'Hanoi Hilton' survivor Robert Shumaker, U.S. Navy (Full Interview)

welcome to veterans Chronicles I'm Greg carumba our guest this week is retired US Navy Rear Admiral and naval aviator Robert shoemaker he's also a veteran of the Vietnam War and spent more than eight years as a prisoner of war there and Admiral shoemaker thank you very much for being with us today you been pleasure to be here where were you born and raised sir I was born in western Pennsylvania town called Newcastle north of Pittsburgh and when I was a teenager my family was consisted of my father who was a lawyer my mother was a writer and I had an older sister and a younger brother but when I was a teenager we moved north about 10 miles to a small college town called New Wilmington where Westminster College is located and I attended public schools there and I just really enjoyed it we lived on a on a farm outside of town and I got exposed to milking cows and driving tractors and it was enjoyable part of life it's a good childhood you bet what drew you to the Naval Academy well I had a uncle it was a marine captain and he was killed in Midway and I was kind of named after him so that that was one incentive and then I had an aunt aunt Edna who sent me a subscription to a boy's life it was called as a magazine I think associated with the Boy Scouts and in one issue in a centerfold it it said Annapolis and West Point where boys become Emeril's in generals well now girls become a roles in generals as well but anyway those two influences I guess drove me towards the Naval Academy and ultimately at least now I don't know if was the same way then when you're commissioned do you kind of get to choose which areas service you want to go into why did you pick flying well again probably the relatives are you know my Marine uncle and also he had another aunt who was in the wasps and in World War two that stood for women Air Service Pilots and these were thousand women that would fly airplanes from the Treece out to airfields and thereby relief of men for combat so I think that influenced me towards Evy Asian and once you were commissioned where did you go from there well I went back to the Naval Academy for a short time as a company officer but then eventually wound up in the Navy flight training program which starts off at Pensacola Florida for the basic work and then moves on to in my case to chase field in the Beeville Texas and what were you flying at that point well they started off and this long time ago of course in t-34s and then into t28 and then into TVs that were called it that was the transition into jet training and then into Cougars Jets and then eventually when I was through was my training I went into more training in Jacksonville Florida and it was a transition squadron called well it was for transitioning into the f8 Crusader which was a single-seat single-engine fighter that could go a thousand miles an hour and it was a tricky airplane I remember in one of my early flights I got it into a spin and it made 14 revolutions with fire coming out the front end and I was in the clouds all this time so it's pretty exciting but I got it out till now it's been a few decades but you're still pretty excited about that bird oh yeah I'm still flying airplanes are you a td6 fantastic absolutely love it well there's a couple important parts of your naval career given before we get to Vietnam that I want to highlight what was a harrowing mission in the Mediterranean explain what happened there well again it was really Crusader in his office USS Saratoga and I was flying a night and I came in to land though Navy planes get stopped by a hook in the back of the airplane and unfortunately through a mechanical malfunction the hook wouldn't come down and so after three attempts the the air boss my radio told me to join the tanker get some fuel and head for Italy so I this is a story kind of like baseball were three strikes and you're out only this is four strikes so the first strike was not coming down the second strike was the the the hoes wouldn't come out of the refueling tanker the third strike was trying to put it into the barricade which is like a big tennis net but unfortunately the arms we call them stanchions now it would not erect to the vertical position and so I got it up to eight thousand to four thousand feet and bailed out and everything's supposed to be automatic you know the chute opens and all well less you didn't open so I fell from 4,000 feet down to about 2,000 feet and pulled the d-ring which is an alternative way of opening the chute and again it didn't open so I figured I'm dead for sure finally pulled it out with both hands and it opened up so that all happened in about ten minutes time Wow Wow well you've you mentioned the challenges that you had an epic of their mission landing on the aircraft carrier but that's a challenge in and of itself even on a normal landing so how did they explain how that works and and how long it took you to get used to that well we again go through a lot of training and you know these are very expensive airplanes in those days there were two million dollar airplanes for sure considerably more now but you practice on land with a you're given some assistance by an LSO standing for landing signal officer and so they talk you down and again you're flying angle of attack mostly and line up and and you know if you played this thing right the carrier's in my day had six arresting wires that were probably about Oh probably about 50 feet apart and if you flew this thing just right and and just right men you you used a mirror landing system it was a large mirror that was gyroscopically stabilized so as the ship moved around the mirror did not and you would get a big blob of light in the center of this mirror and you'd fly hoping to keep that blob of light we call the meatball right in the center and if we're successful in doing that you'd pick up number three wire every time well you graduated from the Naval