As he got up to leave, he reminded me that had I accepted release the year before, I would be enjoying a far more pleasant holiday this evening.
Without rancor, he remarked, “You should have accepted our generous offer. You would be with your family tonight.”
“You will never understand why I could not,” I responded.
“I understand more than you think,” he shot back as he left my cell.
I didn’t know what to make of this unusual encounter at first, fearing that it was the precursor to another attempt to release me. After a while, however, it occurred to me that the Cat was simply in an expansive holiday mood, and being a man who evidently possessed some Western tastes, he had wanted to affect the image of a courtly enemy enjoying a brief Christmas truce with a fellow officer. I didn’t mind. I enjoyed the cigarettes.
Despite our improved fortunes in the fall and winter of 1969, we continued to suffer moments of despair, occasioned by grim misfortune, and sometimes by less serious experiences.
Keeping a sense of humor was indispensable to surviving a long imprisonment without losing our minds, and most of us looked hard to find some humor in our experiences. Many greeted the most difficult moments with a dark gallows humor, and we were always grateful for occasions to laugh about the embarrassments and absurdities of daily prison life. When we are asked today about our years in prison, many of us are apt to include in our account, “We had a lot of fun, too.”
As implausible as that glib response is—and surely it is exaggerated—we did manage to have some fun despite our dreary, often depressing existence. And the prisoners whose company we valued the most were those who could make the rest of us laugh at our circumstances and ourselves.
Bob Craner had a ready wit, and he favored a droll, ironic brand of humor that never failed to cheer me up when I was down. When the death of seventy-nine-year-old Ho Chi Minh and the appointment of his seventy-six-year-old successor was announced, Bob commented, “Ah, the Young Turks are taking over.” Our daily dose of propaganda often included tributes to the skilled marksmen who defended North Vietnam from American bombers. Hannah’s frequent reports of downed American aircraft invariably claimed that the plane had been destroyed “with the very first round.” Bob often responded to Hannah’s familiar boast by speculating that the Vietnamese must have a warehouse somewhere where thousands of crates of shells were stored, each one labeled “Very First Round.”
Although we were neighbors during the worst years of my imprisonment, we managed to make light of our conditions whenever we could, and to laugh about the peculiar predicaments we frequently found ourselves in as we tried to make the most of our dismal existence.
Queenie was a pretty, slender young girl with lovely long hair. She worked as a secretary at the camp and occasionally helped out in the kitchen. We would see her when the guards brought us out to collect our bowls of soup, and Bob Craner and I would look through cracks in our cell doors to see her float around the camp, giggling and tossing her ponytail. All the guards mooned over her, but child though she was of a classless society, she only had eyes for the camp officers.
There were only two other women in the camp, a kitchen worker we called “Shovel” for her unusually flat profile, and the cook, “Mammy Yokum,” a wizened old crone who chewed betel nut and screamed bloody murder at any guard who had the temerity to enter her kitchen unbidden.
Inevitably, we began to have fantasies about Queenie, which she kindled with shy smiles when she caught either of us gazing at her. Bob and I would joke about plans for the day we won the war, when we would forsake family and country to live quietly with Queenie in Thailand. But our love was unrequited.
One terrible day, my ardor got the better of me. A guard had taken me, hobbling on my crutches, to the stall where we were allowed to bathe and wash our clothes by taking water from a tank, a cup at a time, and pouring it on ourselves and our belongings. The stalls the prisoners used were directly across the open courtyard from a washroom the Vietnamese used. They had old, splintered wooden doors. When we were inside, the guard would place a steel bar in brackets across the door to prevent our escape, then wander away to chat with his friends.
The door had cracks in it, which I would look through to observe the daily activities in camp. On this day, I was thrilled to discover that Queenie had decided to take a turn at the washroom; I saw her carrying a load of her clothes in that direction. I suspended my bath to watch her while she washed her clothes, holding each article up to closely inspect her progress. As I maneuvered for a better view, I lost my balance and fell against the door. The guard had decided he didn’t need to lock me in, as I was unlikely to get very far on crutches, and had set the bar next to the door. The door flew open, and I fell, naked and noisily, onto the bricks in front of the washroom.
Because of my bum leg, I couldn’t stand up, and I thrashed around on the ground frantically trying to scramble back into the stall. Startled, Queenie briefly appraised my humiliating situation, then demurely covered her eyes. My guard, hearing the commotion, rushed back, saw what had happened, cuffed me around a bit, and threw me back in the stall, where I finished cleaning up in abject misery. From that moment on, whenever Queenie saw me she would shoot me a look of utter disdain. I suffered her contempt in agony. My kind friend Bob Craner commiserated with me, but did not bother to restrain his laughter over my misfortune, and by so doing turned my embarrassment into a welcome source of amusement for both of us.
I was, and remain, deeply indebted to Bob for his warm fellowship and for the humor he used so effectively to brighten our small, hostile world. So it was with deep guilt, second only to the guilt I felt over my confession, that I discovered I had done Bob a grave injustice. That the experience concluded humorously is a testament to the kind of guy Bob was, and how important his friendship was to me.
The Vietnamese allowed us certain amenities. We all received one short-sleeved shirt, one long-sleeved shirt, one pair of pants, and one pair of rubber sandals fabricated from old tires. We each had a drinking cup, a teapot, a toothbrush, toothpaste, and a bar of soap stamped “37%” (37 percent of what we never learned). We received a daily ration of three cigarettes (often withdrawn as punishment). But our most prized possession was a small, coarse square of cotton rag that served as both washcloth and towel.
I appreciate how difficult it must be for the reader to understand the inflated value of such an unremarkable article. But to a man who is deprived of almost all material possessions, who lies day after day in a dirty, oppressively hot cell, glazed in sweat and grime, a washcloth, no matter how undistinguished, is an inestimable comfort.
On wash day, when we were brought out to collect our first meal of the day, we would each hang our wet clothes and our washrag to dry on a wire strung in the courtyard. We would retrieve the articles as we brought back the afternoon meal.
On one such day in the fall of 1968, between our two meals, the guards hauled me out of my cell and took me to a punishment room for ten days of attitude adjustment. This was during a time when my attitude was frequently adjusted. As I was being transported, I noticed my belongings drying nicely in the sun and immediately began to long for the comfort of my cherished washrag.
Ten days later, my attitude well adjusted, I returned to my cell, and to my intense sorrow found that my washrag was no longer on the wire. Nor was it anywhere else to be found. I was beside myself, and, I am ashamed to admit, I began to feel resentful of the good fortune of my fellow POWs, who were not suffering the deprivation I was then experiencing. Some POWs in the camp had roommates, each with his own washrag—two and three washrags to the cell! Surely, I rationalized, three men could make do with two washrags.