EB-66 Over North Vietnam by John Fer

Video Statistics and Information

Video

Captions Word Cloud

Captions

welcome to Peninsula seniors out and about today we're at the Western Museum of Flight in Torrance for one of their celebrity lectures let's go see what cindy has for us today today we have a gentleman with us who has experienced some extraordinary things in his life and he's here today to share them with us his date of birth is 12 September 1937 but his date of loss was 4 February 1967 a few things he wrote happiness is unity before self happiness is peace it is red white and blue and it's the United States of America ladies and gentlemen it is my privilege to introduce John Ferg and Thank You Sammy very much for that kind introduction I'm I'm very pleased to be here today because I think most of you are about my age and although I like to see the young folks here too because to use that cliche they are the wave of the future they are the future if we can avoid what Ho Chi men used to say capturing the minds and the hearts of the young people and I'll control the nation if we can avoid that sort of political overtone and let our free enterprise American exceptionalism determine our futures has determined our past from our founding I think we're going to be in great shape for the long long long term and especially it's due to folks like yourself the pre boomer generation the pre X Y Z's and all that other stuff that that psychologists psychiatrists and the media like to assign to people we love phrases Americans love phrases as Cindy mentioned to you I'm John Ferg I was born just down the road here in San Pedro in in 32 1937 and I went all through school in San Pedro I graduated San Pedro high school and I went off to USC to study aeronautical engineering well for three years each of those three years I had been trying to get an appointment to the Air Force Academy that was my goal because ever since I was even younger than this young fellow in the front row I'd been building model airplanes and flying model airplanes and one of my dearest dearest dearest closest friends who's since passed away some of you may recall the name les pates Lester Bates was a commercial pilot out here in other words he would he gave lessons all the way from private to the commercial level and he was in partnership with a fella here that whose name I can't remember right now but had a pilot's license in a number less than ten it was so low he had been in aviation that long and I can't think of hard-bitten old cuss but new flying in sight and out and I'll never forget when I walked into their office this fellow had on the wall a sign which said flying spoken here and that's exactly what took place in that office and in the air excellent instruction all good flying talk it's an old map but it generally gives you an idea of the geographical layout of Indochina Siam of course now is called Thailand there's a footnote at the bottom which you can't see and this article where this map was extracted was done by a fella by name of Bernard fall who was an expert in Indochina was killed as I recall while he was covering the war over there but anyway you can see the the three countries Cambodia Laos and Vietnam which at this at this point of the map is divided in the north in South Vietnam and we could see just above way there and above the word Onam which is the central part of Vietnam there is a dashed line that's the 17th parallel now that's the line that to put this in perspective again that's the line that was drawn so to speak as a result of the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu and their and their departure from essentially military departure and political departure from from Indochina specifically Vietnam and you can see DnB on phu slightly below that word in china the chinese province yunnan okay the NBN food was of course that great big fort that was in a valley in which general giap just pulverized before they over ran it by mounting is artillery on the backside of the mountain he didn't carry it over the top where could be targeted by air drops napalm and artillery and bombs and things like that he put her on the backside so he fired over the backside of the mountains the French couldn't get at him so that's the the the the real strategic implementation of a firepower artillery which defeated the French then they they left and then there were peace talks it took place in Paris to determine the future of Vietnam and the outcome was in 1954 following the French defeat that it would be partitioned north and south the South would be allied with a primarily United States certainly the west and the north would be by their choice under the Vietnam in which was a front Organization for the Communists they would be allied with China and People's Republic and the Soviet Union and they were supplied and supported in other ways by them what we did South Vietnam no South Vietnam the way reason we got in here was under the umbrella besides our own strategic interests under the umbrella of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization seto which included Australia New Zealand and the countries in this general area youngsters there'll be a quiz after this is over so take notes one of the weaknesses of our American public school system is that we do not stress geography enough we do not stress geography so it's very important that's one of the reason I'm giving these little background off to the young folks here anyway we got engaged in there and the the government was allied with the United States and vice versa and so about 1961 we started getting more more