I did not learn of the escape attempt until I had been moved back to Hoa Lo, where I met men who had been held at the Zoo with John and Ed. Nevertheless, those of us held at the Plantation surmised that something had happened. Our room inspections became more frequent and more thorough. Our interrogations became considerably more intense. One of the Plantation POWs had been severely tortured for information about suspected escape plans at the Plantation, his tormentors refusing to believe his protestations that there were none. These developments, together with the general worsening of our conditions, alerted us that someone had probably attempted to escape.
Incidents of surpassing courage and defiance were commonplace in those worst days of captivity, and they made my own attempts at rebellion seem minor in comparison. I derived my own resolve from the example of Bud Day, who, although seriously wounded, had valiantly attempted to evade capture, and from countless other examples of resistance that had been carried, flashed, and tapped from cell to cell, camp to camp. They were a lantern for me, a lantern of courage and faith that illuminated the way home with honor, and I struggled against panic and despair to stay in its light. I would have been lost without their example. In recurring moments of doubt and fear, I concentrated on their service, and on the service of my father, and his father, and I accepted my fate.
Of all the many legends of heroic devotion to duty I had come in this strange place to know as real, and to seek strength and solace from, none was more inspiring that the story of Lance Sijan. I never knew Lance Sijan, but I wish I had. I wish I had had one moment to tell him how much I admired him, how indebted I was to him for showing me, for showing all of us, our duty—for showing us how to be free.
He was gone before I heard of him. But Bob Craner and Guy Gruters had lived with Lance for a time, and Bob had told me his story very early in our friendship.
Air Force Captain Lance Sijan was shot down near Vinh on November 9, 1967. For a day and a half, he lay semiconscious on the ground, grievously injured, with a compound fracture of his left leg, a brain concussion, and a fractured skull. He made radio contact with rescue aircraft, but they were unable to locate him in the dense jungle. On November 11, they abandoned the search.
Crawling on the jungle floor at night, Lance fell into a sinkhole, further injuring himself. For six weeks he evaded capture. On Christmas Day, starved, racked with pain, he passed out on a dirt road, where a few hours later the North Vietnamese found him. Thus began the most inspiring POW story of the war, a story of one man’s peerless fidelity to our Code of Conduct. To Lance Sijan, the Code was not an abstract ideal, but the supreme purpose of his life.
The Code is a straightforward document. Its simply worded assertions might strike cynics as posturing, a simplistic and chauvinistic relic of a time when Americans carried with them to war a conceit that they were stronger, better, and more virtuous than any enemy they would face. In truth, few prisoners could claim that they never came close to violating one or more of its principles. But the Code had its appeal, and almost all of us were mindful not to take its demands lightly.
The Code instructs every prisoner to evade capture, and when captured, to seize opportunities for escape. Most of us imprisoned in Hanoi knew that escape was almost certainly impossible. The guards never seemed to be unduly worried about preventing escape because they knew we would have to escape from a city as well as a prison. Had we been able to slip out of camp undetected, our identity would have been impossible to disguise in an isolated Asian population of a million people. Few of us ever seriously contemplated escape, and our senior officers never encouraged it. A few truly brave men tried. All were caught and tortured.
Neither did every prisoner refrain from providing information beyond the bare essentials sanctioned by the Code. Many of us were terrorized into failure at one time or another.
But Captain Sijan wasn’t. He obeyed the Code to the letter.
A short time after he was captured, he overpowered an armed guard and managed to escape, taking the guard’s rifle with him. Recaptured several hours later, he was tortured as punishment for his escape attempt and for military information. He refused to provide his captors anything beyond what the Code allowed. By the time he reached Hanoi, he was close to death.
Over six feet tall, he weighed less than a hundred pounds when he was placed in a cell with Bob Craner and Guy Gruters. He lived there barely a month. In and out of consciousness, often delirious, he would push on the walls of his cell and scratch on the floor searching vainly for a way out. When he was lucid and not consumed with pain, he would quiz his cellmates about the camp’s security and talk with them about escaping again.
Interrogated several times, he refused to say anything. He was savagely beaten for his silence, kicked repeatedly and struck with a bamboo club. Bob and Guy heard him scream profanities at his tormentors, and then, after he had endured hours of torture, they heard him say in a weak voice: “Don’t you understand? I’m not going to tell you anything. I can’t talk to you. It’s against the Code.”
Bob and Guy tried to comfort him during his last hours. Working in shifts timed to the tolling of a nearby church bell, they cradled his head in their laps, talked quietly to him of his courage and faith, told him to hang on. Occasionally he shook off his delirium to joke with his cellmates about his circumstances.
Near the end, the guards came for him. Lance knew they were taking him away to die. As they placed him on a stretcher, he said to his friends, “It’s over… it’s over.” He called to his father for help as the guards carried him away.
A few days later, the Bug told Bob Craner what he already knew, that his friend was dead. And Bob, a good and wise man, resolved to share with any prisoner he could reach the legend of Lance Sijan so that all of us could draw strength from the example of a man who would not yield no matter how terrible the consequences. A few weeks later, when I was moved into the cell next to Bob’s, he told me the story of Lance Sijan: a free man from a free country, who kept his dignity to the last moment of his life.
To maintain our unity, prisoners relied heavily on the senior ranking officers to promulgate policies for the camps. The primary reason the Vietnamese worked so hard to disrupt our communications was to prevent any form of military unit cohesion from strengthening our resistance. Toward that end, they segregated senior officers from the rest of the prison population, making communication with them difficult, and they kept many of the most determined and inventive communicators in solitary confinement.
Contact with senior officers is a very important element of an effective campaign of resistance, and we worked as hard to maintain communications with them as the guards worked to prevent them. If we couldn’t communicate, we couldn’t organize, and if we couldn’t organize, the Vietnamese would pick us off one by one.
We relied on senior officers for more than affirmations or interpretations of the Code of Conduct. Frequently we needed little more than a word of encouragement from our commander to firm up our own resolve when we were preparing to endure the latest round of interrogations. Although there were periods, some quite long, when the Vietnamese succeeded in truncating our chain of command, we would eventually invent some way to restore our communication links to the SROs.