Operation Thunderhead (17 page)

Other uplifting things happened at the Golden Nugget; at least one took place early on for Dramesi. It was only a few days after his arrival at the facility that he learned an old friend of his was just a few cells down from his. Charlie Greene had been another pilot flying F-105s back when he and Dramesi were serving at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina. He had been shot down along with two other aircraft on March 11 that same year. Greene had gone down about three weeks before Dramesi was shot down himself.

Knowing that there was a fellow flier that he had history with was a boost for Dramesi while spending his time at the Golden Nugget. It was one of the few positive things that helped lighten the dank, dreary mood of the whole place and the situation they all shared.

One of the few bright spots on the average day was when Dramesi was allowed out of his cell for personal hygiene. He had the opportunity to wash himself and his clothes but occasionally the guards cut his time a short. On some days, Dramesi was let out of the cell for as little as ten minutes in order to attend to his needs. Shaving gear in the form of an old razor was issued once a week. The blade was dull and didn't cut a beard very well. Even cut and bleeding a bit, Dramesi always felt considerably better after he managed even a rough shave.

There wasn't much at the Golden Nugget to make the prisoners feel good about anything. As far as Dramesi was concerned, the prison staff treated them little better than animals. He felt he had proof of this in the form of some of the other denizens of the immediate area. Just across from the cell that he shared with Meyer, pigs were being held in an old shower stall. The swine smelled just as farm pigs do everywhere; and the stench was overpowering sometimes. From what he could tell, it was just another tool the prison used to try and dehumanize Dramesi and the others.

Some treatment was a little better than others. Eventually, Dramesi was given an issue of supplies. It wasn't much—two sets of long-sleeved shorts and pants in the alternating stripes that identified prison garb, and a short-sleeved shirt to go with a set of matching shorts. He also received a pair of rubber sandals and a blue sweater. In the heat of North Vietnam, he found the sweater to be an odd item of issue but certainly accepted it. Finally, he also received two hygiene items, a toothbrush and a very small tube of toothpaste. He was told that the toothbrush would have to last him for six months and the toothpaste for three months. But being able to scrub his teeth clean for the first time since he had been captured was a luxury.

There were no periods of intense interrogation such as he had experienced in his first weeks at the prison, but Dramesi knew such things could come at any time. The prisoners were completely at the mercy of the guards, and some of the guards didn't know what mercy meant in any language. Goose was far from being the only sadist the North Vietnamese inflicted on the POWs.

When he was taken one day to a room the prisoners called the Riviera, Dramesi thought that his respite from torture might be over. In the room was one of the five individuals who had overseen his long torture session when he first arrived. The North Vietnamese officer in the room had been one of the interrogators during that first ordeal and he could speak reasonable English.

To his astonishment, Dramesi was informed that he was going to be moved to a better facility; one where his roommate could receive the attention he needed. Dramesi would be receiving this great boon because his attitude had been improving. The Vietnamese also hoped that Dramesi would continue to improve his behavior and remember to do as he was ordered by the guards and staff.

The only answer Dramesi gave was that he understood what was being said to him. He neither agreed nor disagreed with what he had been told, only acknowledged it. Nothing he said could be used against him, his fellow prisoners, or his country. His cooperation was extremely limited. Then the interrogator gave Dramesi a lecture on how badly the war was going for the South Vietnamese and the United States. America was losing and the conflict would be coming to an end soon.

Goose came into the room and led Dramesi away when the interrogator was done talking. But they did not return to the cell right away. Instead, Dramesi was taken to a medic's clinic, a shack really. Was he finally going to receive some medical treatment for the wound in his leg? Over and over again, Bug and other interrogators had said that the infected wound would be treated, but nothing was ever done. This time it looked like things were going to be different.

