thedrifter
01-09-04, 08:35 AM
30 years ago, POWs in North Vietnam left behind torture and deprivation
Trudi Hahn, Star Tribune
Published 11/11/2003
Cole Black was hurting and hungry.
For a week, his North Vietnamese captors had used the rope trick, repeatedly tying his arms behind him so tightly that his shoulders dislocated.
The farm kid from Lake City, Minn., was a 33-year-old Navy lieutenant commander flying a combat mission off the USS Hancock in an F8E Crusader when he was shot down June 21, 1966. Villagers traded him for a sack of rice to army regulars who trucked him to Hoa Lo Prison, nicknamed the Hanoi Hilton.
Black begged to be killed, but his torturers didn't comply. You will find it easy to die, they told him, but very hard to live. "We will reduce you to a dog," they said. After seven days of ropes, both his arms were limp and unusable when a guard escorted him to a cell in the prison's Heartbreak Hotel section.
A bowl of green swill sat on the floor. Sagging over the bowl was weevil-infested bread, a rat was gnawing on one end.
The guard kicked the rat away and slammed the door. Unable to pick up the bowl, Black sank to his knees. Like any dog on the farm back home, he shoved his face into his food and began to eat.
Three decades ago, 472 prisoners of war were freed from North Vietnamese prisons. (In all, 765 came home from countries holding POWs.) Most were college-educated pilots and navigators who came home to heroes' welcomes and then resumed military careers in a country that had been torn apart by a lengthy, unpopular war.
"It was uncomfortable to be Vietnam vets," so for a long time people didn't talk about it, said Vietnam veteran Chuck Shantag.
Shantag and his wife, Mary, keep in contact with former Vietnam-era POWs for their Web site, http://www.pownetwork.org.
For this Veterans Day, Black and three other former POWs with Upper Midwest roots looked back more than 30 years to their experiences in North Vietnamese prisons.
In the early years, the Communists set about systematic torture to get military-target information, which the airmen usually didn't have. Written confessions also were demanded of the POWs, who were considered war criminals by the North Vietnamese.
At no time did Hanoi comply with the rules of the Geneva Conventions, which spell out acceptable treatment for prisoners.
"You were just trying to live for five more minutes," Black, now a retired Navy captain, said by phone from his home in Escondido, Calif.
To survive, the POWs relied on faith in God and country, support from each other, humor and the thought of getting home.
The 'Hanoi March'
After the rope torture, Black was put in solitary confinement for two weeks. On a slanted concrete slab, his ankles were crushed into too-small leg irons that broke his skin and squeezed his muscles to the bone. The green soup, made from a stalk harvested from sewage ditches, was served often, and often had not been boiled long enough to kill bacteria. The result: diarrhea.
He had to sit in the excrement. "Periodically," he said, he was uncuffed and allowed to clean up.
On July 6, 1966, Black got what he calls his first Hanoi "liberty," or sailor's night out, when he and scores of other POWs were forced through the sultry streets in the "Hanoi March." The men were beaten by angry mobs, and they feared they would be killed.
Later, back at Hoa Lo Prison, with blood running from a split lip and a battered face, Black was taken to a dreaded torture cell, but no torture took place. Three MiG pilots came in and were served beer by a guard who then left. The pilots asked Black several questions about how Navy pilots managed low-level dogfighting without crashing. The session ended abruptly when all three North Vietnamese stood up and talked among themselves. They turned to Black and, as a sign of respect to a fellow aviator, pushed their beers toward him and left the room.
Six months at a time
Time moved slowly for men, like Black, who spent seven birthdays in prison. He had all day for chores, such as trimming his fingernails by rubbing them across the concrete floors.
Time moved slowly for families back home, too. Retired Air Force Col. Richard Bolstad was a 36-year-old captain when he was shot down Nov. 6, 1965, while flying a propeller-driven A-1E Skyraider on a search-and-rescue mission out of Udorn Air Base, Thailand. Two years later, word that he was alive reached his family in Minneapolis.
Bolstad, interviewed at his Williamsburg, Va., home, said that when Christmas 1965 passed and he wasn't home, he focused on getting home by Independence Day, then by the next Christmas. Fourteen times he held hope, six months at a time. With the cease-fire of January 1973, he, Black and the other longest-held pilots flew out on the first of several freedom flights, Feb. 12, 1973.
