Bloods (43 page)

When they gave up, I was still smilin’.

Hally got back to the cell first. The public had gotten unruly during the march. They could hardly control them. They were kickin’ the guys, throwin’ rocks at them. Hally was all black and blue.

When the guard brought me to the door, Hally gasped, “Fred.”

Blood was running everywhere, down to my feet. Hally caught me, and put me in my bunk. “Fred, what in the world did they do to you?” He thought I had been where he had been.

I cried, “Oh, Hally.”

We both shed a tear or two.

“No, no. I went to the hospital.”

Four days later, the guards came to get Hally. They just walk in and say, put on your long-sleeve prison pajamas, gather your stuff, and let’s go.

Tears start to roll down my eyes. I’m just hoping nothing happens to him.

We cried.

And he was gone. It took about two minutes.

It was the most depressing evening of my life. I never hated to lose anybody so much in my entire life. We had become very good friends. He was responsible for my life.

Then they moved in John Pitchford and Art Cormier.

From August 4 to the end of the year, they would torture us once or twice a day. They wanted everything they could get about your personal life, your family. I would tell them anything, like I didn’t have children. And they would make you redo it. You are tellin’ so many lies, they know you are lying.

They would cup their hands and hit you over the ears. And the guard would come up behind you and kick the stool out. Or make you stand on your knees with your hands in the air. Or stand at attention with your nose to the wall, both hands in the air. In my case, one hand is all I can get up.

There was an officer we called Dum Dum, because he
really was kinda stupid. One day in August of 1967, he said, “You have a bad attitude, and you disobey camp regulations. You communicate with other criminals. You must be punished. You must have ‘iron discipline.’ ” I said, Oh, shit. The torture is starting again.

I ended up in a place we called the Gatehouse with Larry Guarino and Don Burns. Except when you would eat—twice a day if you’re lucky—and go wash, they kept you in manacles and leg irons.

Dum Dum would order the fan-belt treatment, beating with strips of rubber. Or you would be struck with bamboo. And you would fall around the floor because of the irons.

In November they took us to a building called the Barn. Burns was already there. He had lost 30 pounds. He was death warmed over. I was coughing up a big lump of somethin’. It was too dark in the damn cell to see what I was spittin’ in the night bucket. We took a little white pot from where we bathed back to the cell, and I coughed into it.

I says, “Damn, it’s blood.”

Larry says, “We gon’ have to tell the officer.”

“No. No. I ask them for something, they gon’ ask me for something. I ain’t giving nothing.” Not after three months of having my ass beaten.

“Well, we’re going to because there’s something wrong.”

Thank God he did.

Some days later they x-rayed me at the hospital. After they brought me back, this officer came in. I knew something was wrong. This officer got so nice. But he just told me I had a problem. Not until early February do they tell me I have a bone that’s in my lung, very close to my heart. I’m thinkin’ it came off the rib cage from the beatings. I knew the shoulder area had fused together.

But they didn’t open me up until the first of May. They removed my seventh rib to get the chips out. And when they put me back together, they did one thing I’m sure was intentional. They left some nondissolvable stitches in.

The Vietnamese guarding my hospital room would make me get up and mop the floor. But this lady who worked in the kitchen sorta chewed him out when she saw it. He
wasn’t the worst guard in the world, because he would close the door so nobody else would see her moppin’ the floor instead of me. And she would bring me whole loaves of bread and put them in the drawer by the head stand. She knew nobody was gonna look in there, because they didn’t want to touch anything I touched as sick as I always was.

They brought me back to the camp on May 27 and kept me in solitary. That stretch would run 53 weeks, the longest of 700 days of solitary that I would have.

Now they want me to make tapes, write statements denouncing the war, denouncing our government, and telling young GIs, especially black ones, they don’t have any business in Vietnam fightin’ for the American imperialists.

They want it from me more than anybody because I was the senior black officer. They wanted it bad. And by this time, our black guys are doing good work, hurtin’ ’em down South.

