Operation Thunderhead (24 page)

It was now that Atterberry's skill was going to come into call on the escape. The men had reached a point where they could scale the outer wall of the compound with the least chance of being spotted. But the electric fence had to be breached and then there was the barbed wire to deal with. As far as Dramesi was concerned, they were going to make it and he told Atterberry as much.

It was about now that the rain stopped coming down, only Dramesi was too focused on what he was doing to notice it. The branches of some trees helped shield the top of the outhouse roof from causal observation. That was where Dramesi intended actually crossing the outer wall. Climbing up to the roof of the small building would put them both within reach of the outer wall and the wires that ran along the top of it.

As the senior officer, Dramesi considered it his responsibility to take the risk of shorting out the electric wires. Following the instructions received earlier from Atterberry, Dramesi had a hooked piece of bare wire in his hand to place over the top line of the electric fence. There were two live wires held up on insulating posts, placed one above the other. Reaching out, Dramesi gingerly put the hook of his shorting wire over the top of the upper line. Then he dropped the wire across the lower line.

Instantly, there was a fat blue spark and a loud pop when the shorting wire touched the bottom line. Sparks flew across the area as the power took the shortest route and overloaded the system. Some distance from where the two men were up on the wall, there was a loud crack as the circuit breaker blew out. Instantly, all of the lights on the north side of the camp went out, plunging the area into darkness.

As guards shouted across the area, Dramesi noticed for the first time that the rain had stopped. Not only was the rain gone, but the clouds were breaking up. The two men would soon be far more visible on top of the outhouse roof than they would have preferred to be.

In the distance, Dramesi could see the guards in the compound gathering around an electrical box on the outside of one of the buildings. The guards had no apparent idea of what to do; they spoke excitedly to each other and kept trying to reset the circuit breaker by flipping the switch lever on the outside of the box. The circuit wasn't going to reset at all, not as long as the shorting wire remained in position. Seeing the guards occupied the way they were was very satisfying to Dramesi. They would be occupied with the electrical box long enough for the two men to cross over the top of the outer wall.

Since he was already up on the wall, Dramesi was going to be the first man to cross over to the outside. The only problem was the barbed wire, which managed to catch him as he was trying to go under it. Calling quietly to his partner, Atterberry quickly unsnagged him. Once on the other side of the barbed wire, Dramesi took the bundles of gear that Atterberry passed to him and dropped them on the pavement on the outside of the main wall. To cut back on the distance he had to drop, Dramesi hung down on the outside of the wall by his fingertips.

It was still a long way down to the hard ground. Trusting in his ability to make a rolling parachute landing fall from the training that had been drilled into him by instructors now on the other side of the world, Dramesi released his grip.

The drop to the hard ground on the outside of the wall was nearly ten feet. In another life, in another place, ten feet might seem like hardly anything at all—the height of a set of household stairs, the branch of a medium-tall tree a child might climb. But in the middle of downtown Hanoi during an escape from a prisoner of war camp, it seemed like a very long distance indeed. If he broke his leg, sprained his ankle, or injured his knee (again!) Dramesi's escape attempt would be over just as he reached the outside of the camp. But none of those things happened. He hit the ground as his jump instructors had taught him. Absorbing the impact easily, he got to his feet and looked up to Atterberry on the wall above him.

With Dramesi on the ground to help break his fall, Atterberry dropped down without incident. Now the men darted over to a group of bushes between two nearby huts. They were free for the moment, but there were a number of things they had to do immediately to remain that way.

Working by touch, the men broke down their bundles of gear. More dye went on their exposed skin to replace that washed off by the rain. The surgical masks went over their faces and the hats they had made were on their heads. With the baskets placed on either end of the bamboo pole, Dramesi shouldered the pole in the same manner as uncounted thousands of Asians did throughout the country. Shouldering the burlap bag holding the rest of their supplies, Atterberry also resembled nothing more than another Asian worker carrying a bundle.

These crude disguises and human nature were all the men had to help them in their escape. Now it was the time to seriously put things to the test as they had to move away from the prison compound.

They were in an area densely packed with local housing. Now that they could see the situation more clearly, Dramesi immediately decided to change their escape route through the area. Believing in facing a problem head-on, Dramesi went along the main local street, right past the gate of the Zoo Annex. Just feet away from the two escaping prisoners were the armed North Vietnamese guards who saw them every day.

But none of the guards saw the two men walking by. Dramesi and Atterberry continued walking down the road heading north to the main road that ran into Hanoi.

The guard shack at the gate was not the only obstacle the men ran into soon after making their way out of the compound. Three North Vietnamese policemen pedaled past the two escaping prisoners. Each officer was wearing a white uniform and mounted on a bicycle, another everyday sight in North Vietnam. The bicycles passed within three feet of the prisoners but their disguises continued to hold. It took some daring for the two men to just keep walking normally with their heads held down. But they had demonstrated their ability to gut things out simply by surviving in the North Vietnamese prison system for the past several years. They would both keep going for as long as they could.

FREEDOM RUNNERS

There was no cry from any quarter as Dramesi and Atterberry continued their escape. The pair just kept walking along with their burdens, not looking at all out of place even at the relatively late hour. As they passed by a public watering spot, a local was filling a container from a flowing pipe. There wasn't anything out of the ordinary about the scene, just a bent pipe coming out of the ground with water flowing from the open end and a man filling water jugs. But just as the pair of escapees came up to him, the man finished filling his container and stood up, looking right at them.