In late March 1973, after all known prisoners had been flown out of Vietnam, he told the Minneapolis Tribune about the torture.
From a prison camp nicknamed the Briarpatch, where he was locked in a room and tied with ropes for the full month of August 1966, to the Zoo to the Hanoi Hilton, "if you did anything that displeased them, you could expect to be beaten or forced to kneel with your hands up in the air or put in leg irons or put in tight forearm manacles or put in handcuffs or placed in solitary confinement," he said.
He left out "holding up the wall," being forced to stand chest against the wall, hands held high, from early morning to evening, sometimes for weeks. Black said that enduring it was a continuation of military service: If guards had to watch, they weren't harassing other prisoners, who might be trying to communicate.
Communicating brought the worst torture, Bolstad said. But, said Black, it was crucial to try, especially with some new arrival who had probably been beaten and was severely depressed.
The POWs started using a tap code between cells. John (Spike) Nasmyth, in his POW memoir "2,355 Days," credits Bolstad with expanding the tap code to sweeping chores, spelling out letters with a pattern of swishes from his broom.
Amid such deep isolation, the POWs turned to spiritual guidance. Bolstad's religious regimen was simple.
"Pray, pray, pray," he said.
Torture subsides
Severe physical torture eased in 1969 with several events, including the death of North Vietnam's President Ho Chi Minh. Despite the better conditions, Hanoi never followed key provisions of the Geneva Conventions: to identify all prisoners held, to release the sick and injured, to permit impartial inspections and to permit free exchange of mail.
Maybe the information about less torture hadn't reached the angry North Vietnamese farmers who grabbed Rick Bates on Oct. 5, 1972, and bound his elbows behind him. Both shoulders popped. He was paraded around, beaten and cracked in the head with a rifle butt.
When he was shot down, retired Air Force Maj. Richard Bates was a 24-year-old first lieutenant, a fast FAC (forward air controller) in an F4E Phantom looking for targets out of Ubon Air Base, Thailand.
The air war had picked up in 1972, and airmen at high risk of being captured were briefed on what to expect in Hanoi prisons.
"One of the survival techniques they teach you is to feign shock and confusion," Bates, of Fort Worth, Texas, said last month at the home of retired Air Force Lt. Col. Tom Hanton in Falls Church, Va. "I did a really good job."
His interrogator gave an order in broken English: "You must cooperate or you will be Spanish!"
The dazed American almost giggled at the error. After a while, he figured out the threat: If he didn't cooperate, he would be punished.
The South Dakota boy was stashed in a bunker tunnel about 3 feet by 4 feet by 7 feet long that was, at times, bombed by American planes. His hands were bound every night, until he figured out how to untie them to ease the pain in his shoulders.
He said the Lord's Prayer a thousand times, and the 23rd Psalm a thousand times. Then he thought about his teenage years in the Twin Cities. He managed to remember the names of 92 of the 94 kids in the 1966 graduating class at Golden Valley High School. Then he worked the states in alphabetical order, with capitals, and then capitals in alphabetical order, with states.
After 30 days, he was trucked to the Hanoi Hilton. After another 30 days in solitary, he lived with a couple of cellmates in December 1972 in the Little Vegas section. Then, the Communists started one of their frequent shufflings of POWs, and the cell filled up.
"My Christmas present was 28 guys piling into my room," he said. Among them was Hanton. Bates had done air searches for the navigator after Hanton was shot down June 27, 1972. Now they were imprisoned together.
Mosquito glory
Capt. Hanton, then 27, had flown 133 successful missions in F4E Phantoms out of Da Nang, South Vietnam. His first mission out of Takhli Air Base, Thailand, ended in the same pattern that many airman had gone through: ejection from a shot-up plane and a beating from villagers on the ground, followed by 30 days in Hanoi Hilton solitary. He had a wooden platform bed, a latrine bucket and not much else in the humid Hanoi summer.
He tried the tap code; no one answered. He turned inward, to memory. Guards interrupted at odd hours, daytime, nighttime, anytime, demanding cooperation.
Once past solitary, Hanton worked at resisting, using the sort of adolescent tricks he had tried in eighth grade at St. Richard's parish school in Richfield.