Until the end of November they interrogated me four or five hours a day. Two of ’em, the good guy and the bad guy. The bad guy never gets to be the good guy. But the vice camp commander, he swings both ways. We called him Lump. He had a tumor on his forehead. The good guy was Stag. That’s an acronym for Sharper Than the Average Gook. He was a very good interrogator. He read a lot of novels, and he knew black literature. He had read
Raisin in the Sun
and
Invisible Man
. He knew more about Malcolm X than I did. And we was versed in Stokely Carmichael’s philosophy. Absolutely. Stokely was helping them with broadcasts from Hanoi.

In those brainwashing sessions, Stag would say, “Xu, we will change your base, your foundation.”

They called each of us by a Vietnamese name. A
xu
is a little brass coin, like a penny. Maybe they gave me the name because of my color. Regardless, they made me feel that I was worth less than a penny.

I said, “You tryin’ to brainwash me?”

And he would back off a little. They hated the word brainwash. Scared ’em.

Stag and Lump couldn’t understand why I couldn’t be on their side, on the side of another colored race. I told
them, “I am not Vietnamese. My color doesn’t have nothin’ to do with it. We have problems in the U.S., but you can’t solve them. Like you, I am a uniformed soldier. If I have you in the position you have me, I wouldn’t expect you to do what you want me to.”

I’m being as tactful as I can.

“A soldier’s a soldier. Things go on that we have no control over. I’m still an officer in the United States services. I will respect that, and I would hope that you will respect that of me. I can’t do what you ask.”

They never got to home plate. Just like when they beat me, I always kept in mind I was representing 24 million black Americans. If they are going to kill me, they are going to have to kill me. I’m just not going to denounce my government or shame my people. All this time the wound don’t heal up, because of these stitches. They looked like fishing cord to me. All black. But they’re swearing there wasn’t anything there. It would heal up.

They say, “No, no. These honorable stitches. Don’t have to take out.”

When I asked for a Band-Aid to cover the hole, Stag said, “We don’t have. Many injured Vietnamese. We must use all medicine for Vietnamese.”

I was hemorrhaging daily. And one time I woke up, and the stuff comin’ out of the hole looked green. I am having a serious problem.

So when I go to interrogation, I ask for a pill. They said no. So I start quiverin’ and shakin’ on the stool. Stag starts to get excited, and he has a guard take me to my cell. Then they bring me out into the yard, so all the guys can see them give me medication. And when they pulled the needle of penicillin out of my arm, I was so infected, honest to goodness, that it felt like I was gettin’ ready to explode. My body was so poisoned, I was about as sick as any time before.

The next day they took me to the hospital, took the stitches out, and cleaned up the hole. They knew exactly where the stitches were. And from that day, November 28 to the next February, 1969, they stopped puttin’ the pressure on.

They put me back with Art Cormier in April. And for several days I was coughin’ up blood clots in the mornin’.
I think it was because I was tryin’ to exercise, primarily runnin’ in place. And I had to cut that out.

One morning I spit into a piece of paper, because it felt like somethin’ in my throat that wasn’t normal.

I said, “Art, you won’t believe this.”

He said, “What you got?”

“Look at this.”

It looked like a piece of regular fishing cord. Almost one year to the day they had operated, I had coughed up a piece of the stitching.

So we showed it to the guard, and he sent for the medic. Then they gave me some antibiotics.

I had been coughing up so much blood and mucus that the stitching was coming out that they hadn’t removed.

I stayed with Art until the escape attempt May 10. Ed Atterbury and John Dramesi dyed themselves with a mix made from iodine pills, went through the roof and over the wall, shorting out the electrical shock on the barbed wire. But they were captured before morning. They brought them back blindfolded to the headquarters building in the camp. Then they were taken off to torture. Atterbury was never seen again.

By now we had secret committees for everything. We had the morale committee. We had an entertainment committee. Education committee. And, of course, we had the escape committee. And that was the one they really wanted to know about now.