Maintaining his composure, Dramesi simply nodded in greeting to the local. All the man did was return Dramesi's greeting and go back to what he was doing. As the two escapees continued on their way, Dramesi was very glad for the surgical masks they had made; not only had the simple disguises passed several tests along the way, they also covered the wide grin that was plastered across his face at that moment. As he looked back at Atterberry, Dramesi figured the man's mask was covering the same kind of smile.

The pair continued on their way with no further incident until they began to approach what they thought was the town of Cu Loc. That was the first time a local tried to speak to the two men directly. As a villager approached them he was waving his hand and speaking rapidly in Vietnamese. Neither Dramesi nor Atterberry spoke enough Vietnamese to say anything that might help them and they couldn't understand what the local was saying anyway. They did the only thing they could in the situation: they ignored him and continued on their way.

Staring at the two escapees as they continued with their burdens, the local just stood in the middle of the street, looking confused. When Dramesi looked back, the local was heading off to some of the larger buildings nearby, and it looked like he was now in a hurry.

Just in case the man suspected anything, the two men sped up to a trot. There was a canal next to the road and Dramesi decided to cross to the other side of the water. Taking off his mask, he indicated to Atterberry where they should go and headed down to the water. The banks of the canal were steep but the two men got across without too much difficulty.

At Atterberry's sudden warning, Dramesi ducked down and took cover. On the opposite side of the canal there was a truck slowly moving along the road. Along the bank of the canal were men walking along shining flashlights at the ground. It was obvious they were looking for something, and the two escapees figured that it could only be them.

It was time to try and find a better hiding place than simply laying down in the mud. There were some buildings nearby so the two men ducked in next to them. In the warm darkness they both heard a familiar sound—the soft grunting of hogs coming from inside the building. Lifting up a barricade intended to keep the hogs in but not humans out, Dramesi and Atterberry were able to slip inside the hut and close off the opening behind them. Now they were both in pitch darkness, their only company the smell and the pigs. The pigs didn't seem to care that the men were hiding with them and Dramesi was glad that the animals didn't get excited and start to squeal.

Outside of the pigsty, the men searching the canal banks continued on their way. Whatever it was they were looking for, neither Dramesi or Atterberry ever learned. The two men just remained hidden in the darkness as long as they considered it necessary. It wasn't practical for them to remain in the pigsty; eventually the owner would come by and discover them. And Dramesi wanted to continue putting distance between themselves and the prison camp.

The farther away from the camp they could get before they were discovered missing, the better. Distance meant that there would be a greater and greater area for the North Vietnamese to cover in their search for the escapees. The population surrounding the Zoo Annex meant there would be little trouble assembling search parties.

Leaving the pigs behind, the two men continued along the side of the canal for a short distance. At Atterberry's suggestion, they turned away from the canal in order to find a good hiding place to wait out the day. They had no sign of the Red River being nearby, so Dramesi gave up on stealing a boat that night.

There was a low stone wall in a bad state of repair surrounding a small church. It had taken much longer to get clear of the city than Dramesi had planned and the churchyard looked to be the best hiding place they were going to find. The building would have been too obvious and searchers would have been sure to check it. But the churchyard had a number of bramble bush thickets scattered over the area, some of them quite thick. Picking one of the thickets next to the broken wall, the two men crawled deep inside.

The large thorns had proven painful to get past. Hopefully, any searchers who might come by would find them too much of a bother and abandon the area. As the two men waited out the morning, Dramesi considered how far they had come and what they had accomplished. No matter what, they both knew that they had made their best pitch for freedom. The North Vietnamese would know that at least two prisoners hadn't given up their will to be free.

The two men had lost track of the time and had no real idea of how long it was until daylight. Dramesi figured that they had come maybe four or four and a half miles from the prison camp. He did suspect that they had made a mistake in timing or something else.

What neither Dramesi nor Atterberry had known at the time of the escape was the exact location of the Zoo or the Zoo Annex in relation to the Red River. The bank of the river had been just barely over a mile from where they had originally gone over the wall. But the river ran to the east of the camp. They had been going in the wrong direction.

As the sun came up, the two men sat in the bramble thicket, the stone wall at their backs. The rain of the night before had washed the air clean and the sun shone down from a clear sky. It felt very good to be free, no matter how much longer it lasted. The sunshine illuminated the churchyard, and the two men could see the groups of North Vietnamese moving across the countryside. These were not people who would be fooled by the simple disguises the two men had. They were armed groups of fifteen to seventeen men and women clearly intent on finding the escapees. They were all armed with rifles or AK-47 automatic weapons.

It wasn't long before one of the search parties came into the churchyard and went up to the abandoned building. Tearing away the barricades that blocked the entrance, the group went inside and thoroughly searched it. It looked to Dramesi as if their luck might still be holding as the group of North Vietnamese came out of the church. Having found nothing, they were gathering up to leave the churchyard when one of the young men decided to examine the thickets in the yard.

In what looked to be almost an afterthought, the young man came up to the thicket where Dramesi and Atterberry were hiding. With a pistol in his hand, he got down on his hands and knees to try to force his way between the thorns. The escapees' luck had run out.

Not more than a few feet from where the two men sat, the young North Vietnamese suddenly yelled to his comrades as he cocked the pistol in his hand. The sound of that one gun being cocked was magnified many times as safeties came off rifles and AKs. The rest of the searchers were running up to the thicket at the yell of the young man.

There was nothing else to be done. Slowly, Dramesi and Atterberry crawled out of the bramble bush as the young man backed away in front of them. Mud-covered, the two prisoners stood in front of the proud group of searchers. The escape was over.

 

 

According to later reports, the two men had managed to cover three miles in the twelve hours of their escape. The two men were driven back to the prison camp in an NVA jeep. Atterberry managed to shake hands with Dramesi before the two men were separated.