Vietnam POW Ken Cordier Veteran Tales

Good morning, isn't it great to be alive and free? The North Vietnamese communists imprisoned me for six years and three months in really harsh and sometimes incredible conditions. You would think that I lost my life and freedom during that time, but no. As long as you have freedom in your mind, you will have a degree of freedom and we will talk about that here. I was finishing up my tour, in fact my second tour in Vietnam, flying off camera in Bay and on this fateful day, my mission was to escort a B-66 electronic warfare bomber escort it over North Vietnam on its electronic meeting of Intel.

Well, I took off that morning with my Mike Lane rear cedar and headed to refuel over Thailand and then join the v66 over North Vietnam. flying at 24,000 feet and doing about 500 knots when suddenly without warning I felt their hit and the plane went out of control both fire lights started flashing and all the warning lights and they and the plane went out of control because it had No Stick The authority moved and nothing happened, so I yelled at the back cedar. Mike was beaten and ejected. He was confused, the poor guy whose first mission was up north and he was a mile or two behind the plane the whole time and he thought he had said oh something. and it wasn't until he felt the gusts of wind when my canopy was gone and saw my seat pop out of the plane like a cork from a champagne bottle that he realized that if he no longer wanted to be the commander of the plane he better pull its handle and it came out well, it was an incredible event.

I mean, getting shot down is the most dramatic change of status you can imagine, one minute you're a top fighter pilot, master of the universe, and seconds later. you are hanging helplessly on a parachute, it is very difficult to capture that sudden change of state. As soon as I got out of the plane and opened my eyes, I saw the Phantom explode there, so it was very close, so I looked down between my eyes. feet I'm in the ejection seat now I looked down between my feet and I saw that I had been shot with a second Sam that exploded right below me and I could see that I was heading towards that orange and black fireball that looked like At the Gates of Hill, Well, I had enough time to close my eyes and hold my breath and I felt a flush and I went through the fireball and surprisingly I didn't get a scratch, not even a splinter of John Kerry on my arm.

I had a long way to go, but I panicked for the first time in my life. I had the feeling that if I didn't get out of that seat, I would write it on the ground and my reasoning was that the flames, the heat from the fireball had burned out the automatic parachute extraction device and it wasn't going to work against it. everything I had been trained to do. I pulled the handles, cut the lap belt and the restraints moved away from the seat, grabbed the D ring, pulled the handle and Ban the parachute open. I couldn't wait to see silk on me, but again that was going against than I had been trained to do because you are supposed to wait until you reach a lower altitude before deploying the parachute due to the opening impact.

I had a few minutes on the float and assessed the situation. I couldn't tell where I was because there was a low cast and I finally fell into it and if it had been such a tense moment, I think I would have enjoyed it. because I was like floating in a sea of ​​cotton candy, very calm and serene in this cloud cover, well, then I fell through the cloud cover and I looked down and I couldn't believe it, all these missions I had flown over Vietnam mostly. over the jungle, but there was no jungle, it was all rice fields and villages and there was no place to hide, so I knew I had very little chance of evading well.

I finally hit the ground and came out of my parachute and the first thing I did was What I felt was the range of the gunpowder so I wasn't hallucinating the fireball and my eyebrows which I saw later were burned and I had freckled gunpowder burns on my forehead, the same on my arms, the flame went up my sleeve, then I looked around and I could see these peasants running through the rice fields shouting and a couple of them waving rifles, so I did the honorable thing: I threw my 38 as far as I could and I stood up and raised my hands.

I was quickly captured and just like my back seat and taken to the village where the army arrived with a truck and then the hard stuff began. They took off our shorts, blindfolded us, tied our hands behind us and threw us in the back of this truck where they tied us to the side and drove us to Hanoi stopping in every town along the way and I found the same scene everywhere, they rolled up the truck's tarpaulin and you could hear angry voices gathering and the same scene everywhere, they threw stones at us and hit us with bamboo. sticks and the worst thing was that everyone wanted to spit on us and when we arrived in Hanoi or covered in saliva we didn't have a chance to shower for about a week, well the trip to Hanoi was really painful sitting on a board. and the roads were terrible and every time we came to a pit, I bounced in the air and fell, hitting my tailbone and screaming in agony.

