'The Boots' Official M/V
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Of all the significant events in America in 1973, probably the happiest news was the return of the prisoners of war from the detention camps of North and South Vietnam. Analysis of the psychological condition of those POW's seems to suggest that they survived their experiences as prisoners far better than did Americans in other similar situations, particularly the Korean conflict. News stories and magazine articles about POW’s stress that communication was the key element accounting for the better condition of the Vietnam POW returnees. Like communication in the larger world, communication in a POW society serves three roles: (1) it makes possible social interaction; (2) facilitates group dynamics; and (3) serves as a necessary tool for the socialization and indoctrination of new group members.1 Articles concerning the release and debriefing of American servicemen held as POW’s in Southeast Asia have made clear the importance of communication in this setting. A conclusion already drawn is that a strong communication tie among Vietnam war POW’s was a primary factor in preventing the psychological breakdowns that were common among American POW’s held during the Korean conflict, where few such ties existed. The point has been made by Lieutenant Commander John S. McCain III, U.S. Navy, who was shot down over Hanoi on 26 October 1967 and released in the spring of 1973: As far as this business of solitary confinement goes, the most important thing for survival is communication with someone, even if it's only a wave or a wink, a tap on the wall, or to have a guy put his thumb up. It makes all the difference.2 There were many differences between the POW groups in Korea and those in Vietnam. The majority of American POW's in Korea were young draftees, serving in the Army infantry. Many of those young soldiers who succumbed to so-called "brain-washing" were young men who had never had any real understanding of the nature of democracy or any high degree of identification with the principles and morality of a democratic system.3 Almost all POW’s held in Southeast Asia were older officers and pilots. The Southeast Asia group had a far better grasp of why they were in combat, had volunteered to be there (by becoming pilots), and were thus better prepared to resist POW stress, although not entirely immune: The shock of capture is one of the most traumatic overwhelming, stupendous, psychological reactions that can happen to an individual. . . . It is the complete and final cutting off of all you've ever known, all you’ve ever dealt with, all that's ever been familiar . . . . 4 Communication with other POW's is the means to integrate into a society to develop a new "familiar." Communication as an Element of POW Social Interaction Social interaction is the principal way to establish and keep in touch with the new reality. POW's in Vietnam depended on each other for news, support, and sanity. For those who were unable to make a contact, the price was high. Some men cracked under the hardship and strain. "In extreme cases," Kushner said, "men would lie on their beds in fetal positions, sucking their thumbs, calling for mama. One of the men sat on his bed with a blanket over his head for two years."5 POW's interned in South Vietnam came off the planes in 1973 at Clark Air Base, Philippines, in much worse psychological condition than those imprisoned in the North. Military analysts found an explanation for this: "Most prisoners held in the South by the Viet Cong suffered an even worse fate. Chained in separate cages, they were kept in total isolation."6 methods of communication For the men fortunate enough to be imprisoned near other Americans, the only roadblock to establishing communication was the method. POW debriefing indicate that a variety of methods was used. One of the most common was the "tap code." The rudiments of tap code are taught to Southeast Asia-bound men at the Jungle Survival School (JSS) in the Philippines. It is a simple code based on the following arrangement of the alphabet, omitting the letter K. The first taps identified the horizontal line. The second taps identified the vertical column. Hence an "S" would be four taps followed by three taps. code block 1 2 3 4 5 1 A B C D E 2 F G H I J 3 L M N O P 4 Q R S T U 5 V W X Y Z The communication here was very good. We would tap between rooms; I learned a lot about acoustics. You can tap--if you get the right spot on the wall--and hear a guy four or five rooms away.7 Variations on this code, including abbreviations, are possible. Special tap codes speed up the process, thereby lessening risk of detection. With the prisoners' special tap code, . . . he "could send a message through five rooms and get an answer back in ten minutes." We really got pretty fast at it.8 There were situations--for example, single-cell buildings or unusually alert guards--which made use of the tap code impossible. When paper and pen, or their practical equivalent, were available, notes were passed. Notes were passed in the latrine, exercise and prayers were kept up, and a camp chronicler was even appointed to record the history of the captivity.9 In the following example, the exchange of notes