Faith of My Fathers (34 page)

My father wrote empathetically to Mrs. Flynn, commiserating with her that they must resign themselves to trusting in God and the courage of their loved ones as the only assurance that they would come home. “There is little anyone can say and even less they can do when personal tragedy strikes,” he wrote. “Our hearts are with you.”

The second letter was a reply to the friend with whom I had completed the escape and evasion course in Germany. He had written my parents to share his observations of me, assuring them that I had been well prepared for my present adverse circumstances and possessed the ability to “come away from this situation in good condition, and to be an example to others.” My father wrote back that he and my mother had “derived much reassurance from the account of your experiences [with John].”

The last letter was a reply to Admiral B. M. “Smoke” Strean, who was the Deputy Chief of Navy Personnel and had approved my transfer to the
Oriskany
after the
Forrestal
fire. Admiral Strean had “hesitated to write because I feel I had a part in this—in helping him get what he wanted—and thus a feeling of some blame in the outcome.” Strean assured my father that his normal practice was to go slowly when considering requests for “unscheduled assignments which carry some hazard…. [But] your son badly wanted this assignment.”

My father quickly wrote back to reassure his apologetic friend: “I deeply appreciate your letter. You are a great man in every respect. You should have no regrets. I have no regrets. John wanted to go back and I know he would not have been happy otherwise. I am proud of him.”

Few close observers of my father ever detected that my captivity caused him great suffering. He never let his concern affect his attention to duty or restrain him from prosecuting the war to the greatest extent his civilian commanders allowed.

However, his closest aides knew he kept a personal file containing all reported information about the POWs, the location and conditions of the camps, and every scrap of intelligence about me that could be obtained. Included in my father's file were copies of the letters I had written to Carol, as well as some copies of letters that other prisoners had written to their wives.

During my first months of captivity I was allowed to write several letters to Carol, a privilege I attributed to the publicity surrounding my capture. Eventually, the Vietnamese withdrew the privilege and restricted me to one or two letters a year. Not until late in 1969 would prisoners be allowed to write home on a monthly basis.

Carol wrote me every month. The Vietnamese withheld all but a few of her letters from me. She also sent me many packages, few of which I received, and none of which contained all the items she had sent. With the exception of 1971 and 1972, I would usually receive a package at or sometime after Christmas.

It was always clear that the guards had taken most of the contents as their share before passing a package on to me. Sometimes I received candy, instant soup, socks, and underwear. Once I received pipe tobacco but not the pipe that had been included with it. One package contained only a single pair of skivvies and a bottle of vitamins. The Vietnamese had neglected to remove the shipping receipt that indicated the package had originally contained five pounds of material.

That I received so few of Carol's letters and packages is probably attributable to Carol's refusal to send them through the offices of the antiwar organization COLIAFAM, the Committee of Liaison with Families of Servicemen Detained in North Vietnam. COLIAFAM had arranged with the Vietnamese government to be exclusively authorized to process letters and packages to the POWs. Many families, including mine, refused to sanction this abridgment of a prisoner's right under the Geneva Convention to receive mail without interference from his captors or any agency working on his behalf.

One Christmas, Carol received a letter from COLIAFAM denouncing the resumption of the bombing campaign in the North and demanding an immediate and total withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam. A postscript contained a none too veiled threat, warning her that letters that were not delivered by COLIAFAM “will not be accepted and…may jeopardize [the prisoner's] mail rights.”

When I was a prisoner of war I resented the antiwar activists who had visited Hanoi and, wittingly or unwittingly, made our life in prison more miserable than it already was. Today I no longer bear any ill will for most of these people. I have made far too many mistakes in my own life to forever disparage people, most of whom were very young at the time, who long ago, and in the name of peace, made a bad mistake. I have not yet, however, managed to relinquish my resentment of COLIAFAM.

