Operation Thunderhead (28 page)

While it was the Navy SEALs who garnered the bulk of the attention when it came to combat in Vietnam, the UDTs had also maintained a presence incountry throughout the war. The primary missions of the UDT detachments tended to match the meaning of their name. Underwater work was conducted, particularly along the shores of South Vietnam. Working from specialized submarines, the UDT operators (the term
frogmen
was only used by the general public and was not popular in the Teams at the time) conducted reconnaissance missions that resulted in detailed charts being made up of much of the South Vietnamese coastline. Many of the areas surveyed and charted had never been mapped before.

Demolition operations were also conducted by UDT detachments in Vietnam. Navigable canals were blasted through the marshes, and obstacles placed by the Viet Cong were blown free of the streams, rivers, and canals by high explosives. Underwater skills were learned, new equipment tested and trained with, and mission capabilities were increased.

On January 10, 1972, Alfa platoon of SEAL Team One was deployed to the U.S. Naval Base at White Beach on Okinawa. The unit was to act as the contingency platoon for the SEAL WESTPAC DET (West Pacific Detachment). The SEALs were led by Lieutenant Melvin “Spence” Dry as their officer in command. They were to operate as missions came up.

NEW TIME

The world changed for the prisoners in North Vietnam with the death of Ho Chi Minh. The worst of the tortures was over and the treatment of the men in general improved. For Dramesi and much of the prisoner population leadership, they remained in isolation. Improvements came, but their arrival was gradual.

Through his own tricking of one of the guards, Dramesi was able to finally sleep in his cell without the weight of the iron shackles on his feet. Once a week he was taken from room #18 and allowed to clean himself and his clothes in a shower. On return to the room where he was kept, Dramesi was once again put in ankle shackles and a heavy iron bar was threaded through them. Then a large iron padlock was snapped on the bar to prevent it being removed again. The guard he called “Kid Crazy” or more often just K.C., would simply toss Dramesi the heavy lock and then stand at the room door waiting to hear the sound of the lock being snapped shut. Figuring out how to make a noise with the metal pieces that sounded like the lock being shut wasn't too hard for Dramesi to accomplish. When K.C. heard the sound and left the room without looking back, that was hard for Dramesi to believe, but only for a moment. Then the grin spread across his face. After the last inspection of the evening was done, Dramesi was able to spend a night sleeping without the heavy weight of the irons across his legs.

An attempt to jam the lock with lead taken from a toothpaste tube almost resulted in disaster. With a few small bits of lead Dramesi had jammed up the lock mechanism so that it could be closed and look secure, but wasn't actually locked. That way he could remove it at will. But when a guard tried to open the lock with a key, the lead caused the whole mechanism to jam. Through some luck, Dramesi was able to get the lock open and cleared before his sabotage was noticed. The guards had been concerned with the situation but in the end they did not punish the prisoner. Dramesi's freedom from the leg irons had only lasted for a short, but satisfying, time.

It wasn't until past the middle of November 1969 that Dramesi was finally released from room #18. It was nighttime and dark, but he was blindfolded when finally taken to a location at the Hanoi Hilton complex known to the prisoners as the Stockyards. Placed in an unlit, filthy room, Dramesi was allowed to move about in the darkness to try and settle himself in to his new cell. The stench of the barely ventilated place was strong and he was still wearing his leg irons. In the end, he was able to escape in the only way that was left to him at the moment: He slept.

It was a week before things improved, and they did so fairly rapidly. There was an issue of clothing, some comfort items including some well-received soap, and even a pair of sandals, which helped protect Dramesi's badly abused feet. What was truly astonishing was how suddenly the quality and quantity of the food improved. At first, there was so much food that he couldn't eat it all. But his body quickly grew used to getting the materials it needed to try and heal itself to some extent. One of the things that really helped Dramesi improve was being issued all the water that he wanted and needed.