I felt as if my back had been broken and later I found out that this was indeed the case. So it was that we arrived in Hanoi the next morning and immediately went into a room that I couldn't see of course, oh, all I know is that they made me sit on the floor with my hands tied and blindfolded and in At that moment a man entered the room and began to ask me. The English questions at the beginning were name, rank, service number, date of birth and those questions they were required to answer under the Geneva Conventions.

Well then he moved quickly, passed out and started asking military questions about what type of plane he was flying and what his targets were they assumed I was up there bombing and the ANA I politely refused to answer these questions and after a while he feigned anger and he said you must answer our questions what makes you think you don't have to answer my questions I said well your country cyma Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war and there is a lot of tension because he says nonsense, you are not a powa, you are a criminal of war, the USA.

Don't declare war on us and that's why you are all illegally hairy and we are going to treat you like criminals. If you do not answer my questions, you will be severely punished. I thought so, of course. Heard this before, it's probably like Hogan's heroes. They'll put me in a cooler for a month. Well, that wasn't the case. They tied me up, untied my hands and put handcuffs on it. Clamps behind me. They put ropes around my arms and put me down. the floor and the foot on my back and I pressed it until my elbows were touching and then they just went away and left me well, as you can imagine it was very painful and with my back hurting at first I don't think they would hold up.

Over an hour and after I screamed enough and loud enough they came in and loosened the ropes and resumed the interrogation, this time they took off my blindfold and there were three little Vietnamese people sitting at a table and it was supposedly my court of war crimes and and Then they resumed the interrogation, so I thought I was going to have to tell him something because I can't stand this painful torture, so I started making up questions, making up answers as I went along and he stood firm enough to give in. account of that. He was putting it on and he stood up and said, I don't have time for this.

You are wasting your time and for that you will be punished better. I still feel pretty brave, so I said, "This is awesome." You're torturing me and when I need to see a doctor he looked at me bewildered and said, "Oh, you're not bleeding, it was bad." I said, I think my back is broken. I'm in a lot of pain and that was a big mistake, I found out. Then they took out anyone who had an injury, they tortured the injury so that it would break sooner. Well, this time when they put me on the ropes again, they had me on the ground and they put a rope, another rope around my neck and my ankles and arched me back. as far as they could and how boy that gave a new meaning to the word pain so here I am tied to the ropes and I didn't last long that time I said okay I will answer your questions and so they loosened the ropes and and I resumed the interrogation well I noticed that they were taking a lot notes of everything he said so I decided it would be better to find some way to construct a story and stick to it and then I decided to tell him the truth but I multiplied everything by three I didn't think that would work for long, surely they would realize the absurdity which was making these outrageous claims about the range of our radar and stuff like that so anyway I tried it and it worked it was pretty easy when they went back and actually asked we asked them a question just tell them the truth multiply by three well that made me helped me get through that interrogation and then I spent the next the rest of that day and the next day with cyclical interrogations mostly the same questions also some political questions about what I thought about the war I said I think about the war and did I support my government, yes I do and what they were looking for was for me to make some statement against the war or say that I thought it was wrong for us to be there, which I never did and I never suffered from telling my two feelings.

Then on the third day they came with ropes and handcuffs and said now you will write your confession of war crimes. Well, they must have thought that I. I wasn't going to really want to do that so I said I can't do that I haven't committed crimes and I can't confess to the crimes that I haven't committed so they tied me up again and they put their hands in me they tied the handcuffs and I said okay now I know what's coming I said what I have to write and I broke down I gave that up against me my personal motto never give up and never give up I gave him the confession well a piece of paper was written four small paragraphs and I had to copy them from my fist and handwriting and sign it and I was just going to write this copy this confession and the worst thing was that in the end I had to write a thank you I thank you the Vietnamese people for their lenient and humane treatment signed it, that's all and after that they left me alone rest of the night and when it got dark, they came and blindfolded me and took me to a truck and we headed to the main street. camp at the time we called the zoo and they put me in a solitary room and I would be in that camp three years and eight months and I would never go more than a hundred yards in any direction, okay, so I'm in a solitary cell. and no one to talk to, no way to communicate and i really feel depressed.

