Operation Thunderhead (11 page)

In spite of needing to breathe, Dramesi was able to control himself, use his self-discipline to force his body to his will and exhale slowly and quietly. The incoming air was sweet no matter how badly the rice paddy smelled. The enemy had passed him by; there were no searchers standing on the paddy dike. It was time to get up and get going.

Slogging through the soft mud, Dramesi came to the higher solid ground of the surrounding paddy dike. Climbing up the sloping sides, Dramesi came to the top and looked back in the direction of the searchers. What he saw made him freeze into place.

The flashlights were once again approaching him. They were coming back and he was out in the open. There wasn't time to crawl back into a rice paddy and hide in the water. They would be on him before he could quietly hide again. There were thickets of brush on the far side of the paddy dike, away from the direction of the approaching lights. He slipped down the dirt of the dike and struggled to move into the densest of the nearby thickets. He held himself still, scarcely daring to breathe as the lights once again probed around him. The lights illuminated the surrounding brush, but couldn't penetrate deeply into the thicket. The lights paused, and then moved on.

Once more he had escaped detection. Luck was still with him, thought it was touch-and-go for a moment. As he slipped into the paddy, Dramesi noticed that the bottom was very soft and mushy. The water on top of the sludge was also much deeper than the other paddy had been. As he crossed the water, he sank deeper and deeper into it. Near the center of his crossing, his nose was barely above the water. That's when Dramesi felt he was certain it wasn't another rice paddy. He was crossing a cesspool, an open source of fertilizer for the surrounding rice paddies.

After having crossed the repulsive pond, Dramesi climbed up another dike to gain some high ground. Looking back, he could see that the dancing lights of the searchers were still moving across the paddies. But they were looking where he had been, not where he was. And they were gradually moving away in the opposite direction. Finally, the lights were out of sight. Complete darkness closed in and Dramesi was once again alone with only the countless frogs and crickets. Slipping occasionally as he stumbled and splashed across the fields, Dramesi continued due east.

RUN

Passing through two villages during the night, Dramesi kept to the shadows and attracted no attention. He was nearly exhausted, his reserves not being very much after days of captivity and torture. He had to find a place to hide before it became light and people started moving around. But the farmland he had been passing through was mostly flat; the only real feature of the ground all around him were the endless rice paddies. There were no buildings, abandoned huts, thickets, or large trees where he might be able to hide during the day. Time was working against him.

As dawn approached, he crossed a small footbridge. Tired, he almost fell into a group of guards patrolling the area. He slipped into another of the constant rice paddies he had been crossing all night. The guards had not been alerted that the escaped prisoner was practically right next to them, and they continued on their way.

Having passed the night almost constantly on the move, Dramesi was more than a little tired. He was also cold, wet, and hungry. The thin clothes he had on were little more than rags, and soaked through, they helped chill him until his body was shaking. The approaching dawn told him that he had been moving in the right direction. And the increasing light also told him that he had picked up passengers during his many trips through the contaminated water of the rice paddies. There were black leeches all over his lower legs. The calves of his legs had the shiny, wet black slugs all over them, digging painlessly into his skin to draw their sustenance from his blood. They would also transmit diseases into him as they sucked out his blood.

The slippery, slimy creatures would be hard to pull off; and if he did, they would leave a bloody hole behind. But he still had the bottle of wintergreen he had been given back in his cell. With just a touch of the aromatic oil on his fingertip, the parasites immediately released their hold on his flesh. Falling to the mud he was standing in, the leeches slithered away as he touched even more of them with the wintergreen. Finally, his legs were clean of the bloodsuckers.

What he needed in addition to a hiding place right then was water. He had been walking through water all night. But it was hideously polluted and would kill him as surely as a rifle bullet if he drank any of it, though the death would be a much slower one than a gunshot could give. Picking dew-covered leaves off the surrounding plants would supply him with clean water, but there was precious little water actually in the tiny droplets of dew. After licking a number of leaves, Dramesi realized that he was just wasting time and not slaking his thirst at all.

