Operation Thunderhead (21 page)

There had already been a large increase in the number of POWs being held in North Vietnam. There had been two dozen fliers shot down and imprisoned in August and again in October 1967 alone. To hold this increasing population in secure facilities, the North Vietnamese opened a number of additional prison camps. The Zoo was full to capacity by the fall of 1967. Squeezing additional prisoners into cramped quarters wasn't held up by the North Vietnamese out of a concern for their welfare. Security considerations were a major concern.

An additional facility was opened next to the Zoo in mid-October 1967. The new facility shared a wall with the original Zoo compound, but otherwise operated as a completely separate camp. The new facility consisted of several cellblock buildings facing a central pond along with a number of interrogation rooms and administrative facilities. The cell buildings were separated internally into two fairly large holding rooms, each room being about seventeen by twenty feet in size. The rooms were intended to hold at least four and up to nine prisoners each.

The filthy central pond was soon labeled Lake Fester by the prisoners. The camp itself was called the Zoo Annex. Outside of being able to communicate with the other inmates of a cell, there was little else that gave the Zoo Annex's prisoners a better chance of survival. The food remained poor in quality and limited in portion. Communist indoctrination of the prisoners remained a heavy influence on their daily lives, but the interrogation and torture sessions were relatively light in comparison to past experiences. There were daily activities that allowed the prisoners to get out of their cells and into the daylight. These activities included maintaining a garden as well as general cleanup and trash details.

Most of the population of the Zoo Annex was made up of junior officers, men with a rank of O-3 (Air Force captain/navy lieutenant) and below. This was in part to separate the younger men from the leadership and experience of the older officers. It also disrupted the chain of command that had built up in the camp.

The SRO among the POWs held at the Zoo Annex was Air Force major Konrad W. Trautman. Trautman had been a combat pilot during the Korean War, having flown twenty combat missions in the F-84E jet. On his sixty-second mission over Vietnam, he was shot down while flying close to Hanoi on October 5, 1967. He was a resident of the Hanoi Hilton by that evening.

John Dramesi was in one of the last groups of prisoners to be transferred from the Zoo. Security considerations for the prisoner transfer were simple enough: Dramesi was blindfolded and led from the facility. Having examined the Zoo facility in as much detail as he could, Dramesi was very familiar with the distances within the compound, including the steps it took to get to the southeastern wall; he had considered that wall as a possible exit point for an escape. When he was led from the Zoo, Dramesi paid careful attention to how much time it took to walk him from one place to another. When he heard a gate opening, he knew that they had reached the Zoon Annex. After entering a building, the blindfold was taken off and Dramesi could finally see his surroundings.

In his arrival discussions with one of the North Vietnamese camp staff, Dramesi denied having considered escape. Through a large open door, he could see a high wall topped with strands of barbed wire. When the staff member said that escape would be difficult, Dramesi agreed.

After their discussions were over, Dramesi was told that he would be living with eight other prisoners. As far as Dramesi was concerned, that was fine, but it wasn't as if he could have done anything about it anyway. He knew that the North Vietnamese could do with him as they wished, and he said as much. The tone of the staff member suggested that Dramesi should not be quite as argumentative, but rather grateful. Then the prisoner was led from the room.

The new cell was large and had a pair of iron doors securing it. When he went in, Dramnesi found himself in the center of a large group of prisoners. The men were able to freely talk to one another, something Dramesi hadn't experienced in a while. Recognizing Al Meyer and two other men he knew, Dramesi was quickly introduced to the rest of the men. In an unexpected development, Dramesi found himself the senior ranking officer among the prisoners in the cell. Eventually, a clarification on the seniority policy—that it was based on a man's rank when he was shot down—would make another man SRO for the cell. But for a time, Dramesi was in charge of cell #6.