But interrogations were not over. It wasn't long before Dramesi found himself back in front of Bug in a new interrogation room, though the torture that had spotlighted so many of the other meetings with Bug was not employed. Instead, Bug used a different ploy, telling Dramesi that other prisoners had been released from captivity. They were home in the United States while he was still in Hanoi.

The demands to write continued unabated. One of the things demanded of him was a request in writing that the camp commander have his leg irons removed. But Dramesi refused.

The structural security of the door to his new cell was so poor that Dramesi knew that he could get out if he wasn't wearing the leg irons. As he slept one night during a tropical rainstorm, Dramesi dreamed about a successful escape. In the dream, he ended up at sea with Ed Atterberry, floating about and waiting to be found by the U.S. Navy. He was still the man he had been before the ordeal of torture he had just gone through. And John Dramesi was not done trying to escape.

On December 9, Dramesi was told he had been forgiven by the camp commander. The leg irons finally came off and the miserable little cell was left behind. He was moved to an area of the camp the prisoners called Little Vegas and the cell blocks located there had been identified by the names of a number of casinos in Las Vegas. Dramesi was sent to the Mint and secured into cell #1.

Cell #1 was even smaller than the one he had left behind, but the Mint held something Dramesi hungered for: company in the form of fellow prisoners. In cells #2 and #3 were George Coker and George McKnight. For as long as they could, the prisoners communicated with each other. The North Vietnamese had put the three escape attempt survivors next to each other in the same cell block. The men had a lot to talk about.

Talking was still something that would quickly earn the angry attention of a guard. In the solitude of their cells, the men leaned into the walls in order to hear the tapping sounds made by the other prisoners. The tap code was simple and words were just spelled out by the sound of soft strikes against a wall. For hours, there remained the haunting image of men listening in the darkness and rapping.

On occasion, Dramesi would meet face to face with another prisoner, the first one being George Coker. The freedom to speak was a very welcome one, but the long tap conversations remained a standard for communications between the prisoners while in their cells.

When caught trying to pass a written note to other prisoners, Dramesi was taken into one of the interrogation rooms and threatened with torture. It was May 10, 1970, exactly one year since he had tried to escape. He was forced to stand facing a wall for several days, but there were no long sessions with the ropes or the return of the leg irons. It wasn't very long before Dramesi was looking out of his cell window, examining the camp compound, and making mental notes on things like the guard rotations, the one guard tower visible to him, and the makeup of the compound wall. Such information would be valuable for another escape attempt.

Moved to a new cell block, this one the Stardust, Dramesi was in a solitary room—but George McKnight was now in the cell across from his. Life was continuing to improve very gradually for the prisoners, though communications were still limited. Small gift packages had arrived from back home for some of the men, and they were allowed to receive them.

There were discussions on the plausibility of escape attempts between Dramesi and his immediate group. But the plans were never practical enough to be considered seriously. There were rifts between groups of the prisoners in the compound and throughout North Vietnam. Some of the prisoners cooperated with the North Vietnamese to different degrees; some remained as solid as they could in their resistance. For Dramesi, the Code of Conduct was not as flexible as it was for others and he remained as adamant as ever in his decisions. There were other prisoners who also stood as Dramesi did, but not all the POWs were as firm in their resolve.

On Christmas Day 1970, all of the prisoners received something of a gift from the North Vietnamese: the creation of Camp Unity. The men were taken out of their cells and searched thoroughly before being sent out in small groups to stand in a nearby alleyway. Prisoners who had been communicating with each other for weeks now actually met face-to-face for the first time. Many just ran about shaking hands; some hugged and some cried. It was a major reunion of people who had suffered together and now could share friendly human contact.

But the delivery of the presents was not over. The North Vietnamese gathered the men up, blindfolded them, and moved them in groups under armed guard. In a short time, the men arrived at the new location. For Dramesi, he found himself in a large room with what seemed to be a huge group of POWs. Forty-seven prisoners would now be sharing the living space of a single room more than seventy feet long and over twenty feet wide. And they could talk freely with each other.

