Two Souls Indivisible (5 page)

Each response was the same.

"Fred Cherry. Major," he said. He gave his serial number and date of birth, and he took out his Geneva Convention Identification Card, which outlined his rights as a prisoner.

"Forget about it," an interrogator said, ripping it up. "You're a criminal."

Cherry could hear hundreds of teenage students chanting in Vietnamese. The interrogator said, "They're yelling, 'Kill the Yankee!'"

"So kill me," Cherry said. "You're going to do that sooner or later."

"You are a criminal," the interrogator said.

"I'm Fred Cherry. Major."

After a few more fruitless exchanges, a guard bound Cherry's elbows again and they headed outside. They passed men and women in peasant clothes and conical hats, some carrying hoes, shovels, and other hand tools. Cherry's presence was a diversion from harvesting. Suddenly, a young farmer ran toward him and rubbed his hand. The militiamen, fearing an attack on the American, pushed their rifle bolts forward. But there was no attack; the peasant just wanted to see if Cherry's color rubbed off. He quickly disappeared back into the crowd.

Cherry was returned to the jeep, and they drove all afternoon and into the evening. Almost all vehicles were heavily camouflaged. Headlights were seldom used, but when they were, they showed only through the bottom third of each lens. (The rest was painted over.) Cherry had not had food or water since the morning, but his exhaustion was greater than his hunger or thirst. He just wanted to lie down.

By ten
P.M.
they reached Hanoi, one of Asia's oldest cities, where pastel villas and spacious verandas recalled the French colonial rule. The French left something else as well: the Hanoi Hilton. It was Fred Cherry's next stop.

There is never a good time to become a POW, but Fred Cherry's timing could not have been worse. His arrival coincided with the North's first crackdown on American prisoners.

Navy Lieutenant (j.g.) Everett Alvarez, Jr., was the first American POW in the North, captured in August of 1964 after alleged attacks on U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. The Vietnamese had not developed confinement procedures—the Hoa Lo Prison still held civilian convicts—and Alvarez's treatment, initially, was bearable. The Johnson administration, gearing up for a presidential election, stopped the air raids, contributing to this relatively benign environment. While the food was bad, Alvarez was able to write and receive letters, to leave his cell for exercise, and even to read. Loneliness was his biggest enemy. Using a nail, he marked the passing days by scratching messages in one corner of the prison: "Happy Labor Day." "Have a good Thanksgiving." "Merry Christmas." He suffered daily interrogations, but he found his examiners more amateurish than cruel. They lectured him about Vietnam's history of wars against various oppressors and exhorted him to write a letter to Ho Chi Minh expressing his appreciation for his favorable treatment. He refused.

As the number of POWs increased, they were routinely subjected to questioning, bullying, and indoctrination. Political officers hectored them about the evils of capitalism; demanded that the Americans denounce their government and acknowledge their own criminality; occasionally threatened execution; and inflicted some physical abuse. If a prisoner was caught violating any rule, such as communicating to another inmate, he was locked in isolation. Life was hard, but not horrific.

The situation changed in the fall of 1965, which happened to be one of Hanoi's coldest autumns in years, forcing America's three dozen prisoners to shiver in the concrete chill. But the weather was the least of their problems. The Vietnamese officials abruptly escalated their physical abuse, using torture as almost a rite of passage for virtually every POW in the North.

The change came about for several reasons. On October 24, the guards raided the prison cell of Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Robinson Risner, an American hero even before he was shot down. He had been heralded in a
Time
cover story as an example of the dedicated American fighting man in Vietnam. Unfortunately, the enemy saw the story—it received copies of America's leading magazines—and made Risner's life miserable. When guards ransacked his cell, they discovered a list of directives that the Americans had been passing around, explaining how they were to create a chain of command, communicate among themselves, and frustrate their captors. The guards also found an iron bar that was used to drill holes in the wall. To the Vietnamese, these were the first pieces of evidence that the Americans were organizing to resist, in essence to continue the war behind bars. Reprisal was swift. Rules were enforced with torture, resisters were punished ruthlessly, and privileges were denied—Red Cross packages, for example, were seized. Even the food was downgraded. Until then, the POWs had gotten one and sometimes two bananas a day. After the crackdown, months passed before some prisoners saw fruit again.

