Operation Thunderhead (19 page)

 

 

Navy lieutenant (junior grade) George T. Coker had been shot down the year before, on August 27, 1966, while on his fifty-fifth mission over North Vietnam. Acting as the bombardier/navigator on an A6A Intruder piloted by J. H. Fellowes, Coker and his pilot had to eject when their plane was struck by ground fire. It was either antiaircraft fire or the fragments of a nearby SAM explosion that damaged the wing of the Intruder, putting the plane into an uncontrollable spin and forcing the crew to punch out. Their parachutes were reported by a wingman on the mission. Originally listed as missing in action, both Coker and Fellowes were captured shortly after their landing. When the capture of the men was announced over Radio Hanoi, Coker's and Fellowes's status was changed to prisoner of war.

Having been a tough wrestler during his college days, George Coker was not going to fold easily to the North Vietnamese demands. His youthful attitude was an asset, and he soon developed a reputation as a strong resister. That reputation resulted in his receiving a lot of attention from his North Vietnamese captors, but he remained defiant to the best of his considerable ability.

On November 6, 1965, Air Force captain George G. McKnight was shot down over North Vietnam while flying his Douglas A1E Skyraider. One of the prisoners sent to the hellhole called Briarpatch, a camp in the mountains west of Hanoi, McKnight suffered through some of the most primitive conditions found in any of the North Vietnamese prison camps. Housed in simple brick huts with shuttered windows and no electricity or water, McKnight and a dozen of his fellows were kept literally in the dark. The prisoners at Briarpatch were some of the earliest American fliers to fall into North Vietnamese hands. Because of this, they suffered the longest.

The weather in the mountains during the winter was brutal, the prisoners only having thin blankets for protection from the cold. And they still faced the constant threat of torture at any time. The starvation rations they were placed on were barely enough to keep the men alive and weakened them further. Serious malnutrition became a problem for all Briarpatch prisoners who were forced to spend a long period at the camp. With the beginning of spring, the weather warmed, but the treatment of the prisoners became even more brutal.

In the summer months, there was a concern among the North Vietnamese that there might be a raid on Briarpatch itself. As a result, the prisoners were kept secured: handcuffed or tied to a rope much of the time. Trenches were dug and fortifications put up to help defend the camp and supposedly protect the prisoners. There were even deep holes dug in the dirt floors underneath the prisoners' bunks, supposedly to give the men a bomb shelter in case of an air raid. The holes were also found to be excellent punishments to be inflicted on the prisoners by the guards. McKnight was one of the men forced to remain in one of those dirt holes for a month for trying to communicate with other prisoners. The holes were dark and wet, the walls of the pits crawling with vermin.

In spite of the treatment and living conditions, George McKnight was able to resist the North Vietnamese to the point that they considered him one of the hardliner prisoners, one of the men who set a bad example for the other prisoners. A transfer to another prison camp would be an improvement of sorts for McKnight. He ended up being one of the men eventually sent to Dirty Bird when that facility was opened.

At Dirty Bird as well as all of the other prison camps, the intent of the North Vietnamese was to make the prisoners feel totally helpless in the day-to-day running of their lives. The North Vietnamese intended that the prisoners feel completely under the control of their captors.

The prisoners resisted such control as much as they could. In some of the prisoners, there was still the seed of the ultimate resistance to their captors—escape. Escape from any camp in North Vietnam was hard to even consider. One big problem for the prisoners was specific knowledge about just where they were. For the most part, they had no positive idea of their exact location, which made planning an escape route particularly difficult.

Like so many of the other prisoners at Dirty Bird, George McKNIGHT was allowed into the small yard behind his cell. To make certain that the difficult prisoner would still be there when the guard returned, McKnight was shackled by one wrist to an ankle. Finding a piece of wire, McKnight learned to open his shackles. Close by was George Coker, also a hard case and also shackled. With his own wire, Coker was able to free himself and the two started to meet on an almost daily basis.

