Operation Thunderhead (26 page)

With a needle, the doctor jabbed his patient with a load of penicillin. The antibiotic would at least help in fighting off the worst of an infection. The holes in the tops of the feet and along the ankles were packed full of the sulphur treatment Dramesi had gone through before. Gauze and bandages went around the wounds.

With his arms still firmly bound behind his back, Dramesi wasn't able to show the doctor the sad state his buttocks were in. Eventually, the medical man could see for himself that the cloth of Dramesi's shorts was fused to the skin of his butt. At first just tugging, the doctor pulled hard and ripped the cloth off, taking skin and tissue with it. The scream that the brutal action tore from Dramesi's throat frightened the doctor's assistant.

With the cleaning and bandaging of the torn flesh of his buttocks done, Dramesi was left alone in the room. The doctor and his assistant left, and Ferdinand took the heavy irons from the room. He returned a few moments later with a lighter pair of leg restraints, which the prisoners called “traveling irons.” The lighter leg shackles were normally used to hobble prisoners so that they could move about, but not run or walk quickly. With what seemed to Dramesi to be almost comical care, Ferdinand placed the traveling irons around the bandages on the prisoner's legs. For more than three and a half weeks, Dramesi had been tortured twenty-four hours a day. And his suffering still wasn't over.

Torturing during the day continued, and the enforced lack of sleep went on during the night. Bright lights were turned toward Dramesi at the end of every day and the guards would pound on the door whenever they saw his head nodding. He sat on his stool, but didn't remain alone. The vermin of the Zoo came in to help keep Dramesi company. Just about every night, a large rat crept into the room, looked about, and took whatever poor scraps the prisoner hadn't been able to finish. On one night, a large black spider came into the room. The huge arachnid was about the size of one of Dramesi's hands, and he watched it make a circuit of three of the room's walls.

Slowly coming up to within a few feet of the prisoner's still badly swollen feet, the spider stopped. Dramesi was afraid that the big arachnid would make a meal of the many mosquitoes feeding on his nearly immobile feet. If it did, there was nothing the bound man could have done about it. But the spider turned and moved away, finally taking up residence underneath the interrogator's table. Dramesi had high hopes that the creature would take it upon itself to try and eat Bug, or at least give him a nasty bite.

The tortures went on after Ferdinand completed his daily ritual of making room #18 smell a little better. Bug wanted Dramesi to write confessions, and finally to make a tape recording reading from papers that were put in front of him. Before he could say no, Goose had given the ropes binding his arms a savage pull. Screaming with the pain, Dramesi acquiesced to Bug's demands. But he still made a mess of trying to read the documents. Stumbling in his speech and barely speaking coherently at times, Dramesi was given sugar water to drink in order to soothe his throat, hoarse from screaming. After a long day, the prisoner was inwardly satisfied that nothing he had said would make a good piece of propaganda. Bug packed away his gear, and the tape recorder was not seen again.

After even more torture sessions, Dramesi felt that he was down to weighing only 100 or maybe 110 pounds. For more than a month, he had suffered daily beatings with fists and the fan belt. The rope tortures had gone on fifteen times. He was no longer bothered by living in his own filth. For thirty-eight days, the little stool in room #18 had been his home, bed, and toilet. He felt that death might not be very far away. In the end, he had told the interrogators some of what they had wanted, but he hadn't written anything of use to them. Neither had he given them a propaganda tape. So much of what he had said were lies and distortions; none of the interrogators could be certain of the use of anything that he had told them. It was a victory.

For the other prisoners who had not taken part in the escape attempt, the nightmare started only slightly later than it had for Dramesi and Atterberry. Some of the first men to undergo the inquisition at the hands of the North Vietnamese were the men who lived in room #6. The punishments and interrogations were quickly spread out among the rest of the population of the Zoo Annex and then the Zoo itself. For weeks, all of the men from room #6 were tortured for information on the escape attempt. Unlike the Coker-McKnight attempt, which had been very close to a spur-of-the-moment situation, the North Vietnamese were certain that the Dramesi-Atterberry attempt was the result of an organized plan. They refused to believe that the escapees had done most of the planning and preparation for the escape themselves. The North Vietnamese wanted to know what the organization was inside the camp, which prisoners were in it, and how to break it up.