To exploit the anguish of families for the purpose of propagandizing and giving aid and comfort to the enemy is an offense so grievous that it merits denunciation even today, many years after the fact. Had COLIAFAM not intervened, the Vietnamese, for their own sake, would have eventually allowed us to send and receive mail without insisting that it serve the antiwar cause at home. Although I would have dearly loved to receive more mail, I was proud of Carol for refusing to cooperate in a plan to dishonor me. It took courage and wisdom on her part not to be enticed by COLIAFAM's “humanitarian gesture” into aiding my enemies.

My father never wrote me a letter during the war. He knew that the Vietnamese would have regarded a missive from him as a propaganda bonanza. He did try once to secretly pass a message to me.

Prisoners were required to write letters home on a preprinted six-line form. We were instructed to write only on the lines provided, to write legibly, and to restrict our message to comments about our health and family. Many POWs, however, managed to exceed our captors' instructions and pass encoded messages in their letters home.

For example, after my years in solitary ended, my first cellmate, John Finley, wrote a letter to his wife that asked her to say “hi to cousin King Mc, Abel and his brother.” His wife was puzzled by the request, as she knew no one by the name of Mc or Abel. Naval intelligence analyzed the letter, interpreted “Abel and his brother” as an allusion to Cain, and thus concluded that the writer was making a reference to McCain.

Two months later, John wrote another letter to his wife in which he very subtly distinguished certain letters. When the letters were read together they spelled
MCCAIN MY MATE
.

I, too, tried to pass hidden messages in my letters. Lacking John Finley's ingenuity, I was considerably less subtle in the means I used. Vietnamese writing makes frequent use of accent marks. I borrowed the fashion for my letters to Carol, placing marks above certain letters to spell out my secret message.

My technique was quite obvious, and Carol noticed it immediately. In the first letter in which I attempted covert communication, the marked letters spelled out
LCOL GUY
, a reference to Ted Guy, who was then my senior at the Plantation. In another I passed on that
CRANERMATE
[Craner and Gruters]
WELL
. In another, I informed her that I
GET NO MAIL I AM OK
.

After reading these letters, Carol, properly, sent them on to naval intelligence, where my lack of sophistication in encryption aroused considerable concern. An intelligence officer wrote my father's aide to apprise him of my efforts, and of their concern that my messages were so indiscreet that it was “hard to see how they passed even basic censorship.”

The officer asked my father's permission to use one of Carol's letters to me to transmit a carefully hidden caution. My father agreed and ordered the message to read,
JUNIOR URGES CAUTION PLEASE STOP THIS
.

I would have been surprised to receive the message, for I thought I was a fairly clever communicator, or, more honestly, I trusted in the dull wits of the Vietnamese censors to compensate for my indiscretion. As it turned out, my trust was well placed. I never received my father's warning, because the Vietnamese withheld Carol's letters from me. So I kept on sending messages in my letters. The Vietnamese never caught me.

Had I received the old man's message, I might have been a little put out, but I think I also would have appreciated the indication of his concern. I would have taken some comfort in the knowledge that he was, as best he could, watching out for me.

The Navy did manage to get one message through to me. Some weeks after my transfer to Hoa Lo in late 1969, the Vietnamese gave me a package from Carol that they had been holding for a while. It had survived inspection with a few of its original contents intact: a few cans of a vitamin-rich baby formula, a bottle of vitamins, several handkerchiefs, and one tin of candy.

Carol hoped the baby formula would compensate for the nutrition-free diet the Vietnamese provided us. It was intended to be mixed with milk. Lacking any, I had to mix it with water. The result was so unpalatable that despite my chronic hunger, I simply couldn't stomach the stuff, and I threw the rest away.

The candy was another matter. The can contained about twenty pieces of chocolate with vanilla centers. They were such a prized treat that I decided to ration them, savoring one piece each day. On the fourth or fifth day, as I was rejoicing in the pleasure of eating my daily ration, chewing it slowly and deliberately, I felt a foreign particle in the center of the chocolate. I spit it on the ground and finished eating.