was the only contact the narrator had with another American for the duration of his Korean POW experience. One day, however, I glanced out of my door (I was not allowed outside the cell except for a specific reason) and noticed, in amazement, another American dressed in prison garb, using the facility. Deciding this was perhaps the only opportunity I would ever have to make a contact, I quickly wrote a note to give to the American. . . I then mentioned to the guard that I was sick and rushed to the latrine. The guard was unable to see the other prisoner so he paid no attention to my actions. As soon as I got close enough, I threw the note to my fellow American and ran back to my cell. A couple of days later, I saw my new friend again, sitting on the slit trench. As I watched he took a note from his pocket and placed it in a crack in one of the boards near the trench. When he was finished, I asked my guard for permission to relieve myself, and picked up the note.10 When facilities prevented use of taps and notes, the POW's found other methods of contacting their comrades. I had good communications, because there was a door facing the outside and a kind of louvered window above it. I used to stand up on my bucket and was able to take my toothbrush and flash the code to the other prisoners, and they would flash back to me.11 There were some disadvantages to the use of informal, spontaneous codes. Insignificant actions and gestures could be seen as possibly meaningful. "One day, one of those prisoners, looking straight at me, while his guard was a few steps away, whistled 'Plaisirs d'Amour.' Was he trying to convey anything?"12 A prisoner might torment himself for months, trying to find the "hidden" meaning in such an experience. When contact was so limited, the thought of a wasted "conversation" could be maddening. penalties for communicating Because the guards knew the value of communication as well as the Americans did, they severely punished men for their attempts at contact. The following quote from Commander McCain is part of an incident resulting from his being caught tapping the wall: When I said that, the guards, who were all in the room--about 10 of them--really laid into me, kicking and laughing and scratching. After a few hours of that, ropes were put on me and I sat that night bound with ropes. For the next four days, I was beaten every two to three hours by different guards. My left arm was broken again and my ribs were cracked.13 For those men who were not actually caught communicating but who were thought to be in possession of the code, punishment was equally brutal. Prisoners were hung upside down, from beams, until they were ready to talk, made to stand for hours without being allowed to move, and forced to crawl through latrines filled with human excrement. They were beaten with clubs and rifle butts.14 The need to communicate with their fellows was intense enough, however, to drive POW's to risk anything in order to continue. A lot of it was my doing, because they realized far better than we did at first the value of communication with our fellow Americans. When they caught us communicating, they'd take severe reprisals. I was caught a lot of times. One reason was because I'm not too smart, and the other reason was because I lived alone. If you live with somebody else you have somebody helping you out, helping you survive. But I was never going to stop. Communication with your fellow prisoners was of the utmost value--the difference between being able to resist and not being able to resist. A lot depends on the individual. Some men are much more self-sufficient than others.15 psychological effects of communication The emphasis on communication produced a number of strange results. During the Korean POW experience, when contacts were few and "brainwashing" commonplace, American POW's grew fearful even of each other. The following refers to a contact made in a Korean repatriation camp, two days before actual release: Even though Frank Schwable was an American in prisoner-of-war garb, I was slow to trust him, being suspicious of everything and everybody, and judging from his restraint, he felt the same way about me.16 There are a number of examples of Americans escaping from Korean camps, running into each other in the wilderness, refusing to speak to each other, and continuing independently. Sometimes specific human contact was not necessary to remind a POW that he had a society. Other contacts might be enough to "fix" him back into his group. The POW's in Vietnam were primarily reinforced by the direct support of the POW society, but British correspondent Philip Deane resisted Korean brainwashing through the help of a completely different and much larger society. Then they made a mistake. They gave us Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island in English, and I read it fourteen times in succession, casting off the world of Capitalism, Socialism, Communism, Stakhanovism, and plunging desperately into that forgotten world of a child's imagination, with pirates and treasures and overworked clichés. I recaptured my childhood, then my youth, the books I had read, the men I had known, the power to think, I could read Marx again, and question myself honestly without fear.17 