We were released from Skid Row in three groups. Bud, Orson, and I, our bad attitudes uncorrected by our time in exile, were in the last group to leave. In November 1971, we were finally reunited with our friends at Camp Unity and put into a cellblock together, our morale restored.
–– CHAPTER 26 ––
Pledge of Allegiance
During the last fourteen months at Camp Unity, I served as entertainment officer, appointed to the post by Bud Day. In this capacity I was ably assisted by a number of my roommates, most notably Orson Swindle and Air Force Captains Jim Sehorn and Warren Lilly. We enjoyed the work.
Bud designated me room chaplain, an office I took quite seriously even though I lacked any formal training for it. Orson and I also served as the communication officers for the room, charged with maintaining regular contact with the other rooms in Unity. We both had plenty of experience for the work, and despite my reputation for recklessness, I prided myself on the job we did.
We never let a holiday or a birthday pass without arranging a small, crude, but welcome celebration. Gifts fashioned out of odd scraps of material and our few meager possessions were bestowed on every prisoner celebrating a birthday. A skit, always ribald and ridiculous, was performed to commemorate the occasion by embarrassing the celebrant. Marine Corps, Navy, and Air Force anniversaries were also formally observed.
Both an avid reader and a movie fan, I took great pride in narrating movies and books from memory. With a captive audience, I would draw out the telling of a novel, embellishing here and there to add length and excitement, for hours before I lost the audience’s interest. Among the texts both the audience and I enjoyed most were works of Kipling, Maugham, and Hemingway.
Our most popular entertainments, however, were our productions of Sunday, Wednesday, and Saturday Nights at the Movies. I told over a hundred movies in prison, some of them many times over. I tried to recall every movie I had ever seen from Stalag 17 to One-Eyed Jacks (a camp favorite). Often running short of popular fare, I would make up movies I had never seen. Pilots shot down during air raids in 1972 were a valuable resource for me. They had seen movies that I had not. Desperate for new material, I would pester them almost as soon as they arrived and before they had adjusted to their new circumstances. “What movies have you seen lately? Tell me about them.” On first acquaintance, they probably thought prison life had seriously affected my mind. But they would give me a few details, and from that I would concoct another movie for Saturday night. Movies had become a lot more risqué in the five years I had been away. I narrated a few of these as well, and my audience was all the more attentive.
My performance was usually well received, although on occasion some of the men’s interest flagged when watching a repeat performance for the fourth or fifth time. However, I always enjoyed the undivided attention of one inveterate movie fan.
Air Force Major Konrad Trautman, a reserved, precise son of German immigrants, never missed a performance. He would take his seat early and wait patiently for the movie to begin. With a pipe filled with cigarette tobacco clenched tightly between his teeth, he sat impassively, never making a sound. He listened intently to every word I uttered. No matter how many times he had seen a movie or how crude the production, Konrad never betrayed the least hint of disappointment. Fans like that are hard to come by for even the most celebrated actor, and I always took great encouragement from Konrad’s evident appreciation of my qualities as a thespian.
During the Christmas season we performed a different skit and sang carols in our crudely decorated room every night for the five nights before Christmas. A longer production was saved for Christmas night. Orson Swindle and I, with a few other guys, staged a mangled production of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. We livened up the venerable tale with parody, most of it vulgar, to the great amusement of our howling audience. Jack Fellowes played Tiny Tim, attired in nothing but a makeshift diaper. Another, not known for his particularly feminine appearance, was chosen to play Bob Cratchit’s wife.
A week before, Bud had asked Bug for an English-language Bible. Bug initially dismissed the request with a lie, claiming that there were no Bibles in North Vietnam. A few days later, perhaps remembering that his interference with the practice of our religion had resulted in the Church Riot earlier that year, Bug announced that a Bible, “the only one in Hanoi,” had been located. One prisoner was to be designated to copy passages from it for a few minutes.
As room chaplain, I was given the assignment. I collected the Bible from where it had been left by a guard, on a table in the courtyard just outside our cell door. Hastily, I leafed through its tattered pages until I found an account of the Nativity. I quickly copied the passage, and finished just moments before a guard arrived to retrieve the Bible.
On Christmas night we held our simple, moving service. We began with the Lord’s Prayer, after which a choir sang carols, directed by the former conductor of the Air Force Academy Choir, Captain Quincy Collins. I thought they were quite good, excellent, in fact. Although I confess that the regularity with which they practiced in the weeks prior to Christmas occasionally grated on my nerves.
But that night, the hymns were rendered with more feeling and were more inspirational than the offerings of the world’s most celebrated choirs. We all joined in the singing, nervous and furtive at first, fearing the guards would disrupt the service if we sang too loudly. With each hymn, however, we grew bolder, and our voices rose with emotion.
Between each hymn, I read a portion of the story of Christ’s birth from the pages I had copied.
“‘And the Angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day, in the city of David, a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.’”
The night air was cold, and we shivered from its effect and from the fever that still plagued some of us. The sickest among us, unable to stand, sat on the raised concrete sleeping platform in the middle of the room, blankets around their shaking shoulders. Many others, stooped by years of torture, or crippled from injuries sustained during their shootdown, stood, some on makeshift crutches, as the service proceeded.
The lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling illuminated our gaunt, unshaven, dirty, and generally wretched congregation. But for a moment we all had the absolutely exquisite feeling that our burdens had been lifted. Some of us had attended Christmas services in prison before. But they had been Vietnamese productions, spiritless, ludicrous stage shows. This was our service, the only one we had ever been allowed to hold. It was more sacred to me than any service I had attended in the past, or any service I have attended since.
We gave prayers of thanks for the Christ child, for our families and homes, for our country. We half expected the guards to barge in and force us to conclude the service. Every now and then we glanced up at the windows to see if they were watching us as they had during the Church Riot. But when I looked up at the bars that evening, I wished they had been looking in. I wanted them to see us—faithful, joyful, and triumphant.