"I'd do what they [guards] wanted done, but do it backwards, or screw it up," he said.
continued.......
Trudi Hahn, Star Tribune
Published 11/11/2003
Cole Black was hurting and hungry.
For a week, his North Vietnamese captors had used the rope trick, repeatedly tying his arms behind him so tightly that his shoulders dislocated.
The farm kid from Lake City, Minn., was a 33-year-old Navy lieutenant commander flying a combat mission off the USS Hancock in an F8E Crusader when he was shot down June 21, 1966. Villagers traded him for a sack of rice to army regulars who trucked him to Hoa Lo Prison, nicknamed the Hanoi Hilton.
Black begged to be killed, but his torturers didn't comply. You will find it easy to die, they told him, but very hard to live. "We will reduce you to a dog," they said. After seven days of ropes, both his arms were limp and unusable when a guard escorted him to a cell in the prison's Heartbreak Hotel section.
A bowl of green swill sat on the floor. Sagging over the bowl was weevil-infested bread, a rat was gnawing on one end.
The guard kicked the rat away and slammed the door. Unable to pick up the bowl, Black sank to his knees. Like any dog on the farm back home, he shoved his face into his food and began to eat.
Three decades ago, 472 prisoners of war were freed from North Vietnamese prisons. (In all, 765 came home from countries holding POWs.) Most were college-educated pilots and navigators who came home to heroes' welcomes and then resumed military careers in a country that had been torn apart by a lengthy, unpopular war.
"It was uncomfortable to be Vietnam vets," so for a long time people didn't talk about it, said Vietnam veteran Chuck Shantag.
Shantag and his wife, Mary, keep in contact with former Vietnam-era POWs for their Web site, http://www.pownetwork.org.
For this Veterans Day, Black and three other former POWs with Upper Midwest roots looked back more than 30 years to their experiences in North Vietnamese prisons.
In the early years, the Communists set about systematic torture to get military-target information, which the airmen usually didn't have. Written confessions also were demanded of the POWs, who were considered war criminals by the North Vietnamese.
At no time did Hanoi comply with the rules of the Geneva Conventions, which spell out acceptable treatment for prisoners.
"You were just trying to live for five more minutes," Black, now a retired Navy captain, said by phone from his home in Escondido, Calif.
To survive, the POWs relied on faith in God and country, support from each other, humor and the thought of getting home.
The 'Hanoi March'
After the rope torture, Black was put in solitary confinement for two weeks. On a slanted concrete slab, his ankles were crushed into too-small leg irons that broke his skin and squeezed his muscles to the bone. The green soup, made from a stalk harvested from sewage ditches, was served often, and often had not been boiled long enough to kill bacteria. The result: diarrhea.
He had to sit in the excrement. "Periodically," he said, he was uncuffed and allowed to clean up.
On July 6, 1966, Black got what he calls his first Hanoi "liberty," or sailor's night out, when he and scores of other POWs were forced through the sultry streets in the "Hanoi March." The men were beaten by angry mobs, and they feared they would be killed.
Later, back at Hoa Lo Prison, with blood running from a split lip and a battered face, Black was taken to a dreaded torture cell, but no torture took place. Three MiG pilots came in and were served beer by a guard who then left. The pilots asked Black several questions about how Navy pilots managed low-level dogfighting without crashing. The session ended abruptly when all three North Vietnamese stood up and talked among themselves. They turned to Black and, as a sign of respect to a fellow aviator, pushed their beers toward him and left the room.
Six months at a time
Time moved slowly for men, like Black, who spent seven birthdays in prison. He had all day for chores, such as trimming his fingernails by rubbing them across the concrete floors.
Time moved slowly for families back home, too. Retired Air Force Col. Richard Bolstad was a 36-year-old captain when he was shot down Nov. 6, 1965, while flying a propeller-driven A-1E Skyraider on a search-and-rescue mission out of Udorn Air Base, Thailand. Two years later, word that he was alive reached his family in Minneapolis.
Bolstad, interviewed at his Williamsburg, Va., home, said that when Christmas 1965 passed and he wasn't home, he focused on getting home by Independence Day, then by the next Christmas. Fourteen times he held hope, six months at a time. With the cease-fire of January 1973, he, Black and the other longest-held pilots flew out on the first of several freedom flights, Feb. 12, 1973.