and more deeply involved with advisers on the ground instructing their violets with beasts b-26s and t-28s and things like that just rappin bomb racks arm and and you know getting them up to speed militarily you have to remember too you have to remember too that the north under Ho Chi Minh never ever ever ever gave up on their goal of unifying Vietnam both north and south never he founded the Indochina Communist Party in 1930 and was a was a like to say a nationalist but there were strong undertones of Marxism and Leninism and all that stuff that the Communists like to spout so anyway immediately he started then infiltration and with advised his own advisers and getting the Vietcong which was an indigenous fighting force involved in attempting to overthrow the Saigon gut as they call it the Saigon government and you can see Saigon at the very very tip down there by Kate come out just across from Phnom Penh and Cambodia or the Khmer Republic as they say I went through t-birds down at a Laredo Air Force Base on the on the border of Mexico I got checked out as a primary pilot in this little device the Tweety Bird and it got its name Tweety Bird made by Cessna because it screamed so loud it had a loud tweet sound to the engines and it was side-by-side seating as you know and an excellent primary bird it was very very difficult to to make errors and not recover from it even a flat spin is a very good airplane subsonic but an excellent airplane now this is my this is my be 66 class you can't see it very well I'm sure but these are the guys that checked out in the combat crew training squadron down a Shire Force Base which was the recce school at the time they had just gotten in the RAF force but they still had us checking out in the the b-66 and we all got checked out in the RB 66 which was the photo bird because we didn't have any see models or be models of the b-66 without all the jamming gear on it in the pod and the back end when I got to to Thailand in order to fly these missions over the north we moved into takla airbase and talked the airbase in addition to the usual support facilities had housing for the pilots and we called these hooches in this slide here you can see looking down the sidewalk or the boardwalk between all the hooches gathering of the young men who did the housekeeping and that's those are who we called the hooch boys and this is my hooch boy and the hooch where I lived the facility that that housed probably a dozen other pilots or aircrew members and that's me in in civilian clothes I was his first lieutenant at the time this was in 1966 the fall of 66 and that's my my quarters my little share of the world there with mosquito net and in my bed now in in December in December of 1966 as part of his his visits to the the troops during during the war Bob Hope came to talk Lee and here he is he already had lunch and he's coming out of the officers mess at talk Lee and I happen to be outside waiting for him so I snapped this picture and Bob Hope again he's getting in there with the base commander the fellow in the glasses he's getting into the Jeep and he's about ready to go back to the to the airplane a c-130 that they flew in on and the last one that's the ambassador to Thailand who came up to be with Bob Hope at the club and they're about to say goodbye and he's headed to the airplane as I said this is shortly after I had arrived in in Southeast Asia most of you will if you've seen the 66 will recognize it a comma fledged airplane that's the intrepid warrior they're about to get in the beauty about this airplane was it only had one pilot one pilot and I loved it because I came out I came out of b-47s into this thing and I always sat in the back and even the Navigator told me what to do as a co-pilot i sat there and i ran the gun and i read the checklist and i computed the fuel flow and all this other stuff and I made the radio calls but there wasn't much action and backseat landings were not very often given to co-pilots because if yet the the aft and I'm gear first you took a huge porpoise in the air that was dangerous in a b-47 though anyway I love this airplane because it had only one pilot and I was a first lieutenant at the time and it was a real thrill to be an aircraft commander had a navigator and a crew in the back now if you look directly behind me and sort of between the gear in there is is a pod where the bombe used to be and that's where there were four electronic warfare officers Ravens and those guys back there did all the hard work they did the heavy lifting listening for triple-a radar acquisition and tracking and the Sam the most deadly the Sam surface-to-air missiles that we were supposed to jam which also jam all of it but the Sam's were the really dangerous ones and when we're in airborne they looked like big telephone poles okay so this is this is one of the f-4s whenever we flew north whenever we flew north we always had a flight of four escorts early on we used to have the f100 force because that's all they had a they used him for air-to-air intercepts and things like that and then when they weren't busy doing that sort of stuff they would fly escorts for us but they burned gas like nobody's business had no legs and well they could shoot down MiG's and things like that the MiG's never launched very often to intercept us so they got rid of the 104 and they kept him around Saigon and that area there so they can go into air defense there in case the North ever came south with their their aircraft but anyway the Air Force then got the F force and this is one of our escorts he came up alongside I asked him so I could take a picture