Operation Thunderhead (8 page)

Security at the new village was different from the slit trench at the last one. Before being hidden away for the day, Dramesi was stripped down to his shorts. Whether this was for security reasons or an attempt to humiliate him, he never really knew. Instead of being put on display for the villagers the nearly naked prisoner was placed in a hole in the ground. There was only one entrance to the hole, and the roof of the enclosure was made up of large planks. One possible reason for stripping the prisoner was made clear when Dramesi looked about his new prison. Three walls were stacked floor to ceiling with boxes of ammunition and grenades. He was in an ammunition storage bunker. Without having any clothes, he was certainly not going to be able to hide anything to use against his captors later.

Later in the morning, the roof of Dramesi's prison was opened up as the guards removed some of the planks. This gave the prisoner some fresh air, and also gave the locals access to him. The village children circled the hole, taunting the prisoner within. Shouting insults in a language the prisoner didn't understand wasn't as satisfying to the kids as throwing rocks and other items at their target. Poking at the prisoner with sticks was fun until Dramesi grew tired of the situation and yanked the sticks out of the kids' hands. Throwing some rocks back at his tormentors also convinced the children to go and find another game to play.

The children moved on and left the prisoner to his own thoughts, all except one. As Dramesi sat in the hole, one much more aggressive child crept up to the hole with a knife in his hand. Unseen until the last moment, the child stood and threw the knife at the prisoner. Unlike what has been seen in the movies, a thrown knife is not a very good weapon. Ducking to the side, Dramesi avoided the flashing blade as it went past him. Striking the wall, the knife fell to the bottom of the hole and lay there. The simple weapon would not have done the man much good in his present situation and he had no way to hide it on his person. Dramesi left the blade untouched as the child ran away.

Later in the morning the villagers began returning to their huts. Several of the locals stood about the hole leading down to Dramesi's “holding” pit. One young man stood out from the others; he was wearing boots to all of the villagers' sandals, and had Dramesi come up out of the hole and sit where everyone could see him.

As the villagers started to gather in greater numbers, the young man started to play cheerleader, getting the people riled up and excited. The object of all of the attention was obvious: The young man hated Dramesi and he wanted everyone else in the village to do so as well. Now, Dramesi was starting to feel exposed, much more so than he was just by sitting there in his underwear.

As the village women started to cry and the men got angrier and angrier, the young boot-wearing rabble-rouser may have become concerned himself. The villagers waved farming tools about in a threatening manner. If this was the reaction the young man wanted to get, he had succeeded. Before things got out of hand, Dramesi was put back in his hole and the crowd calmed down.

It wasn't long before Dramesi was once more brought up out of the hole. People were still standing around, but no one appeared particularly threatening. The prisoner was once again sat down on a plank, and a small bowl of rice covered with some green vegetable matter was handed to him.

Along with the villagers, a small dog and swarm of flies kept the prisoner company while he ate. One of the rules Dramesi had been taught back in survival school was you had to eat when you and what you could. He knew that he would need the nourishment, and his captors hadn't been very forthcoming when it came to food. The rice and vegetables weren't much, but it was more than he'd had for several days now. The blob of some kind of matter on top of the rice and greens was something else again. What it was, Dramesi didn't know, and he didn't want to know. It moved, or at least distorted, when he picked it up with his chopsticks. It was easy enough to appear too clumsy with the sticks and the glob fell to the ground. Whatever it was, the dog seemed to think it was edible, as had the flies. The villagers simply looked on and smiled at the prisoner's inability to eat with the simple utensils they used every day.

When dusk came, the procedures that had been followed for the last few nights were changed. After Dramesi was given a red T-shirt and pants, his hands were once more tied behind his back. He would be carried once again, but this time not by stretcher bearers. Just outside of the village, Dramesi was unceremoniously dumped into the back of a small truck, where two guards joined him.