Having been one of the prisoners taken from the camp on trips to get water, McKnight told Coker about what he had seen in the local area. There was a large bridge nearby, one made of steel girders with distinctive structural details. It was probably the Doumer Bridge, McKnight had thought. As a navigator who had spent a lot of time flying over the Hanoi area, Coker felt certain that McKnight was correct in his identification. It was the Paul Doumer Bridge in Hanoi (now known as the Long Bien Bridge), and had been a major target. Knowing the landmark of the bridge told Coker how far the camp was in relation to the Red River, the main waterway the bridge crossed. That gave the men their present location with fair accuracy. Dirty Bird was only a few blocks from the river—three or four at the most, according to Coker. Even in the heavily populated area, they might be able to cross such a distance and get to the water without being detected.

The Red River was a major transportation route through North Vietnam. The muddy brown waters ran from the mountains to the northwest and passed along the northern side of Hanoi. From there, the river ran to the southeast, through the countryside of North Vietnam, to empty into the South China Sea at the Gulf on Tonkin. Patrolling in the Gulf waters would be the ships of the U.S. Seventh Fleet.

As a Navy officer, Coker was very familiar with the ships patrolling off the coast of North Vietnam. If they could reach the Gulf of Tonkin, the chances of them being picked up by some U.S. vessel were very good, particularly if they could make their way out to sea to the location known as Yankee Station.

Together, the men decided to escape. The worst thing that might happen was that they were killed in the attempt, but the possibility of freedom made that risk seem a very reasonable one to them. On a practical basis, they knew their chances of success were slim; odds of 1 chance in 1,000 of a successful escape were probably optimistic, but it was still a chance. Dismal as they were, those odds still seemed better than the chances of continued survival in a North Vietnamese prison camp.

There were other aspects of the situation that worked in the favor of the two men. From his time spent at the Zoo, Coker had been shown by another prisoner how to remove the lock from the cell doors. The security arrangements for the doors at Dirty Bird were much the same as they had been at the Zoo. Certain that he could open the doors to the cell, Coker knew that he could get them both out of the building.

Getting over the wall surrounding Dirty Bird didn't strike McKNIGHT as too great an obstacle to their getting out of the camp. Getting past the large number of people he had seen around the outside of Dirty Bird could be the real problem. Then there was the estimated sixty miles of river that Coker figured they would have to travel to make it down to the ocean. The general plan was to swim down the river at night, hole up during the day, and finally steal a boat to take them out to the ships at Yankee Station. Their total travel time was estimated at eight days. They could forage for food; their military training and what they had already been eating in the camps kept either man from being squeamish about what could be considered edible. At worst, they could drink the river water if they had to. It would only take them about three or four nights to get to the river's mouth. There, they could overpower the crew of a small boat, or just steal one from where it was tied up, and head out to sea.

The plan didn't really appeal to McKnight at first. But he remembered a squadron commander he'd had who had always considered the ideas that his juniors brought to him. If an idea seemed impossible, then others wouldn't think it could be done, so give it a try.

The planning stage of the escape lasted only about a week. The date was set for the night of October 12, 1967, Columbus Day back in the States. The day before their planned escape, both Coker and McKnight tested the locks on their cell doors to make certain that they could open them. It turned into a near disaster for McKnight.

The locks on the outside of the cell doors were secure to anything the prisoners could do to them. But the shackle that the locks closed could be attacked from the inside of the cell door. When McKnight loosened the pin on the inside of his door, it got away from him. The weight of the lock pulled the shackle pin through the door before McKnight could get a grip on it. Now the lock was hanging down at the end of its chain, still closed on the shackle. He couldn't open the door and just grab the lock and put it back into place, there wasn't enough slack in the system to allow him to do that.