anyway he flew up there they came from the triple nickel squadron mostly which was JPJ and Robin olds wing over in in a you adorn their u-bahn excuse me you bunt over near the Laotian border and so they would fight before of them that would come up and we'd stack and I'll get into this little more - we'd stack 2,000 feet above one another two of us I I was in the C model I'd be at the about 32,000 and below us at 30,000 would be the B model ok Jam only beyond was just a barrage jammer they just turned everything on in Jam certain frequencies we were selective we could jam and we could cut and we could figure out what different frequencies were so he could adjust to it and that sort of thing and meeting new king if anything new came up just a little bug bit above that dot that says Bangkok it's where the air base of Tok Lee is located I would fly from Tok Lee we would fly north right to the junction of the top or the Vietnamese and Laotian border there you can see Laos and there was a attacking station located on on a hill a Lima site we called him which was lightly defended and by special forces guys and some Air Force people to operate the electronics there and we would fly channel 79s that was the was the channel number for that attack and we fly just about due north it'd be zero zero one to the TAC ant site 79 and then we turned just a little to the east-northeast and come in on the back side of the the city of Hanoi just across the Red River I'll just Crouch to draw that for you welcome Bob this this tract and then we turn in and we fly in orbit north of Hanoi which is right here north of Hanoi east and west we fly this orbit east and west and I mentioned 32,000 for manias the C model and the B model would be at three thirty thousand feet and we had to stay about 20 miles south of the Chinese border not naturally this is a different scale but there was a line that followed the Chinese border that was about 20 miles south of the border and sort of paralleling the border itself and we had to stay out of that area that was called a buffer zone because if we got into an area that was too close to China its scrambler makes them we would be in deep trouble because we didn't have any armament and of course the f-4s would would defend us but if if they have too many then of course it would be disadvantageous but anyway you can see north of Hanoi an orbit that is east and west it would alternate as a racetrack which is your standard oval or a figure 8 now we go inbound and we fly and get ourselves established with it with it with an oval orbit and we never went out over the water but went close to the to the eastern edge of Vietnam and then we turn back 10 turn to the left and to come back again and fly a ground track that was to the west and then we'd get out I would say around the other side of the Red River slightly you can see the mountains coming down by the Red River that's thud Ridge thud Ridge was the ground identification point that the 105's used to enter hanoi airspace so they fly missions out of kirat and talk ly at different times during the day the same route we flew and then when they entered just past the NBN fou and got close to thud rids they dropped down to say about 500 feet and then they turn very sharply and they'd come down the Red River or thud Ridge and they'd come on the western side of the thud Ridge so they couldn't be picked up on radar so they'd be masked by the mountains and we flew above at the course because we didn't have any any any strike mission so it didn't make any difference and we had jammers and and and cutters and things like that so didn't make any difference so we would fly on this orbit oval or figure eight in anticipation of the arrival of the f-105s and to a lesser degree some of the f4 air-to-ground guys and it was on this on on on February the 4th in 1967 that I was just established in the orbit I was just established in the orbit at the at the eastern end and I was going to turn to the north and then resume the the ground track going out to the west again when the navigator when the Ravens in the backend said hold your turn don't make your turn yet and I knew when they said that that that they were cutting a site that was of some interest now if it was a known site they wouldn't have said that because we would have just turned on the jammers and jammed them selectively but he said hold your turn so I did that and I went a little bit further to the east than I ordinarily would and so about 10-15 seconds later the the head Raven they had electronic warfare officer in the backend number four said okay start your turn now while a navigator gets antsy when you exceed the physical parameters of your of your your cleared area of where you're supposed to fly and so he said okay make this turn a tight turn so now let me give you some background on the equipment in the backend the equipment in the backend if you're flying straight and level emits a cone shaped pattern and it's about 45 degrees if you can visualize this thing it's 45 degrees between the horizontal and and the vertical flight path okay so you've got a big cone it's about 45 degrees and inside that cone is the effective range of your jamming so whenever you roll into a bank you'll move that cone a little bit well today or on this particular day the 4th of February it wasn't very smart in retrospect but we did it anyway rolled into a bank which was about 60 degrees so I could come back and avoid flying into that buffer zone over over China in in the Chinese airspace okay well when we rolled over we projected the the the jamming out to the side and it was at that