Deane trusted Robert Louis Stevenson. He felt no need to be on guard with the author; the communicating between book and man was open. In the Vietnam prison camps, the POW's so totally distrusted their captors that they had a tendency simply to invert whatever their captors told them and believe that. Sometimes, however, some genuine good news sneaked through and bolstered spirits: The North Vietnamese gave us very little except bad news about the U.S. We didn't find out about the successful moon shot (in 1969) until it was mentioned in a speech by George McGovern saying that Nixon could put a man on the moon, but he couldn't put an end to the Vietnam war.18 Communication as a Facilitator of Group Dynamics Perfecting methods of communication, resisting punishment for engaging in communication, and instilling in fellow prisoners the trust necessary to reach out and try to communicate helped to create a POW society. The risks necessary to maintain links welded the community, particularly in North Vietnamese POW camps. From this social interaction developed groups so closely knit that they recognized their own sociological status and consciously sought to create a strong, supportive society. The group dynamics of a row society embody the two thrusts, leadership and cohesiveness. Awareness on the part of POW leaders that men need a strong group with which to align themselves is one reason Vietnam POW's apparently weathered their experiences so much better than their Korean War predecessors. Deciding the source of leadership in a POW society is a simple matter. Military tradition dictates the senior ranking man as commander; the "Code of Conduct" requires all to accept command and requires all other military personnel to subordinate themselves accordingly. "If I am senior I will take command. If not I will obey the lawful orders of those appointed over me and will back them up in every way."19 Among the POW's held in North Vietnamese camps were senior officers capable of handling this particular challenge. It was apparent that the POWs held in the North were in generally better health than the men imprisoned elsewhere. This was ascribed to the improved diets and facilities provided by the North Vietnamese in the latter stages of captivity, and to the strong leadership asserted under the military discipline that prevailed in the camps. (It was this very lack of self-imposed military discipline by US servicemen that helped bring about disaster in the POW camps of Korea.) 20 Military custom requires that a POW camp be run as a military organization. The guidelines are basically limited to Sections III, IV, and V of the "Code of Conduct." The military model is an excellent one for a POW society. The POW's are all familiar with it, and it offers a very complete (and rigid) pattern into which the men can fit. The POW's in North Vietnam elaborated somewhat on the guideline. Prisoners' over-all commander, Air Force Colonel John P. Flynn, formally organized the camp (old French prison in downtown Hanoi) as the 4th Allied POW Wing.21 Over the years, the POW Wing gradually established a military command structure with local commanders, executive officers and deputies in charge of operations, intelligence and training….The senior officers within this group exercised far-reaching powers. The wing command even promoted three sergeants to officers with the understanding that the commissions were subject to review and approval by the Pentagon, White House and Congress. . . . Working with their own appointed chaplains, one group of POWs compiled an abridged Bible from memory and the wing tapped its own historian to chronicle the story of the camps.22 leadership-formal military roles In addition to providing the pattern for a strong society, the 4th Allied POW Wing also gave the POW's something to do, roles to play. The implications of this are numerous. First, the wing--by its very formalized existence--connoted control and discipline. The men were not on their own; they were accountable to recognized authority and a chain of command. Second, military organization gave weaker men support and gave strong men support in times of weakness. Commander McCain, speaking on this subject, agreed that " . . . it was also valuable to establish a chain of command in our camps, so our senior officers could give us advice and guidance."28 Third, the structure and assigned tasks gave the POW's direction. Responsibility, even if limited to passing a tap code message from one wall to the next, gave purpose to a day. The discipline resulting from this kind of concrete, formalized assignment helped preserve the POWs' sanity. group cohesiveness Cohesiveness, as well as leadership, was necessary to create the POW society. In the Southeast Asian setting of the most recent POW experiences, it was easy for POW's to identify each other as group members. They were different from their jailers racially (black and Caucasian POW's versus Oriental guards); they spoke a different language, had a completely different culture and thought pattern. Group norms were not difficult to establish. Once the leadership reminded the POW's who they were, i.e., officers and men in the U.S. military service, the fundamental norms relevant to them were the same