How a Navy sailor fell off his ship — then grew to become a Vietnam POW hero | EUROtoday

The front-page newspaper {photograph} was putting on the morning of April 6, 1967 — a dramatic picture exhibiting the usS. Canberra firing at Communist targets from the warship’s place within the Gulf of Tonkin.

Little did these readers know – his shipmates actually didn’t – that one of many Canberra’s most junior sailors was struggling via these exact same waters that day.

South Dakotan Douglas Brent Hegdahl, who’d by no means seen the ocean earlier than becoming a member of the Navy within the midst of the Vietnam War, had in some way fallen from the ship. Just 20 years outdated, he survived hours within the Gulf earlier than North Vietnamese fishermen plucked him to security.

Then he was turned over to the North Vietnamese – and so started his unbelievable journey because the youngest and lowest-ranking POW on the notorious Hanoi Hilton, the place Hegdahl pretended to be silly to his captors as he secretly collected data, displaying an ingenious aptitude for memorization, commentary and subterfuge.

Hegdahl memorized the names of 254 POWs, serving to to reclassify 63 service members from MIA to POW – not solely bringing solace to dozens of wives and households but in addition offering the navy with key intelligence, akin to the precise deal with of the scary jail itself.

“No one knows what they’re going to do under circumstances like that and Doug, who was from a tiny town in eastern South Dakota, barely got through high school, but he was a smart guy, and he figured it out,” says Marc Leepson, whose new ebook, the primary biography of Hegdahl, The Unlikely War Hero: A Vietnam War POW’s Story of Courage and Resilience within the Hanoi Hilton, is out this month.

“He somehow figured out the way to survive and did it against all odds and succeeded against anybody’s wildest expectations,” Leepson, 79 and in addition a Vietnam veteran, tells The Independent.

Memorizing names modified lives. “I mean, 63 names were changed from ‘missing in action,’ which usually means you didn’t survive, to ‘prisoner of war,’ which means you did survive,” he says, including that Hegdahl was an “enlisted man” amongst fellow prisoners who have been “Naval Academy graduates, guys who are pilots of giant jet planes that flew off of decks of aircraft carriers and were air aces in the sky.”

“And this 20-year-old kid who was in the deck crew does this amazingly,” he says. “I think it was one of the most heroic acts not in combat during the Vietnam War. And I think that’s something that people should know.”

Funnily sufficient, whereas Hegdahl’s heroism originated in a brutal jail paradoxically nicknamed for a well-known resort chain, his formative years performed out in a special place additionally regionally nicknamed “Hilton.”

Hegdahl and his two brothers grew up residing in and dealing in a resort his mother and father bought in downtown Clark, South Dakota – “which the locals nicknamed the Hegdahl Hilton, an ironic nod to the fact that it was far from fancy,” Leepson writes.

Both his mother and father have been Lutherans hailing from Norwegian immigrant households, and Hegdahl loved one thing of an all-American midwestern childhood, swimming within the native pool and Boy Scouts when he wasn’t engaged on farms or on the household enterprise. He was referred to as a playful, well-liked sensible joker however didn’t apply himself in school, taking greater than 4 years to complete highschool and graduating at age 19 and a half. He was additionally a chief candidate for the draft as America continued its extremely controversial conflict effort in Vietnam; his mom satisfied him to affix the Navy earlier than he might be conscripted, reasoning that it might be safer than in-country fight.

After coaching in San Diego, Hegdahl received despatched to the Canberra in February 1967 – and two months later discovered himself overboard. No one, together with Hegdahl, has ever been capable of clarify how he ended up within the water. The 6-foot, 225-pound apprentice seaman remembered getting up from his bunk and abandoning his thick eyeglasses, earlier than going as much as the deck to observe the weapons firing at nighttime.

“I can’t tell you how I fell from my ship,” Doug mentioned after his launch. “All I know is, I walked up on the deck. It was dark and they were firing, and the next thing I recall I was in the water.”

Luckily, the previous highschool athlete was a powerful swimmer. He treaded water for hours earlier than fishermen noticed and rescued him, then turned him over to the North Vietnamese. Two days later, he discovered himself at Hỏa Lò, higher referred to as the Hanoi Hilton – the place US prisoners together with future presidential candidate John McCain have been brutally tortured throughout years of captivity.

“At first, the North Vietnamese interrogators figured Doug Hegdahl for a spy who concocted a dubious tale of falling off a ship in the Tonkin Gulf,” Leepson writes. “But he soon convinced them that he was anything but a CIA spy; that he was, in fact, a lowly enlisted man who had no knowledge about any Navy operational information that could be useful to them; and that he really was blown off the deck of his ship.

