, I came to appreciate the POW adage “The days and hours are very long, but the weeks and months pass quickly.”
Solitary also put me in a pretty surly mood, and I would resist depression by hollering insults at my guards, resorting to the belligerence that I had relied on earlier in my life when obliged to suffer one indignity or another. Resisting, being uncooperative and a general pain in the ass, proved, as it had in the past, to be a morale booster for me.
Hypochondria is a malady that commonly afflicts prisoners held in solitary confinement. A man becomes extremely conscious of his physical condition and can worry excessively over every ailment that plagues him. After Bud and I were separated, I struggled to resist concern bordering on paranoia that my injuries and poor health would eventually prove mortal.
I received nothing in the way of medical treatment. Three or four times a year, Zorba, the prison medic, would drop by for a brief visit. After a quick visual appraisal of my condition he would leave me with the exhortation to eat more and exercise. That I often could not keep down the little food allowed me after the guards had taken their share did not strike Zorba as paradoxical. Nor did Zorba bother to explain how I might manage to exercise given my disabling injuries and the narrow confines of my cell. I was routinely refused permission to spend a few minutes a day out of doors where I might have had the space necessary to concoct some half-assed exercise regimen.
I did try, despite my challenging circumstances and uncooperative guards, to build up my strength. In the summer of 1968, I attempted to do push-ups, but lacked the strength to raise myself once from my cell floor. I was able to perform a single standing push-up off the wall, but the experience was so painful that it only served to exacerbate my concern about my condition.
By late summer in 1969, my dysentery had eased. The strength I gained from holding down my food enabled me to begin exercising my leg. Whenever possible, I limped around my cell on my stiff leg, and I was greatly cheered when I noticed the limb slowly becoming stronger.
My arms were another matter. Over a period of two years, I began to regain some use of them, but even then exercise occasionally resulted in my arms’ total immobility for a period that could last up to a month. After I returned to the States, an orthopedic surgeon informed me that because the fracture in my left arm had not been set, using my arm as much as I had during my imprisonment had worn a new socket in my left shoulder.
In the last two years of my captivity, prisoners were quartered together in large cells. Because of the improvement in our food and living conditions, I was strong enough to perform a rigorous daily exercise routine. Lopsided push-ups and a form of running in place that resembled hopping more than it did running gave my daily workout a comical aspect. But in addition to endlessly amusing my roommates, the routine considerably strengthened both my mental and physical reserves.
Left alone to act as my own physician, I made diagnoses that were occasionally closer to hysterical than practical. Among its many unattractive effects, dysentery often causes rather severe hemorrhoids. When this affliction visited me, I became morose, brooding about its implications for my survival. After some time, it finally occurred to me that I had never heard of a single person whose hemorrhoids had proved fatal. When this latest infirmity disappeared after a couple of months, I made a mental note to stop acting like an old man who stayed in bed all day fussing about his angina.
There is little doubt that solitary confinement causes some mental deterioration in even the most resilient personalities. When in 1970 my period of solitary confinement was finally ended, I was overwhelmed by the compulsion to talk nonstop, face-to-face with my obliging new cellmate. I ran my mouth ceaselessly for four days. My cellmate, John Finely, who had once been held in solitary himself and understood my exuberant reaction to his company, listened intently, frequently nodding his head in assent to my rhetorical points even though he could not possibly have taken in more than a fraction of my rambling dialogue.
I have observed this phenomenon in many other men when they were released from solitary. One of the more amusing spectacles in prison is the sight of two men, both just released from solitary, talking their heads off simultaneously, neither one listening to the other, both absolutely enraptured by the sound of their voices. Most “solos” settled down after spending a few days with a roommate and recovered the strength and confidence of men who were sound in both mind and body.
We had a saying in prison: “Steady strain.” The point of the remark was to remind us to keep a close watch on our emotions, not to let them rise and fall with circumstances that were out of our control. We tried hard to avoid seizing on any small change in our treatment as an indication of an approaching change in our fortunes.