Operation Thunderhead (20 page)

Then the “armed guard” stepped further out of the shadows and the men could more clearly see the gleam of light on the horns of the cow. The animal didn't care at all as the two relieved escapees continued with their run.

A train moved across the Doumer Bridge, the clanking, squealing noise of its movement hiding the two men as they moved into the shadows under the bridge. Hidden in the darkness, the men completed their last preparations before entering the water. Using the cord from their pajamalike trousers, Coker and McKnight tied their wrists to each other. From Coker's left wrist a cord reached over to McKnight's right wrist. Now there was less chance the two men would get separated in the muddy waters of the river.

The two men did not want to get separated if at all possible. Working as a team gave them a greater chance of success than if they tried to escape separately. One man could help the other as they went across the countryside; while one slept, the other could stand watch. And there was just the mutual moral support the two men could give each other on their desperate quest for freedom. Slipping into the warm waters of the Red River, they both struck out, swimming with the downstream current.

The channel of the river where the men entered was less than about one hundred yards wide. Once they reached the main channel, the river opened up to nearly a half-mile width. Moving out farther into mid-channel, the men swam with the four- to five-mile-per-hour current as the waters moved to the distant Gulf of Tonkin. There were sampans tied up along both riverbanks, making the idea of eventually stealing a boat seem much more reasonable. The scattered lights of campfires and lanterns also showed that the people of North Vietnam lived along the riverbanks. They would have to hide from the locals when it became light, but for the time being they would just be able to swim with the river.

Now that they had reached one of their major objectives, McKNIGHT felt even stronger about their chances of making it. They didn't need to steal a boat; he felt strong enough to swim all the way across the Pacific to San Francisco.

At the light started to grow in the east, Coker felt that the pair had traveled about fifteen miles from the point where they had entered the river. It was getting to be time to find a lay-up point where they could hide during the day. When they crawled out onto the north bank of the river, they found the area barren. There were no plants or structures where they could hide, not even a large pile of rocks. Getting back into the water, the two men continued to swim downstream as the daylight grew brighter fast.

With the light of dawn coming swiftly, the two men had to make do with whatever hiding place they could find. There were no drifting piles of brush or trees moving down the river, so there was no way they could hide in the water. Two bobbing heads out in an open river would get the attention of anyone in normal times; in a nation at war it would probably get both men shot.

Getting out of the water and climbing up the steep riverbank, the two men made a try at creating their own hiding place. There was no cover, only the claylike soil of the ground itself. With their hands, the two men clawed at the soil, digging away as fast as they could.

Out on the water behind them, the desperately digging men heard a sound. Not pausing in his work, Coker turned to look out into the river. A sampan was going by; the people on board stared up at the two men on the riverbank. The people on the sampan didn't cry out, didn't point or shout, they just stared at the two digging men as the sampan continued on with the current.

With at least some kind of hole dug out of the bank, the two men settled in to the cover they had made for themselves. Only someone looking down from the top of the riverbank would be able to see where they were hidden, and the mudflat that they had seen stretching out from the back of the bank made that seem unlikely. It was hard to rest, but they both knew they had to. While they lay in the trench, Coker told McKnight everything he could about the layout of the river. If something happened to separate the men, he wanted to be certain that his partner could follow the proper course out to the ocean. As McKnight was finally slipping off to sleep, Coker said something a little out of the ordinary. He reminded McKnight that it was the day after Columbus Day, which had fallen on a Thursday that year. It was Friday the Thirteenth.

Woken from sleep by Coker, McKnight was told that the escape attempt was over. Not sure of just what his partner was talking about, he questioned the statement. An old man had come up to fish in the river just a short time earlier. He had stepped up to the top of the riverbank and looked directly down at the two men. Letting out a shout of fear, the old man had taken off, waving his arms and his fishing pole.

That was the time the two men thought would be the most dangerous of their escape: if they were caught by an angry mob of locals. Both men knew very well the orchestrated near-riots that had been caused by the POWs being paraded down the streets of Hanoi. At those times, armed military men had been able to control the worst of the crowd's fury. Out in the open and alone, Coker and McKnight knew that they might be lynched.

Getting up out of their hole, the two men looked around for another escape route, but the land was just as open as it had been when they climbed in. A noisy crowd quickly gathered on top of the riverbank, looking down at the two men. One person in the crowd had a weapon, but he was so shook up by the appearance of the prisoners and the noise of the mob that he couldn't properly load it. With slow, careful movements, the two POWs raised their hands in surrender.

 

 

Surviving the shouting mob, Coker and McKnight were turned over to the military, who took them away. They were transported to the Hanoi Hilton, where they both underwent an interrogation about their escape. Open about what they had done, McKnight didn't cooperate with the interrogators as much as he simply told them the truth. Both men expected to die in prison at the hands of the North Vietnamese. The tortures they had faced were ample evidence of what they could expect, and neither of them figured things would get any better. Escape was a tremendous risk, but it wasn't any worse than remaining prisoners.

Astonishingly, there was no real torture applied to either man. There had been no escape committee, no organization of prisoners that had aided the men. It was very nearly a target of opportunity, and the North Vietnamese seemed to recognize that. Only a few days went by before Coker and McKnight were returned to Dirty Bird.

The rest of the prisoners at Dirty Bird knew that something had happened, but had no real information as to just what had taken place. What was obvious was the reaction of the guards and the staff. They were nervous about something, and there were suddenly a number of apparently high-ranking North Vietnamese officers walking about the place.