Academy in 1956 and so that's just a couple years before the space race really starts to heat up and you advance pretty far in the NASA astronaut program how did you get connected in it and what was that process like no I think I nominated by my commanding officer but it produced a lot of candidates but there were four criteria he had to be younger than 35 he had to be I have at least $1,000 their jet time he had they have elisa bachelor degree in engineering and four he had to be shorter than six feet tall to fit in the thing so they had a number of screenings and they were going to pick 14 for the Apollo project and so I made it through a number of screenings down to 32 from which they were gonna pick the 14 and and I got selected I had to go through a lot of physical examinations and I think it was about a attend a physical examination in in Texas and at the very end they said well we see a shadow in in some lymph nodes and this was kind of embarrassing because and that disqualified me by the way the guy that took my place was a guy named Roger Chaffee who was later killed in the explosion on Apollo 1 but what's embarrassing is in those days there were nothing but men on aircraft carriers and my lymph nodes were swollen because what they call mononucleosis known otherwise is the college kissing disease so I had a little trouble explaining that anomaly to my friends but anyway that kept me out of the probe there's more than one way to get mono a nice yeah the lesson from that story how did you react to getting so close to being part of the Apollo program and you know real letdown and you know I just probably felt dejected and thanks but but that happens to people in life you know Yuri and it's how you recover what kind of resiliency have after a defeat and later on as a prisoner of war you know there were a lot of times when we were beaten down and you just had to rely on your on your resiliency and your background to overcome those defeats let's move on to the Vietnam War now what exactly were you deployed there deployed fairly early in the game in 1965 aboard the aircraft carrier Coral Sea and I was sent a squadron called then the the Black Sheep squadron and so we pulled into oh I got married just shortly before the deployment to a Canadian lady to whom I'm still married and we had a baby in the first year of our marriage and the baby was only three weeks old when I got shipped out and so yes we're seaman West heading for Vietnam the carrier broke down the mechanical problem and had to put into Pearl Harbor and my wife was able to get tickets with our baby over to to see me I was thinking boy this cost $600 that's a lot of money but in the light of what later happened it was the best investment we ever made yeah because she then had two racist maybe old by herself amazing sir we're gonna take a quick break we'll be right back with much more of our conversation with a retired US Navy Rear Admiral and naval aviator Robert shoemaker veteran of the Vietnam War and spent more than eight years as a prisoner of war we'll get into all of that when we come back on veterans chronicles Admiral when we left off you had just been deployed to Vietnam leaving a young wife and newborn son at home and the day that changed her life is February 11th 1965 and this is shortly after gulf of tonkin and the ramp up of US military operations in Vietnam right the event that torched off the sequence of things was an attack by the North Vietnamese against some American soldiers said I had a hotel and you think you old as I remember eight of them and so that caused us to retaliate from two carriers and so I was assigned to be a photo escort which meant that after all the bombs were dropped and everything then the photo plane which was also Crusader would make a pass over to see to get bomb damage assessment and then he needed some fighter protection so so I and several others were assigned to escort him through so anyway yes as we're patrolling back and forth off the coastline I saw that the Vietnamese were shooting at us and so I mean what they call a combat turn I was flying on my skippers wing he was a navy commander and and in a combat turn you slide and there's a danger of losing sight of each other as you slide through and I lost one eye I said I lost you where are you he said I'm right behind you and I was right at the point where I was about to roll in so I rolled on in and it was kind of a bad day weather-wise about 2,000 foot ceiling and as I rolled in I it was machine-gunning this building and I got hit in a tail section the airplanes don't fly very well with holes in them and this thing flipped upside down and pointed straight down and I keyed down on my mic intending to say 4:03 I'm hit and if I had completed a sentence I never made get out because be ejected and this time fortunately the parachute opened quickly but only 35 feet over the ground and we were taught when we land to distribute the shock of landing by the seven-point distribution where you land on your feet and immediately roll - sideways to your knees and your hips and things so I perfected the one-point landing which is right on my bottom and consequently I'm about an inch shorter than I it was intended to be but anyway I was concealing myself and after about probably about an hour or so I heard this hoard of Vietnamese people some were peasants some were soldiers and they were beating through the bushes saying anglais Anglais which you know there was a hundred year period before this when the French were involved in Vietnam so that was their way of saying Englishmen yeah and they all passed me by and I figured well now I didn't have a personal radio wish that you know later people had but I figured I could make it to the coast and maybe escape but anyway anyway one soldier kind of turned around he hit a TK 47 and he saw me and it was a duel that I didn't want to participate in so he had me and they capture me and watched me on off to a large convention