as in pre-POW times. The particular norms relevant to camp experience were determined by the leadership and enforced by peer group pressure. These particular norms covered such matters as how much torture to bear before "talking," what constituted "accepting favors" from the enemy, and the amount of trouble a POW was expected to give his guards. Group Inputs. Cohesiveness in the group was effected by two sources. The group itself strengthened its cohesiveness. POW’s in North Vietnam were so well organized that ". . . in some of the prisons a series of courses in languages, mathematics, and various other 'mind-expanding' subjects were taught by fellow POWs."24 Sometimes pranks served to bolster morale. The following incident took place in a camp in North Korea, after the POWs had been tortured for months because they refused to confess to American germ warfare. One day they had decided to put one over on their captors. Someone had found a dead rat and they cooked up a plot to see just how much the Communists would fall for. They printed an Air Force serial number on two sides of a small swatch of white cotton cloth. Next they fashioned a small harness for the dead rat, and they tied string from the harness to the cloth so that it resembled a small parachute. At night they took the rat into the middle of the compound and placed it on the ground, exactly as though it had dropped from the skies via the parachute. The next morning the first Communist interrogator who spotted the dead rat cried out in alarm, and soon a large group of guards and interrogators assembled. . . . Later the interrogators returned to call a general assembly of the POWs in order to brief them on this horrible device that the United Nations had dropped on them in the night.25 This same group of men "became" jet fighters for an entire week, revving up engines before flying to the latrine, landing after such trips with the help of flagmen and elaborate runways in the dust of the compound, sustaining "terrible" injuries during crash landings, etc. The guards were angry, bewildered, threatening, and finally afraid (that they would be blamed for inducing what they saw as mass psychosis). As suddenly as they had begun the game, the POW's stopped it, and enjoyed several months' respite from harassment by the now cautious guards. The triumph of sheer silliness over the nightmare of a POW camp welded those POW's into one of the few strong POW societies of the Korean conflict. In some North Vietnamese camps, American POW's enjoyed group living. This was a major factor in building cohesiveness. The great advantage to living in a big room is that way only a couple or three guys out of the group have to deal with the "gooks." When you're living by yourself, then you've got to deal with them all the time. You always have some fight with them. Maybe you're allowed fifteen minutes to bathe and the "gook" will say in five minutes you've got to go back. So you have an argument with him and he locks you in your room and you don't get to bathe for a week. But when you're in a big room with others, you can stay out of contact with them and it's a lot more pleasant.26 Guard/Captor Inputs. The other source of cohesiveness in a POW camp can be the enemy himself. Of course, there are specific successful actions the captors can take to disrupt the cohesive society. Many US senior officers and uncooperative prisoners of lower rank were held in solitary confinement. Navy Captain James Mulligan was kept alone for 3 ½ years; Colonel Risner for 4½ years and Air Force Colonel Fred Cherry for two years--with an unattended infected shoulder. Said Mulligan …,"You're isolated in a small cell, with no sound, no fresh air. I was kept like an animal in a solid cage, worse than an animal. I couldn't even see out. I didn't see the sun for four years."27 Depriving the men of their leadership is an effective way to destroy the group. Some kinds of torture were effective in forcing POW's to perform certain functions; torturing a man's best friend rather than him was successful sometimes. [The Vietnamese] regularly trussed up captured pilots and exhibited them in trucks and jeeps to jeering, stone-throwing crowds; they packed some prisoners ten to a cell and dumped others in windowless 9 x 9 foot cubicles with only rats for companions. They withheld medical care from some prisoners in order to extract information from their cell mates, and beat others to force them or their buddies to appear before visiting antiwar activists.28 Taking a man completely out of the POW society was another cohesion--destroying action of the captors. Some POWs were forced to kneel on cold concrete floors for days, while their knees swelled up like balloons. Others were beaten with rubber hoses--under the nose so no telltale marks were left. A man would sit on a small stool, without sleep, for twenty consecutive days. Breaking on the 21st day, he gave the antiwar statements they were demanding.29 The guilt feelings of the POW who did crack could be handled by the group; group norms were flexible enough in some cases to countenance "talking" after the kind of torture just described. On the other hand, social cohesion was strengthened by the increased hatred of the enemy which torture--and