Surviving Hell (14 page)

But there were domestic successes as well as domestic failures. I remember Dick Bolstad, who was in a big cell with me in 1971, listening wistfully as I talked about Gaylee and the other men talked about their wives. He hadn't had time to marry his fiancée, Sissy, before shipping out. But he was as enthusiastic as any of us, telling how beautiful Sissy was inside and out, and how he was sure she would be there when we got home. We didn't say so to Dick, but we thought that if she were the fantastic woman he claimed she was, she'd meet someone else while he was cooling his heels in prison year after year, especially without a wedding ring to anchor her down.

When Dick finally got a package, among the remnants left after the camp commander and guards had pillaged it, were a couple of photographs. Sissy really was a beautiful woman. Now we old married guys really began to rib Dick, enumerating all the reasons why someone who looked like that, and wasn't already legally bound, wouldn't wait for a guy like him.

But Dick turned out to be right. Sissy was there when he came home. They got married and had a beautiful little girl. When Gaylee and I have visited them, we have been struck by how happy they are.

 

 

We squeezed in a few other subjects besides women. Several POWs, for instance, had great recall of books and a way with words to tell the stories in detail and interestingly. Among the great book reporters were Jack Van Loan, John Borling, Barry Bridger, and Jim Young. Bill Metzger, who was in a four-person cell with Jim Young, told me not long ago that Jim retold all 11 of the Horatio Hornblower books by C.S. Forester.

A few of the favorite movies that we told over and over again were
Dr. Zhivago
,
The Great Gatsby
, and
Sand Pebbles
. Some of the outstanding movie tellers were Jim Bettinger, Chuck Zuhowski, John McCain, and Chuck Rice. One of the three POWs in a cell with Chuck later told me that Chuck “told” a different movie every night for three weeks. Bill said, “Leo, I swear Chuck must have lived in a movie house before he got shot down—it was great.”

Not all movies or books had to be real. Jim Warner, a creative young Marine aviator, was an exceptionally talented teller of movies that had never been made. Jim could create the theme, story, and characters, and describe the visual camera shots—all out of whole cloth. His were some of the very best movies that we “saw” at the Hanoi Hilton.

We also had top ten lists. Long before there was David Letterman, there was Mike Christian, the guy with whom I practiced Spanish with a majority of made-up words. Mike was a handsome Naval officer who was tough as they came. If he was forced to give an inch to the Vietnamese, the next day he took back two.

I lived with Mike for a year toward the end of our six years in Hanoi. We were in big cells with about 25 POWs. With that many men, there were more topics to talk about, more discussions and debates to have, and more classes to take. But boredom was still an enemy lying in wait for us. It was Mike Christian who had a new idea, which immediately caught on with all POWs, when he said one day, “Leo, you know the first ten items of clothing I'm going to buy when we get home?” Mike had memorized them in priority order and immediately rattled them off. Then he asked me, “Do you know the first ten people I'm going to call when I get home?” He rattled them off as well. Then he told me a couple of other lists
he had thought through. One of them involved the top ten people he would never talk to even if he ran into them face to face. Jane Fonda was at the top of that list.

Soon list mania infected everyone in the cell—then expanded to other cells. We developed lists for the first ten things we would eat, the first ten trips we would take, the top ten cities we would visit, the top ten cars we wanted. I reviewed them each day so I would not forget. Of course we started comparing lists and plagiarizing shamelessly.

 

 

We had a discussion one day about the speeches we would give if we were ever released and if anyone back home was interested enough to listen. Bob Lilly suggested we should do a Toastmasters class in the cell. In college he had been on the debate team and later had taken a Toastmasters course.

Bob said, “We will need a speech timer—who volunteers?”

Chuck volunteered.

“What's your pulse rate?” Bob asked.

“It varies a lot.”

“You won't do. We need someone with a steady pulse and best if it is about 60 beats per minute.”

John Stavast spoke up, “I already know how to speak, and so I'm not interested in any Toastmasters stuff, but I have a good heart, pulse about 60.” He became the official counter.

Rather than just asking us as a group, Bob individually asked each POW to sign up for his course. He gave a little pitch about how Toastmasters would help us better explain our experiences to the organizations he confidently predicted would be interested in hearing about them. A high percentage of us signed up.

Time came for the first Toastmasters class, and 14 of the 25 POWs in the cell showed up. (“Showing up” meant we sat on our bed boards in one end of the cell.) It was obvious that the other nine, however much they pretended to be doing something else, were listening to see how things would go.

Bob had given a lot of thought to his class. “Gentlemen, no matter how well you speak in public now, this class will make you
better,” he began. “So listen up; here are the expected results if you stick with the syllabus.”

Several of us glanced around making eye contact with one another thinking, “Whoa, what have we gotten ourselves into?”

Bob spelled out what we'd gain:

There may have been a couple of other goals, but at this point the other nine POWs had stopped talking, started listening, and moved closer. None of us knew this Bob. Until now, we had all been through the same hell and were more or less equals in a prisoner-of-war camp. Suddenly Bob had become a teacher.

Bob reconfirmed with John that he was going to time the speeches. Next he asked for a volunteer to count the “ahs” in each speech. By now, I was a bit anxious as we were randomly assigned to speak from three to five minutes, and so I volunteered to count the “ahs.” John used his 60 heartbeats per minute for time, and we began. The speeches ranged from mediocre to polished. The two-week class added more students than it dropped and everyone “graduated.” To his credit, when we came home Bob contacted Toastmasters International and told the story about having a Toastmasters class in the Hanoi Hilton. The organization found it such an interesting story that they recognized us retroactively as a club and sanctioned the graduates as successfully having fulfilled the real class credits while in prison.