hall and and eventually out on the sand dunes to to a shooting squad where I was sure they were going to shoot me they had an officer and four soldiers and I was thinking hey this is a I broke my back in landing and I was thinking hey it's only gonna hurt like going to the dentist you know it'll be over it with soon but fortunately they didn't pull the triggers and and put me in a Jeep playing vehicle and two days later up the road up the Muffy's Road you could possibly mansion I made it up to Hanoi and it was about that time that they tried to use you as propaganda you know that was their whole scheme you know the truth of the matter is we didn't really care you carry that much military information into battle with us you know not where the next target was or anything like that and at that time the Vietnamese weren't really smart enough to to really press us for information and and initially they were torturing but it seemed kind of silly I'd be I'd go to this quiz room we call them quizzes and you'd sit on a concrete block and it was really important for the interrogators to be seated at a higher level than you at a table and this would go on for hours and then they'd be ranting on about the history of Vietnam and what North wasn't more so so anyway I remember one time you see we're obliged to give only minimal information in that situation it's called the big four is called the name rank serial number and date of birth and I stuck to that and after a while though the questions they were asked me were kind of silly and they had copies of Time magazine Newsweek and things that had write-ups of of me in there and so they wanted to know how many chickens my father owned well my father was the Harvard Law graduate and have a nice law practice but he didn't know any chickens yeah but I didn't see any and this went on for a couple days and I didn't see anything wrong with telling them that he had 35 chickens you know complete fabrication but when I got back to my cell I thought boy that is a big mistake I just made I crossed the line of the big four and I decided from then on anything one of the information that we're gonna have to force it out of me and they did I read at one point I don't know if it was this particular media event if you want to call it that where they kept asking you questions and you ended up talking about the evils of communism was that the same event yeah you know there were quite a number of events but you know I you know I tried to play the dumbest guy they never captured you know you know if you try to match wits with them they they've gone they've got you outgunned but you know sorry I kind of refrain from getting into long conversations with them but you know they control ya with their English and they would prevent us from learning anything about how to speak Vietnamese because I guess they figured that we will learn things about our imprisonment and whatnot so their whole philosophy of imprisonment and we learned this this time went on was to separate the prisoner so they they couldn't talk or communicate with each other and in ourselves we had they were kind of well they were concrete cells once I've spent most of my time in were four feet wide and nine feet long and probably about 12 feet high and up at the top of the ceiling would be a loud speaker where they would play for me sometimes four hours a day their propaganda and and their form of music and things but and we can get into this later if you like we sorted them by developing a technique for communicating absolutely no that's definitely one of the things I I want to get into did they provide any care for your broken back well what they did was they told me that I complained cause it had trouble sitting up I think it was a compression fracture that I had and so they used to term the lenient and humane treatment of the Vietnamese people will take you to a hospital so they got me back in my flying outfit and then blindfolded me and put me in again in a blacked-out Jeep and drove around and around around and finally stopped about a block short of a building and they said there's the hospital so and between me and the hospital were hordes of photographers with very expensive photographic equipment yeah and so I questioned whether out of participate in the same that my back was hurting so much I decided to go up there so we go in the side this building here's this little wooden table with a woman that was dressed as a nurse and a guy who claimed to be a doctor they had a stethoscope and so he and all these photographers and he said what is the state of your father's health and I said well that's not germane to into things and he smiled as a photographer s'en and pump my checks just what it says to stethoscope and then they the english-speaking nurse said the doctor said you would be feeling better in a few days and how would I go you know without even an aspirin stuff so that was the medical treatment it was here's my first introduction to to the importance of psychological warfare propaganda and things you mentioned the dimensions of the cell what were the other conditions like when you were first imprisoned well you know things change around in eight years time I was initially put into a much larger I wouldn't even call a cell it was more of a room and that that went on for about three months or so and I had a little wormhole through through the wooden door where I could peek out into the courtyard and see part of the courtyard and after about it was either 2 or 3 months I noticed that well what's the day that guard would come and open the door and you take your PT or sanitation bucket off about a hundred yards or so and dump it into what was once a shower area and but I noticed through this wormhole that he was always methodical and I would go to dump the bucket and then another American wouldn't who would follow his first American I had seen in number of months so I tried to figure out a way to contact the guy so someone who