The North Vietnamese were able to disband any possible prisoner organization without any information from the prisoners. Tortures were doled out in wholesale lots. For months, the screams of men undergoing extreme torments echoed around the Zoo compound; then, the tortures spread outward.

To ensure that their prisoner population was secure, the North Vietnamese interrogated men at other prisons in the system besides the Zoo compound, First it was the prisons in Hanoi itself, then the ones around the city. Finally, even the prisons out in the country employed the torturers full-time. Many of the prisoners were suffering with no knowledge of any escape attempt. They had nothing to tell their interrogators to help make the pain stop.

Through their vision spots under doors and through cracks, the prisoners in the Zoo watched other prisoners being taken out of their cells and moved along to the torture rooms. Floggings with the fan belt became so common that the North Vietnamese established a standard procedure for employing them. The prisoners would be stripped of their trousers and forced to lie on the floor. Two guards would alternate rushing in from a corner of the room to swing the fan belt down and strike at the bare buttocks and legs of the man on the floor. By alternating, the guards were able to keep up their exertions for a longer time and the running up to the prisoner helped build up the impact of the weapons.

The technique reduced to a bleeding mass the lower back, buttocks, and thighs of a prisoner undergoing a flogging. The punishments didn't stop there; they only changed. Bamboo clubs were used to break all of the cartilage in a prisoner's lower legs. Guards would feel along the shins of a screaming man to see what parts they hadn't broken yet, then lean back and strike at anything solid they found.

The reprisals and interrogations went on from that first Sunday after the escape and well into the summer. Twenty-six prisoners were taken from the Zoo and the Zoo Annex to undergo extensive tortures and interrogations. The ropes were used on all of the men with some variations in the techniques. Men were tied in excruciating positions, with their arms secured behind their backs and then they were lifted from the ground by the ropes that were securing them.

One cell in the Zoo compound was discovered by the North Vietnamese to be the primary means of communications between the Annex and the Zoo proper. There was a window in cell #1 of the Zoo that overlooked the wall of the Zoo Annex. Because of that window, the men inside could see the hand signals of the prisoners in the Annex. That window was quickly sealed off by the North Vietnamese on the day Dramesi and Atterberry were brought back to the Zoo. To the North Vietnamese, the three prisoners inside that cell must have known everything that was going on in regard to the escape and many other activities in the camp. That singled the men out for particular attention from the interrogators.

Second only to the suffering undergone by Dramesi and Atterberry were the tortures given to those three prisoners from cell #1. Because of operational security, Trautman had not told anyone in the Zoo about the escape. The men in cell #1 hadn't passed on any messages about the escape. In the Zoo were the bulk of the senior officers among all of the prisoners. There couldn't have been a plan without their approval; the North Vietnamese were certain of this and they intended to learn all of the details.

The window of cell #1 being shuttered was only the first step the North Vietnamese took to minimize communications among the prisoners. Every hole, window, and ventilation port in the Zoo and the Zoo Annex was closed off. The heat of the coming summer made the cells stiflingly hot. The lack of circulation made it hard to breathe. But the sealed-off openings weren't enough to keep out the screams of the tortured men.

From cell #1 Red McDaniel, Al Runyan, and Ken Fleenor underwent tortures straight out of Dante's
Inferno
, only these tortures were worse because they were real. McDaniel suffered more than seven hundred lashes during floggings that went on for more than two weeks. There were thirty-eight bleeding wounds opened up on his back, legs, and buttocks during a single flogging. Beatings were common as the prisoners were struck with fists, shoes, sandals, and clubs. Electric shock was used; power from a battery coursing through the twitching muscles of a prisoner left him a mewling travesty.

