Most of us, if asked, could probably point to one Christmas in our past that we remember most fondly – one that stands out from the rest. If you were to ask our men held prisoner in the old Hoa Lo prison in North Vietnam during the 60s and 70s, they would undoubtedly identify the Christmas of 1970 as being the most surprising and uplifting.

   Events completely unbeknownst to the American Prisoners of War (POWs) at the Hanoi Hilton, as the Hoa Lo prison was named by its unhappy inhabitants, would cause the Christmas of 1970, relative to the awful years preceding it, to be so much more hopeful. It is a fascinating historical fact that a daring raid by dozens of American Special Forces troops on the POW camp at Son Tay, about 20 miles northwest of Hanoi, was the impetus for the Vietnamese to unintentionally make Christmas of 1970 a significantly happier event than even the POWs could have imagined.  But more on that in a bit.

  If you were to ask Captain Jerry Coffee, USN, about his most memorable Christmas as a POW at the Hanoi Hilton, he would probably give you a more qualified response. Taking disabling anti-aircraft fire in his RA-5 Vigilante over North Vietnam, he made it out to the Gulf of Tonkin before ejecting, but was quickly captured anyway. For Captain Coffee, his first Christmas in captivity – 1968 – was most memorable for him. In an article he authored in 2014, he described that Christmas:

I unwrapped the other two [candy bars] and smoothed out the red and silver foil, put the “chocolate” on the floor for my rat, recocooned in my blanket and started smoothing the foil. Then, while humming Christmas carols, I carefully “origamied” a swan, a rosette and a star. I then pulled three threads from my blanket, tied them to each ornament and hung them from the edge of the empty upper bunk, so they were at my eye level.

Each of the little hanging ornaments rotated slowly on their thread in the dense, cold air. With the background of carols in my mind, my thoughts went to family Christmases past, recalling as much detail as possible, then to the very first Christmas, and the glory of the Christ Child’s birth. Like the three kings from the East, I offered up my three little shimmering gifts to the Baby Jesus, and finished up with my own Christmas prayers.

This always will be the most memorable Christmas of my life.

 In 1968, brutal interrogations and torture were the rule.  Claiming that our military action against North Vietnam was not a war covered by the Geneva Accords of 1949, the Ho Chi Minh regime ensured that our POWs were treated in an abysmal manner, with the usual goal being some coerced written, oral, or video propaganda that the Vietnamese Communists could make available to the world. It was therefore all the more courageous for Captain Coffee to refuse outright to do anything that would appear to show good treatment by his sadistic captors.

  The systematic torture was somewhat suspended late in 1969, after the death of Ho Chi Minh; but the solitary confinement and filthy living conditions, almost completely open to the weather, persisted. It was, then, an unexpected event when Christmas of 1970 arrived, along with a major change in the accommodations of hundreds of American POWs.

  Lieutenant Commander Howard Rutledge wrote of the events in his best-selling book, In the Presence of Mine Enemies:   

 Pacing my 4 x 8 foot cell in Cell Block Stardust at the Hanoi Hilton . . . I suddenly remembered this was Christmas Day.  My memory flashed to our home in San Diego at Christmas. It had been six years since our family had gathered together around a tree loaded with gifts . . . Six years had passed since our family had been together around the Christmas tree, and my eyes filled with tears prompted by those happy memories . . .

That Christmas night my devotional reveries were disturbed by the sounds of guards entering Las Vegas [the Americans gave names to the different areas of the Hanoi Hilton], throwing open cell-block doors. Without warning all of us in Las Vegas were herded one-by-one out of that stinking place and into one large area we promptly dubbed Camp Unity.  Talk about a celebration! We laughed and hugged and chatted excitedly.  We had no idea why we were together or what it meant – but we were together.  And if it were only for a night, we would enjoy it.

 What the POWs could not know is that only a month earlier, on  November 21, 1970, U.S. Army Colonel Bull Simons and several dozen Special Warfare troops had conducted one of the most remarkable operations of the entire Vietnam conflict.  The daring surprise assault on the Son Tay POW camp, so near Hanoi, was executed flawlessly with impeccable precision. Unfortunately, the 70 or so American POWs had been moved some time prior to the rescue attempt, due to the Red River overflowing its banks and threatening the water supply at the Son Tay POW camp and even the camp itself.¹

  One thing we can be sure of: the North Vietnamese did not allow the POWs to come together in Camp Unity out of the largesse of their sadistic Communist hearts. In retrospect, it is clear to see that the Hanoi regime was frightened by the assault on Son Tay. The captors only eased the solitary confinement of most of the prisoners out of sheer lack of space caused by consolidating all the POWs in the more defensible Hanoi Hilton. But whatever the reason for the Christmas founding of Camp Unity, the POWs were grateful to God and continued to keep faith with our country.

