As part of Vietnamese efforts to convince the world that we were being well treated, they had recently stopped using letter-writing privileges as a tool to force our cooperation and begun encouraging us to write home often. It occurred to me that this change in prison policy offered an excellent opportunity to take advantage of our enemy’s eagerness to improve their public image. I thought it fitting to use a privilege that had often been denied us to suit Hanoi’s war ends as a means to suit our own.
I proposed to our senior officers that we begin a letter-writing moratorium until our treatment and conditions were improved. If men were physically abused for refusing to write home, I suggested we write honestly about our mistreatment. I was confident the Vietnamese would never let such letters reach our worried families.
After some discussion our senior officers agreed, but, wisely, made the no-letter policy voluntary. Some men had not communicated with their families for years and were understandably anxious to let their families know they were all right. By summer, however, nearly everyone was refusing to write home.
On the evening of March 17, less than three months after we had begun living in large groups, Bud Day, Orson Swindle, and I were taken from our rooms. Along with twenty-four others, several men from each room in Camp Unity, we were blindfolded, loaded into trucks, and driven to a punishment camp ten miles outside Hanoi, a place we called “Skid Row.”
During the trip, some of the prisoners tried to fix the location of our destination. It was a common practice for POWs to keep a mental record of directions and distance when we were being relocated. One man was designated to control the vectors by memorizing each turn of the truck in sequence while another silently counted the time that elapsed between turns.
The exercise required extraordinary concentration, but usually yielded a remarkably accurate estimate of our location. It was not something that I was very good at it, however, and so I never seriously attempted to join in the exercise. Wherever we were heading, we would still be prisoners of war in North Vietnam when we arrived there. While I was as curious as the next guy about our destination, I knew that those basic facts of our existence would not be affected by a change of scenery. So that night I bounced along in the back of the truck, blindfolded and tied in ropes, silently cursing my bad luck, while my friends concentrated on their labors.
We had been singled out for our bad attitude, which I somewhat regretted, for it had cost me the open society of Camp Unity. But punishment wasn’t the only purpose of our exile from Camp Unity. The Vietnamese had decided to round up all the troublemakers whose influence with the other prisoners made it difficult to maintain order and discipline in the new living arrangements at Hoa Lo. Thus, though we were not happy about our relocation, we all took a certain pride in our distinction as the camp’s hard cases. The POWs who remained at Camp Unity called us the “Hell’s Angels.”
We were kept in solitary confinement in small cells, six by four feet, each with a narrow wooden bunk. The cells had no ventilation and were without lights or bathing facilities. The camp had a stinking well with human waste floating in its dank water. My morale sank.
Bud Day remained our SRO. He was kept in one of the cells in the back of the building, while I occupied one in the front. Miserable, we took to insulting and arguing with our guards. Bud ordered us to knock it off, believing that beatings were unlikely to improve our wretched circumstances. His order was occasionally disobeyed, as our anger undermined our discipline. Frustrated, Bud kept insisting that while we should not accept mistreatment without complaint, we should also refrain from unnecessarily provoking the guards.
Bud himself had been beaten and threatened with a fan belt a few weeks after our arrival at Skid Row, and had for a few days been locked on his bunk in stocks. He wanted to spare the rest of us such abuse if it could be avoided without compromising our principles. Overall, when we left the guards alone, they left us alone, satisfied that leaving us to suffer in such squalor was adequate punishment for our crimes. But Bud had a hard time keeping control over several of us. I regret that I occasionally added to my dear friend’s burden. My temper, worsened by my return to solitary confinement in this dismal camp, occasionally got the better of me.
A small space separated the cells in the front of the building from a brick wall. The upper part of each cell door was barred, but otherwise uncovered. Wooden shutters that could have been used to cover the bars were kept open for those of us in the front, while the windows in the back cell were usually kept closed. The Vietnamese routinely tried to undermine our solidarity by according some prisoners a privilege of open shutters while denying it to others. I was pleased to receive this particular privilege, as it mitigated the effect solitary confinement had on my morale.
During our first days in Skid Row, we communicated freely with each other through our barred windows, talking constantly and loudly, our voices bouncing off the wall in front of us. Initially the guards didn’t seem to mind our ceaseless chattering. Occasionally they warned us not to talk so loudly, but they made no other objection to our conversations.
After a week or so, senior prison authorities must have reminded our guards that Skid Row was meant to be a punishment camp for recalcitrant prisoners and instructed them not to show any leniency to us. One morning, as soon as we resumed our conversations of the previous day, the guards appeared, shouting, “No talking. No talking.”
“Bullshit,” I yelled back. “I’m going to talk.” Too accustomed now to unconstrained conversation, and still angry over our expulsion from Unity, I was in no mood to be silenced.
“No talking, Mac Kane!”
“Bullshit. I’m going to talk. You bastards kept me in solitary for years. You’re not going to shut me up now.”
One of the guards, intending to terminate any further protest on my part, slammed and locked the wooden shutter over the bars of my door, leaving me fuming in my darkened cell.
Refusing to back down, my anger now completely beyond control, I screamed at the guards, “Bao cao, bao cao. Open it up. Bao cao, bao cao. Open it up, you bastards, open it up.” The guards scurried off to find an officer. When they located one, they led him back to my cell and opened up the shutter, finding me red-faced and glaring at them through the bars.
“What’s wrong with you, Mac Kane?” the officer inquired.
“I’m not putting up with this shit anymore. That’s what’s wrong with me,” I answered. “I want to talk, and you’re not going to shut me up.”
The officer left without responding to my declaration, the guards hurrying after him. Ten minutes later, the guards returned and instructed me to roll up my sleeping mat and other belongings. I did as instructed. They escorted me from my cell and chucked me into the cell next door, which was occupied by Navy Lieutenant Pete Schoeffel.
This new arrangement suited me fine, and I quickly cooled off. But I doubt Pete welcomed the idea of sharing quarters as much as I did. The cells were hardly suited to cohabitation, measuring little larger than a cardboard box. Two men could barely stand shoulder to shoulder. Nevertheless, Pete took it all in good humor, graciously giving me leave to sleep in his bunk because of my bad leg, while he found what little comfort he could on the concrete floor.
In August, monsoon rains threatened to flood the Red River and Skid Row, and we were transferred back to Hoa Lo. For a brief moment we held out hope that we were being returned to Camp Unity.
Our hope was crushed when were marched into Heartbreak Hotel, where we were kept four and five to a room. The rooms were small and the conditions miserable. Many of the men became ill; a few were suffering from hepatitis. Tempers were frayed, and morale sank even lower. A couple of months later we were taken back to Skid Row, which, given the awful conditions at Heartbreak, was almost a relief. While conditions remained miserable, the Vietnamese lightened up on the discipline, and we were allowed to talk among ourselves without fear of further punishment.