moment that we rolled into the turn the jamming wasn't effective that the Vietnamese the North Vietnamese or it could have been Russians operating their sights I don't know but in because the Russians did operate a lot of their sites and fly some of their airplanes but anyway when we rolled over we effectively shut down our jamming and they fired for Sam's one right after the other they all must have come up within ten seconds what we had done after the fact I found out was flown over and a mobile site one that had been moved in overnight now they have a lot of mobile sites but you have to number one you have to detect them electronically and then you have to photograph them to verify that there's a site there before the intelligence guy we'll keep them on the missile order of battle in other words the charts that we are given in the briefings just before the mission so this particular mobile site was moved in overnight we didn't know it was there but these guys picked it up the guys on my back-end picked it up well when we rolled in we effect effectively lost any jamming they fired four and two of them did some very severe damage one of them impacted the airplane and it killed three of the four guys in the backend right off the bat one of the Ravens the youngest kid the lieutenant in the inexperienced position Raven one and incidentally just coincidentally and lucky for him furthest away from the impact it came up for the left side and he sat in the right front seat in that pod that I described to you so he got out okay we got some shrapnel damage on the left side the Navigator and I were kind of beat up a little bit with with shrapnel and as I mentioned to other folks sometimes I received mine for the most part in the same area that that that Forrest Gump got his and that was in the buttocks all right so I had bloody shorts and undershirt when I when I punched out of the airplane I told a navigator go ahead get out of the airplane I rang the alarm bell for the guys in the backend a red light alarm bell to signal for them to go out now they all ejected downward so when the report of the after action came in from the escorts as to who got out of the airplane they said only to suit only two chutes were cited mine and the navigators because we went up he didn't see the one guy eject downward so they thought all four were killed until a good while after our captivity so anyway we punched out of the airplane broke it in half the the fighter escort reported that that it broken in half flaming halves and that sort of thing and we ejected and came you know tumbling down through the old atmosphere there and the one thing I remember to this day is how cold it was very very cold there February and of course Jetstream comes down and cold air pretty much blanket set that part of the world as well as you know other parts of the globe but anyway our parachutes are set to if we're incapacitated to be deployed at 14,000 feet through a barometric system okay when when the barometer senses 14,000 pressure altitude it sets a little retracting mechanism in in motion and it pulls the the d-ring of mechanism of its own accord so if you know you're unconscious you you have a nice let down I was tumbling through the air and you know I wasn't I couldn't believe that I was shot down for one thing I'm not supposed to be I'm not supposed to be hit I'm supposed to be outside and so it be a jammer and all that sort of stuff so anyway I'm tumbling through the air and when I went out of the airplane I didn't pull my visor down so my eyes were hit with the high-speed slipstream and what that did was rupture my eye my the vessels in my eyeballs okay and so they became very blood almost black in their color and I couldn't see so I was tumbling down through the air cold in shock and thinking what if that parachute barometer doesn't work because I couldn't see I wouldn't know how close I was to the ground so I reached over and it must have been about 28,000 or something like that I pulled the ripcord and it deployed nicely and I just swung there and I said well the personal equipment guys had told me this you you guide your chute by reaching behind and with one hand opposite and getting the shrouds and then in the front you get the other one and you twist him like this and you can guide yourself slipped the parachute and all that other stuff because I had seen a village as my eyesight cleared I saw a village down I said these guys are going to be after me well why not to tell you I must be the weakest guy in the world or I wasn't doing something right because I couldn't move that parachute I could not slide it and so I dropped down on side of a ridge which was in view of this village as I came down and I was on the ground and and took all by my gear off and I buried the chute and then I went through my survival kit including the the survival mirror which you know you can flash to rescue people and get their attention and and they know that you're on the ground because I didn't want to use the radio on the guard channel because the Vietnamese monitored the guard channels 243 zero they monitor guard channel and then they send their their troops or their militias or whatever it is to that area and they'll they'll capture you're quicker so I didn't want to use a radio so I I reached in the reach in my survival vest and I was looking for my my mirror and it was nothing but a handful of dust nothing but a handful of dust and as I looked down I noticed that's where all my wounds were on that side so that thing probably saved by some some injuries so I didn't have I didn't have a signal mirror I went into