I was not prepared for what had happened to me in the last three days and of course surviving a POW situation or anything else in preparing for life is really key and although there is no way I would prepare myself specifically to be Pio. The training that I received really gave me something to fall back on and a preparation to help me in that difficult moment and that was the training that we received was very good, for example, when I was in the survival school in the interrogation training the interrogator of the interrogator school came out with a bunch of communist propaganda and ice brands and stopped the training right there, they say never smile if you're smart, it's an insult to them and you'll do very badly. so when I finished my torture sessions I was really exhausted and felt dizzy.

I wanted to have a good laugh. I bit my cheeks until they bled to keep from laughing. So here I am in this lonely cell. Someone tried to hit the wall. to me, but I didn't understand it. I had seen this code while I was in the interrogation room and had seen it etched on the side of the table, but I didn't have much time to study it and I was wrong. then I was tapping on how his audience was gibberish, it made no sense after only a month of isolation. I was in the interrogation and the interrogator said: would you like to have a roommate?

I said yes, that would be good and he said, well, you have to promise. obey camp regulations, i.e. no talking loudly, no singing or whistling, no exercise, and definitely no communication with other people. I said okay and then I walked up, claimed my back seat and they took us through a cell in a different building and that began. our time together in this two-man cell. I like to describe the cells to paint a picture. I do it with five bees and the cell measured seven by nine feet and was whitewashed inside so they could tell if you needed to do something. the walls and the five bees are the boards, the bricks, the light bulb, the box and the bucket, well, our beds were like a crude door on trestles, just boards nailed together, and any mattress hanging over the beds was a bare light bulb and that was on 24/7 you will wonder why they didn't turn off the lights during the day and waste electricity because for the third time the bricks covered all the windows so that we couldn't see outside it was forbidden to see the other Prisoners of war and, of course, that made the cells very hot in the summer, without ventilation and with a clay tile roof and it was like an oven and of the things they didn't care about, we were there to bepunished, so they were not worried about our creature. amenities and then the fourth B was the box.

We had many speakers in the ceiling of each room in each cell and that was for our daily ration of Vietnam voice propaganda in the morning and at night and propaganda produced locally by the interrogators and They did this because, unlike Korea, They had classes, they didn't want us to see each other or communicate, they wanted to keep us completely isolated, so they just funneled the propaganda into the rooms and the whole camp became a classroom and the last B of course. It was the bucket, the rusty bucket in the corner was our bathroom and they took us out once a day to empty it oh, as we settled into our daily lives, I can describe that with B also not talking, not reading, not writing, not exercising. and quite harsh confinement regime since our day started at 5:00 a.m. when they rang the gong and the gong was not a round brass gong that they hit with a mallet, there was an empty 85 millimeter shell casing hanging from a tree and the guard hit it with a wrench it made a horrible noise and woke you up quickly well with This When my back hurts a lot, I'm ready to get up anyway, so we got up and the first thing was to fold the mosquito net.

They gave us all a mosquito net, which is a humane thing to put up, it was just a buzz of mosquitoes and it would have been just terrible and unhealthy to have to deal with the mosquitoes as we were walking around with bites everywhere anyway, so we put up the mosquito net and then we're supposed to sit in our bed and think about our war crimes and until 6 o'clock when the voice of Vietnam came on, which was a broadcast broadcast to the GIS in South Vietnam with a lot of propaganda and stuff that made them feel nostalgic, they simply transmitted this to ourselves as an extra helping of propaganda. for us it was the news they called was read by Hannah Hannah was our name for an English speaking Vietnamese and at the end of a 30 minute broadcast they played two popular American songs and that was the highlight of the day and I will never understand why not They just turned off the radio when they got to the music, but they had the music at the end for the GIS to hang up and listen to, so they heard some current popular music, well that was really cool for us and then after the voice of Vietnam, we wait for breakfast.

Breakfast came around 10 or 11 and consisted of some ground brown rice and another bowl of soup, and I'm not talking about Campbell's soup. it was summer boiled vegetables without meat without seasonings autumn was the best to boil a couple of pieces of pumpkin in water and where it was absolutely worst we got cabbage every day for four months long after breakfast was supposed to come out a small patio to bathe 10 minutes a day and the bathing facilities were a seepage pit and we dropped a bucket and we took out a bucket of muddy water and we poured it on ourselves and I wash I wash our clothes with us we had a little cake of grandmothers' lies so They gave us every 60 days and that was washing bodies and our clothes and shaving once a week with a miserable rusty razor so we only went out two three times a week then at noon they rang the gong and they allowed us to take a nap and a nap, you know, that's good, we got out of this environment sleeping for two hours, but not that fast, most of the guards saw us so security was a lot lighter, there weren't as many guards walking around so we took that.

