Project Homecoming - Part 2

Shoot-down and Capture

When I asked Alex Bowman (not his real name) for details about his shoot-down and capture almost eight years before, he spoke in great detail as though it had happened only yesterday.  I was kept pretty busy taking notes and we had to stop and go over some things more than once.  He had been flying an RF-101, a reconnaissance version of the F-101 Voodoo fighter aircraft, in the area of Hanoi, way up in the northern part of Vietnam.  He went in low and fast.  The motto of the reconnaissance pilots was, "Alone, unarmed and unafraid!"  Well... two out of three is not bad.  I can't imagine his feelings as he flew only a few hundred feet off the deck at night with his only armament a loaded camera.

He had done this many times before and had always come home safely, though sometimes with a few bullet holes in his nice camouflaged aircraft.  Tonight would be different... much different!  And where he had been about the middle of his 100 mission tour and thinking already about happier days at home with his family, he was about to begin an almost eight year period of captivity.

As he pulled up to slightly higher altitude (probably 600-700 feet for the photography run over his assigned target) he knew that he was under attack by the deadly radar-guided anti-aircraft 20 millimeter cannon.  Bright orange tracer shells lit up the black night and it was obvious that they were much more accurate than the antiaircraft fire he had faced before.  And then it happened!  His aircraft shuddered as cannon shells stitched their way right through his jet engines.  Though he had no personal injuries yet, it was obvious that his aircraft would quit flying in only a few moments.  As fire warning lights lit up all across the engine instruments panel, he pulled the aircraft up sharply to gain altitude that would aid his parachute escape and raised the handles that exposed the firing triggers for his ejection seat.  As he squeezed the triggers, he felt the sudden vertical boost as the seat rockets fired, then everything went black.

Moments or minutes later, he found himself on the ground, in the jungle, in the inky darkness of the night, with a severe arm injury.  Evidently, he had broken his arm in the ejection.  Putting the limp arm in a sling he made from his parachute, he gathered up the remainder of his parachute and hid it, then took the survival rations and those few possessions that were in his bailout kit and moved as best he could to get away from the point of landing.  He knew that his plane had gone down very near there and it would be a focal point for any search that took place for him.

With his injuries, he had much difficulty traveling in the dark.  Knowing that the enemy had a bad habit of placing land mines and setting traps on trails made it very tough also.  His plan was to move as best he could at night toward the coast and hide for sleep during the day.  He had a survival radio which he used intermittently to signal to any friendly aircraft that might be searching for him.  (Every aircraft loss triggered a massive search effort to recover the downed pilot.)  All pilots routinely monitored the emergency (GUARD) channel on every strike mission and reported locations of each signal for use by the rescue helicopters (Jolly Greens).

It was a good plan and it might have worked, except that "Charlie" (the North Vietnamese or Vietcong) was literally all around where Alex was.  On his third day of evasion, he was discovered by a peasant family.  Alex was already pretty weak from infection by then and was surrounded by pitchfork wielding farmers who treated him pretty roughly, causing him terrific pain where he had injured his arm.

He was turned over to North Vietnamese Regular Army troops who "interrogated" him pretty thoroughly.  Their form of interrogation was pretty continuous beating that brought their hapless victim to the brink of death more than once.  But they were experts in their trade.  They knew just how much to do to leave no doubt that they could kill the prisoner, yet stop just short of actually doing it.  (After all, American POWs were a valuable resource who knew LOTS of information that could be useful to their cause.  They could also be outstanding propaganda pawns that could extract favor from the U.S. with proper handling... and they knew how to do that too.

Alex was in several jungle cages like you would put tigers in when he was first captive of the Vietnamese Regulars.  Medical treatment was nonexistent.  His arms went untreated for months.  Food was far below our standards and usually only a little thin gruel with rice.  Alex said that in retrospect, they probably fed the prisoners as well as they, themselves, were fed.  It was just that they didn't have much of anything.  Alex could literally see the pounds melt away during those first weeks and months.

While he wasn't being interrogated, he was imprisoned in a solitary cage or cell.  While still in the jungle, they moved him often, probably in conjunction with troop movements.  Alex thought often of escape during these movements, but there was just no place to go and he was physically very weak.  Eventually, they moved him up the chain of command to where the interrogators were more expert and they worked in earnest to get beyond Alex's Name, Rank & Serial Number.  He was kept in a lightless, solitary cell with no one to talk to but his captors and they used every trick in the book.

It was a severe test of the "Fighting Man's Code" developed after the Korean War to serve as a means of continuing the fight even in captivity.  What Alex and every single POW found, though, was that there was NO WAY to stick to only Name, Rank & Serial Number.  Though they knew the value of that and stuck to it with every cell in their body, the Vietnamese were masters of bodily torture and the terrors of the mind.  They had the power to kill every POW and had no reason to deny themselves that pleasure once they had gained all of the value from them that they could.

What our heroes did, was to recognize that there was no information that was worth losing one American life.  They knew (and those that didn't, learned) that everyone had a breaking point beyond which human endurance, no matter how noble, could not be sustained.  But what they did was to adjust their code a bit.  First, they held to the basics of Name, Rank & Serial Number almost to the point of death (and some DID die that way)!  Then beyond that, when they had reached the point that they knew they could not survive if the cruel torture persisted, they gave in, but just a fraction.  They made the enemy work for every tiny piece of it and they tried to garbage it up as much as they had the strength for.  Those that were forced to sign confessions inserted clever phrases or wording that those who knew them could easily identify as words they would never use, so it was clear that they were "confessing" only under extreme duress.

*    *    *    *    *    The move to the Hanoi Hilton is next     *    *

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