  Former Senator (and Rear Admiral, USN) Jeremiah Denton was a devout Catholic and had the distinction of being one of the longest held POWs in North Vietnam. In his book, When Hell Was in Session, he wrote that on Christmas eve of 1970 “. . . there was a heavy rattling of plates which usually meant a move, and a friendly watergirl cleared her throat loudly, a danger signal.” He described how a heavily armed team of civilian intelligence agents “swooped in and shook down the cells searching for contraband”. They found a tape that had been smuggled into camp containing information from U.S. intelligence, along with parts of a radio receiver.²  This, on the heels of the Son Tay raid, caused the North Vietnamese to consolidate the prisoners, necessitating housing them together.  Senator Denton remembered clearly that Christmas night: “Nearly 350 Americans were now together” in Camp Unity.

  Of course, the number of POWs in Camp Unity emboldened the prisoners to hold worship services, which started immediately on the first Sunday after that surprising Christmas. The guards made it known that worship services were not permitted, and they tried to shout down those leading the prayers and giving benedictions; but finally all the North Vietnamese could do was make threats and isolate the leaders. The worship services continued until the Americans came home.  They had won a great battle.

 The American prisoners in the North Vietnamese prison system, nearly to a man, had always nurtured their religious beliefs during their captivity. If it is true that there are no atheists in foxholes, it is equally true that long years of brutal incarceration and isolation often makes one stronger in the fundamentals of how one was raised. When you only have rats and cockroaches to keep you company in your cell, you generally open yourself up to Almighty God. In fact, the prisoners regularly encouraged one another in their Faith through the tap code, invariably signing off with “GBU” for “God Bless You”.

  Even if you are not a prisoner in a vermin-infested cell, Christmas often tends to evoke happy memories of the past.  For countless POWs, it went beyond the reminiscences of family gatherings to actually pondering the genuine meaning of this great Holy Day.  Lieutenant Commander Howard Rutledge wrote for unnumerable POWs when remembering happier Christmas seasons:

I was astounded to realize how unaware I had been of the real meaning of Christmas on those days so long ago. Oh, I knew it was Christ’s birthday and I knew He was God’s Son – Someone very special. That was nice, but it took prison to help me to see what Christmas really meant. All the world was a prison and every man a prisoner until He came . . . Baby Jesus, lying in a filthy manger, surrounded by the smells and sounds of the barnyard, was more than a cute, cuddly kid, as Christmas cards portray Him. He was God Himself come down. . . He would die to set men free. Christmas Day would be the beginning of freedom for men who would believe. I spent that day thinking of the freedom I felt in Christ and wishing to be free to celebrate His birth again with my family.

 It may come as a surprise to most Americans that each of the services operates its own Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) programs, which are mandated for soldiers, sailors, and airmen whose specialties are considered to be at a potentially high risk of capture. In the Resistance portion of SERE training, our military members are taught about the spirit and intent of the U.S. DOD Code of Conduct, and how to apply it.  The SERE courses are considered intense, and learning is accomplished in both a classroom environment and through practical application. But the students also have the example of countless military members who have gone before them – who have comported themselves in an exemplary manner and have returned with honor.

  The men who survived the Hanoi Hilton overwhelmingly lived the Code of Conduct, each and every day for years, in an unimaginably arduous situation. It should give us all pause to recognize that these true patriots paid a high price, and many even made the ultimate sacrifice, to uphold the Code of Conduct. Most of the toughest resistors are gone now: Colonel Bud Day, USAF; Jeremiah Denton, Gerry Coffee, Howard Rutledge, to name just a very, very few. No doubt many of their lives were cut short due to the horrific treatment they received at the hands of the Vietnamese Communists.  This Christmas, let us remember their gift to us – the gift of men of conviction and principle who point the way for us to follow. And perhaps, as we ponder their courage and tenacity, we will ask the rhetorical question that Rear Admiral George Tarant asked in the final scene of the movie version of James Michener’s The Bridges at Toko Ri: “Where do we get such men?”

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Footnotes

¹ In his meticulously researched book, The Raid, Benjamin F. Schemmer raises the ironic possibility that the POWs that had certainly been at Son Tay were moved due to the CIA Operation Popeye, which was the seeding of the clouds over the Vietnam/Laos border in order to cause torrential rain that would make the Ho Chi Minh Trail impassable. Long before we all started noticing chem trails, the U.S. government was busy working on ways to control the weather for specific military or geopolitical purposes. It may well be true that the CIA’s covert operation was the cause of the failure of an otherwise beautifully executed mission – and there is much evidence to support it – but the most heartbreaking fact of this whole sad episode is that the CIA had a representative at every planning meeting for the rescue, and never said anything about the possible impact of weather manipulation to the military planners and operators.

² Commander James Stockdale, USN, had been in secret communications with U.S. intelligence agents from within the Hanoi Hilton for years. Some of this was discussed in his book, “In Love and War”. Decades later, however, the Smithsonian Channel produced an in-depth video titled, “The Spy in the Hanoi Hilton,” which gave amazing details about this fascinating story.