In my first cellblock in Unity, Building Number 7, I lived with many of the more senior prisoners. Air Force Colonel Vernon Ligon was the senior ranking officer. Robbie Risner, Jim Stockdale, and Jerry Denton were his deputies. Near the end of 1971, I would be moved into another cellblock, Number 2, with Orson. Bud Day, the ranking officer in Number 3, assumed command of our squadron.
Until we were all moved into Unity, I had not had the pleasure of Bud’s company since we had parted at the Plantation three years earlier. Bud had been held at Hoa Lo while I was living in Little Vegas, but out of reach of my communication chain. For most of the years preceding our reunion, Bud had suffered awful conditions and monstrous cruelty at the Zoo, where mass torture was a routine practice. For a time, the camp personnel at the Zoo included an English-speaking Cuban, called “Fidel” by the POWs, who delighted in breaking Americans, even when the task required him to torture his victim to death.
Bud was the third-ranking officer at the Zoo, after Larry Guarino and Navy Commander Wendell Rivers. When Larry and Wendy were moved to Vegas, Bud became the SRO. To the poor souls who shared the misfortune of being imprisoned in the Zoo, Bud was as great an inspiration as he had been to me during our few months together.
I doubt I will ever meet a tougher man than Bud Day. After the Dramesi-Atterbury escape, treatment worsened in all the camps, but it reached an astonishing level of depravity in the camp they had escaped from—the Zoo. Men were taken in large groups to various torture rooms where they were beaten, roped, stomped on, and struck with bamboo clubs. Their wrists and ankles were shackled in irons. Few were gagged. The Vietnamese wanted the others to hear the screams of the tortured. This new terror campaign was intended to destroy any semblance of prisoner resistance. It lasted for months.
The Vietnamese introduced a new torment to their punishment regime—flogging with fan belts. Prisoners were stripped and forced to lie facedown on the floor. Guards would take turns whipping them with fan belts, which unlike ropes and cords would only raise welts on the sufferer’s back and not tear his flesh. They would not relent until their victim had mumbled his assent to whatever statement their torturers demanded he make. The senior officers were spared this treatment for some time. The Vietnamese wanted them to witness the suffering of their subordinates before turning the full brunt of their malevolence on them.
Guarino was the first senior to be taken. He was rope-tortured, sleep-deprived, clubbed, and whipped for weeks, until at long last he broke and gave the Vietnamese an acceptable confession.
Bud was next. His arms were still useless from the rope torture he had experienced after his capture. This time they would flog him nearly to death before he relented. They made him confess to knowledge of elaborate escape planning in the camp, planning that John or Ed would have been grateful for had it truly existed. The Vietnamese wanted names. Bud would only give them his. They flogged him some more until to his great sorrow he gave them two more names. When they stopped, he took it back, claiming that the men he named were innocent, as indeed they were.
They resumed the torture, demanding that Bud inform on another prisoner, Wendy Rivers. Bud refused, and was whipped again. After six weeks his ordeal finally ended.
Nothing that happened to me during my time in prison approximated the suffering that these men, who had steeled themselves with an unyielding devotion to duty, survived. That they had survived was itself an act of heroism. I had experienced a few rough moments, and, out of spite for my enemies as much as from my sense of duty, I had tried to fight back. But these men, and the many other prisoners whose heroism made them legends, humbled me, as they humble me today whenever I recall what they did for their country and for those of us who were once privileged to witness their courage.
–– CHAPTER 25 ––
Skid Row
In February 1971, we began a dispute with the Vietnamese over their refusal to allow us to conduct religious services in a manner we thought fitting. The Church Riot began when the camp edict against POWs gathering in groups larger than six and against one man addressing large groups was used to forbid us to hold services. Our SRO ordered us to challenge the prohibition. On Sunday, February 7, we held a church service. We had informed our warden, Bug, of our intentions. George Coker began the service, and Rutledge gave the opening prayer. Robbie Risner read the closing prayer. A four-man choir sang hymns.
Soon Bug arrived and yelled at us to stop. He ordered the choir to cease singing. He was ignored, and the service continued. In a rage, Bug had the guards haul Risner, Coker, and Rutledge out into the courtyard. As they were led out, Bud Day started singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and soon every man in every cellblock joined in. When we finished the anthem, we started on a succession of patriotic tunes. The whole prison reverberated with our singing, and the wild applause that erupted at the end of every number. It was a glorious moment.
Finally, the Vietnamese managed to disrupt our fun when they marched in en masse, arrayed in full riot gear, and broke up the party.
Risner, Rutledge, and Coker were taken to a punishment cell in the part of the Hilton we called “Heartbreak Hotel.” Our SRO, Vernon Ligon, warned Bug that we would hold church services next Sunday, and every Sunday after that.
Bud Day, Jim Kasler, and I were among a number of POWs ordered out of the room to be interrogated and harangued by camp authorities for our criminal behavior. We were taken out separately, and the expression on the guards’ faces as they escorted us at bayonet point indicated the seriousness of the situation.
A number of senior Vietnamese officers from various camps were standing together in the courtyard, officers who had been responsible for the brutality we had endured in the bad old days. But they were no longer permitted to use torture as a first resort to coerce our submission, and they appeared anxious and uncertain about how to cope with our new assertiveness.
When we were returned to our room, Bud, Bill Lawrence, and I discussed our captors’ predicament, and how at odds they all seemed. We were emboldened by their confusion. The guards placed ladders against our building and stood on the rungs to peer into our window and scribble notes about our behavior. Their notes were used by the camp officers to determine which POWs should be moved to other cells and camps. The quality of the food declined from bad to awful. Jerry Denton ordered us to begin a hunger strike until our grievances were settled and Risner, Rutledge, and Coker were returned to us.
One evening, a few nights after the riot, one of the two collaborators at Hoa Lo who had ratted on me for trying to talk to them read a poem over the camp loudspeakers that he had written about the riot. The poem was titled “Cowards Sing at Night.” It scorned us for raising our voices in protest to sing the national anthem.
By this time, the poem’s author did not have any friends in camp besides the Vietnamese and his fellow collaborator. Most of us pitied him more than we hated him. That night, however, after he finished his poetry reading, there were any number of prisoners who would have killed him had they had the opportunity to do so.
At week’s end, Soft Soap Fairy announced that it had always been the policy of camp authorities to permit religious expression. Therefore, we would be allowed to hold brief religious services as long as we didn’t abuse their tolerance to further our “black schemes.”