"THE
INCREDIBLY STUPID ONE”
(SN
HEGDAHL, USS CANBERRA – PRISONER OF WAR)
By
Dick “Beak” Stratton, Captain, USN (Ret.)
It
was a warmer than usual summer day in Clark, South Dakota when a
rather large and ungainly young man, a recent high school
graduate, set about finding his way in the world. The salivating
Navy recruiter asked the youngster what it would take to have him
sign up: “why, I’d like to go to
Australia
.” It was as good as done. After all, in 1966, if you were lucky
enough to ship out on the USS Canberra, more likely than not,
during the course of your hitch, there will be a port call to the
ship’s namesake—
Canberra
,
Australia
.
This
young man came from a solid, patriotic Norwegian Lutheran stock
that believed when your country called, you answered. You did not
go to the bus station but to the recruiting station. You did not
go to
Oxford
, you went toVietnam. So Douglas Brent Hegdahl III shipped out to
boot camp at
San Diego
, where he slept through the Code of Conduct lectures since he
would not be fighting in the trenches. Lo and behold, he did get
orders to the USSCanberra. At that time
Canberra
with 8-inch guns mounted on the pointy end and missiles on the
round end was assigned to steam with the
Gulf
of
Tonkin Yacht Club
in the South China Sea off the coast of
Vietnam
. (And, yes, She did have
Canberra,
Australia
on her Port of Call list.)
Doug’s
battle station was the aft ammunition handling room for the 5-inch
guns, located aft in the bowels of the ship. One morning he had
the 0100 watch while the
Canberra
was steaming down the coast of
North Vietnam
firing its 8-inch guns against targets of opportunity (bicycles,
water buffalo and occasional trucks) on Highway 1.
At about 0330
he rolled out of the rack. Being a prudent farm boy, he locked all
his valuables in his locker and then proceeded to go out on deck
for a breath of fresh air before manning his battle station.
Now
there is a non-repetitive exercise in the surface Navy called
“going out on deck when big guns are firing.” If the
concussion does not blow you over the side, it will at least blow
out your eardrums. But Doug must have slept through that safety
lecture. He doesn’t know what happened. Either not being
night-adapted, or being without his glasses, or concussion did it,
he ended up going arse over teakettle into the South China Sea
about three miles offshore with no life preserver, no
identification, no nothing. Meanwhile he watched the Love Boat
merrily steaming over the horizon, firing at the coastline and
never missing him for two days.
There
is not much to do in the
South China Sea
at 0345. He took off his boondockers and hung them around his neck
in case he needed them when he reached shore. He stripped off his
dungarees, zipped up the fly, tie off the cuffs and popped them
over his head, as he was taught, to make a life preserver. He
reports back to you that it doesn’t work. (He missed the part
about old dungarees, with holes, out of the Lucky Bag would have
to be kept wet if they were to hold any air at all.) So he put on
his trousers, socks and shoes. (Sharks? Sea snakes?)
Somewhere
along the line he had heard that drowning was a “nice way to
die;” so he thought he would try it out. He put his hands over
his head and down he went—bloop, bloop, bloop.
Now both he and I
had heard the myth that when drowning you would get cuddly, warm,
all the nice things in your life would flash by in your mind and
you would go to your eternal reward to the sound of music (harp?).
Doug resurfaced and reports back to us that it is all malarkey:
there are no movies, there is no music and it’s colder than
Hell!
As
dawn came he started swimming away from the sun, hopefully towards
shore. He could see the haze of land, but the harder he tried, the
further back it receded. So he just rolled on his back, playing
like a whale, humming a few tunes and saying a few prayers. Notice
he never gave up. How many people have we been exposed to in the
course of our lives, in a situation like that would have just
plain given up? About 1800 that same day, a Vietnamese fishing
boat came by and hauled him out of the water—some twelve hours
later.
Even
those peasant fishermen could figure out that this moose would
never fit in the cockpit of an A4 Skylark. They turned him upside
down and inside out which garnered them absolutely nothing.
Remember, he had prudently left everything back on the ship in his
locker. Picture yourself being tortured to admit you were a CIA
agent who entered the water in
Coronado
,
California
to swim ten thousand miles across the Pacific to infiltrate their
shores!
When
the authorities got him ashore, they showed Doug piles of
materials allegedly written by Yankee Air Pirates who had been
captured before him.
