John McCain, Prisoner of War: A First-Person Account – Part V
My younger brother, Joe, was very active in the National League of Families of American Prisoners of War and Missing in Action in Southeast Asia. That was the umbrella for all the POW family groups. So he has filled me in on why the North Vietnamese attitude toward the American prisoners changed, and given me this information:
As the bombing of the North picked up in 1965, 1966, Hanoi made its first propaganda display by parading beaten, subjugated American pilots through the streets. To their surprise, the press reaction around the world was generally negative.
Next, the North Vietnamese tried the tactic of forcing Cdr. Dick Stratton to appear and apologize for war crimes. But he had obviously been mistreated, and was doing this only under extreme duress. That backfired, too. They followed this by releasing two groups of three POW’s in February and October, 1968. These men had been there less than six months and had suffered no significant weight loss and were in pretty good shape.
Until the Nixon Administration came to office in 1969, the Government back home had taken the attitude: “Don’t talk about the prisoner-of-war situation lest you hurt the Americans still over there.” Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, early in 1969, went over to the peace talks with the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong in Paris. [Talks had begun under President Johnson late in 1968.] Laird took pictures of severely beaten men, such as Frishman, Stratton, Hegdahl—all of whom had suffered extreme weight loss. He got the photos through foreign news services. He told the North Vietnamese: “The Geneva Convention says that you shall release all sick and wounded prisoners. These men are sick and wounded. Why aren’t they released?”
In August, 1969, Hanoi let Frishman come home. He had no elbow—just a limp rubbery arm—and he had lost 65 pounds. Hegdahl came out and had lost 75 pounds. Also released was Wes Rumbull, who was in a body cast because of a broken back.
Frishman was allowed to hold a press conference and spilled out the details of torture and maltreatment. Headlines appeared all over the world, and from then on, starting in the fall of 1969, the treatment began to improve. We think this was directly attributable to the fact that Frishman was living proof of the mistreatment of Americans.
I’m proud of the part Joe and my wife, Carol, played here at home. The temptation for the wives, as the years went by, was to say, “God, I want them home under any circumstances.” When Carol was pressed to take this line, her answer was, “Just to get him home is not enough for me, and it’s not enough for John—I want him to come home standing up.”
I received very few letters from Carol. I got three in the first four months after I was shot down. The “gooks” let me have only one during the last four years I was there. I received my first package in May of 1969. After that, they let me have approximately one a year.
The reason I got so little mail was that Carol insisted on using the channels provided by the Geneva Convention for treatment of prisoners of war. She refused to send things through the Committee for Liaison with Families run by the antiwar groups.
This brings me to something that I want to discuss in more detail:
As you may know, back in 1954, the North Vietnamese had a big hand in toppling the French Government in Paris because the French voters had no more stomach for the Vietnam war their Government was waging at the time. That was the way the North Vietnamese won in 1954—they didn’t win in Vietnam.
The French agreed to pull out of Indo-China with no questions asked when they signed the agreement. As a result, they got back just one third of their POW’s.
I’m convinced that Hanoi hoped to win in our case by undermining morale among the people at home in America. They had to marshal world opinion on their side. I remember in 1968 or ’69 [North Vietnam Premier] Pham Van Dong’s speech to the National Assembly, because we were blasted with these things on the loud-speakers. The title of his address was, “The Whole World Supports Us,” not, “We Have Defeated the U. S. Aggressors,” or anything like that.
In 1969, after the three guys who were released went back to the U. S. and told about the brutality in the POW camps, President Nixon gave the green light to publicizing this fact. It brought a drastic change in our treatment. And I thank God for it, because if it hadn’t been for that a lot of us would never have returned.
Just one small example of the way things improved: Over my door were some bars, covered by a wooden board to keep me from seeing out, and to block ventilation. One night, around the end of September, 1969, “Slopehead,” the camp commander himself, came around and pulled this thing off, so that I could have some ventilation. I couldn’t believe it. Every night from then on they pulled that transom so I could get some ventilation. We started bathing more often. It was all very amazing.
In December of 1969 I was moved from “The Pentagon” over to “Las Vegas.” “Las Vegas” was a small area of Hoala Prison which was built by the French in 1945. It was known as the “Hanoi Hilton” to Americans. “Heartbreak Hotel” is also there—that’s the first place that people were usually taken for their initial interrogations and then funneled out to other camps.
This whole prison is an area of about two city blocks. At “Las Vegas,” I was put in a small building of just three rooms called the “Gold Nugget.” We named the buildings after the hotels in Vegas—there was the “Thunderbird,” “Stardust,” “Riviera,” “Gold Nugget” and the “Desert Inn.”
I was moved into the “Gold Nugget,” and immediately I was able to establish communications with the men around the camp, because the bath area was right out my window, and I could see through cracks in the doors of the bath and we would communicate that way. I stayed in that one, in solitary confinement, until March of 1970.
