Surviving Hell by Leo Thorsness Read Free Book Online Page B

already knew about the tap code. While in Heartbreak, I had learned about it from a POW named Fred Cherry, who was in the cell next to mine. Fred had been shot down in late 1965: He was a tough old-timer and knew the system. An African-American, who now weighed about 120 pounds, Fred was back in Heartbreak to be punished for having refused to make a propaganda tape. One day, when I was on the slab in stocks, I heard an-ever-so-quiet seven taps in the rhythm of “shave and a haircut—two bits.” I had no idea who it was or what it meant. I made a few random taps back. “Shave and a haircut—two bits” came again. Once again I tapped several times. Fred knew that the new prisoners started out in Heartbreak, and, since I didn’t give the right response (two taps), he knew I was a new guy who didn’t know the code.
    It was essential to know the tap code—at times it literally meant the difference between life and death. Fred Cherry, bless him, hollered from his cell to make sure I heard. He yelled, “Who are you?” I hollered back, “Major Leo Thorsness out of Takhli.” “Okay, got your name. Now learn this tap code—organize the alphabet into a matrix of five rows, five letters in each row. Throw the K away so you have 25 letters. For a K, send a C, from the context of the word, you’ll know if it’s a K.” He went on, “First tap the row, pause, then tap the column, pause before the next letter.”
    The guards heard Fred, of course—all of Heartbreak heard Fred. They came running and beat the hell out of him and put him into the stocks. But he had clued me into the tap code.
    Visually it looks like this:
    Communications were our life blood. In practical terms, the tap code allowed us to get the names of the new shoot downs. And as
soon as any POW learned the name of a new guy, like Fred did for me, it was spread throughout the camp. Then a POW would tell a Vietnamese interrogator that he knew that Leo Thorsness was alive and in Heartbreak. That meant another beating because it proved he had communicated. But we felt that if the North Vietnamese prison officials knew the other POWs knew, then the odds of the named POW disappearing went down.
    Another reason communications were critical was to pass on news of the beginning of a new “purge.” Every so often the prison officials were told by the North Vietnamese government to get propaganda from American POWs. The North Vietnamese believed that if officers in the United States Air Force and Navy condemned the war, it would help the antiwar movement turn America against the war. The North Vietnamese loved the antiwar movement. I had an interrogator tell me more than once: “We know we cannot defeat the United States military in the jungle, but we will defeat you in the streets of Washington, New York, and Los Angeles.” As the years went by, they knew that the longer they hung in there, the better their chances were.
    At the beginning of a purge, the Vietnamese picked a prisoner and told him to condemn the war by making a tape recording or writing a letter to the American government or memorizing a statement to be repeated to some visiting delegate. When that POW got back to his cell, after having been tortured for refusing to be a propaganda tool, he immediately went to the wall and began to tap. It was terrible news to know what might be coming, but, if you knew what they wanted, what the POW had done—what he said and how he said it—and why they finally stopped torturing him, the information might make the difference between living or dying during your own torture session.
    When a guard wanted to check on us, or had something to give us, he used the flipper in our cell doors—an eye-level window about a foot long and eight inches tall with a hinge on the bottom. Frequently the guard would sneak along the outside walls of our cell blocks and, when he got to our flipper