The relationship between camp commander and political officer varied somewhat from camp to camp. At the Plantation, Soft Soap Fairy was the political officer, and he always referred to “Slopehead,” the camp commander, as the officer responsible for torture and punishment. Slopehead did most of the dirty work, but Soft Soap, for all his protestations of innocence, was responsible for getting the information from prisoners that Slopehead would eventually try to beat out of us.
Next in line were the turnkeys who supervised our daily routine. They let us out of our cells to collect our meals and to bathe, locked us back in when we had finished, monitored us constantly to prevent communication, and, if so disposed, responded when we called “Bao cao” to get their attention.
The turnkeys were younger than the interrogators; many of them were still in their teens. Some of them treated us no worse than their job description obliged, but others harbored considerable animosity toward us and seemed to relish opportunities to degrade us. Being so young, most turnkeys, when they first took up this line of work, were curious about the strange Americans they guarded. But in time, increasingly irritated by our evident disrespect for their authority, many of them grew to despise us, and they would go out of their way to give us a hard time.
For a time, I had a turnkey who ritualistically expressed his intense dislike of me. We called him “the Prick.” He would enter my cell and order me to bow. Our captors believed that their advantage over us entitled them to formal displays of deference. They expected us to bow whenever they approached us. We believed otherwise. When the Prick ordered me to bow, I would refuse, and he would respond to the discourtesy by smashing his fist into the side of my head and knocking me down. On a few occasions when I just didn’t feel up to the confrontation and bowed, he hit me anyway. These encounters were not episodic. They occurred every morning for nearly two years.
The Prick had other, less violent means of harassing me. He would often intentionally spill my food, trip me when I walked to the showers, or take me to the shower on a hot summer day and laugh when I discovered there was no water in the tank. But he seemed to regard his morning visitations as the most satisfying form of self-expression.
Occupying the last station in the camp hierarchy were the Vietnamese we called “gun guards.” These were young soldiers who wandered around the camp carrying a rifle on their shoulder. Many had physical handicaps or other limitations that made them unfit for jungle fighting. Most gun guards were largely indifferent to us. Their duty was certainly preferable to fighting at the front, wherever that might be on a given day, and I’m sure they appreciated the relative security of their work. But few ever displayed a particular zeal for lording their authority over the prisoners. They just did their job, in six-hour shifts, and counted their blessings.
After one difficult interrogation, I was left in the interrogation room for the night, tied in ropes. A gun guard, whom I had noticed before but had never spoken to, was working the night shift, 10:00 P.M. to 4:00 A.M. A short time after the interrogators had left me to ponder my bad attitude for the evening, this guard entered the room and silently, without looking at or smiling at me, loosened the ropes, and then he left me alone. A few minutes before his shift ended, he returned and tightened up the ropes.
On Christmas Day, we were always treated to a better-than-usual dinner. We were also allowed to stand outside our cells for five minutes to exercise or to just look at the trees and sky. One Christmas, a few months after the gun guard had inexplicably come to my assistance during my long night in the interrogation room, I was standing in the dirt courtyard when I saw him approach me.
He walked up and stood silently next to me. Again, he didn’t smile or look at me. He just stared at the ground in front of us. After a few moments had passed he rather nonchalantly used his sandaled foot to draw a cross in the dirt. We both stood wordlessly looking at the cross until, after a minute or two, he rubbed it out and walked away. I saw my good Samaritan often after the Christmas when we venerated the cross together. But he never said a word to me nor gave the slightest signal that he acknowledged my humanity.
An Air Force major lived in the cell next to me at the Plantation. Bob Craner and I were indefatigable communicators. We talked endlessly through our cups or by tap code on any subject that came to mind.
Bob was a naturally taciturn fellow. He had a roommate for a time, Guy Gruters, another Air Force officer. Had I also had a roommate, Bob might have been less inclined to talk to me as much as he did. But I was alone, and I needed to talk as much as possible with my neighbor to keep from lapsing into despair. So Bob kept up his end of our ceaseless conversation to get me through my years in solitary. We talked at great length every day about our circumstances, our families, and our lives back in the States.
He loved baseball and revered Ted Williams. Bob could recite Williams’s batting average in every year he had played in the major leagues. He was never more animated than when arguing over who was the better ballplayer, Williams or Stan Musial. In high school, Bob had developed a crush on a young girl. After admiring her from afar for many months, he worked up the nerve to ask her out. When he arrived at her home to collect her for their first date, they somehow fell into a conversation about baseball, during which the young lady ventured an opinion on the Williams-Musial dispute. She thought Musial the better player. From that moment on, Bob would have nothing to do with her.
He had grown up in a family of modest means and after high school had entered the cadet program started by the Air Force, which at that time didn’t have an academy of its own. He eventually earned a college degree while serving in the Air Force. He was a naturally gifted pilot, and, recognizing his talent, the Air Force had sent him to fighter weapons school at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, which only the best pilots were permitted to attend.
Air Force pilots were allowed to fly only one hundred combat missions in Vietnam. When Bob had completed his hundredth mission, he requested and was denied another tour by his commanding officer. He went to Saigon to argue his case with the Air Force command in Vietnam. After a long campaign, his superiors relented and granted him another tour. He was shot down on his 102nd mission.
He never complained about his misfortune nor regretted having prevailed on the Air Force to let him fly another combat tour. He joked when he told me about it, laughing when he remarked, “Well, I guess I got my wish.” But I never observed a trace of bitterness or self-reproach in Bob. We both were doing what we wanted to do, what we had so long prepared to do, when our luck turned for the worse. We chose our lives and were grateful for their rewards, and we accepted the consequences without regret.
He was my dear friend, and for two years I was closer to him than I had ever been to another human being. Bob spoke for both of us when, months after we were released from prison, he described how completely we had relied on each other to preserve our humanity.
McCain and I leaned on each other a great deal. We were separated by about eighteen inches of brick, and I never saw the guy for the longest time. I used to have dreams… we all did, of course, and they were sometimes nightmares… and my world had shrunk to a point where the figures in my dreams were myself, the guards and a voice… and that was McCain. I didn’t know what he looked like, so I could not visualize him in my dreams, because he became the guy—the only guy—I turned to, for a period of two years.