Tied in ropes and irons, McDaniel suffered a compound fracture of one arm. While McDaniel was suspended in the air from a rope, a guard tried to push the bone sticking out from the torn flesh back into the arm.

All the senior officers were tortured, some to the point of near insanity. Men were beaten into unconsciousness; others wished they could “go out” to escape the pain. Larry Guarino was the SRO of the Zoo and had had no prior knowledge of Dramesi and Atterberry's escape attempt. If he had, he would have ordered the men not to go. He thought that there was no chance of success of any plan that did not include outside help. Guarino also considered any plan that did not have such help to be in direct violation of the order issued by Reisner years earlier. Dramesi had been right in considering Reisner's order to have been for a specific incident. But Guarino had been right in thinking that any attempt, successful or not, would cause the remaining prisoners to suffer a brutal retribution by the North Vietnamese.

Men suffered their tortures and then were stuck into solitary confinement for extended periods. Dramesi was finally released from the ropes on June 17. The stool, ropes, and lamps were taken away by Ferdinand and the prisoner was allowed to collapse to the floor. For the balance of that day and the night that followed, Dramesi was left alone; no guards came in to see him. He lay on the cool tiles of the floor in a near swoon, too crushed to really sleep and too exhausted to stay awake.

Ferdinand came back into the room with a mosquito net and hung it from four chairs spaced on the floor. For two nights Dramesi slept there; it took everything that he had left in the way of strength just to creep under the mosquito net. Now he was receiving a small bowl of soup as well as more bread. A cup and container of water were placed close at hand.

By June 20, Dramesi was taken from room #18 and placed in another cell across the compound. He was barely able to move, even with the lighter set of leg irons having been removed from his ankles. He had to carry his waste bucket, and even that effort took everything he had left in the way of strength. Left inside the cell block, Dramesi sat on his bucket while Ferdinand was out of sight. Reaching down, he put his hand under the door of cell #1. He had no idea who was inside the cell, it didn't matter. What he wanted to do was tell someone in the prisoner population that he was still alive. That was the message he tapped out against the bottom of the cell door. There was no answer from inside.

As he started to tap out the message again, he stopped. There was a touch against the palm of his hand. The fingers of whoever was inside cell #1 were gently stroking the palm of Dramesi's hand. Whoever was inside that cell either did not know the tap code, or they just didn't know what to say. But it was a gentle touch from another human being, a fellow sufferer in the prison of the damned.

As Ferdinand returned, Dramesi pulled his hand back. On the other side of the cell door came a whine and scrabbling sound as the occupant also knew that a guard was approaching. In his mind's eye, Dramesi could see whoever was in that cell retreating to the farthest corner of the room, huddling and staring at the door in fear.

But Ferdinand hadn't come up to punish anyone. Instead, he took Dramesi to a shower and allowed him to clean himself for the first time in over a month. After just trying to absorb the feeling of water running over him, Dramesi was taken back to room #18. For months, he remained there in solitary confinement. He was kept in the lighter traveling irons but fed soup and bread twice a day. Once a week, he was allowed to go and clean himself in the shower and empty his bucket of waste.

In September, a change took place throughout North Vietnam. The guards and officers whom Dramesi could see were wearing black armbands. He heard people crying. Then came the sound of artillery booming. It was a twenty-one-gun salute given in honor of the death of Ho Chi Minh. The leader of North Vietnam was dead and the lives of the prisoners would be changed because of it. It was September 1969.

SEALS, FROGMEN, AND DARK WATERS

There were a great more U.S. Navy forces in Southeast Asia than the ships of the Seventh Fleet at Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin. These forces ranged from the massive carriers that had launched many of the aircraft that penetrated the skies over North Vietnam, to the small, fiberglass-hulled boats of the Brown Water Navy, which traveled the rivers and canals of South Vietnam. There were also troops that were part of the Navy. These Navy troops were not just the United States Marine Corps that had served with the ships of the U.S. fleet since the earliest days of the country. There were also new units of fighting men, some so unique that their kind had never been seen in the world before.