 

 

If 24 POWs were in a cell, there were often ten or so separate conversations going on. The subjects were the same—when will the war end, how are the wife and kids doing, sports, and fishing. There were rarely stories that had not been heard before.

Listening to them day after day, I determined to find a new topic of interest that would draw out my cellmates. I started a casual
conversation with Bill, a POW from Wisconsin. “Why do you think that folks raised like us in the Midwest have higher values—you know, more honesty and that sort of thing—than those from the East or West coasts?”

“Because our parents had better values,” Bill answered.

“Why is that?”

“Because they worked hard and lived off the soil.”

“That's exactly right,” Norlan, a POW from Iowa, chipped in. “My parents were farmers and worked harder than the big city slickers on the coasts.”

Ray, an Ivy Leaguer from Connecticut, hearing these comments, couldn't restrain himself. “That's a bunch of bullshit.”

Soon everyone in the cell was involved in the argument, which became heated and lasted over two hours. After the first five minutes, I pulled back and lay down on my bedboard to listen. It was a great afternoon.

A few days later, I got another one going about why Air Force pilots had fewer accidents than Navy pilots, throwing out a made-up accident rate for Navy men and theorizing that it was because we Air Force men were better trained. In the rhetorical melee that followed, the Naval aviators never questioned the premise but argued hard on the causes. Again I pulled out just after things got hot and enjoyed another good day while lying on my bedboard.

It took a couple of months and several more heated discussions before my cellmates finally caught on to what I was up to. They all gave me a bad time. These discussions took place the last months of 1972, our last Christmas in prison. We drew names for pretend presents. In addition to having my name in the hat, I also got a special gift from everybody. It was a large pebble they sneaked into the cell. The toilet paper wrapping had this inscription. “To the Harmony Officer, Leo. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

T
hough things got marginally better for us after 1970, we never forgot who or where we were. We all knew that we were marked forever and would always see things—particularly things involving our country—from a different angle of vision than that of our fellow citizens.

When I finally came home, I got involved in politics, eventually serving in the Washington state senate from 1988 to 1992. It was a time of heated debates about desecrating the United States flag. The Washington legislature had scheduled its own debate, and our caucus asked me to speak in favor of protecting the flag. I agreed to do it. I had been in the senate for two years and never yet mentioned my POW experience on the senate floor.

Generally when a senator spoke, the initial polite attention was gradually overwhelmed by side conversations among the legislators. On this afternoon, a flag resolution was introduced with the usual reading and paper shuffling, and I stood up, the first to speak. I glanced at the gallery, normally sparsely occupied by a handful of spectators but on this day full. The room was silent. My seat was near the rear, the normal location for freshman senators. I took a deep breath, glanced at my speech outline on my desktop, and looked at the members as I took up the microphone. To my surprise, all the senators had turned in their chairs to face me.

My speech was short—only about three minutes—and, unknown to me, a concerned citizen in the gallery was taking notes, and, a few months later, a summary of my speech appeared in
Reader's Digest
.

I spoke that day about Mike Christian and something he had done in 1972, our last year in prison. By that time, we were allowed outside most days for a few minutes to pour a bucket of water over ourselves from a concrete tank in the prison yard and call it a bath. A gutter ran by the tank, under the prison wall and into the Hanoi drainage system. While 25 naked POWs poured water over themselves, there was always a bit of milling around that delayed the guards locking us back up.

During one of these moments, Mike saw a slimy rag in the gutter and whispered to me, “Leo, there's something in the gutter I want to get back to the cell—keep the guard's attention.” As a prisoner, you scrounge anything you can and help others to do the same. In this case I helped by talking loudly to draw attention while Mike stooped over and hid the rag in his pajama top. Mission accomplished. Back inside the cell we saw that it was a small handkerchief. Soap was precious but when Mike asked us we all chipped in a little to clean the cloth. Tattered gray was as good as he could get it.

Mike scrounged a small piece of red roof tile and laboriously ground it into a powder, which, mixed with a bit of water, became a faded red or maroon color to make the flag's stripes. We had gotten a bit of medicine in the last year of our captivity, usually a blue pill of unknown provenance prescribed for all afflictions. Mike patiently leached the color out of one of the pills and used it to make a blue square in the upper left of the handkerchief. With a needle made from bamboo wood and thread pulled from our single blanket, he stitched little white stars on this field of blue.

It took Mike a couple of weeks to make the flag—working at night under his mosquito net so the guards couldn't see him. Early one morning, he got up before the guards were active and held up the flag, waving it as if in a breeze. He said in a loud whisper, “Look here, gang.” As we turned Mike's way, we automatically came to attention and saluted. Some of us began to cry.

Mike knew—we all knew—the Vietnamese would eventually find the flag during one of their periodic inspections when they stripped us naked and ran us outside so they could go through our belongings.

The night after they found the flag they took Mike to the torture cell and beat him badly. Sometime after midnight they pushed him back into our cell. He was bloody and semi-conscious, so badly hurt that even his voice was gone.

But as I've said, Mike was a tough man. He recovered in a couple of weeks and immediately started looking for another piece of cloth.

T
he end of 1972 was an intense time. We were able to follow the presidential election because the North Vietnamese were convinced that Senator George McGovern would win and filled camp radio with daily news booming his antiwar candidacy. During the campaign, the North Vietnamese often quoted McGovern. One of his quotes stuck in our craw: “If elected president I will go to Vietnam and beg on my knees for the release of our POWs.” Every POW was instantly enraged. During torture, many of us had been forced to “stand” on our knees until we passed out. To picture an American president offering to kneel to those who had done this to us was an abomination. We held our own presidential vote. Of the 189 POWs available to communicate by tap code, the vote was 188 for Nixon and one for McGovern. We never found out who the one was.