Operation Thunderhead (25 page)

“We tried,” were the last words Atterberry ever said to Dramesi.

Word quickly spread through the Zoo and then the Zoo Annex that the escapees had been recaptured. The luck of the two men had proven false in a number of ways. The original plan for the escape to go out on a Saturday night had been a reasoned one. The guards usually arrived later than normal on a Sunday morning. But the Sunday morning of the escape had proven different than the norm. The prisoners were woken up at 5:00 A.M., even earlier than on a weekday morning. The discovery of the missing prisoners had stirred up a hornet's nest of activity among the North Vietnamese.

Very few of the prisoners had known anything at all about an escape attempt. Normal operational security had meant that only the people who had to know had been told. That was the men in cell #6 where Dramesi and Atterberry had been kept and cell #5, where Trautman and his fellows were held. Other than that, no one else knew of the attempt, even after the escape had been uncovered.

For Dramesi and Atterberry, their ordeal at the hands of the North Vietnamese torturers began almost immediately after their arrival at the Zoo. Initially, Dramesi was taken to the auditorium of the Zoo, a place called the Ho Chi Minh room by the prisoners. His handcuffed wrists were pulled out ahead of him as Dramesi was laid out on a small table. His legs dragged down behind him, heavily weighted with iron shackles.

Both Dramesi and Atterberry had discussed what they would tell the interrogators about the escape. The men had agreed to answer questions but not when. Dramesi knew from hard-learned experience that a prisoner had to ride out a lot of torture to make any lies he would tell sound convincing. That was the rule he had used to survive the first years of his imprisonment with his personal honor intact. It was also the attitude that had earned him the name
dau
among his interrogators. The name meant “pain” in Vietnamese.

One of the items Fidel had liked to use so much the prisoners was called the “fan belt.” That item was a strip cut from the sidewalls of a used tire. Originally, the rubber piece had been used as a rope to draw water from the wells of the prison compound. But a broken section of the rope had been discovered to be a very effective whip by an innovative guard. It was with that fan belt that Dramesi was beaten.

Stretched out across the tabletop, the prisoner was held while one of the guards whipped him over and over with the fan belt. It was an extended flogging, one that wasn't going to stop for some time. Men had been beaten with the fan belt before under Fidel's direction. It was these floggings that had resulted in such human wreckage that fellow prisoners had wondered how the recipient of the beating was still alive. Now, Dramesi would be one of those recipients.

In that miserable room surrounded by his enemies, Dramesi started sounding out from the pain of the flogging. He wouldn't allow the sound to come up easily; first there were whimpers with every stroke. The whimpers grew to cries, and then finally full-throated screams of torment. Still the flogging continued until the guards grew tired of lashing at the screaming mass of human flesh in front of them.

The men doing the flogging may have been the regular guards and staff of the prison camp. But some of the interrogators were new. When the guards had finally stopped the flogging, they dragged Dramesi to another room for further questioning. His back was a mass of bruises and bleeding welts.

In the office were three interrogators, all of them North Vietnamese who spoke good English and whom Dramesi had never seen before. What they wanted to know was why Dramesi had escaped. That was the primary question. Interspersed with the questions were hints that there were those in higher command who wanted a full report on the escape, a personal view on just what had happened.

Through the pain of his situation, Dramesi knew that he had to stick it out as long as he could. Only with his endurance of the torment they were dishing out to him would he be able to outwit the North Vietnamese, hold back on telling them what they wanted to know, lie to them and confuse them. Then he was rewarded with a small victory.

One of the new interrogators screamed in the prisoner's face, threatening him, telling him what his future held. Dramesi was going to be put on a starvation diet, bread and water alone, and not much of either. And he would receive no cigarettes, none at all!

This threat got a quick reaction from Dramesi. He screamed at his interrogator, he begged. They couldn't take his cigarettes away! They couldn't do that.

Once more, the interrogator shouted at the bound man in front of him. Shaking his finger, the man reiterated;
“And no cigarettes!”