It was time to communicate with the tap code at that point, I had already learned the tap code correctly and we enter this new cell and someone on the other side of the wall taps, shaves, cuts his hair and taps, shortly Over time we become proficient in tapping. like woodpeckers amazing what you can play when you have nothing else to do we were kind of innovators in abbreviations like the ones people use today in text messages we had all kinds of little abbreviations to save save play the one thing we didn't have to they used today was hahaha and it would have been great to have known how to use hahaha.

I mean, we had G n G goodnight, God bless you and stuff like that, but after things progressed and we got a little bored, we learned everyone's name and what the current interrogation topics were, why. we started doing family history, the information and finally that ended it, you know you are married, children, family, conscious word of your vacation, where you have been stationed, blah blah blah, so you go through all that and now it's days endless with nothing to do except not to get caught tapping and then we resort to telling jokes by tapping jokes on the wall the only thing is that when I tell you a joke and you think it's funny you laugh and that makes me feel good did I entertain you or is it a bad joke you know, give me a Bronx applause, well the way we laughed was with our nails clicking on the wall and it was considered a bad joke, we'd hit it with our elbow, well things move like that and there aren't many events and then one day some poor guy was caught tapping and we found out what the consequences were.

They brought him in for questioning and demanded to know who he was tapping with. Of course, the guy would deny everything. They said no, you're lying, and then they put on. Him on the ropes every time they wanted something from us, the default position was to put you on the ropes, they knew you would break, so with a lot of mental anguish the guy would admit that he was fine, he was touching the John Brodack next door and that was really bad. because you knew the next thing was they would take him out, torture him, find out who he was tapping and before it was over we called it a quiet position because they would find out that the entire camp was in communication, not just the cells within a cell block , but the other buildings and we have a lot of innovative ways of communicating between the buildings, so it was really a bad bad experience because of all the torture involved, well every cloud has a positive side and the positive side was that they thought that if they changed the camp that would break the organization and then they took my cellmate to another building and someone came in with me and so on.

They had a master plan where they mixed everyone up all over the camp and thought that would show him that I won't be able to communicate well now as soon as the guard closed the door and left. I'm touching the wall. Hi, I'm Kim Corey. Hello who are you? The next day, the entire camp was in contact, but they. They were never able to stop us despite the torture and beatings, they never prevented us from communicating well, life continued quite hard, losing a lot of weight with the diet and they prohibited exercise if they caught you exercising, it was a weakened iron that is with your feet and shackles tied to your foot. of the board and your hand and handcuffs behind you and they come twice a day and let you free from the handcuffs to eat your bowl of rice and if you didn't have a cellmate to help you use the bucket, it got pretty dirty like that that's how we lived during those early years and we adapted, you know, it was hard to stay optimistic, we tried to stay upbeat with communication and most of us never surrendered to God every Sunday, we had church service when there was no lots of guards around, all the guards were leaving on Sunday and the way we went to church was with the highest ranking officer, the SRO would hit the wall and it was We went through the whole building and we all stood up and took the oath to the flag and we would say the Lord's Prayer and then for about 10 minutes we could meditate or discuss various aspects of our religion with our cellmate and we could only whisper "No." I don't think I mentioned that we can only whisper to our cellmate if they ever hear your voice outside the cell accusing you of communicating and coming in and beating you or worse, we would have 10 minutes of silence of course, no preacher, no.

No singing was allowed in the choir and at the end the SRO would hit the wall and then we would all stand up again and recite the 23rd psalm and that was in the church at the time, well months go by in two years and it was really It was difficult to remain optimistic, but we were tested because the situation worsened three days before the 1968 election. I called President Johnson a liar. Baines Johnson unconditionally stopped the North's bombing of North Vietnam and what I heard was that this was my lowest morale since the day I was shot. sold us down the river because he did not even ask for a list of our names much less any guarantee of our treatment in accordance with the Geneva Conventions and through secret means our government knew in early 1967 that we were being tortured and abused and and then , as for the simplest answer of the Geneva Conventions is that they are obliged to give a list of the names of the people they are holding and in my case I was missing in action for another year after the bombing stopped.

