During that spring and summer, I was caught communicating several times. Sometimes I earned a beating for my efforts, but other times I was just made to sit on a stool in the corner for a day or two like a disobedient schoolboy. Once I was ordered to stand facing the wall for two days and two nights. On the second day, exhausted, I sat down. A guard discovered me, mistook my weariness for insolence, and, in a rage, beat and jumped on my bad leg. The resulting pain and swelling in my leg forced me to use a crutch again. Surprisingly, camp officials chastised the guard for physically abusing me without their approval.
During another of my punishments, a severe one, I again complained that I was being treated like an animal. My guards were then ordered to feed me like an animal. Every day for a week, they brought me a bowl of soup with a piece of bread thrown in it and ordered me to eat it with my hands.
The summer of 1969 was a long, difficult time. But as autumn arrived, our treatment began to improve. By the end of the year, the routine beatings had all but stopped. Prisoners were still physically mistreated as punishment for communicating or other violations of camp regulations. But beatings to extract propaganda information all but ceased. We occasionally received extra rations of food. For a brief period, the guards came to my cell every night and removed the boards blocking the transom over my cell to let in the evening breeze. At times, some of the guards were almost pleasant in their dealings with us. We had hard times ahead of us, but from October of that year until our release, our circumstances were never as dire as they had been in those long early years of captivity.
This welcome change in our treatment coincided with the death of Ho Chi Minh, leading many POWs to think that old Uncle Ho must have had a less than avuncular affection for the air pirates occupying his prisons. A funereal dirge was broadcast over loudspeakers everywhere in Hanoi on the morning of September 4, and the black-and-red mourning patches worn by the guards that day aroused our suspicion that old Ho had passed on to his eternal reward.
I don’t know for certain whether the terrible summer of 1969 was partly a consequence of Ho’s animosity to us, and the change in our fortunes explained by the fact that death had finally silenced his exhortations to the people to treat us like criminals. What we learned from new shootdowns late in the war was that word of our treatment had finally reached the rest of the world, and the discovery that there was a darker side to the plucky North Vietnamese nationalists had begun to cloud Hanoi’s international horizons.
In August 1969, the Vietnamese released, to an American antiwar delegation, Doug Hegdahl, Wes Rumble, and Robert Frishman. Defense Secretary Melvin Laird had showed photographs of Hegdahl and Frishman to members of the Vietnamese delegation in Paris and demanded their release. All of them were in bad shape. Frishman had no elbow, just a limp, rubbery arm. Rumble had a broken back. Hegdahl had lost seventy-five pounds. Dick Stratton and our senior ranking officer, Ted Guy, had ordered him to accept the release. He had memorized the names of most of the POWs held in the North.
In a change from Johnson administration policy, the Nixon administration allowed the three returned POWs to publicly reveal details of torture and deprivation. The ensuing public fury, led by the newly organized National League of Families of POWs and MIAs in Southeast Asia, of which my brother, Joe, was an active member, began to turn world opinion against Hanoi. And the Vietnamese, ever mindful of their reliance on international goodwill, decided to suspend their campaign to beat and starve us into submission.
The first indication that the Vietnamese had revised their “humane and lenient” policy was evident in changes in the way we were exploited for propaganda purposes. We were no longer threatened or tortured to make us confess war crimes or renounce our country. The Vietnamese were now extremely anxious to convince the world that we were well treated.
POWs were filmed playing cards and other games, reading their mail, attending religious services, and opening packages from home. Fewer and fewer prisoners were kept in solitary confinement, although I remained alone for several more months. The Vietnamese more often dispensed with physical intimidation to extract statements from us and instead appealed to our thoughts about our families, or tried to plant doubts about the progress of the war or our government’s good faith to win our cooperation.
Their present public relations dilemma was much on our captors’ minds. “The whole world supports us” was Hanoi’s proudest boast, parroted by politburo member and lowly prison guard alike. They were clearly exasperated by this setback in their design to win the war on America’s campuses and streets, and at odds over what to do about it.
Soft Soap burst into my cell once, highly agitated, and complained, “Even the Russians criticize us. You tell lies about us. You say we pull out your fingernails and make you live in rooms with no ventilation.” That Soft Soap made this complaint while I languished in the suffocating environment of my unventilated cell made the experience only slightly less surreal than listening to the loudspeaker in my cell inform me that the American government was lying about Vietnam’s mistreatment of prisoners.
There were, at this time, various personnel shake-ups among camp authorities that were evidently related to our change in treatment. My turnkey, the Prick, who had started every day by attempting to humiliate me, disappeared from the prison’s guard roster. I derived considerable satisfaction from imagining him humping it down the Ho Chi Minh Trail cursing his bad luck and carrying an impossibly heavy burden, or sweating out a night firefight with a company of better-armed Marines.
The Cat may have suffered the most from the bad turn in Vietnam’s public relations. He was relieved as commander of all the camps and thereafter seemed to function as the senior officer of one part of the Hanoi Hilton. He was still accorded the deference due a senior officer, but he was no longer the highest authority.
From this period on, he seemed almost solicitous of the prisoners’ well-being. He often appeared nervous and distressed. He was observed complaining that prisoners should not be badly mistreated, and, reportedly, he would grow quite agitated upon discovering that a guard had discharged too enthusiastically the responsibilities of his office.
Later on, I learned from another POW that the Cat had been obliged to denounce himself in front of the party for mistreating prisoners in violation of Vietnam’s policy of “humane and lenient” treatment for all prisoners.
On a bitter cold Christmas night in 1969, after I had been transferred from the Plantation back to Hoa Lo, the prison where I had spent my first days of captivity, I received an unexpected visitor. Moments after the last Christmas song had played over the camp loudspeakers, my cell door burst open, and to my complete surprise, the Cat entered my room, dressed in suit and tie, and began to chat with me about home and Christmas. Unlike our previous encounters, he had no need of an interpreter. He spoke English well enough. He offered me cigarettes, which I smoked one after the other. He talked about his experiences in the war, and in the French Indochina War before it. He talked about his family, showing me a diamond tie pin his father had given him. He asked about my family, and expressed his regret that I could not be with them this holiday.
At one point he told me about a particularly beautiful part of Vietnam, near the Chinese border, Ha Long Bay, famous for the thousands of volcanic islands that rise dramatically from its waters. He mentioned that Ho Chi Minh loved the place, and had occasionally enjoyed resting in an old French villa on one of the bay’s islands. Not long ago I visited Ha Long Bay, and I can attest to Ho’s good taste in vacation spots.