Dramesi didn't smoke.

But the emptiness of the threat didn't keep Dramesi from dropping his head and groaning at the prospect of being forced to quit smoking.

There was a new style of torment used by the interrogators to try and keep Dramesi off-balance. He was forced to sit on a stool in front of an interrogator as he asked his questions. When the flow of questions slowed, or Dramesi's refusal to answer became too annoying, he was snatched up by the guards and dragged over in front of another interrogator. The guards pulled the prisoner along by grabbing up the irons that held his legs together. The rough red tile of the floor abraded the flesh of Dramesi's beaten behind until he felt the blood sticking his shorts to his skin. Again, he was dragged over to another interrogator and the questioning began anew.

As the interrogators became tired, one of them stopped and left the room. The two North Vietnamese who remained were soon joined by the camp commander, who joined in on the interrogation. The guards rotated in and out of the room, but the torture never slacked except for the asking of questions. Goose returned to face Dramesi and the sadist continued with the skills he knew best. Blindfolded, Dramesi was beaten by the camp commander.

Beating went on by the guards who started with slaps, then moved on to full swings with a closed fist. His head rocking from side to side from the blows, the tissues of his face swelled up until he resembled a badly carved pumpkin. For the guards, they nonchalantly just wiped the blood off their hands with a rag; it wasn't their blood.

The ropes were once again brought out and Dramesi was bound in an excruciating position. The interrogators had learned from experience what they could and could not do with their prisoners to minimize damage and maximize torment. When his arms and thumbs were tied together, the man exacting the torture paid attention to the circulation in his victim's extremities. When a finger or thumb was cut and there was neither pain nor bleeding, he knew he had to allow some blood back into the limb or the flesh would die. The return of circulation could be as excruciating as the original torture.

For his time in the room, Dramesi wasn't allowed to sleep or rest. He was secured by handcuffs and leg irons at all times. A bright light was trained on him during the night, the glare meant to keep him awake. The interrogators took time off from their work on the prisoner, but the guards remained alert at all times even when not in the room. When Dramesi looked to be nodding off, the guards would rush in and slap him around to keep him awake. Otherwise, they would just beat on the door at odd intervals to make him jerk awake.

In another room in the compound, Ed Atterberry was going through his own ordeal at the hands of the North Vietnamese. Over the days, his screams could be heard echoing through the prison. Some of the POWs said that the screams were loud enough that you could have heard them several blocks away. But none of the prisoners were that far from the point of Atterberry's torment. The cries of both men rang out across the courtyard, soon joined by the sounds coming from other prisoners undergoing the inquisition of their North Vietnamese captors. It was only a little over a week that the sounds coming from the two escapees were cut back by half.

After their initial five days of torture, the two escapees were moved to new locations. Dramesi ended up back in room #18, the place of his first extended torture session at the hands of Goose and Bug. Atterberry was placed in cell #5, across the Zoo compound from room #18. It was there that his screams stopped eight days after the escape attempt.

Years later, Dramesi was told that Atterberry had died on May 18. According to the North Vietnamese, Ed Atterberry passed away from an illness, probably pneumonia or other virus he had caught while trying to escape. If he had become sick, it had come as a blessed relief to the torment that he had undergone at the hands of the North Vietnamese.

ORDEAL

One of the men who had been in room #6, William Baugh, had not agreed with Dramesi and Atterberry's escape attempt. As far as Baugh was concerned, an escapee had to have a reasonable chance of making it all the way out of the country and back to friendly lines, not just getting out of the camp. It did seem to him that Dramesi's attempt was going to be just that, an attempt. In spite of his opinion, he helped Dramesi and Atterberry climb up past the ventilator opening and into the attic of the building.

The men in room #6 knew that the North Vietnamese were going to nail them for the escape attempt. What none of the men realized was the extent to which their captors would go to interrogate and punish the prisoners who had stayed behind. If he had known what was going to happen, Baugh would have been hanging on the feet of Dramesi and Atterberry to keep them from leaving the room.