spilled some ink on the floor in my cell and so I poured some water on it kind of reconstituted it and we had some kind of rough toilet paper and I wrote this note yeah and the note simply said welcome to the Hanoi Hilton if you get this note scratch your ear on the way out now I've cleaned up the story a little bit for the audience here but so I stand there watching sure enough I left the nose there on my first trip and he came back and he was scratching away and that's so we made contact and that's how the place got named the Hanoi Hilton any idea that it would ever become the more famous name for the prison than the name itself well no not really except that when I came back years later in Los Angeles there was a reception for California ex POWs sponsored by Conrad Hilton themself I figured I'd least get a nice free room out of them it didn't work out Admiral let's pause again right there we'll be right back with much more with retired US Navy Rear Admiral and naval aviator Robert shoemaker sir I just want to get a little more detail on the conditions you mentioned there's a sanitation bucket so there's obviously no plumbing involved was there a mattress of any kind what kind of food were you given what food a lot of times it's very monotonous you know and we knew we weren't getting a lot of nutrition because when we try to stand up from a seated position we start to black out so you learn to hold on to something until things cleared up but for a long time it would be pumpkin soup and then one time for six months it was cabbage soup and now this is several years into her imprisonment and right in the middle of an air raid in 1967 the Americans were bombing the heck out of Hanoi several times a day and writing in the in the middle of one of these air raids I heard an American voice and I hadn't heard an American voice in several years said that's mine and he was shouting if shouting as if he were talking to the pilots and we're coming in after burner and guns blazing and he was shouting bomb the cabbage patches so the food wasn't very good really but when they got a little crowded in this prison this was the prison that the French had built and the it was a city jail and so they got a little crowded as more and more Americans arrived and so they moved a couple of guys in with me three guys in with me and I was the senior guys the lieutenant commander there yeah you know I said hey there they're gonna try to separate us again to keep us from communicating so let's figure out some way we can communicate and we tried writing on on these tin plates we had and that wasn't very effective and then this one yeah I named it Harris I came up with a scheme about tapping and so we put the letters of the alphabet into a 5x5 square leaving off the letter K and so if he wanted to send a letter D D for example it's in the first row in the fourth column so you tap once pause like that and you got pretty fast to this thing sometimes maybe four or five words a minute how did you handle spaces between words well the guy on the other end we tamp through concrete walls and the receiver would usually take a little cup and put it against the wall he's here against the wall amplify things and as you'd be working your way through this thing if you got partway into a word if the listener understood what the word was gonna be give to taps and you'd move on to the next word but no you could figure out pretty well spaces how what generally got communicated was an encouragement was it strategy hope for getting out what what kind of things did you well it was that we talked about everything about building houses and about what it was gonna be like when when we got out and and how how best to resist the you know the torture sessions things like that yeah we just gonna support it each other and and later on the vietnamese eventually there were 591 of us but port way through the vietnamese thought they figured out who the leaders of this 591 work and they segregated these guys heaven will Stockdale was one of them Admiral Denton who was a senator congressman Johnson and and I was in this group too and we were all kind of lined up in in separate cells so so one guy you know if you lock the doors of this this room right here you would find out that then we all come to the party with a lot of background and one guy knew a lot about fixing televisions and another about changing oil and cars the guy next to me who later turned out to be a congressman wanted to speak French so I would tap I knew a little bit of French you know I could tap five words to him a day and he would practice them over and over again and there and in three years time in this prison it was called the hell we called ourselves the Alcatraz 11 I never got more than ten feet away from this guy but there was a concrete wall that separated and I never saw long but eventually there was a rescue of temperature over there called Sante and that caused the it was unsuccessful but it caused the Vietnamese to take us out of solitary confinement and put us into a larger group and there I met congressman Johnson who could speak better French than I could and I never figured out to this day how it how that happened what difference did the the tapping make in morale your mental condition over all those years oh it was our lifeblood I mean you know the Vietnamese not by separating us they would pound into our brains through this loudspeaker how bad American was and how bad our social system was and you know and so this was their way of resisting all that and no no kept us going you mentioned that they figured out who they thought were the leaders was there some sort of organizational leadership structure going on oh absolutely they kept us going the most senior people I mean we we were all military people and we were trained in following the chain of command and one of them says you know if you're the senior guy you take charge and and and we did that and that's that's certainly true of Emeril