neglect--provoked in the POW. A comment from a POW doctor: "Ten good men died in my arms," Kushner said bitterly--"three in one week alone. I felt on the edge of insanity," he declared. "I had the knowledge, the training, to take care of those people. All I needed was the equipment, the medicine--and I was unable to get it."30 A number of POW's returned from Vietnam have been quoted as saying that hatred was one of the principal forces which carried them through the experience. The outside threat and the constantly reinforced concept of the captors as evil and despicable bad a very positive effect on the POW society. The captors themselves, along with POW leadership and support from the lower-ranking POW's, were a force in developing cohesiveness in the POW society. Indoctrination for the POW The third major area in which communication is essential in a POW society is in the indoctrination process. An elaborate grapevine eventually grew up linking most of the camps. Prisoners tended this intricate communications system by feigning illnesses to get medical transfers from one camp to another and even by incurring disciplinary transfers by baiting their captors. Wing veterans exhaustively debriefed all new prisoners on their arrival in the camps, and their reports on changing military policies, political trends and new life styles back home were quickly sent out through the grapevine.31 Sometimes it took great effort to get through a new prisoner's thick defenses in order to begin the indoctrination process. Commander McCain recalls an instance: The story of Ernie Brace illustrates how vital communication was to us. While I was in the prison we called the plantation in October, 1968, there was a room behind me. I heard some noise in there, so I started tapping on the wall. Our call-up sign was the old "shave and a haircut," and then the other guy would come back with two taps, "six bits." For two weeks I got no answer, but finally, back came the two taps. I started tapping out the alphabet, one tap for "a," two for "b," and so on. Then I said, "Put your ear to the wall." I finally got him up on the wall and by putting my cup against it, I could talk through it and make him hear me. I gave him the tap code and other information. He gave me his name--Ernie Brace.32 Ernie Brace had been held in Laos by the Pathet Lao and then transferred to one of the POW camps near Hanoi. In the process, he had built himself a very thick shell. Eventually, he became one of the leaders of the particular group of prisoners at the Plantation. precapture conditioning and training If a free man can ever effectively prepare for POW conditions, the Americans on flying status in Southeast Asia had been prepared. The armed forces operate several survival schools; pilots, navigators, and other airborne personnel regularly attended them prior to departure for Southeast Asia. Stateside schools are located at Fairchild AFB, Washington, and Eglin AFB, Florida. These schools are in addition to formal confidence and skill-building courses like the Army Ranger, paratrooper, and Special Forces schools. The Air Force Academy makes practice for POW status part of its regular curriculum. Survival training has been a part of the academy curriculum since the school was opened and . . . all activities are "strictly supervised" by academy staff. The current mock POW exercise is carried out during a 39-hour block of training devoted to training in application of the code of conduct. The resistance training is conducted in a "compound" surrounded by a chain link fence topped with barbed wire, and "protected" by a 20-foot guard tower.33 Survival Schools. Since 1968, the majority of Southeast Asia-bound flyers have attended both the Fairchild AFB Survival School and the Jungle Survival School at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. The author attended both schools in 1969 and found that the courses in both schools simulated many of the anticipated POW problems. The handful of POW's released prior to 1973 lent their expertise in helping the school organizers to build mock-ups of real North and South Vietnamese POW camps, torturer apparatus, and interrogation rooms. Students at the schools were treated as much like POW's as reasonably possible. The knowledge that they were actually on an air base prevented this simulated POW experience from being psychologically identical to the real thing, but it was almost identical physically. Men even spent time in "The Box" (a very small metal or wooden container into which POW's were crammed--and left--until they broke from claustrophobia or pain). In addition to having simulated POW experiences, JSS students learned much potentially useful information about sanitation, survival equipment (and its manufacture and repair), diet, first aid, jungle plants, and wildlife. This information was geared toward helping a downed flyer survive in typical Southeast Asia terrain. The tap and hand codes mentioned so often by former POW’s were also taught at JSS. Here, too, men were reminded of the "Code of Conduct" and its very practical and real application to a situation in which the men at the school might find themselves within the year. Informal Reinforcement of Capture Possibility. Once on flying status in