my first-aid kit because I had a very badly lacerated knee my arms were pretty well beat up and so I took some sulphate tablets and I figured you know I'd seen it in a movie one time brilli honestly I'd seen in a movie self was supposed to kill potential potential infection so I took a couple of three pills like that buried what was left and I ran up the hill I ran up the hill to get away from these guys because I could hear him coming I hear the dogs and I got up the top of this little Ridge top this little Ridge and I couldn't go any further because there was a lot of undergrowth a lot of trees brambles things like that bushes and so I I looked for a place to hide I look back down the hill and I saw this little banana palm it was about nine inches in diameter and of course you can see I'm wider than 9 inches nice as well I got to hide someplace so I squeezed myself down behind this little banana palm and I'm wearing my olive drab colored flight suit so I'm kind of blending in so I squished down behind this bland Apollon and I started praying and keeping quiet and a whole bunch of them went right by me dogs people everybody and then I didn't hear any noise after a while and I thought well they probably reached the same undergrowth the same impediments that I reached and they can't go any further and it was true that's what happened and they all turned around and they look back down the hill and it all hell broke loose Oh screaming and holler and they all surrounded me there must have been about a dozen of them they had these old beat-up rifles stripped me down to my undershorts bloody undershorts and and one of those tank top under shirts and took my pistol my the $5 that I had I had a religious medal which they took away I think I missed that one more than anything else I've been given in Catholic school but anyway yeah left me my socks gave me a stick and then marched me off to the village okay watch me off to the village and there's where I sat for about an hour and a half or so until the army arrived with their Hummer type big jeep vehicle through me and the Navigator in there and we drove on in to Hanoi drove all night and got there about 5:30 in the morning and I went in to a to a place called new guy village that's where the interrogation took place a new guy village was the location where everybody entered the Hanoi Hilton and in Vietnamese it's called wallow which means burning furnace and ball tell you it it gets very hot in there in more ways than one but anyway I went into this room and the Navigator and I were split to different to dinner interrogation rooms and the guy that came into my room was a fellow we later nicknamed I found from the old guys the eagle and the eagle was very bright very very smart in military information knew his newest stuff and he brought in with him a little guy which we nicknamed laid along the monkey man which was sort of a low-grade NCO and he just followed the instructions which I'll elucidate on here just shortly of the interrogator now when you become captured when you become captured in a military scenario so to speak there are two purposes you know for in interrogation there two types number one is for military information because it's perishable they don't want to know yesterday's targets or they don't want to know yesterday's intelligence information because it doesn't do them any good tomorrow when you know when you plan a defense when you plan a defense establishment when you put a defense establish together and you're going to for instance the United States protect the United States your intelligence has to be based upon what the threat not only is today but what it is potentially in the foreseeable future and that's what they are after here they wanted to know what were the targets going to be after Tet now all of you heard of the what Tet heard of Tet before the Lunar New Year okay it's like the Chinese New Year we just finished one recently not us the United States but the the Asian people did anyway the Lunar New Year was about to take place well the two types of course of intelligence I want to get back to again our interrogation are number one in military intelligence because it's perishable and number two propaganda propaganda I'll talk about later on but we're not right now we're engaging here in this description on military intelligence Lyndon Johnson when he was president didn't understand the guy that I described ran North Vietnam Ho Chi Minh didn't understand him he listened instead to his Harvard educated advisors and all these people that told him if we stop bombing over the north we will then entice them in good faith to come to the negotiating table and we can get this war over with we can settle it through negotiations very very very bad assumption because as I mentioned Ho Chi Minh since nineteen thirty had this ambition that he was going to unify and keep unified Vietnam so what Lyndon Johnson did was we're gonna say he said we're gonna stop the bombing over the north for Christmas our Christmas the Lunar New Year the Tet festival okay and of course over the New Year's holiday as well okay and that was supposed to bring them to the negotiating table so the bombing stopped this interrogator said to me what are the targets going to be after Tet I am the foggiest idea I have foggiest idea I used to sit on what we call our frag teams we would take that from the Joint Chiefs we would take the targets that we were going to strike but I had no idea what they they were all we did was write the coordinates down and then we put them in in in Strike Packages and we give them to the appropriate crews yeah