The first action taken by the guards was to place leg irons on all of the prisoners while they were still in their cells. These weren't the horribly heavy punishment irons, just leg shackles for the most part. In addition to securing the legs of the prisoners, their cells were addressed. The cell doors had reinforcing bolts put through them to hold the locking mechanisms securely in place. Not all of the prisoners had known how to open their doors at will, and now it didn't matter.

There were no widespread punishments, no purges or wholesale torture, just the increase in security of the prisoners and the camp as a whole. Suspecting an escape, the prisoners tried to take a head count among themselves. They noticed a missing man, but he was not Coker or McKnight. One of the prisoners had been far too ill to make an escape attempt, but he was missing. It turned out that the guards and staff had taken the man away to use in a propaganda piece.

The use of the prisoners as hostages to help protect the power plant had proven to be a failure. The U.S. air strikes had continued against both the plant and the nearby bridge. The facility known as Dirty Bird was not a secure one and wasn't worth the bother to improve it. By the end of October, all the prisoners held at Dirty Bird had been placed at other facilities. Most of the prisoners were sent to the Hanoi Hilton, where they ended up in the Vegas location.

It wasn't very long before the news about who had actually made the Dirty Bird escape attempt made it into the prisoner communications net. As the story spread to the other camps, the morale of the prisoners was raised by the news. The two escapees received the admiration and respect of their fellow prisoners for what they had tried to do. It was thought that if the news about what was really happening to the POWs in North Vietnam, the torture, the mistreatment, the terrible living conditions, made it to the people of the United States, the military and the politicians would take action. But for that news to get out, first POWs had to get back to the States. Nineteen sixty-seven was not going to be the year that they did.

For Coker and McKnight personally, they were now considered among the worst of the incorrigibles among the prisoner population. When the Dirty Bird camp was closed, a new prison facility was opened. This was a location where the hardliners among the prisoners could be isolated from the rest of their community. It was a very small but secure location, a courtyard behind the Ministry of Defense building. The place was intended to be a dungeon, and it fulfilled that role. The cells were small and cramped. There was no bunk, only a concrete platform raised up from the floor to act as a bed. Besides the sleeping platform the cells had about a four-foot-square area for the prisoners to stand. Individually, the cells were about nine feet long and less than half that wide. They were all sunken below ground level with no windows. Only a dim electric bulb, estimated at being less than ten watts by one of the prisoners, burned twenty-four hours a day. What ventilation there was came from a small space below the cell door and a few pencil-sized holes through a steel plate above the door.

Ten of the cells were in one building in a small courtyard; a second, smaller building was a short distance away from the first, at a right angle to it. The smaller building had three additional cells; the central one was used as a storeroom. The prisoners' bathing area outside in the courtyard shared the space with a cesspool and a pigsty in the corner next to the latrine. It was a dirty, stinking location. It soon gained the name “Alcatraz” from the prisoners who lived there.

For the men who lived at Alcatraz, the situation for the first few months of their confinement there was not as severe as they had expected. There were normal interrogations, but they were not accompanied by the extended periods of severe torture that all of the prisoners had experienced at other camps. Discipline was strict and the enforced isolation of the prisoners was a punishment in itself. The prisoners were allowed very little time outside of the cells. Solitude took its toll on each of the men in his own way. Boredom and claustrophobia were real problems.

Food was as bad as at many of the other camps. Meals were little more than a bowl of cabbage or pumpkin soup, with a piece of pig fat floating in it on rare occasions. Malnutrition and the accompanying infections, disease, and diarrhea left the men weak and suffering. It was a test of the willpower of each of the prisoners that they were able to remain sane in their wretched environment.

To add to the individual's misery, each man was put in leg irons for additional security. For fifteen or more hours a day, the men were restrained by the iron shackles put around their ankles. The iron assemblies weighed from two to twenty pounds and helped keep the men from sleeping even on the poor comfort of their concrete bunks.

Within a few months of the camp being activated, the guards didn't even bother to put the leg irons on the men at night; they just pushed them under the door and expect each prisoner to secure them in place. The guards would watch through the peepholes of the cell door to make certain that the prisoner within donned his restraints. Then they would move on to the next cell. Some prisoners became quite adept at clicking the metal of the restraints so that it appeared they were locked in place. But the padlocks had not been closed securely and when the guards left, the leg irons were loosened.

These were some of the small victories among the prisoner population of Alcatraz. Messages tapped out in a code that all the prisoners knew gave them the ability to communicate between cells. One man would take the message from one wall and transfer it to the cell on his opposite side. Peering under the doors gave some idea of who else was held in the facility, another small fight won against the isolation of the place.

Nearly a dozen prisoners, almost all of them high-ranking POWs, made up the population of Alcatraz for almost two years. Among the POW leadership was a pair of troublemakers, George McKnight and George Coker. They would not be the last POWs to make a serious escape attempt from North Vietnam.

THE ZOO ANNEX

Nineteen sixty-eight was a pivotal year for the war in Southeast Asia. President Lyndon Johnson announced in March that he would not seek reelection to the office of president of the United States. As a lure to get the North Vietnamese to cooperate, President Johnson called a partial halt to the bombing of targets in North Vietnam. With the halt, Johnson invited the North Vietnamese government in Hanoi to come to the negotiation table in order to work out a temporary cease-fire to the fighting in Southeast Asia. There was real hope in some circles that the overtures would result in the war soon coming to an end, but the Communist government of North Vietnam simply played the Americans along to gain time and concessions.

To the North Vietnamese, the announcements by President Johnson were interpreted to mean that the Communists were winning the war. That is how the news was delivered to the prisoners. As far as the North Vietnamese were concerned, the antiwar movement back in the United States was what was going to win the war for them. All they had to do was hold out long enough, and the prisoners would remain in captivity for as long as the Communists thought necessary.