There was pressure to see American antiwar delegations, which seemed to increase as the time went on. But there wasn’t any torture. In January of 1970, I was taken to a quiz with “The Cat.” He told me that he wanted me to see a foreign guest. I told him what I had always told him before: that I would see the visitor, but I would not say anything against my country, and if I was asked about my treatment I would tell them how harsh it was. Much to my surprise he said, “Fine, you don’t have to say anything.” I told him I’d have to think about it. I went back to my room and I asked the senior American officer in our area what his opinion was, and he said he thought that I should go ahead.
So I went to see this visitor who said he was from Spain, but who I later heard was from Cuba. He never asked me any questions about controversial subjects or my treatment or my feelings about the war. I told him I had no remorse about what I did, and that I would do it over again if the same opportunity presented itself. That seemed to make him angry, because he was a sympathizer of the North Vietnamese.
At the time this happened, a photographer came in and took a couple of pictures. I had told “The Cat” that I didn’t want any such publicity. So when I came back—the interview lasted about 15, 20 minutes—I told him I wasn’t going to see another visitor because he had broken his word. Also at that time Capt. Jeremiah Denton, who was running our camp at that time, established a policy that we should not see any delegations.
In March, I got a roommate, Col. John Finley, Air Force. He and I lived together for approximately two months. A month after he moved in, “The Cat” told me I was going to see another delegation. I refused and was forced to sit on a stool in the “Heartbreak” courtyard area for three days and nights. Then I was sent back to my room.
The pressure continued on us to see antiwar delegations. By early in June I was moved away from Colonel Finley to a room that they called “Calcutta,” about 50 yards away from the nearest prisoners. It was 6 feet by 2 feet with no ventilation in it, and it was very, very hot. During the summer I suffered from heat prostration a couple or three times, and dysentery. I was very ill. Washing facilities were nonexistent. My food was cut down to about half rations. Sometimes I’d go for a day or so without eating.
All during this time I was taken out to interrogation and pressured to see the antiwar people. I refused.
Finally I moved in September to another room which was back in the camp but separated from everything else. That was what we called “the Riviera.” I stayed in there until December, 1970. I had good communications, because there was a door facing the outside and a kind of louvered window above it. I used to stand up on my bucket and was able to take my toothbrush and flash the code to other prisoners, and they would flash back to me.
In December I moved into “Thunderbird,” one of the big buildings with about 15 rooms in it. The communication was very good. We would tap between rooms. I learned a lot about acoustics. You can tap—if you get the right spot on the wall—and hear a guy four or five rooms away.
Late in December, 1970—about the twentieth, I guess—I was allowed to go out during the day with four other men. On Christmas night we were taken out of our room and moved into the “Camp Unity” area, which was another part of Hoala. We had a big room, where there were about 45 of us, mostly from “Vegas.”
There were seven large rooms, usually with a concrete pedestal in the center, where we slept with 45 or 50 guys each room. We had a total of 335 prisoners at that time.
There were four or five guys who were not in good shape that they kept separated from us. The Colonels Flynn, Wynn, Bean and Caddis also were kept separate. They did not move in with us at that time.
Our “den mother” was “The Bug” again, much to our displeasure. He made life very difficult for us. He wouldn’t let us have meetings of more than three people at one time.
They were afraid we were going to set up political indoctrination. They wouldn’t let us have church service. “The Bug” would not recognize our senior officer’s rank. This is one thing that they did right up until the end, till the day we left. If they had worked through our seniors, they would have gotten co-operation out of us. This was a big source of irritation all the time.
In March of 1971 the senior officers decided that we would have a showdown over church. This was an important issue for us. It also was a good one to fight them on. We went ahead and held church. The men that were conducting the service were taken out of the room immediately. We began to sing hymns in loud voices and “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
The “gooks” thought it was a riot situation. They brought in the ropes and were practicing judo holds and that kind of stuff. After about a week or two they started taking the senior officers out of our room and putting them over in another building.
Later in March they came in and took three or four of us out of every one of the seven rooms until they got 36 of us out. We were put in a camp we called “Skid Row,” a punishment camp. We stayed there from March until August, when we came back for about four weeks because of flooding conditions around Hanoi, and then we went back out again until November.
They didn’t treat us badly there. The guards had permission to knock us around if we were unruly. However, they did not have permission to start torturing us for propaganda statements. The rooms were very small, about 6 feet by 4 feet, and we were in solitary again. The most unpleasant thing about it was thinking of all our friends living in a big room together. But compared with ’69 and before, it was a piece of cake.
The great advantage to living in a big room is that way only a couple or three guys out of the group have to deal with the “gooks.” When you’re living by yourself, then you’ve got to deal with them all the time. You always have some fight with them. Maybe you’re allowed 15 minutes to bathe, and the “gook” will say in five minutes you’ve got to go back. So you have an argument with him, and he locks you in your room so you don’t get to bathe for a week. But when you’re in a big room with others, you can stay out of contact with them and it’s a lot more pleasant.
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