(95%
of those captured in North Vietnam had been tortured, were not
offered the option of death, and were made to give more than Name,
Rank, Serial Number and Date of Birth sequence permitted by the
Military Code of Conduct and required by International Law.)
Doug
recognized that something was amiss, but, as he said later,
“Geeze, they’re officers, they must know what they are
doing.” So he decided his best ploy was to pretend to be stupid.
He
got them off target by comparing farms in
North Vietnam
and
South Dakota
. He didn’t realize that even then the Communists were
categorizing him to gauge his usefulness to their cause. His dad
had about ten motel units, numberless vehicles and all kinds of
land—but no water buffalo. No water buffalo meant in Vietnamese
parlance that he was a “poor peasant.” This is just as well,
as Communists had murdered over 20 million “rich peasants” in
their various revolutions, because those folks are unreconstructed
capitalists. A little miffed at first, Doug caught on right
away—he is a quick study—it was to his advantage to play out
the poor peasant act to the bitter end.
Tired
of the verbal jousting the Communist cadres told him that he would
have to write and anti-war statement for them. He joyously agreed.
The interrogators were dumbfounded. This was the first Yankee to
agree to do anything without being tortured first. They brought
out the paper, ink and pens. He admired them all and then stated:
“But one small thing. I can’t read or write. I’m a poor
peasant.” This was quite credible to the Vietnamese since their
poor peasants could neither read nor write.
So they assigned a
Vietnamese to teach him penmanship, spelling, grammar and sentence
structure. Immediately his learning curve went flat. Eventually,
the interrogators gave up in disgust; writing a confession for him
and having him sign it in an illegible scrawl. He admitted to the
war crime of shelling the presidential birthplace of Ho Chi Minh
and signed it as Seaman Apprentice Douglas Brent Hegdahl III,
United States Navy Reserve, Commanding Officer, USS Canberra.
No
one has ever seen this piece of paper.
Doug
was shuffled around from pillar to post, since his captors
didn’t know where he would fit into their propaganda plans. One
mistake they made was to put him in for a while with
Joe
Crecca, an Air Force officer who had developed a method of
creating the most organized memory bank we possessed to record the
names of pilots shot down and imprisoned in
Vietnam
.
Joe
took this young Seaman and, recognizing the potential,
painstakingly taught Doug not only 256 names, but also, the method
of memorizing, cross-referencing and retrieving those names. It
was no easy task that
Joe
set for himself for it was not intuitively obvious to Doug the
value of such mental gymnastics.
It
was a hot summer day when I first met Doug. I was in solitary
confinement again. The Communists did not care for me, which was
OK because I didn’t like them either. My cell door opened and
here was this big moose standing in his skivvie shorts (prison
uniform of the day). “My name is Seaman Douglas Brent Hegdahl,
Sir. What’s yours?”
It is awful hard to look dignified when
you are standing in your underwear, knock-kneed, ding-toed,
pot-bellied, unwashed and unshaven for 100 days. I automatically
recited, “Dick Stratton, Lieutenant Commander, USSTiconderoga.”
Immediately I saw that I probably made a mistake as his eyes
rolled back in his head and you could see what he was thinking:
“Cripes, another officer!” But notice that instinctively he
asked the critical and most important question for survival:
“Who is your senior?” The rule we lived by was: “If I am
senior, I will take charge; if junior, I will obey.”
The
Communists took a siesta for two hours every afternoon which was a
good deal for us as we were free from torture and harassment. I
was laying on the floor on my bed board and Doug was skipping,
yes, skipping around the room.
I asked: “Doug, what are you
doing?” He paused for a moment, looked me in the eye and
cryptically said: “Skipping, Sir” and continued to skip. A
stupid question, a stupid answer. After a moment, I again queried:
“What ya doin’ that for?” This stopped him for a moment. He
paused and cocked his head thoughtfully, smiled and replied:
“You got anything better to do,Sir?” I didn’t. He continued
skipping. I guess he did learn one thing from boot camp. You can
say anything you want to an officer as long as you smile and say
“sir.”