Stockdale and Denton there were of these 591 there were a few that misbehaved and were released early and and some of them kind of bought the Vietnamese propaganda but very very few of them I think your audience would be proud of 98 percent of the crowd I asked you about the spaces before but you mentioned that there's no K on the grid so how did you factor in the K well you spilled cat ka t that makes sense did you know about Admiral Denton famously blinking torture in Morse code during one of his propaganda moments yeah we learned about that but of course you know he he didn't really know whether it was being received you know he was blinking away there and but he didn't know whether the Americans would pick up on this thing unfortunately they did but you know as we tapped on the walls you know he he would tell us what he did and so you know we assumed that across you were aware that at least tried to you bet so so as we mentioned when you were deployed you've got this young wife and a young son at home now these years are going by here what are you thinking are you thinking you will eventually get home when the war is over are you starting to wonder oh yeah well you never want to give up hope you know and I remember in my cell I would would kind of Roman numeral numbers you know for cross and and I'd try to keep track of the days and finally I ran out of space to do that and then occasionally you know I was tortured on twelve different occasions and and you know you lose track of time there so I I'd be off a couple of days and tapping through the wall of God would correct me no it's Thursday that whatever data was you know but my wife was a Canadian she's now a US citizen but she raised our son but but in those days the war was being fought displayed in the living rooms of the United States and so she wouldn't let him watch television and he consequently had to learn to read early and he became a pretty good student and eventually went to Harvard and Yale and it's a neurosurgeon now fantastic you married the right woman yeah you bet you mentioned congressman Johnson moment ago that you were close with him which of the other prisoners did you forge the closest bonds with well I John McCain he and I when they moved us after the santé rate together we were in a group of about 40 people and John and I bonded together quite well in fact at one time he had a daughter and I had the son the two fathers schemed to get the pier together as a marriage didn't work out oh it's a good effort though yeah the dowry didn't work out apparently but so one of the things we of course know is the torture that occurred there did that happen right away or did it happen over time it happened over time I think for the first year or so there wasn't much torture but then the Vietnamese would they kind of sneak up on you in the form of if you refused to do something which we would do they would have you hold up the wall that's probably called so we face the wall and hold it like this you know and and hours and hours on in fact I know one guy one of the Healthcare's eleven guys did it for I think five or sixty days you'd be surprised how heavy your arms get and then in my case they put me on my knees you know bare knees on the floor in handcuffs behind me and they would have to if I try to relax by leaning back on my haunches heme was a bayonet and then went on for 12 days so but the worst treatment of all was what we call the Rope trick and it was the situation where they guess you're seated on the floor you'd be handcuffed behind your back and then your elbows to be tied until they touched until your sternum would almost pop and then they'd take a rope from which this thing gets his name and they would take it from your handcuffs up over your shoulders and down to your feet and guards who keep your you're nice and flat when they have a leg iron keeping your feet and it was just excruciating and they shoved a to keep me from screaming they showed the iron bar down my throat you know I still have trouble a lot with my vocal cords because of that so it was pretty agreement is it military training that keeps you going and just being there for the other guy I mean that's well you know that all helps but really I think when it comes down to it it's your own self pride you know you wanted to do this for yourself and for your family you know yeah in my case the Navy down so you have a lot of positive incentives to resist I read elsewhere of a couple other tactics they had one was to give you know heat or blankets during winter and another one I heard was that you had a meal on broomsticks yeah hey you know unfortunately the rats keep getting bigger as the years go on you know and and sometimes these these stories get exaggerated you know I I did have a and it did get pretty cold over there but I was never deprived for the blanket more than a couple of days and there's a story going around about how gene Fonda went over there and and she met these guys all lined up t6p these POWs and they each palmed off their their names and stuff to her and then as the story goes it turns out to be a false story she turned the names over the Vietnamese but stories like that to get exaggerated well the Jane Fonda reference brings up how politicized of course the Vietnam War became were you aware at all did they try to discourage you by letting you know about the protest and so forth and some of the oh absolutely that's what came down through the loudspeakers you know all the women's right for peace and everybody that was against the war you know everybody but a lot of the people would make broadcast that they were then broadcast to us and then they had a woman a Vietnamese woman we called Hanoi Hannah just like Tokyo Rose they would read all the news about how many airplanes they shot down that day and you know it turns out that that was greatly exaggerated also is that how father got the nickname Hanoi Jane you know she's not very popular in our group