Well we were mad but we thought well at least maybe the deal will ease up now and they won't be so harsh, well that was a pipe dream. The Vietnamese seem to think that because our government did not mention us in exchange for stopping the bombing, why did they think? they could do whatever they wanted to us and so they took a new path to punish us, we were the worst kind of criminals and we needed to be punished and some of the things that happened immediately was they stopped the facials, not Mary Kay facials we call Meyer beating facials, they make you kneel and to bring your head to their waist level, they take off a tire sandal and hit your head and face for minor infractions that they didn't have to get permission for. that gave way to spanking and spanking meant you had to strip naked and lie face down on the floor and they put a guard on each side of you with a truck fan belt and they put it on you and we learned about the stripes from The Jesus Experience because when we came back to ourselves, our backs just had red disrespectfully to a guard who didn't like him the guard didn't like him he just wanted an excuse to beat him up other things happened in that spring and summer of 1969 we didn't go out and talk about it we had minimal rations the spankings everything was crushing us and we used to say that would turn the young into old, well, then another positive side.

God remembered the great communist dictator Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam, he died in September and there was a month of national struggle. mourning and as soon as it was over, you could tell there was a new management running the show. The first thing we noticed was that they came and threw all the bricks out of the windows, then they took everyone out of the shackles, there were always guys with shackles served. Various punishments were given to all of them, they took them out of the irons, they started to leave us outside for two hours a day and they didn't limit themselves to her bathing, we simply became very optimistic, we thought, well, they must be preparing to let us repatriate, not only do they take everyone out of irons.

They told us that we should exercise to maintain our health, which changed, and several other things. They told us that we no longer had to bow. We took it as a degrading act and we always preferred it for any reason. We resisted bowing and I just hated bowing. Just like a lot of other guys and we resisted in ways that accomplished nothing, didn't do us any good and only caused their pain, but as I used to say in those days, if you don't get a beating from time to time, you won't get away with it. yours enough and, for example, one day I was being taken for interrogation and at that moment one of the camp dogs came trotting up and crossed my path, well, it was part of the camp rules that you had to bow politely before every Vietnamese, well this dog showed up and I stood at attention, politely introduced myself to the dog walk, the guard immediately knew what I was implying so he gave me a couple of blows with the butt of a rifle to the ribs.

I was lucky I didn't have a broken rib and as soon as we got to the interrogation room he told the interrogator what he had done and the guy started yelling at me and yelling at me and telling me that I would never come home and that the worst criminal, blah blah blah, so I took that for about ten minutes and he sent me back to myself, well this was a minor victory. I had rib pain for a few days but I didn't have to sit on the stool for an hour actually 50 minutes they had these interrogations set up so that you had the interrogation for 50 minutes and then the interrogator had a 10 minute break to smoke cigarettes and until they brought in the next guy, so I saved myself 40 minutes on the stool.

On a cold February morning, this is how we live very hard to stay optimistic and I realized that at that time I was living in a new part of the prison where we had eight men in this cell of 18 by 21 feet of space and I noticed that everyone is getting very serious with her, you know, she turns the corners and everything I said, we have to dosomething about it, you know, so I instituted smile exercises and every morning when I do my exercises, I do 20 repetitions while standing on my toes. and down and up and down to try to tense my facial muscles I invoked my smile exercise and of course some of the boys ridiculed me and said that there is quartier or that they are good and like a Cheshire cat, but some of them were they joined together. and there's a lot to smile about, that's for sure, well, we're going this way and after the treatment changed, I thought you know, part of the uncertainty and not knowing is how long you're going to be there and by then I had already been there.