As he had been working at the side of a rice paddy dike, the light had been growing and the local population getting up for their morning work. A trio of water buffalo was slowly approaching him, indifferent to his presence. The more than twenty people who were already working the rice plants nearby also didn't seem to care that he was there, if they had noticed him at all. Even a small group of children passed by and Dramesi was certain that they had seen him. But the children had failed to recognize the escaped American for what he was. All they might have seen was a rag-wearing, muddy, dirty stranger who really didn't stand out much at all.

Moving east but also trying to stay away from people as best he could, Dramesi followed the words he had been given by an intelligence officer back in Thailand: “People catch people.” You couldn't be caught if you stayed away from people. It was a simple statement, but a true one. And Dramesi was going to follow that advice.

Coming to a stream of relatively clean water, Dramesi stopped to repair himself a bit and see to a slightly better disguise. The bandage around the bullet wound on his right leg was torn and dangling. Taking it off, he cleaned the wound and then packed mud around it to protect it and hide it from casual observation. Tearing the legs off his red “prison” pants, he made a rough pair of shorts for himself. He smeared the ever-present mud liberally over all portions of his exposed skin: his arms, legs, face, and hands. This darkened his complexion a bit and help disguise him a bit more. His boots went around his neck by their laces and his burlap jacket was crushed up and stuffed up on his back underneath his shirt. With a big bundle of rice straw he had picked up, he looked little more than a farmer whom life had handed a bad deal to in the form of a humped back. The thin disguise was better than nothing and helped Dramesi at least feel a little more secure about his chances.

The poor, deformed, and hopeless-looking peasant walking along didn't draw even a second glance as Dramesi passed a number of people over the course of the morning. He crossed a stream rather than move too closely to a group of old women washing clothes, but no alarm was raised about him going by. A group of children working in the fields didn't care about him and the escaping prisoner didn't even draw any real attention from a soldier standing on a small bridge some distance away.

The sun was nearly directly overhead when Dramesi stopped outside a small village. People crossed a bridge over a canal between himself and the village. After the villagers had passed, Dramesi continued on his way, crossing over the bridge himself and moving toward the small community. The approach of several people on bicycles forced him to hurry across the bridge and then move down into a gully next to the road. Appearing to be just someone tending to a bundle of rice straw, Dramesi kept his head down as the cyclists went by.

Not even a boy sitting on a water buffalo only a few dozen yards away paid any attention to him. The bicycles rumbled across the boards of the bridge and went on their way. That was the signal for Dramesi to get moving again himself and not push his luck. Climbing back up to the road, Dramesi looked in toward the center of the small community.

People were bustling about on whatever business they had. As he grew closer to the village, Dramesi could see that there were just too many people for him to just brazen his way through the area. He would have to circle around the village, which meant going back across the bridge.

He retraced his steps, intending to cross the canal by another, smaller, bridge he had seen in the distance. That meant he would have to cross the grounds of a fairly nice building, a stately old home, to get to the other bridge. But even that risk proved to have benefit.

Near the house, Dramesi came across a small banana grove. The fruits on the trees were small, hard, and unripe. But carrying even the green bananas for a while might allow them to ripen enough to eat, giving Dramesi some much-needed food. He pulled a small bunch of the green fruit from a tree and tucked it into his shirt.

Some distance across the fields was a gang of workers maintaining the levees lining the canals. Then Dramesi saw something that really raised his hopes. As a pilot, he had spent long hours studying the target areas he was expecting to fly over. That work was paying off now big time, as he could see a single hill about four miles away. That hill was a landmark he recognized, one that was on the coast of the South China Sea. He was close to the water; the sun shining in his face was also shining down on the ships of the U.S. Seventh Fleet. He had a real chance of making it as new strength surged through him. Forgotten was thirst, hunger, or exhaustion. Freedom was beckoning to him.