yeah I didn't think so I didn't think so sir you also spent from what I've read three years in solitary and even a month in solitary is considered cruel and unusual a lot of the time so describe that if it's possible to put that into words well most of the most of the day like 16 hours our feet would be bolted together through they put clevis over each of our ankles and slide a bar through there and lock it with a head lock so you couldn't move around very much for 16 hours but you know we got pretty pretty sneaky about things and you know we'd be tapping me to Johnson me too there was a guy named Ron stores that live next to me that unfortunately died over there but you know we'd support each other just as much as we could and it's amazing the power of your brain I could relive events in my life you know and and remember classmates I had when I was in grade school and and then I decided I wanted to build a house for my wife and sorry this is 1965 economics and I was going to build this mansion newly married thing that's gonna cost thirty five thousand dollars and so I solicited all kinds of information from people and eventually built the house now it costed a little bit more than $35,000 but but anyway I have a lot of pride in that house that's amazing so things like that that would just keep your mind occupied and forward-looking for over three years yeah but then you know we had duties to do too and then we we would remember the lists of the POWs because the Vietnamese would release the names of only about one out of every three PwC consequently whites back home some of them remarried or left without knowledge if they're their people so so we would memorize these names he's 591 yeah in hopes that if we escaped we'd carry that information out now it turns out that there was a guy there he was a seaman you know most of these 590 ones were we were aviators and pilots but this guy fell off a ship six miles in the Gulf swam ashore the Vietnamese were sure that he was a CIA agent but the guy had a photographic memory and he was able to memorize all these names and the Vietnamese decided they wanted to send him home early he didn't want to go home but the senior guys in this camp said you've got all this information he goes home and he gets a Greyhound bus ticket goes all the way around the United States stopping at the he memorize not just the name supposed to shoot down dates the next of kin hometowns and things so it makes you really proud of it the guy was probably only about 18 or 19 years old that is truly amazing you mentioned the bracelet there were two college girls in the middle of all this experience in California that went to their professor and said we're concerned about what's happening to these POWs and can't we bring some attention to of them and they came up with this idea of manufacturing some bracelets and they were kind of chintzy the little things here and they sold them for $2 apiece and they they had stamped on them the name of APO W and they're shoot shoot down date and they sold them for $2 apiece and the recipient would say that they were gonna wear these things until they knew what the fate of their the guy on the bracelet was and so when I returned a lot of these people and they so like I say million souls and and it didn't bring a lot of attention to her problems but a lot of people when I came back with send their really bracelets to me and yeah even here years after my release you know I still occasionally get a bracelet not really but you know I do keep them in my yeah I'm sure she did yeah when did you well before we get to that did you notice any changes in your captors over time where for the most part as far as I know no matter how much they tortured you they didn't get much information out of anyone I know Senator McCain famously said he gave them the Green Bay Packers offensive line when they asked for his crewmates and so forth but what was it like with the well you you know we're proud of its Americans we don't lie cheat and steal but yeah that puts you at a disadvantage the PW so he learned to lie pretty quickly and remember these lines because they would record all these things so they wanted to know my job on the aircraft carrier and so I told them after a long time then I was in charge of the pool tables well that usually gets the Chuckle because they don't have pool tables on aircraft carriers it the walls don't see stationery but you know they started off with it with kind of the rejects for the privates from their army rejects I guess so so they and the guard to prisoner ratio was about about two guards east powa you know they would round the clock they have guards on us to keep us from talking mostly but I didn't find many many kind ones and everyone didn't put me in charge of naming these scores you know it's important that we develop information on the guards weather habits were you know but with all these people reporting differently and we never know who was who so I was in charge of naming them and I name them all after animals and your audience wouldn't appreciate some of these names they I gave them but they're memorable names it start to get an idea that you might be getting free soon well hey after the Sante raid they moved us back into the you know the big quarters here and we sense that something was up I'll tell you a quick story they got upset with us because we had a church service and they hold three guys off and put them in solitary for I think it's about six weeks but as they're being hauled off one of the other guys started singing the star-spangled banner and the whole camp joined in they could hear some downtown Hanoi singing the star-spangled banner and after six weeks when this guy came back his name was Robbie Reisner they have somehow it it felt it here's the star-spangled banner after several years and he said I felt I could go bear hunting with a swish he said I felt like I was nine feet tall well there's a statue now on the Air Force Academy