Thailand or South Vietnam, men were constantly reminded of the possibility of capture. This happened as they put on their survival vests (with the many little pockets containing dozens of ingenious devices, carefully designed to carry a man through the first few days until he could be rescued), sat through intelligence briefings, waited for long overdue flights of close friends, and took off themselves on mission after mission. Even close friends rarely speculated about the possibility to each other, but they did little things like jogging without shoes to toughen their feet, "just in case." Combat flying boots are one of the first things a POW is divested of, and a tender-footed prisoner won't get far in the jungle. This awareness and the JSS training made the indoctrination of men into the POW societies in Vietnam far easier than in previous wars and conflicts. peer group pressure The peer group in the POW society also helped indoctrinate the POW's. There were some failures, however, according to information released through American news services. Eight enlisted men, banded together in an informal "Peace Committee," refused orders from their superiors and voluntarily delivered antiwar broadcasts for the enemy that far exceeded anything the North Vietnamese were able to force out of the other prisoners.34 Charges were also levied against two officers for misconduct, mutiny, and aiding the enemy. The Pentagon later dropped all charges against both the officers and enlisted men for lack of supporting evidence and for the expressed belief that the ten men had suffered enough .35 However, prisoners who had doubts about the war, or gave statements to protest groups, or were thought to have collaborated with the enemy were certainly judged by the other prisoners. Of the 566 known POW’s from Southeast Asia, only the ten mentioned were formally accused of failing to adhere to the standards of the "Code of Conduct." Peer group pressure and group support must, indeed, have been strong to keep that number so small. The impact of communication on the POW society, and thus on the prisoner of war himself, is clear. With good communications, a strong, supportive society can be formed and maintained. Statements from former POW’s make plain the importance of contact with other POW's; such contact was vital for survival. Without communication, a POW society cannot be formed, thus leaving the POW isolated and in a one-to-one relationship with his captors. When this situation exists, the POW is likely to suffer severe psychological damage and to give to his jailers the information they want from him. Good communication is truly the key element, then, to survival in a POW situation. Air War College Notes 1. C. T. Morgan, Introduction to Psychology (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966) pp. 577-92. 2. J. S. McCain III, "How the POWs Fought Back," U. S. News and World Report, May14, 1973, p. 49. 3. Arthur W. Combs and Donald Snygg, Individual Behavior (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), p. 330. 4. Excerpts from a briefing on POWs, Newsweek, February 5,1973, p. 21. 5. "POWs: The Price of Survival," Newsweek, April 16, 1973, p. 31 (hereafter cited is "Price of Survival). 6. "And Now a Darker Story," Time, March 5,1973, p.14 (hereafter cited as "Darker Story'). 7. McCain, p. 113. 8. "At Last the Story Can Be Told" Time, April 9,1973, p. 20 (hereafter cited as "At Last"'). 9. "Darker Story." 10. W. Mauhrin, Honest John (New York: C. P. Putnam's Sons, 1962), pp. 197-98. 11. McCain, p. 113. 12. Philip Deane, I Was a Captive in Korea (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1953), p. 211. 13. McCain, p. 5l. 14. "Darker Story." 15. McCain, p. 52. 16. Mauhrin, p. 259. 17. Deane, p.174. 18. McCain, p. 115. 19. S. Sidney Ulmer, Military Justice and the Right to Counsel (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970), p. 5. 20. William P. Schlitz, "The POWs Return." Air Force Magazine, April 1973, p. 25 21. "POWs: The Peace Committee," Newsweek, April 2, 1973, p. 27 ("hereafter cited as "Peace Committee"). 22. "Life to a POW Camp: the Well-Tended Grapevine." Newsweek, February 26, 1973, p. 21 (hereafter cited as "Life"). 23. McCain, p. 50. 24. Schlitz, p. 26. 25. Mauhrin, p. 275. 26. McCain, p. 113. 27. "At last," p. 19. 28. "Peace Committee." 29. Ibid. 30. "Price of Survival." 31. "Life." 32. McCain, p. 49. 33. "Survival School at Academy Hit," Air Force Times, July 11, 1973, p. 19. 34. "Charges Filed against Eight POWs," Air Force Times, June 20, 1973, p. 20. 35. "Pentagon Drops POW Charges," Air Force Times, July 18,1973, p. 3. Contributor Lieutenant Colonel Bobby D. Wagnon (B.B.A., North Texas State University) is a member of the Air War College Class of 1976. He has served as a radar intercept officer in the F-89J and F-101B; as a navigator in the EC-121; and as a weapons controller in the United States, Labrador, and Europe. He also served as Commander, 601 Tactical Control Wing, USAFE. Colonel Wagnon is a graduate of Squadron Officer School, the Armed Forces Staff College, and the Industrial College of the Armed Forces. His next assignment will be with the 52d Air Warning Control Wing, TAC. Disclaimer The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.