particularly it was for the b-66 people so we know where the jamming should be oriented in order to support the 105 s and the F force in their strikes so the guy's asking me the eagle is asking me number one what are the what are the targets after tip I said I don't know I don't know is the little guy we called the monkey man then in following instructions came across and gave me a good slap across the face the left side came from my left saying give me a good hard one now when I went through survival school over to the old stead Air Force Base outside of Reno we were taught that they will try to intimidate you in order to get you past the name rank service number and date of birth okay so this slap this slap after I had I had told him only my name rank service number of my date of birth and not my unit what she asked me for slapped me alongside the face and I thought to myself this is exactly the way it's supposed to be I'm gonna prove to be too tough a nut they're gonna put me then into the big compound with the rest of the hard nuts and they'll just forget me and the war will be over and I'll go home then he asked me again he said what was your unit and I said I can't tell you that so I got another slap alongside the face and then I was asked a third time what is your unit which happened to be the 41st TAC recon squadron I said I don't know he didn't slap me this time the young man once you come up here I want to show you something and and I'm doing this just to give you an example of the extremes that that people who are in battle will go to in order to protect their their country okay anyway what happened was this man and he put him on my my wrists them on my wrist opposing okay and they weren't the the handcuffs that have became between the two movies these were mint on my miniature socks very rigid cuffs so he put that like so and then he picked that's just imagine this is a long strap and he took a strap in here he took the scrap down and tied it off here shoots my belt and then what do you can't he did there was lace this strap back and forth across my arms now just picture this young fellas sitting on his rear end with his legs extended and then being rolled on his side and each time that I have the strap lace I pull it tight and tight and tighter and tighter and tighter until I get up here and what happens is the elbows of course get pulled Kentucky one another what do you have left over my shoulder and he tied it around my ankles and cinched it up until I would my nose was touching my meat now Freddie I will tell you thank you Freddie I will tell you Freddie ride will tell you that being athletes we are generally a little more supple and a little more limber than non-athletes and I was an athlete I was a distance runner and I played football and so I was always in pretty fair shape so the bending and touching my nose to my knees wasn't the hard part the most painful most difficult part of that whole thing is that not even pulling my elbows to touch one another not even the the handcuffs the most painful part was that when you cinch down that nylon strap you cut off all the circulation the blood circulation to your limbs and you all know that you've through experience that when you cut off the circulation he it hurts like the daylights it really hurts so after they had tied me up they both got up without any emotion whatsoever and this is the thing I felt hard I felt I felt most severely if you want to say that is that there was no emotion in these guys these guys were just going about their job just going about their job in extracting information so they both got up and they walked out and the pain starting to build up now I always thought I was pretty tough I always thought I was pretty tough but you know in American athletics for instance for young guys they're going through high school and and even in college and all that stuff when the play is over everybody stops and you go back to the huddle or you rest a while and then you go through it again or the referee blows a whistle are there rules there were no rules in this experience I had a knife this was the hardest thing I had that I could grasp very difficult anyway they just left me there so I thought I was pretty tough but I didn't last and hold out as long as I thought I could so I screamed and hollered or so after about 20-25 minutes I guess something like that really hurt they came back in again and they in tied me now I don't know really which is more painful cutting off the circulation and laying there or when they untie you from this contraption feeling all that circulation just surge back into your limbs again because it's pretty painful so I staggered to my feet the Eagle took his seat again the monkey man stood off to my left where he was previously and the Eagle said okay what are what is your unit I I thought to myself fer to this day I am truthful with you when I say I can hear my words to myself fer you're a wimp you could you gave in too soon you gave in too soon I really really had a guilt trip so I told him I just gritted my teeth and I said I can't tell you what my unit is back into the straps again okay cinched me all up just as I described and they walked out and this time when I screamed and hollered they didn't come back right away when they finally did come back untie me I said okay I'm in the 41st squadron attack we come on he says okay now once again my question what are the what are the targets after Tet I had no idea I said I don't know he didn't think that was he he didn't think that was a good answer I went back in the straps a third time by this time I was pretty well