In late March 1973, after all known prisoners had been flown out of Vietnam, he told the Minneapolis Tribune about the torture.
From a prison camp nicknamed the Briarpatch, where he was locked in a room and tied with ropes for the full month of August 1966, to the Zoo to the Hanoi Hilton, "if you did anything that displeased them, you could expect to be beaten or forced to kneel with your hands up in the air or put in leg irons or put in tight forearm manacles or put in handcuffs or placed in solitary confinement," he said.
He left out "holding up the wall," being forced to stand chest against the wall, hands held high, from early morning to evening, sometimes for weeks. Black said that enduring it was a continuation of military service: If guards had to watch, they weren't harassing other prisoners, who might be trying to communicate.
Communicating brought the worst torture, Bolstad said. But, said Black, it was crucial to try, especially with some new arrival who had probably been beaten and was severely depressed.
The POWs started using a tap code between cells. John (Spike) Nasmyth, in his POW memoir "2,355 Days," credits Bolstad with expanding the tap code to sweeping chores, spelling out letters with a pattern of swishes from his broom.
Amid such deep isolation, the POWs turned to spiritual guidance. Bolstad's religious regimen was simple.
"Pray, pray, pray," he said.
Torture subsides
Severe physical torture eased in 1969 with several events, including the death of North Vietnam's President Ho Chi Minh. Despite the better conditions, Hanoi never followed key provisions of the Geneva Conventions: to identify all prisoners held, to release the sick and injured, to permit impartial inspections and to permit free exchange of mail.
Maybe the information about less torture hadn't reached the angry North Vietnamese farmers who grabbed Rick Bates on Oct. 5, 1972, and bound his elbows behind him. Both shoulders popped. He was paraded around, beaten and cracked in the head with a rifle butt.
When he was shot down, retired Air Force Maj. Richard Bates was a 24-year-old first lieutenant, a fast FAC (forward air controller) in an F4E Phantom looking for targets out of Ubon Air Base, Thailand.
The air war had picked up in 1972, and airmen at high risk of being captured were briefed on what to expect in Hanoi prisons.
"One of the survival techniques they teach you is to feign shock and confusion," Bates, of Fort Worth, Texas, said last month at the home of retired Air Force Lt. Col. Tom Hanton in Falls Church, Va. "I did a really good job."
His interrogator gave an order in broken English: "You must cooperate or you will be Spanish!"
The dazed American almost giggled at the error. After a while, he figured out the threat: If he didn't cooperate, he would be punished.
The South Dakota boy was stashed in a bunker tunnel about 3 feet by 4 feet by 7 feet long that was, at times, bombed by American planes. His hands were bound every night, until he figured out how to untie them to ease the pain in his shoulders.
He said the Lord's Prayer a thousand times, and the 23rd Psalm a thousand times. Then he thought about his teenage years in the Twin Cities. He managed to remember the names of 92 of the 94 kids in the 1966 graduating class at Golden Valley High School. Then he worked the states in alphabetical order, with capitals, and then capitals in alphabetical order, with states.
After 30 days, he was trucked to the Hanoi Hilton. After another 30 days in solitary, he lived with a couple of cellmates in December 1972 in the Little Vegas section. Then, the Communists started one of their frequent shufflings of POWs, and the cell filled up.
"My Christmas present was 28 guys piling into my room," he said. Among them was Hanton. Bates had done air searches for the navigator after Hanton was shot down June 27, 1972. Now they were imprisoned together.
Mosquito glory
Capt. Hanton, then 27, had flown 133 successful missions in F4E Phantoms out of Da Nang, South Vietnam. His first mission out of Takhli Air Base, Thailand, ended in the same pattern that many airman had gone through: ejection from a shot-up plane and a beating from villagers on the ground, followed by 30 days in Hanoi Hilton solitary. He had a wooden platform bed, a latrine bucket and not much else in the humid Hanoi summer.
He tried the tap code; no one answered. He turned inward, to memory. Guards interrupted at odd hours, daytime, nighttime, anytime, demanding cooperation.
Once past solitary, Hanton worked at resisting, using the sort of adolescent tricks he had tried in eighth grade at St. Richard's parish school in Richfield.
"I'd do what they [guards] wanted done, but do it backwards, or screw it up," he said.
continued.......