The other prisoners at the Zoo had witnessed Dramesi and Atterberry being brought back. They passed the information quickly through the grapevine to the prisoners in the Zoo Annex. It was still only a small group of the prisoners who knew for certain that an escape attempt had been made, but now everyone suspected it.

For Dramesi, the punishment was quick and brutal. The initial five days of torture in the Ho Chi Minh room continued without pause in room #18. That miserable place became his cell and torture chamber for more than a month. Placed back onto the stool that he had already spent so much time on years earlier, Dramesi felt the weight and bite of the jumbo leg irons. The two-inch-thick iron bar attached to the shackles bore down on his legs with the unfeeling, uncaring crushing weight of its inanimate mass. The cold iron didn't care about his cries, his pain. It just pressed down on his feet, smashing the arches down flat with relentless pressure. It was just the beginning.

When the irons were firmly in place, the blindfold was removed from Dramesi's eyes. He knew immediately where he was, and he recognized the person he was facing: It was Bug, back again to torment him to the best of his considerable ability. Dramesi recognized in the man a professional level of competence in his job. Bug was to extract information, and he was known to the prisoners as the meanest interrogator in the Zoo. He was now concentrating the bulk of his efforts in pulling information from Dramesi, and he did so for hours.

With the ropes being tightened across his arms and back, Dramesi was questioned as to just who had ordered the escape. When Dramesi answered with the truth and accepted responsibility for the action, that wasn't good enough for Bug. The ropes were pulled tighter, the pain increased, and the guards ignored the screaming of their prisoner. While Dramesi cried out wondering just what it was the guards wanted to know, they left the room.

And it wasn't just his own suffering that Dramesi had to endure; he could hear Atterberry being tortured in another room. Whatever the distance between the two, it wasn't enough to diminish the screams. The sounds of the beatings continued until one night, when they just stopped. There was a dull kind of quiet that fell over the prison for a moment. Listening carefully, afraid to breathe in case he would miss a sound, Dramesi listened for his friend. But there were no more sounds coming from Ed Atterberry, and there never would be.

In the morning, Ferdinand came into room #18 and sprayed the air with disinfectant. Then he went through and sprayed perfume into the air. Lights were centered so that Dramesi bathed in their glare while he sat on the stool, tied and weighted down. A fan was turned toward the chair where the interrogator sat and then started. As the breeze blew, the last player of the grotesque act took his cue as Bug came in and sat in the chair. The day's active tortures then began.

Dramesi was ordered to get up and approach Bug. The horrible weight on his ankles and feet kept the man from being able to move. The pain was so strong that he could barely shuffle a step when it was demanded of him by Bug. It was not enough. It would never be enough.

Twice a day, Ferdinand would stand guard as Dramesi ate his meager meal. The mouthful of bread and single cup of water twice a day was all he was allowed, and his body suffered as much from malnutrition as it did from the torture. The flesh of Dramesi's ankles was swollen and dying from lack of circulation. In a terrible parody of medical care, one day a camp doctor came into room #18. He brought with him a tray of instruments, bandages, and gauze. The North Vietnamese normally used a very brutal and direct form of torture to gain what they wanted; the idea of a sophisticated kind of medical action just didn't seem to fit in with their past treatments. Then the doctor treated Dramesi's ankles and feet, and the treatment was a torture in itself.

The guards took off the heavy irons from Dramesi's ankles, unscrewing the long iron rod and then removing the shackles. When the metal came off, so did clumps of dead tissue from the oxygen-starved flesh of the prisoner's body. There were holes in the skin and deep into the tissues of Dramesi's ankles and the tops of his feet, chewed into by the relentless weight of the irons. The prison doctor used forceps to pull out long bits of dead white flesh from the holes. Left in place, the dead tissue would have eventually rotted, poisoning the rest of the feet and leading to amputation at best.