A few moments later, thinking it strange that the manufacturers of the candy would have tolerated such poor quality control, I picked the object up to inspect it. It was a tiny plastic capsule. Excitedly, I moved into the shadows in a corner of my cell, where I tried to open the capsule. Although a naked lightbulb lit my cell twenty-four hours a day, it was of such low wattage that it only dimly illuminated a small area. Almost no natural light infiltrated my cell, and I was free to work on the capsule unseen even in daylight hours.

The capsule was fitted very tightly, and I had a difficult time prying it open. I spent a long time working at it unsuccessfully. Finally I found a sliver of bamboo and used it to push the capsule apart. Inside was a small, folded, incredibly thin piece of plastic. I unfolded it and read the message that the Navy had written on it.

The message read something like:

I HOPE YOU ARE WELL. YOUR FAMILY IS FINE. THE LINER OF THIS CAN WORKS LIKE INVISIBLE INK. PLACE IT OVER YOUR LETTERS. PRESS A HARD OBJECT ON IT. IT WILL WRITE SECRET MESSAGE.

I was elated and very encouraged. The Navy was trying to communicate with me, a clear sign that our country had not forgotten about us. I extracted the white paper liner from the can, inspected it to see if I could detect the invisible residue that coated it, and impatiently waited for my first opportunity to put the thing to good use.

Unfortunately, the Vietnamese chose this particular time to change their normal practice of supervising the prisoners' letter writing. Over the last year, they had allowed me to write home once every few months. They would give me the form, and I would write my few lines, which they then took away and inspected. If it met with their approval, they would return with it and tell me to copy it word for word on a second form. Up until this time, I had always been left alone in my cell to transcribe the letter onto the second form.

The next time they gave me leave to write home, I hurriedly scribbled a few lines on the first form and anxiously awaited the guards' return with the second. To my great disappointment, after my letter passed inspection, the guards took me to the interrogation room to copy it while they watched. I have no idea what precipitated this change in the routine. Perhaps they had begun to suspect that I was writing in some kind of code. Or perhaps they had discovered another prisoner using a device to pass hidden messages in his letters home. I never learned what had aroused their suspicions. But whatever it was, it effectively prevented me from ever using the device the Navy had hoped would enable me to pass messages by less obvious means than I had been employing.

After this latest letter, the Vietnamese curtailed my letter-writing privilege for a long time. When many months later they restored the privilege, they never again allowed me to write a single word outside the presence of guards. I was never able to use the liner.

Despite my disappointment, the experience, on the whole, was an uplifting one. The attempt to facilitate communication with naval intelligence was welcome evidence of the Navy's concern and its desire to gain a fuller understanding of our situation, information I assumed it would use to our benefit. I was cheered and gratified by the effort even though it was unsuccessful.

My father did not meet with any of the prisoners who had been released early. But his file contained all their debriefing reports and reports from officers who had talked with them about me.

In a conversation that was reported to my father, a prisoner, one of the August 1968 releases whom I had been invited to join, informed his debriefing officer that according to camp rumor I had refused release.

Doug Hegdahl and two other prisoners were released in August 1969. An intelligence officer who interviewed Hegdahl asked them for information about me, and cabled my father the following report:

YOUR SON WAS SERIOUSLY WOUNDED WHEN SHOT DOWN IN HANOI BUT HAS MADE FINE RECOVERY AND NOW, ACCORDING THIS GROUP, LOOKS
“
QUITE WELL
.”
HE HAS BEEN EVERYTHING YOU WANT YOUR SON TO BE AND HAS STOOD UP MANFULLY AGAINST ALL EFFORTS TO PERSUADE HIM TO UTTER TRAITOROUS STATEMENTS.

In a subsequent report from Hegdahl, my father was informed about my efforts to disrupt the Christmas service in 1968. Hegdahl also remarked that “John is known in the camp as a daredevil. He frequently gets caught attempting to communicate with other PWs.” Hegdahl thoughtfully concluded his report with the observation that the other prisoners respected me for refusing to cooperate with the North Vietnamese.