We called some POWs “gastro politicians,” because their spirits soared every time they found a carrot in their soup. “Look at this. They’re fattening us up,” they would declare. “We must be going home.” And when no omen appeared in the next day’s meal, the gastro politician’s irrational exuberance of the previous day would disappear, and he would sink into an equally irrational despondency, lamenting, “We’re never getting out of here.”
Most of the prisoners considered it unhealthy to allow themselves to interpret our circumstances like tea leaf readers divining some secret purpose in the most unremarkable event. Prison was enough of a psychological strain without riding an emotional roller coaster of our own creation. Once you began investing meals or an unexpectedly civil word from a guard with greater meaning than it merited, you might begin to pay attention to the promises or threats of your captors. That was the surest way to lose your resolve or even your mind.
“Steady strain, buddy, steady strain,” we cautioned each other whenever we began to take a short view of our lives. It was best to take the long view. We would get home when we got home. There wasn’t anything we could do to hasten that day’s arrival. Until then we had to manage our hardships as best we could, and hope that when we did get home we would have been a credit to ourselves and to the country.
When you’re left alone with your thoughts for years, it’s hard not to reflect on how better you could have spent your time as a free man. I had more than a normal share of regrets, but regret for choosing the career that had landed me in this place was not among them.
I regretted I hadn’t read more books so I could keep my mind better occupied in solitary. I regretted much of the foolishness that had characterized my youth, seeing in it, at last, its obvious insignificance. I regretted I hadn’t worked harder at the Academy, believing that had I done so, I might have been better prepared for the trial I now faced.
My regrets were never so severe that they made me despondent, but I did experience remorse to an extent I had never known in the past, an emotion that helped mature me. I gained the insight, common to many people in life-threatening circumstances, that the trivial pleasures of life and human vanity were transient and insignificant. And I resolved that when I regained my freedom, I would seize opportunities to spend what remained of my life in more important pursuits.
“All that’s beautiful drifts away/Like the waters,” lament Yeats’s old men. Except, I discovered, love and honor. If you valued them, and held them strongly, love and honor would endure undiminished by the passing of time and the most determined assault on your dignity. And to hold on to love and honor I needed to be part of a fraternity. I was not as strong a man as I had once believed myself to be.
Of all the activities I devised to survive solitary confinement with my wits and strength intact, nothing was more beneficial than communicating with other prisoners. It was, simply, a matter of life and death.
Fortunately, the Vietnamese—although they went to extraordinary lengths to prevent it—couldn’t stop all communication among prisoners. Through flashed hand signals when we were moved about, tap codes on the wall, notes hidden in washroom drains, and holding our enamel drinking cups up to the wall with our shirts wrapped around them and speaking through them, we were able to communicate with each other. The whole prison system became a complex information network, POWs busily trafficking in details about each other’s circumstances and news from home that would arrive with every new addition to our ranks.
The tap code was a simple device. The signal to communicate was the old rhythm “shave and a haircut,” and the response, “two bits,” was given if the coast was clear. We divided the alphabet into five columns of five letters each. The letter K was dropped. A, F, L, Q, and V were the key letters. Tap once for the five letters in the A column, twice for F, three times for L, and so on. After indicating the column, pause for a beat, then tap one through five times to indicate the right letter. My name would be tapped 3-2, 1-3, 1-3, 1-1, 2-4, 3-3.
It was an easy system to teach the uninitiated, and new guys would usually be communicating like veterans within a few days. We became so proficient at it that in time we could communicate as efficiently by tapping as we could by speaking through our drinking cups. But I preferred, whenever circumstances allowed, to speak to my neighbors. The sound of the human voice, unappreciated in an open society’s noisy clutter of spoken words, was an emblem of humanity to a man held at length in solitary confinement, an elegant and poignant affirmation that we possessed a divine spark that our enemies could not extinguish.
The punishment for communicating could be severe, and a few POWs, having been caught and beaten for their efforts, had their spirits broken as their bodies were battered. Terrified of a return trip to the punishment room, they would lie still in their cells when their comrades tried to tap them up on the wall. Very few would remain uncommunicative for long. To suffer all this alone was less tolerable than torture. Withdrawing in silence from the fellowship of other Americans and the doggedly preserved cohesion of an American military unit was to us the approach of death. Almost all would recover their strength in a few days and answer the summons to rejoin the living.
In October 1968, I heard the guards bring a new prisoner into the camp and lock him into the cell behind mine. Ernie Brace was a decorated former Marine who had flown over a hundred combat missions in the Korean War. He had been accused of deserting the scene of an aircraft accident, court-martialed, and discharged dishonorably from the service. Determined to restore his good name, he had volunteered as a civilian pilot to fly supply missions in Laos for the United States Agency for International Development, and, when asked, to secretly supply CIA-supported military units in the Laotian jungle.
During one such operation, Communist insurgents, the Pathet Lao, overran the small airstrip where he had just landed and captured him. His captors handed him over to soldiers in the North Vietnamese Army, who marched him to a remote outpost near Dien Bien Phu. He was imprisoned for three years in a bamboo cage with his arms and legs bound. He attempted three escapes. He was brutally tortured, held in leg stocks, and tethered to a stake by a rope around his neck. After his last failed escape attempt, the Vietnamese buried him in a pit up to his neck and left him there for a week.
In 1968, he was brought to Hanoi. Uncertain whether the United States government was aware he had been captured alive, he was greatly relieved to realize that he was now in the company of American POWs whose captivity was known to our government.
When the commotion in the cell behind me died down as the guards left Ernie alone in his new home, I tried to tap him up on the wall. In terrible shape, and fearful that the knocks he heard in the cell next door were made by Vietnamese trying to entrap him in an attempted violation of the prohibition against communicating, he made no response. For days I tried in vain to talk to him.
Finally, he tapped back, a faint but audible “two bits.” I put my drinking cup to the wall and spoke directly to my new neighbor.
“Do you have a drinking cup?”
No response.
“Tap twice if you have a drinking cup and once if you don’t.”
No response.
“I’m talking through my cup. Do you have a drinking cup? If you have a cup, wrap your shirt around it, hold it up to the wall, and talk to me.”
No response.
“You want to communicate, don’t you?”
No response.
I continued at some length, vainly trying to get him to talk to me. But as he had just been given a drinking cup, his suspicion that he was being set up by the Vietnamese intensified as I urged him to make illicit use of it.