That was apparently the situation. Dramesi didn't need to see the disgusted look in the medic's face to know the wound was bad. It had never been properly treated since Dramesi had been shot. The treatment was rough at best, not much better than some of the finer points of torture that Goose had delivered. The medic used a pair of tweezers to remove the dead tissue that filled the wound channel. The pain was intense as it rushed through Dramesi's leg and flooded his body. Finally, the worst of the treatment was over when the wound was clean enough for the medic, or at least the dead and rotting tissue had been removed enough for him to wash out the hole with hot water.

Drying the area of the wound had little of the rush of pain that the treatment and washing had held for Dramesi. The medic packed the open wound with what Dramesi thought was sulphur, put a compress on it, and bandaged the whole thing up. The sulphur treatment of wounds was apparently thousands of years old and probably had at least some beneficial effects. At least that's what Dramesi hoped; the fear he had of possibly losing his leg lessened now that he gotten some kind of medical treatment.

THE ZOO

The next night, the guards came for Dramesi and Meyer. The two men were ordered to gather up their meager possessions. Getting on board a truck in the darkness, the men couldn't see enough of what was around them to really identify the area, only that they were remaining mostly within the city.

The trip was a relatively short one, less than four miles to the southwest. The prison camp the truck arrived at had once been a French film studio. The facility had been converted by the North Vietnamese into a prison when they opened it up as only their second POW facility in the late summer of 1965. It was initially a fairly small facility, a walled enclosure only about 100 yards square in size. Later additional areas would be added that nearly tripled the length of the facility grounds.

Of the fourteen different-sized buildings in the compound, none was higher than a single story structure. The most noticeable feature of the place was a large swimming pool in the center of the main area, though it had been abandoned for any recreational use years earlier. It held only dirty water and garbage as well as some small fish the guard staff raised for their own consumption.

There was livestock wandering around the place, cattle, chicken, and such, so much so that earlier, the prisoners called the place Camp America. A number of the buildings had received farm-oriented names such as “Barn” “Stable,” and “Pigsty.” The concrete buildings had been converted over from their original purposes into cells, badly ventilated dismal living quarters with only filthy cement floors for the prisoners to sleep on.

The original windows in the cells had been barred over, and then finally bricked up entirely by the North Vietnamese. Doors were heavy wooden slabs secured with padlocks. But there was enough flexibility in the poor-fitting door frames and on the hinges that the prisoners were able to push the wood out and peek into the area beyond. There were also peepholes in the doors; it seemed the local animals looked in as often as the guards. A single dim bulb hung from a wire in each room. Burning night and day, the bulbs cast a dull light across a dreary area.

The North Vietnamese referred to the location as Pha Phim (the Film Studio), among other names. To the U.S. government, the place was identified as the Cu Loc Prison. For the Americans who were held there, it became known as the Zoo around 1966. That name came about partly because of the reversal of the norm; at the Zoo the animals looked into the “cages” at the humans.

After arriving at the Zoo, Dramesi and Meyer were both placed in a single cell in the Stable, one of the buildings along the outer wall of the compound. Their roommate status remained only for a couple of days. Two days after the men arrived at the Zoo, Dramesi was pulled out of the cell to meet a North Vietnamese who seemed to have an inferiority complex.

The little, dark-skinned North Vietnamese whom Dramesi met had strapped to his belt a holster with an American .45 Colt automatic pistol in it. A Colt .45 automatic is a large handgun for just about anyone; on this little North Vietnamese it seemed almost cartoonish. But the way the man acted with the weapon was anything but funny. He was immediately named “Colt .45” by Dramesi.

The pistol-packing North Vietnamese officer informed Dramesi in no uncertain terms that the Zoo was a highly disciplined place. There was to be unquestioned obedience to any orders given by himself, or any one of his guards. Pushing a piece of paper in front of Dramesi, Colt .45 ordered that he sign a statement. As he had back in the Hanoi Hilton, Dramesi refused to sign anything. Colt .45 reacted in a quick and violent manner.

Pulling out the big pistol on his hip, Colt .45 cocked it, the hammer locking back into the firing position with a loud “click.” Then he lifted the weapon and put the muzzle up to Dramesi's temple. He stated the obvious, that he would pull the trigger if Dramesi didn't sign the statement. Again, Dramesi refused to sign anything.

