Hanoi's Pavlovicms

The walk-on took only four minutes, but its Orwellian impact unsettled even hard-boiled Communist newsmen. Through a curtained doorway in Hanoi marched a husky American prisoner of war clad in purple and cream striped pajamas. He looked healthy enough, except for his eyes; as the strobe lights winked, they remained as fixed and flat as blazer buttons. Then, at a word from his captors, the American bowed deeply from the waist like a Manchurian candi date, repeating the abject gesture in all directions about a dozen times. At an other command, he turned on his sandaled heel and marched stiffly from the room.

The prisoner was Lieut. Commander Richard A. Stratton, 35, a U.S. Navy fighter pilot from the U.S.S. Ticonderoga who was downed over the North last Jan. 5. His Pavlovian performance in Hanoi--witnessed last month by American Freelance Photographer Lee Lockwood and reported last week in LIFE--raised fears that the Communists were once again resorting to the inhuman brainwashing techniques whose widespread use during the Korean War horrified the world. U.S. Ambassadorat-Large W. Averell Harriman warned that "it would be a matter of the gravest concern" if that were the case, and the State Department demanded that Hanoi allow the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit and examine the U.S. prisoners held in the North.

Peculiar Peccavi. There are presently 150 to 200 Americans held prisoner in North Viet Nam, and from them the

Communists claim to have extracted more than 20 "confessions." Ho Chi Minh still believes that he will win the war by default, and the apparent aim of his prisoners' confessions is to convince the world that U.S. fighting men are sick of the war and guilt-racked over their "criminal" behavior in bombing North Viet Nam.

The confessions sound bizarre indeed to anyone familiar with American parlance. Last November, for instance, Radio Havana carried a peculiar peccavi, purportedly in the voice of Commander Jeremiah A. Denton, U.S.N. 485087, U.S.S. Independence. Sorrowfully admitting his "vicious, revolting crimes" in bombing "the innocent people and civilian buildings of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam," the recorded confession continued: "The brave and determined workers of an antiaircraft battery shot down my aircraft." The tape went on to heap praise on "the kindness of heart of the Vietnamese government and people." It made Commander Denton sound just like the boy next door--to any boy in Hanoi.

Stratton's taped "confession," which was played for Photographer Lockwood and 100 other spectators just before the grotesque bowing scene, was almost as ludicrous. "The second of December was to be an air-wing strike on the suburbs of Hanoi," it said, for which "antipersonnel weapons were chosen to inflict maximum damage on the population. Privately most of the pilots were appalled at the pacific nature of the target. I was inwardly ashamed at being such a coward."

Artful Dodger. The hallmark of such "confessions" is their invariable reference to the "brave" American flier who refused to go on the criminal mission. Stratton's tape refers to a "Lieut, (jg) John Parks" who refused to drop his ordnance on the civilian population of Nam Dinh, and was court-martialed when he returned to the carrier. In fact, no American pilot has ever been court-martialed for failing to drop his ordnance.

The obvious conclusion is that the confessions are written by Hanoi's commissars and taped by American-educated announcers. In Commander Stratton's case, Photographer Lockwood speculated that the prisoner might have been drugged rather than brainwashed. One artful dodger who beat the system was Lieut. Commander Charles Tanner, 34, from Covington, Tenn., who solemnly declared that two fellow pilots on the U.S.S. Coral Sea refused to fly their missions, were court-martialed and dishonorably discharged. The officers' names, subsequently trumpeted by Hanoi: Lieut. Commander Ben Casey and Lieut. Clark Kent.

However the confessions are concocted, or even extracted, the North Vietnamese clearly have not yet succeeded in washing horse sense or humor from many American brains. By contrast with the Korean War's Commu nist captors, whose mind-manipulative techniques succeeded most notably with undereducated, unmotivated Army draftees, Hanoi's Pavlovs have to contend with sophisticated career men, most of them field-grade officers, who generally advocate intensified bombing of North Viet Nam. Hanoi's efforts so far only accentuate North Viet Nam's endemic ignorance of Western idiom, intellect and ideology.

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