At Last the Story Can Be Told

FOR weeks the returned P.O.W.s had been stepping from "freedom birds" onto the television screens--most of them saluting crisply, walking smartly, looking physically fit and acting mentally alert. As the nation's early apprehensions faded, a new idea set in: perhaps the P.O.W.s had been humanely treated after all. That illusion was shattered last week. With all the known surviving prisoners safely home from Viet Nam, the dam of restraints broke, and tales of mistreatment and torture poured forth. Navy Commander Richard Stratton, best known for his deep bows and seemingly drugged appearance in a 1967 news conference, summed up the reports of many prisoners when he said: "I have been tortured, I have been beaten, I have been placed in solitary confinement, I have been harassed, I have been humiliated." Navy Lieut. Commander Rodney Knutson struck the same harsh note. "Lenient and humane treatment?" he asked. "Not on your life!"

Prisoners detailed a mosaic of torture ranging from the brutally physical to the ingeniously psychological. They conceded that treatment had varied for each P.O.W., that conditions had improved remarkably by the fall of 1969, and that high-ranking officers had absorbed the worst of it. But mistreatment was clearly widespread, and often brought on by the prisoners' steadfast resistance. As Navy Captain Jeremiah Denton said, "We forced them to be brutal to us." Even those who considered their treatment comparatively mild, such as Air Force Captain Joseph Milligan, often suffered enormously. Provided totally inadequate medical attention, Milligan treated--and cured--a badly burned arm by letting maggots eat away the pus, then cleaning off the maggots with his own urine.

The favorite props of the North Vietnamese captors were lengths of rope, iron manacles that could be screwed down to the bone and fan belts for administering beatings. Prisoners claimed that they were tied up for interminable periods into positions that yogis could not assume. Ropes tied to a man's ankles, wrists and neck were tightened until he was bent over backward in a doughnut shape. Men were also bent forward into a position of a baby sucking its big toe. The ropes cut off circulation, and in several cases paralyzed limbs for months, even years.

Raw Flesh. Handcuffs on the wrists of one prisoner were tightened so much that blood came through the pores. Hands and feet often swelled to unimaginable proportions and turned black. Jaws, noses, ribs, teeth and limbs, the prisoners charged, were deliberately broken and left unset. The sick and wounded were left in their own excrement for days on end. Fan belts or lengths of rubber turned buttocks of beaten prisoners into raw flesh. Sergeant Don MacPhail said that he was hung from a tree over three fresh graves and beaten with sticks. He was told that he would be in the fourth grave.

Many U.S. senior officers and uncooperative prisoners of lower rank were held in solitary confinement. Navy Captain James Mulligan was kept alone for 3 1/2 years, Colonel Robinson Risner for 4 1/2 years, and Air Force Colonel Fred Cherry for two years--with an unattended infected shoulder. Said Mulligan last week, "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 moon for four years."

Fish Heads. Before 1969 food was kept at near starvation level at the more severe camps. For many prisoners, there were only two meals a day, six hours apart, and they might consist of nothing more than a bowl of watery soup, occasionally with a fish head in it. The bread was often wormy and the rice sandy. Lieut. Commander Knutson said that he and his fellow prisoners ate with one hand on their rice and the other on their soup bowl in order to keep the cockroaches from taking over.

Much of the torture was intended to force "confessions" or extract information. Often prisoners were beaten until unconscious to get them to sign statements about the "humanity" of their treatment. U.S. officials figure that as many as 95% of the P.O.W.s captured before 1970 were tortured. Almost all broke. Said Navy Captain Allen Brady: "I never met a man with whom they were not able to gain at least some of their objectives." Most felt, as did Army Major Floyd J. Thompson, that "these propaganda statements just weren't worth dying for."

There were partial victories. When interrogators put a pistol to Captain Milligan's head to force him to give some intelligence, he gambled that none of the officers present understood English and wrote nonsense after each question. Navy Captain James Stockdale never broke. Asked for information about U.S. ships, he drew a picture of an aircraft carrier with a swimming pool and 300-ft. keel. Navy Lieut. Commander John McCain III once listed the offensive line of the Green Bay Packers as the members of his squadron.

Defense Department officials believe that many of the 55 men listed as having died in captivity in North Viet Nam did so at the hands of torturers. According to several P.O.W.s, Air Force Major Edwin Atterberry, one of two prisoners who escaped and were recaptured in 1969, was beaten to death.

Although there seemed to be far fewer beatings at the hands of the Viet Cong, conditions in the South held their own horror. One prisoner was buried up to his neck for days. Another, who was suffering from dysentery, was denied medical assistance and finally suffocated in his own excrement. For those well enough to walk, there were endless work details. Army Major William Hardy, captured in 1967, figures that the Viet Cong "treated me like a slave" because he is black and "they believed all they heard about Negroes still being treated like slaves in the U.S."

Colonel Risner named Oct. 15, 1969 as the beginning of improvement in the prisoners' treatment. The credit for the change seems to belong to all the people who tried at about that time to focus world attention on the plight of the P.O.W.s--President Nixon, the wives of the P.O.W.s, Congress and the media. Embarrassed by world pressure, the politburo in Hanoi may have passed the word to go easier. At any rate, prisoners were allowed for the first time to exercise outdoors for 30 minutes, but behind bamboo screens so that they could not see each other; they got a third daily meal of bread and water, and a third blanket. They began to pass their days in boredom rather than fear. Milligan began to raise a family of spiders in his cell, and watched geckos "mate with each other and grow old."

By the winter of 1970 most of the prisoners had been taken out of solitary or small-group cells into large open cell blocks that held about 45 men. It was after they were put together that they were able to organize--and even coordinate a resistance of sorts.

They called themselves the "Fourth Combined P.O.W. Wing." Each camp had its own American commandant, as it were. The prisoners adopted Air Force organizational tables--wings, squadrons, operations. A tap code and a hand code were the most effective methods of communicating, but everything helped--the modulations of a cough, the syncopated swipe of a broom.

Flag. By late 1971 the organization had solidified enough to stage its own psychological warfare. On Dec. 7 they staged a church service in the "Hanoi Hilton." Their North Vietnamese captors called it "the riot." On that day the Fourth Combined P.O.W. Wing ordered a mass prayer service in defiance of camp regulations prohibiting meetings of more than 20 men. Ordered to stop, they prayed even louder. When the wing leaders were taken outside the cell block, those inside broke into The Star-Spangled Banner.

Such exercises in symbolism proved immensely valuable in sustaining morale. Air Force Lieut. Colonel John Dramesi, who escaped with Atterberry in 1969 but was recaptured, began in the fall of 1971 to laboriously stitch together an American flag. He used the threads from a yellow blanket for the gold embroidery, pieces of red nylon underwear and red thread from a handkerchief, white threads from a towel and patches of blue from a North Vietnamese jacket. The flag often flew at night in the Hanoi Hilton cell block that he shared with 40 other men, and it was dutifully saluted. "I thought that a flag could be a symbol to which we could attach ourselves, so that we could retain our honor and respect," says Dramesi.

In much the same manner as the prisoners sustained themselves on such bits of symbolism, the U.S. has now turned toward the P.O.W.s as uplifting symbols--victors, in the sense of having survived, in a war that was never won, patriots in a land that had grown weary of flag waving. For the moment, their return has provided the only solace at the end of what President Nixon last week described as "the longest and most difficult war in our history."

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