About an hour after Hannah’s morning rebroadcast, the turnkeys opened each cell door, and, one at a time, each prisoner brought his waste bucket out, set it down, and stepped back into his cell. After all the waste buckets were placed outside and the guards had locked the prisoners back in their cells, two POWs were assigned the task of collecting the buckets, dumping their contents into a large hole in the back of the camp, washing them out, and returning them to their owners. For a brief while, the prisoners used this daily chore to pass notes on cigarette paper and other scraps of paper. The Vietnamese soon discovered our treachery and kept a closer eye on the unfortunate POWs who drew this duty.
After the buckets were returned, the guards filled our teapots. If it was a wash day, they would then take us to bathe. In winters, when water was plentiful, we would often bathe twice a week. In summer, when water was scarce, we would sometimes go weeks without bathing. After we had hung our wet clothes and washrag out to dry and returned to our cells, each prisoner was taken back out, one at a time, to pick up his breakfast, usually a piece of bread and a bowl of soup made by boiling something that vaguely resembled a pumpkin. Each prisoner was then returned to his cell and locked in before the next prisoner was allowed to collect his morning meal.
The food at the Plantation was notoriously bad, and, as the old joke goes, the portions were too small. Discipline among the Plantation’s guards was poor, and we suffered from a high rate of food thievery. The pots in which our meals were prepared were never washed, and the guards who served us were only slightly cleaner. I never enjoyed a reputation for cleanliness, but my frequent bouts of dysentery brought on by my filthy living conditions greatly increased my appreciation of the virtue, and I cringed whenever I watched our food being prepared.
After we finished eating, the process was repeated in reverse as we returned our empty bowls. There were no other activities after breakfast until we were brought out for the afternoon meal. On wash days we collected our dry clothes with the afternoon meal.
Shortly after lunch, around noon, they rang the gong again to signal the afternoon nap, which lasted until two. Until the gong sounded we weren’t allowed to lie down unless we were ill. On some afternoons they piped in additional propaganda broadcasts over the loudspeakers, occasionally playing them all afternoon. Other times we went for weeks without afternoon tributes to the great patriotic struggle, although Hannah never missed an evening or morning broadcast.
Our boredom was periodically alleviated by the provision of reading materials. The camp literature offered little in the way of a rewarding read. Most often, I was given a copy of the Vietnam Courier, a propaganda rag full of decidedly tendentious news accounts of the war and current events.
Reading the Courier, I was always amused by its descriptions of Ho Chi Minh’s many remarkable attributes, powers normally associated with the Divinity. If a certain province reported a poor rice harvest one year, Uncle Ho would arrive on the scene, and, bingo, next year’s harvest set a record. Got a problem with your tractor, call Uncle Ho for an illuminating lecture on tractor maintenance. If air pirates were bombing your village, Uncle Ho would teach the village idiot how to target a surface-to-air missile and in no time at all he would be destroying whole squadrons. No task was too small for Ho. He would always take a few minutes from his busy administration of the war to cure whatever ailed you.
Other times, I received awkwardly written books boasting of extraordinary Vietnamese war victories, whole battalions of American infantry annihilated by a few determined peasants, grandmothers shooting down American aircraft. Of course, all our literary diversions required us to endure a fulminating condemnation of American war crimes.
We were also read aloud to quite often. Works by prominent American authors who were opposed to the war and by other, less distinguished pamphleteers were haltingly, and some times unintelligibly, broadcast throughout the camp. Dr. Spock’s works, sadly not his texts on child care, were a popular form of political enlightenment.
Sometimes we were made to watch movies in which Vietnamese nationalism was accorded even greater supernatural powers than it was in books and newspapers. A tank division or several American battalions were never a match for one lightly armed, gallant, kind-to-women-and-children Vietnamese fighting man. Of course, the Vietnamese took elaborate precautions when taking us to the movies, lest we hopelessly inferior Americans pull some kind of trick on our virtuous, all-knowing guards. Each prisoner watched the movies from a separate cubicle made with blankets or mosquito netting hung over a line.
Although I suppose I should have been insulted by such heavy-handed propaganda, it was so clumsy and so absurd that it seldom failed to amuse me. I came to welcome most of it as a reliably entertaining diversion, but it also exacerbated my yearning for a world in which all information was not portioned out sparingly and in disguise to advance someone’s military or political objectives.
We were deprived of even the most basic comforts. It would be too time-consuming a task to list all the things I missed in prison. I missed the staples of life, of course, good and plentiful food, a comfortable bed, being out of doors. But the thing I missed most was information—free, uncensored, undistorted, abundant information.
When we were released from prison in 1973, the first thing most of us did after arriving at Clark Air Base in the Philippines was order a steak dinner or an ice cream sundae or some other food we had longed for in prison. But I was as hungry for information as I was for a decent meal, and when I placed my dinner order I asked also for newspapers and magazines. I wanted to know what was going on in the world, and I grasped anything I could find that might offer a little enlightenment.
Every night at the Plantation, except Saturday night, all the camp personnel would attend what we derisively referred to as “revival” meetings. We would lie on our hard bunks and listen to the Vietnamese fervently cheer, clap, and shout expressions of nationalism and simplistic slogans epitomizing their national ideology. Each one would take a turn reading from a tract of anti-American propaganda.
At nine o’clock every evening, the guards rang the evening gong instructing us to go to sleep, and, shivering in the cold or sweating in the stifling heat, beset by mosquitoes, and in the glare of a naked lightbulb, we tried to escape to our dreams. That was our day.
The only thing that changed my daily regimen was an interrogation. Interrogations were irregular events. Three or four weeks could pass before I was subjected to one. Other times I was interrogated twice in one day, sometimes by senior officers, sometimes by lower-ranking officers or enlisted personnel whom we called “quiz kids.” The sound of jangling keys and fumbling with locks at night or at other irregular times had the effect of unexpected gunfire. I shot bolt upright the moment I heard it, gripped by terror, my heart beating so loud I thought it would be audible to the approaching guard. In the years after I came home, I never suffered from flashbacks or posttraumatic stress syndrome, as it is clinically termed. But for a long time after coming home, I would tense up whenever I heard keys rattle, and for an instant I would feel the onset of an old fear come back to haunt me.
They never interrogated or tortured us in our cells. They always took us to the interrogation rooms, spartan cells with bare walls, furnished with just a wooden table, a chair behind the table, and a stool in front of it, lower than the chair, for the prisoner to sit on.
Some interrogations were comparatively benign. Sometimes they were little more than training sessions for a new interrogator who was trying to learn English. The interrogators would demand information, or order me to confess my crimes into a tape recorder. When I refused, they would make a perfunctory threat to persuade me to reconsider. When I refused again, they just sent me back to my cell, the threatened beating forgotten.