Either by his own error, or simply bad luck, an old man appeared among the rice stalks not a dozen yards from where Dramesi stood. It may have been that the old man saw the “poor peasant” stealing a bunch of bananas; perhaps he thought Dramesi was a trespasser. Whatever got the old man's attention, he approached Dramesi, shaking his finger and scolding him in a rain of Vietnamese.

The simple disguise only worked at a distance really. When the old man approached Dramesi closely enough, he stopped and appeared startled, if not very badly frightened. Suddenly, he turned and ran, waving his arms and yelling toward the gang of workers on the banks of the canal.

The elation Dramesi had felt only a moment before drained from his body as he looked out across the wide-open fields in front of him. There was no way he could run across the rice paddies, surging through the water and the mud with his two injured legs. The shouts of the approaching work gang were coming up behind him as he pushed the bunch of bananas into the mud. At least he wasn't going to be charged with stealing food from the locals. With a last glance at the landmark indicating his lost chance at freedom, Dramesi turned and faced the approaching mob.

The people was actually afraid of the almost pathetic figure in front of them. Dramesi wasn't about to cower in front of them, but he also wasn't going to incite the mob into attacking. He stood stock-still as the locals approached him as if he were some kind of dangerous tiger that could turn on them with tooth and claw.

Seeing that he was unarmed, several of the youngest locals jumped on Dramesi, pulling him to the ground. Once they had his arms tied behind his back, they seemed to feel a lot more secure about their prisoner. The noisy mob headed toward the local village as a number of soldiers arrived. Taking over the prisoner, the soldiers tied a rope around Dramesi's neck and led him off, marching back to the village.

As the group approached the community, the noise of irate people grew louder and louder. None of the locals or the soldiers really knew what to do with their captive, but they certainly didn't like him being among them. After stopping and talking over their next move, the mob and the soldiers began moving through the village.

There was a line of people along the path—very angry people. While one guard lead the prisoner along by the rope, two more guards walked along behind him. As they moved along, the mob shouted and cursed. Dramesi couldn't understand what the people were yelling, but he noticed that it was again mostly old women and the children who were making the most noise. The angry mob drew closer to throw rocks and sticks at the bound man in front of them. The bravest among the mob would be striking out with their fists before long.

Ducking and dodging the bulk of what was being thrown at him, Dramesi could see that there was one male villager who appeared to be trying to keep up with his progress along the road. The man looked like he was trying to find a gap in the solid line of shouting villagers lining the road, and suddenly he found one.

Darting through the villagers, the man ran up to Dramesi, bounded into the air, and tried to strike out with a flying chop to the prisoner's neck. By playing turtle, hunching up his shoulders and ducking his head, Dramesi was able to lessen the power of the blow. The man continued to chop at the prisoner until the guards finally forced him away.

But the angry man wasn't done with his demonstration of martial arts abilities. When he found another gap in the line, he once again charged the bound prisoner, this time punching Dramesi in the back and ribs. The guards again shoved the man out of the way. The mob of people thinned out until it wasn't much more than a bunch of children throwing what they could find at the bound and helpless prisoner. The parade of prisoner and guards finally stopped at a small cottage, the best-looking building Dramesi had yet seen in North Vietnam. That was where the group was going to wait.

The family who lived in the pleasant little home was just as unlike the villagers as their home was different from the rest of the local structures. They gave the recaptured prisoner a large bowl of rice, on top of which was the usual greens and handful of crushed peanuts. The food was welcomed by the hungry, tired man who had been dragged into their home at the end of a rope. An additional treat was given to Dramesi by one of the family's younger female children. It was a small bowl of sweet rice, something the prisoner had not yet tasted during his stay in North Vietnam. The hospitality was a big shock having come so close on the heels of the mob attacks Dramesi had fared only a short while earlier. And it didn't sound as if the attacks may have ended yet.