Almost three years, so I thought I'd pick a date to tell what I think will be released and I got far enough into the future that we'd probably be out by then, so I picked July. The 4th of 1976, the Bicentennial, is the day I would be free. Well, my optimism paid off because I left on March 4, 1970, so I left early and we lived in this limbo and when that treatment changed, everyone became optimistic. and they thought well they should send us home soon and what nonsense because we still had three years to go while they moved this to a new camp where the physical conditions were better, they had barred windows that were open for ventilation and we were allowed outside but we did a little running track so we could jog barefoot we picked up all the pebbles and everything was smooth so whose stuff is like that even though he had a foray into wine making around this time we moved to this new camp now In the summer of 70 we heard in La Voz de Vietnam that the brotherly socialist people of Cuba had donated a shipload of sugar to Vietnam and after a week we began to see a ball of sugar appear on a tin plate and the boys not knowing what to do with it some said well I don't want to eat that sugar it will rot my teeth and here we don't get any dental care and others had other complaints, some guys mixed it with their rice and made our rice porridge and I said, you know, I'm sure sugar water ferments, so I got Some guys came with me to the wine club and we had these one-liter kettles that up until then we had always kept our water ration in, but when they moved us to the bigger complex, they started to give us these large 20 liter lumens.

Hands up for our water, so we have these kettles with nothing to do and we had just received some packages from home or leftovers. They allowed families to send packages via International Post to Hanoi for us as this is a black market scam because at that time. At that time there were about 1,800 missing, so everyone had a family member who had been shot down, they would send a package and of course the GAR guards and the camp people had a wonderful little business on the black market, uh, two point two or two kilos is four point four. pounds well, a couple of guys got raisins, a very very clever thing to put in the package because the Vietnamese didn't steal that and it's for theft, I mean, like one of my 4.4 pound boxes had a little can of hard candy in it and a pair of hockey shorts, what happened to the rest?

You know, anyway, I took these raisins, I made them and I put them in these teapots where I put the CEMP made simple syrup, sugar, water and I put them on the windowsill to age and safe. enough, it started working and pretty soon there was foam on the top and after about ten days I considered it done and I took the mother off the top of these things and we had happy hour that Friday night, a very good one, but It has some alcohol. Well, any good deal like that is too good to last, so what happened was we were there three months and in November of nineteen seventy, on November 20, we heard planes and anti-aircraft fire and all kinds of things going on and we just We were so excited that we thought the bombing was back and then there was all this noise and Sam was shooting triple-A and then there was silence and then two days later they put us on trucks and took us back to Hanoi, which It was so scary that the U.S.

The almighty U.S. would come and concede us all and take us home, so what they did was empty the old Hilton prison in Hanoi, we called it because it was walo as a Vietnamese name and they emptied to all the Vietnamese prisoners of these seven. big rooms and they put us all in this complex with 350 kids being held and we didn't even know it existed because we had all gone through the section we called the Heartbreak Hotel where they interrogated all the new kids and kept them until they were moved to the main camp which They put us in these big rooms and it was so exciting that we really had a surge of optimism here and we were so excited that we stayed up all night talking, the guards came banging on the bars, we were silent, we slept, we just ignored it.

Well, a lot of the guys were ecstatic and said this is wonderful because within a few days we found out from some Vietnamese prisoners on the other side that it was a capture attempt to liberate a camp and the guys thought, oh, that's wonderful. , but I looked. We see it as a source of pessimism because if the US government were to set up a high-risk operation so close to Hanoi there was no foreseeable negotiation for us and we will be there for a long time, well, we started our life at the Hanoi Hilton . and although many guys became really depressed and pessimistic, we were able to maintain our optimism by staying busy, we never got a book, I never saw a Bible, I very much had my own personal copy like these terrorists and Guantánamo never had a pencil and paper to write without dictionaries or books of languages, so all we had was what was in our brains and we used Yankee ingenuity to create writing paper with toilet paper and chalk with little pieces of orange tile, and it is not necessary to have a blackboard on the wall, the floor worn by 60 or 70 years of prisoners walking back and forth, it was an excellent blackboard for math and chemistry and things like that, where you want to write equations and so on, the kids would group around the The teacher and he would write on the wall and then if the guard came we just rubbed him with his rubber sandal and acted like nothing had happened, so what this forced was it kept our minds busy, we had all kinds of projects. if you had a course you could teach or an area of ​​specialization you were obliged to organize and teach it and of course the German, French and Spanish languages ​​were history of popular mathematics, you name it, it was amazing the breadth of knowledge we had on that topic. group, we even did Toastmasters, a couple of guys were in Toastmasters and they rebuilt the Toastmasters program and we went through all that, all this made time pass and as long as we didn't make noise or create a disturbance, they pretty much left us alone , we call it live and let live, period, well things went on like that for almost a year and a half and then one Sunday in April we heard the Jetson afterburner and the bombs exploding and the air raid and anti-aircraft sirens and we just left. crazy, I mean, we're jumping up and down and cheering and singing God bless America, what a day because we knew that if they were bombing Hanoi, the wars in that thing during the attack on Sante was just a one-time thing to liberate that camp.