wrung out pretty well wrung out when he asked me after they untied me what are the targets after Tet Lunar New Year I said oil storage I just made up something the barges I said the oil trucks hauling oil the imports were going after oil and the reason I said it was because I had read it the previous week or so in Stars and Stripes the newspaper so I figured it was probably a pretty good it was probably a pretty good answer so he bought it I went through the rest of the day with innocuous questions about one of the b-52s coming to to Thailand down south of Bangkok there Oda Powell is a place where there's a base they built a base down there for b-52 so they wouldn't have to fly a long bombing mission from Guam so we he wanted to know the interrogator wanted to know one of the b-52s coming down there and so I told I don't know I don't know into the straps again so I made up something I said in in six months in six months so he write it down now one of the things you have to understand too is he with with with air crews that means you have multiple sources of interrogation so when he put the navigator in one room he put me in another room they had one of those electronic warfare officers in a third room what this guy was doing he was going from room when he left me to stew there in the straps he was going to the other rooms one at a time and he was asking them the same question and he was trying to correlate everything and interrogators interrogators write down everything they write down everything then they get together with the other interrogators and they compare stories now one of the underlying aspects that you have to practice when you get bumped off of what we call position one name rank service number date of birth which under the Geneva Convention you're obligated to give ok once you get bumped off and you have to go to position two which is giving of inaccurate misleading or in erroneous information quote-unquote which is what survivals all about survival schools all about when you back off and you're on position - you've got to remember what you told them remember the pilots you usually know the the KISS principle I wonder if the rest of you know ki SS keep it simple stupid you know so that's what you have to do you have to make up a story that's erroneous inaccurate and misleading on a particular question but you got to remember what you gave them because they write it down ok so the first day was completely military intelligence completely military intelligence because I mentioned to you it's perishable at night I slept on the tile floor they gave me a blanket cotton blanket I was still in my shorts in my undershirt and my socks ok and they brought in they brought in a plate of white rice and a cup of tea about a 14 ounce cup of tea I didn't touch any of it had no appetite whatsoever I sat down at the stool on the stool though and I looked on the top of this table in which there were a lot of words and sketches and scratches and off to one side was a little a short sentence that said all POWs learn this code I thought learn this code and I looked and scratched on the table was a five by five matrix of our alphabet and I thought I don't know what that what does that mean what does that mean this is a five by five now there are 25 letters there to make it 5x5 the 26th the letter is K and it's omitted I just sort of parked it away in the back of my mind the next day the political interrogator came in and wanted to know the information I told you about where I was born what my father did mother did all that sort of stuff and my schooling all of that routine and who I knew what famous people did I know so for one of a better answer I wrote down that I know Hubert Humphrey who at the time you know was LBJ's vice president they never followed up on it to see if they could exploit that for some political purpose but anyway that whole day there was all political stuff indoctrination trying to get me what we call cross over to the people site in other words collaborate the third day I was moved up to another camp what we call little Vegas now little Vegas was part of the Hanoi Hilton or wallow in which the cell blocks were all named after Las Vegas casinos the reason it got those names is not because somebody plucked him out of the Scott of the of the air was because most of the pilots who were shot down were f-105 pilots and the f-105 pilots went through the flight school they earned a ground and all that stuff at Nellis Air Force Base which is just outside Las Vegas no I moved up into little Vegas and I moved into a big room I was still in solitary confinement I moved into a big room and I heard some voices one night I had been there about two nights or so heard some voices speaking American English outside the cell so there was a table and I pushed this table up against the window climbing on the table and I listened and I heard him talking again and I said who is that out there they got quiet because of Europe if you were coming if you were caught communicating it would it tough on you the Vietnamese were really tough everything had to be non calm stuff anyway I said who's there a second time and Sam Baker it turns out we used to be a Thunderbird and excellent pilot he said who was that over there I saw miss John Ferg he said what's your serial number he's gonna check on me so I told him what my serial number was back then it wasn't social security it was a serial number and he said when were you shot down and I said on the 4th of February and then he said this year I said yes which I said what year would it be and he says do you know the tap code light