“But he also conned the North Vietnamese into believing that he was a bumbling fool by playing it dumb when they interrogated him – so much so that the guards started referring to him as ‘The Incredibly Stupid One.’”

Hegdahl’s ploy – and the humorousness he managed to cling to – helped him glean data and work in opposition to the enemy as he dutifully memorized names offered by different prisoners.

“I had probably the most embarrassing capture in the entire Vietnam War,” Hegdahl mentioned in a 1997 interview Leepson quotes within the ebook. “I found that my defense posture was just to play dumb. Let’s face it, when you fall off your boat, you have a lot to work with.”

Leepson’s ebook outlines how, whereas sweeping the yard, Hegdahl was additionally sabotaging North Vietnamese autos by surreptitiously pouring sand and gravel into gasoline tanks. On multiple event, he was taken away from the jail to assist numerous North Vietnamese propaganda efforts, permitting him to pinpoint and memorize Hanoi Hilton’s precise location.

“He was given a little bit of freedom compared to most of the guys, and he was able to scout around and look and report back on torture, and he found out the address of the Hanoi Hilton,” Leepson tells The Independent.

Hegdahl and his imbecile routine constantly thwarted propaganda initiatives by the North Vietnamese, together with an try and re-enact his watery seize on movie. Leepson laughs about “the way he outfoxed them.”

Directed by a propaganda filmmaker and surrounded by villagers serving as extras, Hegdahl repeatedly pretended to not perceive directions, as an alternative enjoying up and performing out throughout what ought to have been scenes.

“He got the villagers, who were supposed to be like extras in the movie … all on his side, and they were laughing and joking, and he was able to frustrate the director to the point that it never got made,” Leepson tells The Independent.

He quotes a 1972 interview given by Hegdahl – who sought to flee the highlight as time went on after his launch – by which he says: “I was so mad about their propaganda that it became a personal war to think how I could mess it up.”

Hegdahl’s savviness and knack for memorization caught the eye and respect of superior officers within the POW camp – who ordered him to simply accept early launch, which US navy prisoners are forbidden from doing in keeping with the established code of conduct.

Hegdahl refused a direct order the primary time however finally relented, and he went house in 1967 with important data.

“He helped with the intel and, in addition to the names  … [Hegdahl’s work] was part of the reason that, in the fall of 1969, the North Vietnamese, and I write about it in the book, changed the treatment of prisoners for the better,” Leepson says. “Torture didn’t stop, but it did lessen significantly, and some of their strictures were taken away – for instance, communication.”

Roger Shields, who served as deputy assistant secretary of protection for POW/MIA Affairs from 1971 to 1977, explains within the ebook that, after Hegdahl offered names to the Pentagon, “we told the North Vietnamese, ‘You are responsible for the salvation and the survival of these particular men,’ thereby putting the onus on the North Vietnamese in a way that had never been done before.”

On the identical day that Hegdahl participated in his first post-release press convention, talking from Bethesda, Maryland, Ho Chi Minh died – prompting a change of management that additionally coincided with extra strain on the Communists from the Nixon Administration concerning therapy of POWs. (The closing prisoners would finally be launched in 1973.)

Hegdahl joyously reunited together with his household upon his return, and his mother and father had ensured his navy paychecks have been invested throughout his time as a POW – permitting him to purchase a house close to the seashore in San Diego, the place he determined to construct his life. The veteran started working as an teacher within the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) faculty in San Diego Bay, the place he was “especially adept at giving advice on how to survive in a POW camp,” Leepson writes.

Among his college students was William J. Dougherty, a CIA officer who was held captive with 51 others on the US Embassy in Tehran in the course of the Iranian Hostage Crisis of 1979.

“I will never, ever forget Doug Hegdahl,” Dougherty wrote in a 2001 ebook about his ordeal.

“I could recall Hegdahl’s lectures with almost crystalline clarity,” he continued. “His comments, advice, examples and stories – more than anything else – saw me through severe interrogations and helped me keep my sanity, dignity, and secrets intact. Thanks to Doug [and my service in] the Marine Corps, I was well prepared for the Iranians.”

Doug retired from SERE in 2001, persevering with to enjoy his privateness and luxury in his adopted seaside metropolis – greater than three many years after his savvy POW tips made invaluable contributions to the conflict effort.

“On a macro point of view, that is also really significant, besides this individual story of courage not under fire, courage in these horrible conditions where he could have been tortured to within an inch of his life or worse,” Leepson tells The Independent. “He wasn’t – but it was a gutsy thing to do.”