So now everyone is optimistic again because President Nixon is taking the war to these people in his capital city. Now maybe something will happen as it turns out it took almost a year but it happened well, every day they were bombing Hanoi again and some of the bombs were getting pretty close, the place was falling from the roof and the crowd was shaking and it was really exciting if you've never been on a bombing raid, well I wouldn't recommend it, but it's very exciting, so this went on for a month and on May 15th they loaded us all with trottin nothing they loaded us half onto trucks and left for places unknown We drove all day and part of the night and arrived at what we later learned was a camp on the Chinese border, five kilometers from the Chinese border, very primitive, it was in the jungle, there was no electricity, we had to go to bed and get up with the chickens, but no.

It was so bad because they told us when there was war it was over, we would return to Hanoi and they would try to improve our conditions, so they left us outside in our little courtyards all day, we still couldn't communicate with other sublots, but the food got better, the soup became a vegetable mixture. thick and tasty soup. I probably enjoy it today and we started getting a can of mackerel every day like canned tuna and we divided it into three parts, so every day we got this serving of Russian mackerel and oil that was really good. good rice we are spending the summer and nothing happens we have no news because there is not even propaganda but on Christmas Day 72 they told us that if we behave well not to make a fuss they let us go out to the area between the buildings and we were able to visit and celebrate the Christmas with our fellow prisoners and this is the first time it happened that we got to see all these other guys besides the one room we had lived in that was interesting and while The Interrogator came with the Hanoi newspaper and on the centerfold there's a big picture of a B-52 dropping a series of bombs and he said the new Yankee war crimes bomb Hanoi B-52 and that was like watching Santa Claus fall.

This smokestack because we knew that if the B-52s were now bombing Hanoi, it would probably end very soon, and sure enough, on opening day, January 20, they made us all load up on the trucks and go back to Hanoi, back to the Hanoi Hilton. We returned to the old complex and they organized us into rooms according to our demolition and after we were there a few days they made us all line up in the courtyard. The only time this happened they said to organize themselves in a military manner and so did each cell. block of 50 to 60 guys we called them squads and we were all lined up and based and we looked pretty smart, I would say, in our striped pajamas and then the camp commander came out and read something in Vietnamese and they translated it into English and it was the protocol about the release of the prisoners, so at that point we knew we were going home and when, and the first group left on February 14th and I was in the second group that was released on March 4th.

It was kind of an agonizing wait for that date but we made the most of it a lot of things that talk about what you're going to do when you get home speculate about family most of us knew almost nothing about the situation with our wives and children and then arrived on March 4, we were loaded onto buses through the main gate and taken to Hanoi gia LOM airport, where we lined up a cordon for our shoot-down date and when our names were called one by one, a step forward greeted the Brigadier General American was a receiving officer, he shook hands and welcomed each of us, one by one, we made a right face and marched towards the C-141 on the ramp with a large American flag on the tail and we talked . about how proud we were after all these years and abuse, all leaving with our heads held high flying in a US Air Force plane, not driven across a crummy bridge in an army truck , so we marched towards the plane, everyone got on the plane. and the ramp went up, it rolled onto the runway and when we took off, as soon as we heard the train go up, that's when everyone let out a round of applause and you've seen pictures, I'm sure of the guys cheering and hugging each other, what a moment.

Then we were flown to Clark Air Base in the Philippines, which is now covered in volcanic ash, but we flew to Clark, went to the hospital directly from the plane bus to the hospital hospital to the rooms they had reserved for us and First thing What we did was, yes, take a shower, take a shower with hot water. One of the greatest pleasures of my life was not having even felt warm water for six years and three months to be under a hot shower. I did it for about 20 minutes until my fingers turned red. Then after that we went to the cafeteria for our first meal and the first meal was steak and eggs cooked to order and with a banana split for dessert, that was really extraordinary and while we were waiting in line I naturally complained because there He cooked every steak. to order a couple of the flight surgeons couldn't wait until the next morning to start questioning us and a guy came up to me and they started asking me questions and what was I waiting for and I said what do you think I've been? locked up because I haven't seen a woman in six or three months and oh yeah, a glass of whiskey please, he said well I can't help you with the other one, but he said what were you drinking when you were shot, I said Jack.