grounds it happens to be nine feet tall of a general Reisner and thereby because Ross Perot dedicated that to him but we started hearing things and you know we didn't even know that the United States to put a man on the moon you know for for maybe two years after the fact but you know eventually they got us out in the courtyard and by that by the rules or the protocols they of this peace agreement they were obliged to read read it to us and I think they kind of expected us to hoop and holler and and we didn't we just kind of file back with a lot of dignity and decorum and deprived them of that but anyways a happy day for us and and they released us in in three groups I was in the first group with Admiral Denton and Denton historically said to Admiral Gayler who minister that this god bless america and that seemed to really resonate can you even put into words what it felt to breathe free air after eight years well yeah it's kind of hard but you know because you don't appreciate freedom until you lose it and and now to regain it into a society that had changed a lot in eight years time took a little bit of accommodation on Airport but nonetheless it felt so great coming back to to my wife and and and son who was now pushing nine I guess and I decided I want to go back to school and so I went back and got a doctoral degree in electrical engineering and then went into program management for a number of missiles that proved to be very effective one it's called the Horn missile one was called the maverick missile there's a Hellfire missiles these are all missiles that are produced by US industry with guidance by the military so I'm proud of that comment and later I became a superintendent of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey California were a naval officers in some foreign officers some army officers to about 1800 of them are working on their usually their master's degrees did you experience any of the anti-war hostility that some returning veterans received no not really you know my hometown and Pennsylvania had a welcoming parade and so I I was never exposed to the spitting here anything like that were there any major challenges and readjusting to life back home no longer had the bucket I had but there was some adjustment sure you know but one of the things that has always stood out to me in fact I think there was even a book about it about leadership lessons from the Hanoi Hilton is that so many of those prisoners yourself included and while I'm sure the physical and emotional scars continue is how many came home and continued to strive whether remaining in the service for several years as you did others as we've mentioned went into public service others in in business it's it's remarkable how well this group thrived after such a horrific experience yeah I think so too I think we're tougher as a result of it kind of like tempering steel like yes but you know we have people who went into religion and into politics and some doctors and many lawyers so acquitted themselves very well I think you understand the concept of service probably better than the vast majority of people for those who either haven't served or maybe don't think about it much what a service mean to you in particularly your service well McKean used to talk about serving a purpose higher than yourself you know and you know your willingness to sacrifice it I think it's important and what she discover as you get older and I'm 86 years old now it's not really money that you ought to strive for it's just being integrity and honest and energetic and appreciative of what we have I think it'll carry you through a lot of ups and downs of life there are there's so many moments that we've talked about is there any moment that you're proudest of either as a as a group or or individually well I think I'm proud of being a member of the Alcatraz 11 we were down to four people left now because of deaths but we hang together and occasionally we have every unions but you know I'm proud of the fact that that I didn't cave in to to the pressure that Vietnamese put on us and there's something say I'm not allowed to talk about because of security but I I'm proud of that because Errol Stockdale put me in charge of external communications and but yeah I can't reveal much beyond that sure a younger generation came to know Admiral Stockdale when he when he ran for vice president in 1992 given his extraordinary leadership at the time what was it like to see some folks almost mock him yeah I feel kind of bad my wife and I with another couple went to see the Capitol Steps was around Washington it's a humorous group that posts a lot of fun and and and they were poking fun at animals talk to him you know because he was a very deliberate man a Socratic type of individual and and that kind of hurt but but he was a deep thinker and he he instituted a program called back us which we all took to heart over there and and his ba ck us you know don't bow to them stay off the air you know because he tried to get us to make broadcasts you don't commit it don't confess anything don't kiss him goodbye and united we stand so that was back us fantastic Admiral I can't thank you enough for your time with us today and we are obviously great deeply grateful for your service to our country thank you sir very much for being with us thank you my pleasure retired US Navy Rear Admiral and naval aviator Robert shoemaker veteran of the Vietnam War spent more than eight years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam I'm Greg Caramba this is Veterans Chronicles

Channel: American Veterans Center

Views: 42,257

Keywords: AVC, American Veterans Center, veteran, veterans, history, army, navy, air force, marines, coast guard, military, navy seal, world war ii, wwii, vietnam war, vietnam pow, prisoner of war, naval academy, usna, aviation, pilot, military history

Id: kjd3imnX1js

Length: 50min 24sec (3024 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 21 2020