Only a few days after arriving, Dramesi and the rest of the men from his cell were transferred into another room within the Zoo Annex. While being moved along by the guards, Dramesi paid close attention to the doors sealing off the new cell. They were metal and made up of vertical panels. It looked to Dramesi as if the doors could be made to open by lifting them up a short distance while pushing them away from their frames. If it worked, it looked as if the doors could be opened by actually lifting them free of their hinges.

Considering the possibilities, Dramesi decided to check out the door while it remained open and the guards were away for the moment. His suspicions were correct. In fact, it took too little effort, because suddenly Dramesi found himself holding up part of a door that had slipped completely free of the frame.

Before a guard could come in and discover what he had done, Dramesi's shocked cellmates shook off their startled stares and helped him rehang the door. The door was back in place on its hinges just as a guard arrived.

In very quick order, Dramesi had organized the cell into two-man teams to work together for an escape. The idea behind the teams was to have two men working together who were close to the same height. It would be hard for any casual observer to identify the height of a pair of men walking at a distance, whether they were five-four or six-four, if they were both the same height to start with. Such were the little details he considered to give possible escapees an edge in passing through the Vietnamese community.

The proven ability to remove the door to the cell had excited the men about the possibility of escape. The only one left out of the possibility of escaping from the Zoo Annex was Al Meyer because of the injury to his leg. The idea of an escape was an uplifting one for the morale of everyone in the building. As the suggestion for a planned escape was spread through the cells everyone tended to voice agreement and enthusiasm. Dramesi was now not only his cell's SRO, he was also the head of the escape committee.

As time went by and preparations continued, setbacks plagued the overall plan of escape for the group. To keep the prisoners from organizing and cooperating with each other too much, the North Vietnamese rotated men at random from cell to cell.

Grumbling among the prisoners grew as escape enthusiasm waned. Weekly inspections by the North Vietnamese meant that nothing regarding a possible plan could be written down. It was also very hard to hide any stockpiling of escape materials or supplies. People started rebelling against the assignments given to them by the escape committee, or really just Dramesi as many of the prisoners considered them to both be the same thing. Disagreements grew and the men started working against one another.

A number of the prisoners started to object to the scrounging of materials throughout the camp. They either didn't want to help hide the pickup of an object, such as a railroad spike, iron bars, and such, or they didn't want to smuggle the object into the cells and try to hide it. Many of the excuses given for the failure to cooperate sounded about the same. Things boiled down to many of the men not wanting to risk being caught by the enemy blatantly breaking the rules of the camp. Things had been bad enough when a prisoner was just being interrogated and he resisted. To work directly against the enemy in an active manner, the image of the punishments that might be brought to bear terrified some of the prisoners.

In spite of the initial wave of support, the popularity of an escape lost most of its appeal to the bulk of the prisoner population in the Zoo Annex. Prisoners who had originally agreed with the planning and preparation were now either just straightforward backing out or putting demands on what they would need in order to escape. Some of the items were excessive to the point of being ridiculous. The worst of the “minimum requirements” included a two-way radio. Some items, knives, a compass, were reasonable and even possible to acquire. Knives could be made from sharpened pieces of metal with strips of bamboo tied in place as a handle. As far as a compass went, the North Vietnamese had unwittingly supplied the means for making one.

In each cell there was a small loudspeaker over which were broadcast propaganda messages, sometimes Radio Hanoi programs, and even music. On the speakers within the easily disassembled boxes were fairly powerful permanent magnets. Simply drawing a piece of steel such as a nail over the speaker magnet would magnetize it. Hanging the nail from a string would be all it would take to turn it into a crude but effective compass.

But the radio was a killer requirement, and the man who demanded that one be available for an escape knew it. It was the fear of torture that made some men grasp at straws so as not to have to escape. Arguments flew back and forth about even the feasibility of an escape. There had been fantasy ideas earlier about killing the guards, stealing a vehicle or an aircraft, and leaving North Vietnam behind. Those had just been the imaginations of men who had no real ability to affect their situation. For Dramesi, it wasn't a fantasy, it wasn't fiction. He had every intention of escaping. And besides, the Code of Conduct required it.