bulb went on I says that's the code they were talking about I said yes he says get on the wall so what I did was picked up my bar of soap which I had been issued and I found believe it or not a rusty nail on the ground on the floor and I and I knew I knew I did not know this thing by heart and I walked over to the to the wall I put my ear up against the wall my ear against the wall and Sam started talking by tapping and I copied the letters down on my bar of soap and then rotate it to the the the narrow side and I'd copy and I keep rotating it through and got the message that he was Sam Johnson he'd gotten shot down in 1965 so what he started tapping was this code and the way you do it is you tap a number of taps for the row and four then the column so you go if you want to tap an a you would tap one and then a second tap so you tap a slight hesitation in the second and you get real good at this you can go you can go real quick through this thing and you can communicate very well if you wanted to do a B for instance the the horizontal would be okay two for the row and then one for the column communication is very important because it under laid it under laid the primary purpose of setting up an organization and that is to resist exploitation for proof for propaganda purposes by the enemy because what they want to do is they want to get you to collaborate they want you to make political statements they want you to give them information on the camp structure in the organization things like that all sorts of different reasons ok so you want to organize but first before you organize you have to communicate and this was the perfect means to start communication now all right let me give you a humorous example and on how you can mess that up to you remember I told you my eyes were badly damaged went for a short period of time well I piggyback that I piggyback that own along with along with a tick and what I'm doing right now whenever I went into interrogations and the fact that I couldn't see to read or write because the greatest fear in my entire life was to be forced one way or another to write a propaganda statement against my country when I got shot down eyes are bad I picked up two tick you know in the twitch and all that sort of thing and that's what I kept so that I wouldn't have to be forced to write or to even read propaganda on the radio because some POWs are forced to do that as it gets tapped through the wall to some guys they hear if a c e so when i moved into a room a new room jb McCamey was a navy commander he said how are your eyes and i said they're fine he said have they gotten any worse i said no they've never been bad he said well we got the word through the tap code that you were going blind and I asked him I said well how did the message come through fer faces blindness that's the way it was sent through the camp well if you use a see her face as blindness instead of the K for fakes blindness you can see how it would get distorted so I straightened them out there and of course when the word went out it was all clarified so the big thing that ended the war I think was the bombing of Hanoi by the b-52s and other airplanes in 1972 and we were told in in early January that it was about to be signed when it was signed it was required that within five days we be told when we were going home and they did vietnamese followed it closely so i came home on the 4th of march right to the date of 73 months and i came home on a day that I had hoped I would come home on and that is a miserable overcast rainy crummy day because I want it's how I wanted to remember that place and they've dressed it up now I understand from people with paid visits there they dress it up to make it look like a hotel but it wasn't a hotel back then do I remain in contact with any of the former POWs I did in a sense when I went to John McCain's election night thing down in Arizona wasn't a very happy reunion between the two of us but because of the outcome of the election but he's a dear friend of mine there's a one of my roommates who's with Raytheon back on the East Coast I communicate with him John Reynolds good friend my closest POWs friend right now is because we fate just threw us together here is Ken Huey Ken Huey is an attorney he came back from Vietnam and went to law school and he's an attorney for the for the county prosecutor over in Long Beach did you tell everyone that you received the Silver Star the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Purple Heart that's only a few so we just wanted to present this to you and a year's membership oh I meant ass so that you'll then do back and we all feel very honored that you were with us today and please come forward and ask John further questions thank you for watching Peninsula seniors out and about here at the Western Museum of Flight in Torrance I'm Betty Wheaton I'll see you next time

Info

Channel: PeninsulaSrsVideos

Views: 18,941

Rating: 4.8153844 out of 5

Keywords: Douglas B-66 Destroyer (Aircraft Model), Vietnam War (Military Conflict), Prisoner of War, POW, Hanoi Hilton, veteran, air combat, Thud Ridge, Gia Lam, interrogation, torture, water boarding, John McCain (Politician), POW release, Vietnam POW, Betty Wheaton, Western Museum Of Flight (Museum), Peninsula Seniors, Jarel Wheaton, Boeing B-52 Stratofortress (Aircraft Model), McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II (Aircraft Model), Surface to air missile, Pilot (Profession)

Id: NaK2JPEnfWY

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 58min 30sec (3510 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 16 2015

Reddit Comments