One
siesta period he said: Hey, Beak, you went to college and studied
government; do you know the GettysburgAddress?” We got a brick
(no paper or pencils for the criminals) and started to write it
out on the tile floor until we got it correct. Then he stopped me
with the question: “Can you say it backwards?” Well, who would
want to say theGettysburg Address backwards? Certainly not the
Jesuits at
Georgetown
and especially not me. Doug could say it backwards, verbatim,
rapidly. I know because I could track him from the written version
we had on the floor.
“So
what?” you might say.
The so what is that when they threw him
out of Vietnam, and throw him out they did, he came out with 256
names that
Joe
Crecca had taught him memorized by service, by rank and
alphabetically; next to each name he had a dog’s name, kid’s
name or social security number to verify the quality of the name
which we had picked up by tap code, deaf spelling code or secret
notes. He still has those names memorized today and sings them to
the tune of “Old MacDonald Has a Farm.” One of our
intelligence officers asked him if he could slow the recitation
down to make for easier copying. Doug replied “No” that it was
like riding a bike, you had to keep moving or you would fall off.
If it weren’t for
Joe
Crecca, Doug and our government would not have had those names
until the end of war five years later.
In
trying to get people to accept early propaganda releases, the
Communists would have some “good cop” interrogator like the
ones we called the “Soft Soap Fairy” talk to the prospect and
sound him out for pliability. They got Doug one day and asked what
we eventually learned to be the lead question: “What do you want
more than anything else in the world?” The answer of the weak
and willing was : “To go home to my family.” Doug thought for
a long time, then cocked his head with a smile and said>
“Why, I’d like a pillow, Sir.” This was not an unreasonable
response since we had no pillows on our cement pads or bed boards.
However, the response sure confounded the enemy. They eventually
came up with a name for Doug amongst the guards and interrogators:
“The Incredibly Stupid One.” His original resistance ploy had
paid off.
Because
they thought him stupid, they would let him go out in the cell
block courtyard during the siesta to sweep up the grounds period
monitored by only one sleepy, peasant guard. I thought that was
great since it kept him from skipping and I could get some rest.
However, curiosity got the better of me and I started to watch him
through a peephole we had bored in the cell door. He’d go
sweeping and humming until the guard was lulled to sleep. Then
Doug would back up to a truck, spin the gas cap off the standpipe,
stoop down and put a small amount (“Small, because it’s going
to be a long war, Sir.”) of dirt in the gas tank and replace the
cap. I watched him over a period of time do this to five trucks.
Now,
I’m a liberal arts major who shot himself down, so all I can do
is report what I saw. There were five trucks working in the
prison; I saw Doug work on five trucks; I saw five trucks towed
disabled out of the prison camp. Doug Hegdahl, a high school
graduate from the mess decks fell off a ship and has five enemy
trucks to his credit. I am a World Famous Golden Dragon (VA 192)
with two college degrees, 2000 jet hours, 300 carrier landings and
22 combat missions. How many enemy trucks do I have to my credit?
Zero. Zip. Nada. De Rien. 0. Who’s the better man? Douglas Brent
Hegdahl, one of two men I know of who destroyed enemy military
equipment while a prisoner of war.
Later
on, Doug, having left his eyeglasses on board
Canberra
, discovered that he had difficulty linking up isolated cell
blocks throughout the prison compound with his defective distance
vision. So he went to the authorities and asked if he could read
some of their propaganda. They were delighted. Here was a
prisoner, without being tortured, volunteering to read their
swill.
But
then Doug cautioned them with his: “Small thing [They never
learn]; I cannot read without glasses.”
So they trolled out a
dime store clerk who fitted him with glasses by trying one on
after the other until Doug said he could see. His near vision was
OK. Unbeknownst to the clerk, he was fitting Doug for distance
vision, Now, in between sweeps and gas tanks he was able to link
up cell blocks not only by sweeping in code but now also using the
deaf spelling code.
The
Vietnamese were big on token propaganda releases of prisoners to
make various peace groups look good and our government look
impotent. They would try to pick people who had not been tortured
or in jail long enough to look emaciated. Usually they were
volunteers, violators of direct orders from their Seniors and
traitors to our cause of resistance.
These releases always were of
three at a time. The magic of the number three was always a
mystery to us. As our leaders exercised greater internal
communications and controls, it became harder for the Communists
to make up a propaganda release party. Seeking to round out the
number they finally turned to “The Incredibly Stupid One” who,
although not volunteering, was certainly too dumb to do them any
harm.