James Stockdale, a Navy commander who was captured a month before the crackdown, later wrote: "By carrying out a new policy action, North Vietnam had crossed a boundary. Henceforth, Americans were to be allowed to stay within the bounds of name, rank, serial number, and date of birth only at North Vietnam's sufferance." The prisoners later dubbed this campaign, lasting from late October 1965 to the fall of 1969, "the Extortion Era."

Even without discovering contraband, the Vietnamese may still have tightened the screws. America's frequent bombing raids, while not crippling the country, were damaging. The North realized that hostilities could persist indefinitely—as could the prisoners' captivity—so imposing strict discipline on them would diminish their resistance. More important, the North could exploit the Americans to advance its own goals. In past wars, combatants used their POWs to negotiate more favorable peace terms, but the Vietnamese believed they could use their prisoners to elicit—through whatever means necessary—statements condemning the U.S. government. Borrowing interrogation and propaganda techniques from the Chinese and Korean Communists, they believed such pronouncements, written, taped, or filmed, would boost the morale of their own people and stir up antiwar sentiment in America. As a Vietnamese official told Stockdale, "Our country has no capability to defeat you on the battlefield. But war is not decided by weapons so much as national will. Once the American people understand this war, they will have no interest in pursuing it ... We will win this war on the streets of New York."

The Vietnamese recognized the importance of public opinion in America but were remarkably naive in believing that a statement from a POW—or anyone in captivity—would carry any weight. Nevertheless, they were never stymied by their lack of sophistication. Torture would be the tool to extract POWs' statements, to break their will. Many prisoners believed that torture was an extension of Communist doctrine, giving rise to the definition "A Communist is a person who will torture you to write a statement that you are not being tortured."

But the roots of such abuse lay deeper. The Hoa Lo Prison had been built by the French for their Vietnamese captives. The leg irons, manacles, and handcuffs that fit snugly on the small frames of the Asian prisoners cut deeply into the flesh of the Americans. Ho Chi Minh, in
French Colonialism on Trial
(1926), condemned torture as a means of oppression, but after he assumed power, he used it to crush opponents. Ho's chief military strategist, General Giap, said in 1956: "We ... executed too many honest people ... and seeing enemies everywhere, resorted to terror, which became far too widespread ... Worse still, torture came to be regarded as a normal practice."

It was normal practice for the pro-American government in South Vietnam as well. Its regular police and security agencies, trained by the French, tortured suspected Communists to pry out the names of other cadres, then either shot them or sentenced them to a concentration camp. In the infamous "tiger cages," prisoners were beaten with a bludgeon or an electric whip. Women arrested were usually raped as well as tortured, because, as the American journalist Neil Sheehan wrote, "The torturers considered rape a perquisite of their job."

Vietnam's history of torture made its use against the American POWs all but inevitable; it was simply bad luck that the prisoners captured at the end of October 1965 arrived with its most ruthless application.

***

The Jeep carrying Fred Cherry drove through Hoa Los big front gate. The vehicle cut through an outer stone wall, rumbled across a cobblestone alley, turned into a tunnel, passed through another set of gates, and then stopped in a courtyard. The distance between the street and the courtyard was only about seventy feet, but the clanging of the metal gates and the eerie blackness of the tunnel signaled a passage into a forbidding world.

Built at the turn of the twentieth century with a capacity of two thousand offenders, Hoa Lo was North Vietnam's main penitentiary and the headquarters of the country's entire prison system. Occupying an entire block, it was surrounded by a concrete wall about sixteen feet high and six feet thick. Embedded in the top of the wall were shards of iridescent greenish-blue glass, said to be the remnants of French champagne bottles. Beyond the glass were three strands of barbed wire, one of which was electrified. Guard towers stood at the prison's four corners.

The courtyard itself had a veneer of order and serenity. A bit larger than a basketball court, it was lined with faded, two-story white stucco buildings with red tile, which served as administrative offices. Along the cobblestone driveway stood four well-tended flower beds for the pleasure of prison officials or visitors—but not the inmates, who were delivered to a nearby cellblock.