The camp rules were not really relaxed to any extent. But the men could interact openly, and that was something they had never been able to do before. There were still interrogation sessions, mostly involved with the North Vietnamese trying to gather propaganda materials of one kind or another. Writings were demanded and tapes desired, but Dramesi and a number of others still refused to cooperate to varying degrees. One thing that appealed to Dramesi in particular was the re-creation of a certain prisoner organization, an escape committee.

With the large gathering of POWs in the single room, there were now a number of senior officers available to lead the prisoners in a cohesive manner. One of these officers was placed in charge of the escape committee and Dramesi was told that he would have to clear any plans through them. Dramesi was held in a position of respect by a number of prisoners, including senior officers, in part because of his hard discipline and personal strength that had allowed him to survive severe torture without bending to the will of the North Vietnamese.

The present lack of torture and what were considered improving conditions for the prisoners caused a large number of them to disagree with Dramesi on the idea of escaping. It had not been long since the summer of torture following the escape attempt of Dramesi and Atterberry. The men remembered those horrendous days and were not anxious to relive them. The threat of reprisals frankly terrified many of the POWs. But for Dramesi, there was no question of whether any of the prisoners should attempt to escape; it was just a matter of when. It was their duty, their honor, and their right to be free.

There were a number of prisoners who would talk to Dramesi and to whom he would listen. One of these men was Major James H. Kasler. Not only was Kasler an ace pilot from his more than one hundred missions during the Korean War, he had been a tail gunner in B-29 bombers during World War II, flying missions against the Japanese in the Pacific. Now he too was a POW, having been shot down over North Vietnam on August 8, 1966. The North Vietnamese had recognized what a prize they had in holding Kasler as a prisoner and had given him particular attention during questioning. He had also been one of the prisoners to go through long sessions with Fidel, and had still come out without cooperating with the enemy.

The resistance of the prisoners against the authority of the North Vietnamese had to be maintained, if not increased. But many of the prisoners were worn down. The ultimate in resistance would be an escape, but almost none of the other prisoners were interested in even hearing about such an idea. But several people did want to keep the idea of escape alive in Camp Unity, and one of these people was Colonel Reisner.

After some conversation with Dramesi, Reisner admitted that his earlier orders about not escaping without outside help had been directed toward a single situation. Dramesi had been right to try and escape when he did, and now Reisner wanted him to establish a committee to research, plan, and organize another escape attempt. There was one control that Dramesi had to accept, though: There would be an officer unknown to him who would have the final say on any escape attempt. Someone else would give the go or no-go order.

That situation was not the one Dramesi would have preferred, but he did accept it. He was to plan an escape, but was not the head of the escape committee. That position was held by Colonel Hervey Stockman. Within a short time of Dramesi's conversation with Reisner, Stockman had approached him for a talk. In spite of his enthusiasm for a freedom bid, Dramesi was able to critique what had gone wrong during his attempt with Atterberry. He could accept the mistakes made and plan against repeating them. One thing that Dramesi was able to quickly identify as a problem was the lack of ability to tell the time.

Dramesi and Atterberry had been able to get several miles from the camp, walking through a populated area and not drawing a great deal of attention. It was the fact that they had not gotten far enough, been outside what Dramesi called the five-mile security zone, that had allowed them to be so quickly captured. But the thing that was most important in making an escape attempt was the will to succeed, having the determination to make the attempt in the first place and actually carry out the plan.

Colonel Stockman felt he could agree with Dramesi's opinions on what an escape would need. And he told Dramesi that the escape committee would be meeting and work out a plan. Along with Dramesi and Stockman, the committee would include George Coker, George McKnight, Jim Kasler, and Bud Day. Of the six men in the committee, half of them—McKnight, Coker, and Dramesi—had already made escape attempts from camps. Immediately following his shoot-down and ejection, in spite of being badly injured, Bud Day had gone through a period of escape and evasion from the North Vietnamese. It was a very good pool of determination, knowledge, and experience with which to plan and execute a possible escape.