Then he sat me down against the back wall of the second room, removed a cuff from my good arm, and reattached it carelessly or kindly—it didn’t matter—around my right ankle. He then returned to the party in the other room. It was apparent that he could hardly wait to regale the group with the story of my shootdown and capture, the exaggeration of which had by now, I was sure, reached near-mythical proportions.
As my eyes accommodated to the dim light, I could see this room was littered with trash from all the transients—drivers and transport people—who came and went. The sweet smell from the bubble pipe mixed with the smell of feces and urine in the far corner. The opium and the beer would surely have their effect and it seemed the word was that the southbound traffic would have priority most of the night.
As the party became more raucous, I began to realize this might be my final chance to escape. The bottom of the plaited wall I was leaning against was about eight inches from the ground, and the dirt was fairly soft. With my free left hand I began scooping it away from directly under the wall. Several bottle caps lay within reach; using the sharp edge of one, I was able to nick a bamboo sliver from the butt of one of the diagonal cross-pieces of the plaited wall.
God, I was only seven or eight years old when I had listened religiously to my favorite afternoon radio serials: Jack Armstrong, Captain Midnight, Tom Mix, and Terry and the Pirates. It had been Terry held captive in some Oriental horror chamber who had ingeniously improvised a bamboo sliver to release himself from captivity and a fate worse than death at the bloody hands of the infamous Pirate Chieftain. Using the bottle cap I shaved the sliver thinner and smoother until it was about the size and thickness of a plastic collar stay. The cuffs were hardly precision equipment. It was easier than I had imagined to slip the thin, stiff sliver between the side housing and the ratchet of the cuff on my ankle. As I depressed the spring-loaded claw on the inside, the ratchet slipped out. Way to go, Terry! Glancing toward the opening to the outer room, I repositioned the cuff loosely around my ankle so it would appear as it had been.
The dirt was scooping away easily and I soon had a trough deep enough for me to be able to slide beneath the wall to the outside. I hadn’t the slightest idea what was on the other side except that it was the side away from the highway, the east side, so I would want to go straight away from the hut toward the Gulf. The options were limited at best. To go north meant to parallel Highway 1 and go deeper into North Vietnam. To go south meant again to parallel the highway for at least fifty miles before reaching the DMZ; then I’d need to somehow cross the Ben Hai River. After that I would have Viet Cong and possibly North Vietnamese patrols to avoid before reaching our own forces. East was the only possibility.
I figured the Gulf couldn’t be more than twenty miles away through mostly farmland and paddies like I’d traveled along that first night. My plan was simple if somewhat naive: I would anticipate the dawns and conceal myself through the day, sleeping as much as possible. I could eat bananas and greens and young rice shoots. Night after night I would travel until reaching the ocean, where I would steal a fishing boat and row or sail or drift out into the path of radar coverage of one of our destroyers or carriers operating in the Gulf. Rescue would be an overwhelmingly joyful occasion, and my shipmates would be incredulous that I had escaped from deep inside North Vietnam. The message traffic would go out, and Bea would be phoned immediately that I had escaped and was safely back aboard the Kitty Hawk and would soon be back home for recovery from my injuries. She would hug the kids and cry with relief, and all my buddies back in the home wing would raise a toast at the bar during happy hour and say “Coffee, that slippery sonovabitch, we knew if anybody could do it, he could!”
I contemplated that thought: Could anybody do it? I knew no one had so far, but a year and a half later, Air Force Major Bud Day would be shot down and captured just north of the DMZ. Almost immediately—with the crudest of methods—a Vietnamese medic had set his broken arm and applied a cast from shoulder to fingertips. Then, in spite of a badly wrenched knee and a torn-up face, he escaped from an underground bunker and headed south. For over a week he moved through a barren and devastated landscape of bomb craters and charred trees. He survived close encounters with Vietnamese patrols, and a near-fatal B-52 bombing attack that left him vomiting and bleeding from the ears. He barely appeased his hunger by swallowing raw frogs and a few berries. After nearly two weeks of evasion, he crossed the Ben Hai River into South Vietnam and worked his way within a mile of a U.S. fire base. He could see and hear the helicopters ferrying supplies in and out. Reluctant to approach in the fading light and be mistaken for the enemy, he holed up in the bush for one more night. As he emerged from his concealment the next morning for the final run, he was spotted by a couple of North Vietnamese soldiers, shot in the leg, and recaptured. With one leg shot through and the other swollen to huge proportions, body emaciated and dehydrated, the cast on his broken arm crumbling, he was taken back into North Vietnam to be incarcerated for many years. His heroic attempt had fallen short by less than a mile.
The smile on my face was hidden in the shadows as one of the Boy Scouts looked in on me. It had been about fifteen minutes since he’d checked. Satisfied that I was hunched over asleep, he returned to the group. That was it. I’d have fifteen minutes to split this roach coach and get farther away than they would imagine I could get after they discovered I was gone. I thought, This is it, man, go! I took a deep breath, removed the loose cuff from my ankle, and snapped it closed so it couldn’t snag something, leaned back into the trench I’d scooped out, and wriggled my head and shoulders through. The lower part of my body followed easily.
It was pitch-dark. Had I mistakenly thought there was a moon? I arose and stepped away from the wall—and smacked right into another wall. Shit! The impact was so loud I was glad for the noise of the party inside. I looked left and saw moonlight on the ground a few feet away. I’d exited right into the wall of a closely adjoining building whose eaves had obscured the moon. I crabbed to my left toward the moonlight, turned east at the corner, and stopped dead. Damn! It looked like I was on the west side of the hamlet and was about to go right down Main Street. Again I heard laughter coming from the shed. I figured that since the lane ahead was deserted, maybe everyone else in the village was celebrating too. I could see just well enough to jog cautiously down the middle of the path; there were houses and sheds on either side and lamplight glowing from cracks and doorways. Miraculously, I encountered no one. Way to go, Babe! You’re gonna be outa here!
As the buildings became more and more sparse, it got darker and darker. The moon had become mostly obscured by a passing cloud and I barely noticed when the lane became a narrow path on a dike separating two paddies. My experience thus far had taught me that most of the dikes were laid out on cardinal headings, and I was reasonably sure I was still heading east. I was spurred on by the prospect of a straight path all the way to the Tonkin Gulf. I quickened my pace, so much so that I almost made it through midair across the three-foot ditch connecting the adjoining paddies. I’d completely missed the plank that crossed it and found myself flailing forward through black space. I crashed into the opposite bank with an incredible racket. There were several five-gallon water cans stacked right where my head and shoulders landed. The rest of me went into the ditch. The tin cans scattered noisily along the path and into the water. The sound of my splash and the cans hitting against one another was exceeded only by my subsequent thrashing and cursing as I tried to scramble back up the muddy slope to the level path. Christ! I couldn’t have made more noise if I’d been in a bowling alley. Somewhere nearby a dog started barking as if it already had me cornered. Others joined in immediately. Soon it sounded like there were a dozen dogs for every house I’d passed, all of them deciding to celebrate Tet at the same time.
Watch where you’re going, you dumb shit! You’ve really got to make tracks now!
Had it not been for the distracting crash of the cans, the din of the dogs behind me, and the desperation of the situation, I would have hurt more from the fall. I’d wrenched my good shoulder, knocked the breath from myself, and cut my lip on the rusty edge of one of the cans. It occurred to me, as I stumbled on down the path, that they might have been used to carry human fertilizer, so commonly applied in this part of the world.