Some of the concerns the other prisoners had regarding punishment torture were very real ones. The Zoo Annex hadn't been going through a lot of active torture during some of 1968, but that wasn't the case in the Zoo. One of the most aggressive of the torturers in the Zoo was not even a North Vietnamese. The stories of what “Fidel” and his crony “Chico” and others did to prisoners were widely known among the populations of both camps but direct experience with the men was limited to less than twenty in the Zoo.

Referred to as the Cuban Program by the United States Department of Defense, Fidel and Chico were Cuban nationals who may have been in North Vietnam to evaluate interrogation methods. As Fidel stated to the POWs who had the misfortune to come under his direct control, his purpose was to obtain the total submission of the prisoners. His intention was to break the men, completely and thoroughly.

Fidel was tall and slim, reportedly a good-looking individual. He had a solid idea of his own importance as he swaggered around the camp. Even the camp commandant deferred to him. The prisoners simply learned to fear the man. Using a combination of heavy torture and psychological pressure, Fidel abused the prisoners to a point where even the North Vietnamese became eventually appalled. His torture sessions were so severe that three prisoners disappeared, reportedly taken away for “treatment” but most likely tortured to near-death. They never recovered. Other prisoners were beaten to the point where their fellows couldn't see how they could still be alive. But they did live, and the story of the Fidel the Cuban could terrify men who had already survived severe torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese.

Dramesi was an active, aggressive fighter; he attacked problems head-on whenever possible, though he always considered his course of action, studied a problem, and meticulously learned everything that he could in order to stack the deck in his favor. He wanted to escape because that was one of the things demanded of a soldier by the Code of Conduct. Many of the other prisoners were much more reserved in their actions. They had already gone through hardships that few outside of North Vietnam would have believed. The threat to the prisoners' lives as represented by individuals such as Fidel were very real ones. Arguments about the possible success, or most likely lack of success, of an escape attempt grew heated among the prisoners.

Actually getting out of a cell was not as great a problem as it first appeared. That argument couldn't be brought up by the prisoners who had seen Dramesi take the door off its hinges his first day. He had also spent a great deal of time working on the wooden outer doors of the cells, practically cutting one free with an improvised tool. In addition to their own efforts, the prisoners could also see the effect of the occasional sloppy attitude on the part of the guards. The door to the cell that Trautman shared with three other prisoners had been left unlocked one night by a guard. The thought of being able to just walk out the door had weighed on the thoughts of the prisoners all night, but none had taken advantage of the situation.

The reservations of the prisoners centered not just on getting out of the cell, but on getting past the population of Hanoi. In a message passed on to the other prisoners regarding the unlocked cell door, Trautman questioned just where they could have gone after leaving the room. The prisoners had some idea of where they were in relation to the Red River and other landmarks but intelligence was limited. The population in the city surrounding them was on the lookout for all Americans; the North Vietnamese government offered a standing reward for a captured flier. A local who caught himself a downed American could receive as much as the equivalent of $1,500 U.S., a significant amount in a country where most lived in poverty.

The one problem that was constantly brought up was the difficulty a Westerner would have in passing though an Asian city. In spite of their poor diet reducing the weight of any of the prisoners to a shadow of what they had been, most of the men were taller than any of the locals. The average North Vietnamese was a black-haired, slender Asian only about five foot two inches tall. No matter how thin, there was no mistaking the height of the average Westerner.

In spite of the protests, Dramesi knew that he could pass by the average North Vietnamese. He had already done so once with very limited preparations. People simply weren't that curious about someone walking by, even if they were taller than average. When they broke out of Dirty Bird, Coker and McKnight had also learned it was possible to pass through a population center such as a city. But the men in cell #6 with Dramesi didn't have that information. Instead, they raised other problems with the cross-country escape.