To help break up the outline of the vehicle, plants were strapped to all sides of the exterior. The rolling bush joined a small convoy of other vehicles moving quickly along a fairly narrow jungle pathway. The drivers must have known their route well enough; they drove through the night without lights. Though Dramesi was concerned at the speed they moved in the darkness, his guards didn't seem to care at all. In the preferred posture of soldiers all over the world, the guards slept as the truck convoy continued on.

With the guards asleep, Dramesi managed to untie his hands without making any real noise. In spite of being able to make a hole in the camouflage plants surrounding his truck, Dramesi did not try to escape. He thought the truck was moving east, the direction he wanted to travel when he did escape. Moving in the vehicle was taking him where he wanted to go—or at least in the right direction.

Arriving at another village just before dawn, Dramesi could see one of the reasons the United States was going to have problems moving the air war forward. It took some time to get the truck placed where the guards wanted it because the village was crowded with other vehicles. The vehicles were all trying to stay as close to the huts as possible while remaining under the cover of the jungle canopy. The village was off-limits to U.S. air strikes, the civilians acting as a greater defense than the heaviest antiaircraft guns. Taking further advantage of the situation, the North Vietnamese had ammunition stored everywhere: huts, trucks, even paths were stacked with ammunition crates and containers.

Carried once more by his captors, Dramesi was taken to a small house in the middle of the village ammo dump and truck park. Creature comforts were more than limited; a foot-wide plank was his bed, and nothing else was offered to him until the next day.

While consuming a small bowl of rice the next morning, Dramesi took the opportunity to survey his present environment. The house was sparsely furnished with a few pieces of furniture: a bed without a mattress, tables, some chairs. The walls were made of bamboo tied together with rope, which was also made from bamboo. There was a spot in one corner of the room, between the wall and the roof, where there was a hole large enough for Dramesi to crawl through. A small table underneath would make reaching it possible. What was outside the wall was unknown but Dramesi needed to know the layout of the village in order to plan some kind of escape attempt.

As things turned out, getting outside of the building wasn't a problem. Through one door was a roofed-over but otherwise open kitchen area. Nothing was around that looked like a latrine or bathroom, so he pantomimed his needs to the guards in rough sign language. A guard simply pointed to the open doorway leading outside.

Keeping up the pretense of not being able to walk very well at all forced Dramesi to crawl out the doorway on his hands and knees. Crawling to where he could attend to nature's call, Dramesi looked about but saw nothing notable. The villagers noticed him, though, especially when he was crawling back to the bamboo hut. Some old women who were carrying babies approached him; one of them thought it was funny to place her child on the back of the American “horse.” The baby didn't think much of the situation and started to cry. All during the day, villagers came up to the bamboo walls of the hut to stare and poke at the American prisoner.

Before dark, Dramesi was given another meal: rice with some dry chopped peanuts scattered on it. There wasn't another move that night, and the guards settled in to sleep. There were three of them—two men and now a woman—all armed and all sleeping on top of the bed. With Dramesi's crippled act making it look like he could hardly move, the guards left him untied. But they did move the table out from under the opening in the wall and secured the doors.

That night, Dramesi took a chance and stood up in full view of his sleeping guard detail. There was no reaction from any of them as they lay sleeping, each person cradling a weapon in his or her arms. The door was locked and there was no way for the prisoner to open it without making a lot of noise.

There wasn't going to be a way out, not from this hut. Three guards made it impossible for Dramesi to overcome all of them quietly, even if he got his hands on a weapon. Waiting and watching for an opportunity was the best plan for the moment, so Dramesi went over to the corner the guards had set him in and went back to sleep.

More rice and peanuts made up a morning meal served by a young woman who was apparently there to watch him while his guards were away. She gave him water when asked, and did not abuse him.

It was a different situation when the guards came back that evening to continue their journey. Picking Dramesi up on his stretcher, they were moving him to a truck when the villagers closed in. The group attacked the seemingly helpless American with fists and sticks, with the most vicious and dangerous attacks coming from the old women and small children. It didn't matter who was swinging a stick or throwing a rock—at least not to the person on the receiving end.