Cherry barely noticed his surroundings. Fighting through sleep, he worried whether his wife and children knew he was alive and hoped that they could get back to the United States and find someplace to live. He was taken to an area that the Americans had dubbed the New Guy Village, where the Vietnamese inflicted their worse torture. Room 18 had soundproofed walls and an array of menacing contraptions, including a giant hook suspended from the ceiling. Ropes were tied around the inmates' arms and strung up on the hook, the cord sometimes soaked with gasoline to intensify the pain. Catty-corner to that was a second chamber, the "knobby" room, whose pale green walls were covered with rough knobs of acoustic tile that muffled screams, the tile cracked from the impact of many bodies.

Cherry walked into that room and recognized a familiar arrangement: the rickety wooden stool, the desk covered by a blue cloth, the interrogator, the guard. A conical shade on an overhead light bulb could be used to direct light into the eyes of the prisoner. A tape recorder hidden beneath the table could capture and later broadcast damning statements.

His arms still tied behind his back, Cherry sat so close to the desk that he could barely move his knees. By now he was so tired that he struggled to keep his head up and his eyes open. The pain in his left shoulder was increasing, but, fearing the injury would be exploited, he did not acknowledge it to his captors. To stay awake, he needed a diversion, and he noticed a plant in a large urn against a wall. The plant drifted in and out of focus, but Cherry kept his mind on it.

His interrogator, the man called Rabbit, sat before him while a guard stood behind him.

"You're a criminal," Rabbit said. "You committed crimes against the Vietnamese people. Are you going to admit your crimes?"

Cherry shook his head.

The guard whacked him across the head with his palm, then kicked his chair out from under him, the pain shooting through his body as he fell to the floor. He was lifted up and placed back on the chair, and he looked at Rabbit again.

"What was your mission? Who was in your squadron?"

Cherry stated his name, rank, serial number, and date of birth. He tried to brace his body before the next assault, but to little effect. The guard grabbed his head and crashed it against the table, then kicked the chair out.

In seconds he was back on the chair, and the questions continued.

"You killed thirty people," Rabbit said, his voice rising. "Do you feel good about that?"

This time Cherry responded. "I didn't kill anyone," he said. "I just gather information."

"What kind of plane did you fly?"

"An RF-105 reconnaissance plane," Cherry said. The Air Force didn't have such a plane.

The officer wrote the information down, then looked up and said, "You have no RF-105s."

"We sure do," Cherry said. "I had one."

"How does it work?"

"I have no idea. The pilot just pushes the button, leaves it on, then turns it off. That's all the pilot knows. Okay?"

Months later, Cherry saw in a Vietnamese magazine a photograph of the tail of an F-105, and it was called an RF-105. He figured it was his plane because he doubted anyone else used that lie.

A hand grabbed the back of Cherry's head and again slammed it to the table.

"What was your destination?" Rabbit spread maps out on the table, and Cherry saw they were his, retrieved from his downed Thunderchief.

Rabbit continued asking questions, but Cherry was too groggy to hear much. Throughout the night, he was knocked to the floor, was punched across the ears and neck, and had his head slammed against the desk. Blood trickled out of his nose, welts formed over his eyes, and his ears rang. At one point he murmured, "Under the Geneva Conventions ... you can't treat a prisoner this way."

"You are not a prisoner of war!" Rabbit stood up quickly. "You are a criminal!"

Cherry finally realized that his POW status meant nothing because no one, with the exception of the enemy, even knew he was a POW. The enemy could kill him, and his death would be attributed to the shootdown—killed in action.

Yet he was learning to weather the abuse. He relaxed his entire body and tried to think of something pleasant—flying combat missions. He envisioned maneuvering through the air, dropping bombs, eluding the enemy. His trancelike state gave way to actual sleep, and his head dropped, but a guard yanked it up and banged it on the table. As the night wore on, they continued to ask him about his plane, his missions, his targets, and what he knew of North Vietnam's defenses. He refused to answer their questions. At one point, his arms were twisted behind his back and pushed upward, further ripping the socket of his left shoulder. They tied his arms, milled about, chatted, drank tea. Had he yelled out, the knobby room would have muffled the sound, but he never screamed. Finally he blacked out, but he had survived his first day as a prisoner of war.