Daniels black and said, oh, okay, and then he's talking to other guys and when I went up to the room after the meal, here's a liter of Jack Daniels on the pillow and they still hadn't given us access to even the beer , sohere is your liter. by Jack Daniels I took the cap off, gave it a tug, and passed it to my friends. Everyone in the rooms around me had heard what was happening and everyone gathered around her. We made a pass with that bottle that was visible. empty, so that was the end of my day of freedom, we were there for three days with medical treatment and initial interrogations and the first thing they wanted in the interrogation, I said, I mean report their interrogations, when it's the enemy, it The first thing they wanted was for us to write down all the names we had memorized, they already knew that we all had memory banks and that memorization was something you appreciated to keep your mind active.

I had 350 names on my list and most of the guys had more, so we wrote down all our names, cross-referenced it once we were all out and that way we accounted for everyone that was in the system, including the ones that died there, and that was the first thing was throwing away our memory banks and then the other questions about the conditions at the time of our departure and so on, well, three days was enough and then they took us all back to the United States and divided us at five different regional medical centers where we met their families, as you can imagine.

It was quite an emotional event reading my wife and my two children who didn't remember me, they were three and five when I left and ten and twelve and I came back and my parents were there too so it was really a memorable homecoming and that began. My second life, yes, it was different, it was challenging and my wife didn't do well, she left her job as soon as I was knocked down and she stayed home. Weyden was a kind of Rekluse and, consequently, the children. They didn't get the education and discipline they should have had, so we had some problems there.

One of the things I had discussed before the launch was good for me. I'm going to keep my mouth shut as best I can and not make mistakes. no criticism or set rules or expectations for three months and I stuck to it. I just observed that I took notes. I had a lot of things to talk about once I got back on active duty, which was actually four months, so I waited until I got to the new duty station at the new house and then we had a family reunion and they didn't take it very well and then I didn't realize it at the time but my wife had depression and as soon as I came back she is willing to leave everything to me and we needed to work as a team which we didn't so my adjustment period to respond to her question I considered it five years when I got divorced and it wasn't a good time for Me and I turned to Utley and said I would rather spend another year in Hanoi than live those five years again.

It was difficult and since we were not, in many cases we were not prepared for what we had to face now. The guys whose wives were strong and did a good job with the kids and kept things together was a lot easier, but then there were a lot of guys who got divorced right away, so there was a whole spectrum of readjustments and some of them, there are some guys I know rare to this day. I don't think they've readjusted in 40 years. I harbor negative feelings and, like in my case, I wanted to find where I was captured.

I was shot down and captured in a very remote area only 85 miles from Hanoi, but it is a really primitive country. I've been back several times and shot the last trip two years ago. I spent some money, I had to do some bribery and hire a trustworthy guy from South Vietnam to go deliver it, I spent some wealth on some of his contacts and we found out where they captured me, so we went back there with my wife and My daughter and we visited so those people had an interpreter. It was really closure to meet these people and there were still simple rice farmers and they had not shown any anger or tried to mistreat the traders when they first captured us and they were curious to know why.

I would go there after all these years. I sold it through the interpreter. I just want to thank them for not killing me and they appreciated it. I got some gifts of school supplies and stuff. It is a good experience, no, and in fact living in In Dallas, I have met and made good friends with some Vietnamese and I consider them good people, intelligent and, of course, those of us who came here are already successful in their own country and have a wonderful work ethic and education. ethics and they, the Vietnamese who came here after that war, are like our European immigrant ancestors a hundred years ago.

I told them that and I have said it many times. I said we are very proud of you and what you have done. I've done that since I got here and as far as going back to this line of dresses, I haven't had any problems with them now. If I ever came face to face with one of the tortured boys, I might have a hard time controlling myself and I know it. To this day I could put a bullet in the head of any of the half dozen of them I had to suffer for and not a shred of remorse.