Prying open the peephole cover, McKnight stretched his arm out and felt for the lock. It was a very vulnerable moment as he knew that a guard could come by at any second and see his arm scrabbling for the lock. The moments passed as McKnight desperately reached for the lock, searching by touch only. Finally, his fingers grasped the errant chunk of metal. In the last moments of his working on the lock, McKnight was certain he would be caught. By feel, he was able to line things up and stuff the shackle back into the hole in the door. With a nail, he secured the lock mechanism back into the door, loose enough that he wouldn't have any difficulty taking it out the next night. Then he leaned back and remembered how to breathe.

The next day seemed to crawl by for both men. The guards seemed to pay particular attention to McKnight. His cell was searched five times. The guards went through his meager belongings without specifying what they expected to find. If the man had made any physical preparations for their escape attempt, gathering food, supplies, and such, the guards would have found them and the plan foiled before it had really begun.

The one preparation McKnight had already sweated through was now causing him more anxiety. He felt for certain that at any moment, the weakened lock on his door would pull off into a guard's hand. But the shackle held. The night finally came. It was time for the two men to make their final preparations and escape.

BID FOR FREEDOM

While the nightly propaganda broadcasts were coming out of the speakers in each cell, Coker and McKnight made their final preparations. To help disguise the fact that they were gone, the men had been sleeping under a blanket each night in spite of the heat. The guards looking into the cell through the peephole grew used to seeing little more than a lump in the darkness. When the night of October 12 fell, the men arranged their extra clothing, blanket, and food bowls under the covers. The makeshift dummies were adequate, or at least better than nothing.

The first one out of his cell was Coker. After releasing the mechanism, he put the lock back up on the door after passing through. Once in the outer hallway, Coker went over to McKnight's cell and softly called out to him. Once they had put the lock back up on McKnight's door, the two men slipped off down the hall.

Moving along a tight corridor that ran along the wall of the prison building, McKnight led the escape out into the moonless night. The evening was dark, but the sky clear. With there being so few lights in Hanoi at the time, there was little to block the view of the stars. The brilliant points of light shone down on the two men making their way to a low wall.

Climbing up onto the wall allowed the escapees to get to a point where they could reach the roof of the building. To help hide their faces and hands from view, they scooped up the handfuls of soot that was everywhere and used it to darken their white skin. Once smeared with the camouflage, they moved across the roof to another wall, dropping quietly down onto it. That wall gave them access to the roof of another building, the far end of which had a pipe leading down into a coal bunker.

Sliding down the pipe and clambering down the pile of coal put the two men up against an outer wall of the compound. On the other side of the wall was freedom, or at least the rest of the city of Hanoi. The barbed wire across the top of the wall was not much of an obstacle to the men who had already dared so much. Holding the strands apart for one another, they climbed up.

The side street that the wall ran along was dark, but not yet completely deserted. There were some locals moving along on their own business, but none of them looked up to see the two darkened men hiding in the shadows. Waiting until everyone had passed, Coker and McKnight dropped off the wall. Remaining in the shadows as much as possible, the two men moved off down the street. Ducking into the doorway of an empty building, the two men stopped to get a better idea of their bearings and to try and calm down their rapidly beating hearts.

The sudden feeling of freedom was exhilarating. McKnight felt as if he could take fifty-foot bounds, but they were still well inside the city proper. The two men could be discovered at any moment so they quickly continued their drive to the river. They had to cross one of Hanoi's main roads that lay between themselves and the Red River, but their luck held as they ran. Crossing the embankments of a wide ditch put them into the wetlands that bordered the river. Just a short distance away was the looming structure of the Doumer Bridge.

Brilliant lights flickered and sparks flew from the girders of the bridge as work crews labored to repair the damage done by U.S. air attacks. The lights of the acetylene torches kept the workers from being able to see into the darkness as the two men slipped along the riverbank to reach a point under the bridge itself. Then there was a sudden movement in the darkness. In the starlight, the men could see the gleam off a round rifle barrel. They had been caught by a man coming out of the shadows. Their bid for freedom was over within minutes of their escape.