Surviving Hell by Leo Thorsness Read Free Book Online

pitied me, things were good for them—their
health, their marriages, their jobs—and not for me. This bothered me, and I’d summon someone else. But it was always the same story: all good for them, all bad for me.
    I became so addicted to these hallucinations, and so adept at arranging them, that once when I emerged from a torture session and was briefly put in a holding cell with another POW, I offered to summon his wife and tell her he was alive. Naturally he gave me a strange look before skeptically saying, “Okay.” So I closed my eyes and called her. I told her he was alive. I asked how her kids were and she said fine. I opened my eyes and told him his wife was fine, and so were his kids—the four girls. That got his attention—he indeed had four girls. But he also had three boys, a fact that never penetrated my altered state.
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    My back was broken and refrozen during these first torture sessions. My knees were further damaged. My body was wrenched apart. There was nothing particularly imaginative about the North Vietnamese techniques. They hadn’t improved much on the devices of the Spanish Inquisition. They bent things that didn’t bend; they separated things meant to stay together. At times I couldn’t tell if I was screaming or imagining that I was screaming.
    When we finally came home, several journalists, perhaps annoyed by the brief support for the war our stories of our captivity had generated, skeptically implied that when we said torture we actually meant intimidation, coercion, and degradation. But the reality of the torture we experienced was engraved on our bodies. We later calculated that some 65 POWs died from torture during the years of captivity—nearly 20 percent of all those imprisoned. Some, like Lance Sijan, were tortured so long and so hard that they simply withered away. Others, like Earl Cobeil, were tortured so expertly by some of the Cubans working for the North Vietnamese that their minds stopped working and they no longer felt pain and eventually died.
    There were three Cubans, headed by a sadist we called “Fidel,” at the Hanoi Hilton. They ran a little program called “Operation
Submission,” focusing on eight POWs who had been more or less picked at random for extreme torture intended as on-the-job training for the North Vietnamese. (I was number eight-and-a-half and only got a sampling. I particularly remember being on the floor with Fidel working me over as he played Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walking” on the phonograph.) The Cubans frequently told us, “You will do everything and anything we ask you to do before we’re finished with you.” Earl was their research project. They killed him from within. A POW who had been his cellmate later told me that he saw “Fidel” hit Earl directly between the eyes with a rubber hose, but Earl was so bad off that he didn’t even blink. This POW had to pry Earl’s teeth apart to put rice in his mouth, but eventually could not keep him alive. (While still in prison, several of us pledged $1,000 each to find someone to find and kill “Fidel”—it didn’t work out.)
    Our loved ones were tortured too. After he bailed out, Captain Charles Shelton was seen on the ground, destroying his radio. But he never made it to the camps and was likely killed where he landed. But the Pentagon didn’t know for sure, and for 20 years kept promoting him to higher rank. This encouraged his wife to keep up hope. Eventually, after a lengthy review, Shelton was declared presumptively dead and his wife committed suicide, one of the last victims of the North Vietnamese.
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    When I broke—when I went beyond name, rank, serial number, and date of birth—it was the lowest point in all my six years of captivity. When floating down in my parachute, I believed I had failed my family. If I died when I hit the ground, they