As
part of this conditioning they had both Doug and I examined by
“the Doctor.” This was a female soldier we saw through a
peephole we had in the door get briefed up and then dolled up like
a physician. The physician made a grand entrance worthy of a
world-famous brain surgeon. The effect was somewhat spoiled by the
face mask protecting her chin rather than covering her mouth; she
really had no ideas what the face mask was for. The exam, after
looking in all the holes in your head and listening your heart,
consisted of “feeling you up” under the guise of palpitating
your internal organs while the translator asked, “The Doctor
wants to know if you miss your wife (girlfriend)? Wouldn’t you
like to be with her now?”
Then
they would pull Doug out for interrogations sounding him out for
an early release. They told him not to tell me as I was an officer
who did not care about his welfare like they did. They informed
him: “Stratton would never even speak to you if you were in
America
.” Doug would come back from each go around and immediately tell
me everything that was said. One time he plaintively asked:
“Beak, you’d speak to me if we’re home now, wouldn’t
you?”
They
started to try to fatten us up with large bowls of potatoes laced
with canned meat. No one else in the prison was getting it. As a
result I told Doug we couldn’t take it. We could either not
touch it and turn it back in; in which case the guards would eat
it. Or we could dump it in the slop bucket so that no one could
eat it without getting sick. Doug thought this was a bit on the
scrupulous side, but went along with it.
I told the
Camp
Commander
that under no condition would I accept an early release even if
offered and if they threw me out I’d have to be dragged feet
first all the way from
Hanoi
to
Hawaii
screaming bloody murder all the way.
It was time to cut to the
chase. Doug would have to go.
Doug
did not want to go. We finally told Doug that as long as he did
not have to commit treason, he was to permit himself to be thrown
out of the country. He was the most junior. He had the names. He
knew firsthand the torture stories behind many of the propaganda
pictures and news releases. He knew the locations of many of the
prisons.
It was a direct order; he had no choice. I know, because
I personally relayed that order to him as his immediate senior in
the chain of command.
Well
throw him out they did. The 256 names he had memorized contained
many names that our government did not have. He ended up being
sent to
Paris
by Ross Perot to confront the North Vietnamese Peace Talk
Delegation about the fate of the Missing in Action. He entered the
Civil Service and is today a Survival School instructor for the
U.S. Navy and the James B. Stockdale Survival, Evasion,
Resistance, And Escape Center (SERE), naval Air Station, North
Island, Coronado, California.
And yes, he can still recite those
names!
You can watch him do it on the Discovery Channel special on
Vietnam
POWs—Stories of Survival.
A
while after Doug had been released, I was called over to an
interrogation. It was to be a Soft Soap Fairy kind of gig since
there were quality cigarettes, sugared tea in china cups, cookies
and candy laid out on the interrogation table. A dapper, handsome
Vietnamese, dressed in an expensive, tailored suit and wearing
real, spit-shined wingtip shoes, came into the room with a serious
look on his face—all business. “Do you know Douglas Hegdahl?”
“You know I do.” “Hegdahl says that you were tortured.”
“This is true.” “You lie.”
Rolling up the sleeves to my
striped pajamas (prison mess dress uniform), I pointed to the
scars on my wrists and elbows and challenged: “Ask your people
how these marks got on my body; they certainly are neither birth
defects or the result of an aircraft accident.”
He examined the
scars closely, sat back, stared and stated: “You are indeed the
most unfortunate of the unfortunate.” With that he left the
interrogation leaving me with all the goodies.
Upon release I
compared notes with Doug and we determined that time frame was the
same time he accused the Vietnamese in Paris of murdering me [I
had not written home once writing became voluntary] for
embarrassing them in a Life magazine bowing picture. T
hanks to
Doug, despite the scars on my body, the Communists had to produce
me alive at the end of the war.
“The
Incredibly Stupid One,” my personal hero, is the archetype of
the innovative, resourceful and courageous American Sailor.
These
sailors are the products of the neighborhoods, churches, schools
and families working together to produce individuals blessed with
a sense of humor and the gift of freedom who can overcome any kind
of odds. These sailors are tremendously loyal and devoted to their
units and their leaders in their own private and personal ways.
As
long as we have the Dougs of this world, our country will retain
its freedoms.