Rolling off the stretcher to try and protect his face and head, Dramesi fell to the ground. Two of the guards rushed forward and picked him up, pulling him along with his arms across their shoulders. Now the guards were also being struck with sticks and stones.

Threatening the crowd with their weapons, the guards made their way to the truck. Dramesi was put in the back along with some of his guards. They quickly left the village behind as they drove off into the darkness once again.

INTERROGATION

With the occupants of the vehicle safely in place, the truck left the village and riled mob behind. As far as Dramesi could tell, the vehicle was still moving in a generally eastward direction, which made it easier to ride along rather than make an escape attempt on the road. The guards were relatively relaxed since they thought that their prisoner was barely able to move around on his own—an opinion that Dramesi was careful to maintain by crawling whenever possible.

The truck stopped well before dawn. In the darkness, Dramesi was pulled from the vehicle and manhandled into a holding cell. The facility appeared to be a prison of some kind. The room he was thrust into was small, the local equivalent of a jail cell, and appeared to have been built fairly hastily from a standard hut.

There was a board in one corner to act as a bed, but there were no other amenities. It was just a place to hold prisoners until they were moved to a more secure facility. The small room was only about five feet wide and seven long. The main walls of the building were of wood, the outside wall of the cell being one of these. About three feet up from the dirt floor was a window opening with four iron bars set into the sill. A wood shutter closed off the window, blocking the view of the outside area.

A weak point of the structure was the inside wall of the cell; it was made of bamboo secured with the common twisted bamboo twine. Tough but flexible, the twine was used as a construction material throughout of the tropics of Southeast Asia. In addition to the twine, metal wire was also used to secure the bamboo wall together and down to the floor. The bamboo was ill-fitting with gaps between the stalks allowing a view of the areas of the house outside the cell. The bamboo wall was what drew Dramesi's attention; he went to sleep that first night considering the possibilities it offered. He had to learn more about the area around him and who was there before any real plans could be made. Wadding up some old burlap cloth he found in the cell, Dramesi did what was most important for any possible escape: he went to sleep and got some rest.

Daylight the next morning allowed Dramesi to see some of his surroundings through the gaps between the bamboo stalks of the walls. A cooking area was visible, identifiable by the usual pots and pans. A double bed without a mattress indicated where some guards could sleep nearby. To the right of the house was a pen area where a large bull was tied by a brass ring in its nose leading to a tether. A yapping dog chased chickens in front of the house. The bull wasn't going to be a problem if Dramesi stayed out of the reach of the animal's tether. The dog might be an issue—not because of any danger from the animal's bite, but the noise it could make as Dramesi slipped out could alert the guards or anyone else nearby.

There were no sanitary facilities of any kind in the cell. Yelling for the guard and gesturing for what he wanted got Dramesi released from his cell. Maintaining the posture that he was far more injured than he really was, Dramesi crawled out and into the yard after the guard opened the cell door. At the corner of the building he was able to relieve himself while also looking around to the rear of the building. What he saw did not aid any thoughts of escape. Behind the house were additional buildings at some distance past a stretch of barbed wire. That was not going to be the way to go when he broke out of his cell some night.

Once back in his cell and alone, Dramesi made the first practical moves toward an escape. The weak point in the entire structure around him was the bamboo wall of the cell; the top did not extend to the ceiling. By grabbing on to the rafters of the building and pulling himself up, Dramesi was able to see over the bamboo wall. An old man on the other side was squatting and shelling peanuts. When he saw Dramesi watching him, the old man came over and handed the prisoner a handful of the nuts. The food was welcome and tasted good. When Dramesi indicated that he would like some more, the old man passed another handful over to the prisoner. It was obvious from this slight kindness that not all North Vietnamese hated Caucasians on sight.