So for months they really got hard on us. There was a shortage of water and toilet paper. They cut down your bath time to once every two weeks. No more cigarettes. And they nailed boards over the windows, so there was no fresh air. And they separated the senior officers, like me and Art and Bud Day, and worked us over with bamboo and rubber straps in the interrogation room. I don’t think anyone got it nearly as bad as Bud and Dramesi.

It was no point in me thinkin’ about escape at the Hanoi Hilton with only one good hand and one good leg. And I just forgot about gettin’ over the wall. It was too high. I didn’t have anything in my room to climb up on. And there was broken glass cemented to the top of the wall. Since they drove me in from forty miles, I knew all the checkpoints. You’re not goin’ anyplace. And at the Zoo,
the senior officer would never approve anybody as injured and crippled as I was trying it. But I always thought about it.

And we always thought about rescue. We had a whole plan for aidin’ any outside force that came to rescue us. We were organized into teams to go after the guards. We had plans to take over. We knew who would go to which doors first.

I learned about the Son Tay raid when they took us all to the Hanoi Hilton. The Green Berets got in there but found no Americans. That was in November of 1970. We put the story together from drawings the South Vietnamese prisoners made and left for us to find. They showed something like a C-130 transport, walls, guards, and bodies on the ground.

Not more than a dozen guys ever did anything that was aid to the enemy. Most of them were young troops, Army and Marine, who were captured in the South. But there were two senior officers who refused to take orders from us, made tapes for them to play on Radio Hanoi, and met with the antiwar people, the Jane Fonda and Ramsey Clark types.

Those two got good treatment. Good treatment. Extra food. Different food. Stuff to read. They could stay outside most of the day. They didn’t lock ’em up until late in the evening. And they had fish bowls in their cell.

We were furious. And the Vietnamese knew it. They wouldn’t let us get close to them. They would have been hurt very badly. Or worse.

I had less respect for those two than I did for our captors. Most of us did. We considered them traitors then. And I feel the same way today.

A few guys went through deep depressions and weren’t cooperatin’ with us as much as they should. But that is normal when you go through a deep depression. We just wouldn’t let them quit. We would just keep bangin’ on their walls and tell them if the guard hears, you are just as involved as us, so you might as well bang back. And it worked. They would start answering.

No matter how rough the tortures were, no matter how sick I became, I never once said to myself, I want to take my own life or quit. I would just pray to the Supreme
Being each morning for the best mind to get through the interrogations, and then give thanks each night for makin’ it through the day. And you would meditate with your cellmate. Or tap the letter C from wall to wall through the camp. Then everyone would stop for silent prayer. C was the call for church.

Man, did we miss the movies. And when we finally got together, we have a movie committee, too. Bradley Smith, a Navy guy, could give you the best movie reviews you could ever hope for in your life. He would hardly miss a detail. Last almost as long as the movie. You could just close your eyes and see it.

John Pitchford was a racin’ enthusiast. He knows every horse ever raced. He could do the same thing with a Kentucky Derby race Bradley did with a movie.

But I was fortunate to know one guy who talked sex from the time he got up until the time he was sleepin’. That’s every day. And I really tuned it in. For the first several months, I was kind of pushin’ it in the background. Then for months and months I was too far gone to think about it. And when you become more relaxed, natural things happen. If you didn’t masturbate, you’d have wet dreams.

Man, in solitary, in the darkness, you would see everything you have ever done. You would fantasize anything you wanted. The mind goes like a computer. It picks up from everywhere, compensating for all the deprivations that you’re goin’ through.

Women? I had fantasy affairs with the ordinary women that I met in my lifetime. I had fantasy affairs with the most beautiful women in the world. Jewels of women. I did movie stars. I never would’ve been so successful out here.

I always wanted to race cars. I would race cars for hours on a race track. And I’ve never been on one in my life. And I would do air-to-air combat. And I would calculate and recalculate a bomb release. Lots of that.

And I would re-create the times I’d go picnicking with my children. Play ball with the boys. And come home and give everybody a ride through the area on a motor scooter. And I would imagine what size they are now.

In my dreams I always went somewhere and had to go right back, or go to the airport but the plane had left.