This wasn't like the other torture sessions. It wasn't going to be a long, stretched-out period of pain and anguish. If Colt .45 pulled the trigger and the gun was loaded, Dramesi wouldn't care—his brains would be blasted out the other side of his head as the heavy pistol snatched his life away from him.

If the gun wasn't loaded, then Dramesi would have called Colt's bluff, which would probably really piss him off. Then he really would load the gun. Before Colt pulled the trigger or issued another threat, there was another sound growing in volume outside the building.

The increasing wail of an air raid alert siren broke the tension. There was an American air strike coming in somewhere around Hanoi. Guards and camp personnel were running about. Forcing Dramesi along, one of the scrambling guards shoved Dramesi toward one of the buildings near the main gate of the compound. Once inside of the building, it turned out to have been a garage of some kind; the guard pushed Dramesi under the cover of a rough bed. Then the guard ran for cover himself, closing the door to the garage and locking it behind him.

There were two more prisoners under other beds in the old garage. Ignoring the air raid going on outside, the men lost no time in getting to know each other. One of the men was a big guy, six foot four, who also knew a number of the same people whom Dramasi did from his days at the Myrtle Beach Air Force Base. The big guy was Bill Baugh, and he had been badly banged about when his F-4C had been shot down. One of Baugh's eyes was glazed and white. He could only see some shadows and movement out of it. His punch-out had been so rough that Baugh couldn't remember if he had been injured in the ejection itself or when he landed. Chances were it was on the ejection, since he also had some compressed vertebrae along with a broken jaw and cheekbone.

The other prisoner with Baugh was Don Spoon. He had been the “back-seater” in the two-place F-4 Baugh had been piloting. He had been captured along with Baugh when their plane was shot down on January 21, 1967.

The air raid ended and the guard returned to the prisoners. Together, the three men were marched at gunpoint back to where Colt .45 was waiting for them. Instead of just dealing with Dramesi, the North Vietnamese pushed papers in front of each of the three prisoners.

The demands were simple: each of the prisoners would write out a statement that they would obey the orders they were given by the North Vietnamese. Anything that they were told to do, they would have to do and he wanted signed statements from each of the men attesting to that fact. The first prisoner Colt .45 approached was Don Spoon. He refused to sign, refused to write down anything. Bill Baugh did the same thing. The astonishing change came when Colt .45 turned to Dramesi to write out the statement and sign it.

Picking up the pen, Dramesi quickly scribbled some lines across the paper and then signed it. He then told the two other prisoners to do the same thing. The other men followed Dramesi's example.

The only problem with the capitulation was that Colt .45 could apparently read some English, or he could at least recognize writing, even if it was unintelligible to him. The smile on the North Vietnamese's face faded into a frown as he picked up the pages and tried to read them. There were no words on the paper, just a few scribbled lines. His face growing redder as his rage grew, Colt .45 crumpled up the useless papers and shouted for the guard.

Since the men wouldn't cooperate by writing with their hands, they weren't going to be allowed to do anything with them, including rest. The guard took the prisoners out of the room at the point of a bayonet. Forced into a cell in the building next to the garage, the men were directed to stand in the middle of the room with their arms raised.

The prisoners were not allowed to lower their arms; they weren't allowed to rest or sleep. All they could do was stand in the room with their hands up. Though the guards didn't remain in the room watching the prisoners, they looked in at intervals to make sure the prisoners were standing where they were supposed to with their hands up. To ease their inspection of the prisoners, the guards left the door to the room open.

The prisoners soon figured out where they could stand and see out the open door well enough to tell when the guards were coming. With that warning, the men could move back to the center of the room and put their hands up. As the day wore on, it was Dramesi who suggested that they allow their arms to droop a bit when the guards looked in on them. That way the guards would think they were getting tired, not that they were supermen who could hold their arms up indefinitely.