True Superheroes - Part 2

Today’s superhero also proved his mettle in the prison camps of North Vietnam.  While Lance Sijan was probably the most junior officer held in the camps, Seaman Apprentice Douglas Hegdahl was the most junior of all US prisoners held by the North Vietnamese.  Like Lance Sijan, every prisoner’s account I’ve ever read or hear first-person from men who were held in North Vietnam sang Doug Hegdahl’s praises – to a point of reverence.  

 

Doug fell off his ship, the USS Canberra, on April 6, 1967 while it was in the Gulf of Tonkin.  After surviving overnight and into the next day, he was picked up by fishermen who turned him over to the North Vietnamese army.  By his own estimation, he was “rescued,” not captured, as he had seen enough sharks to know that he was not going to survive much longer in the water.

 

A country boy from South Dakota, Doug Hegdahl was smart like a fox.  Because the North Vietnamese viewed junior US enlisted personnel like they viewed their own – as uneducated hicks – they treated Doug as generally worthless for propaganda purposes.  He played up the “dumb country boy” part to the hilt, and was basically made the camp clean-up gopher at the “Hanoi Hilton.”  As the only American with freedom to roam the camp, he became the de facto “town crier.”  Using the prisoner’s “tap code” with a broom, coughs, clicks and other means of noisemaking, he passed and received news to and from virtually all the prisoners in the camp.  In doing so he learned all the key information about all the men held there – name, rank, date of capture, condition, etc.  Not only did he know the men in his camp, but he also learned the information about other Americans who where held in other camps from prisoners who had been shuffled around.   Since he couldn’t write any of the information down, he had to memorize everything – which he put into a song that he repeated constantly so he wouldn’t forget.  

 

In 1969 the North Vietnamese offered to release some prisoners as a “goodwill gesture” to accompany Fonda on her trip back to the US.  A senior US prisoner Dick Stratton ordered Doug to accept early release in order to get the word out as to their conditions and to inform the US about all the prisoners whose information was stored in Doug’s head.  According to the Code of Conduct for US forces, a US servicemember should not accept early release from captivity, and Doug, feeling great loyalty to the men, was reluctant to take it.  However, orders were orders, and soon many families of men who were still listed as “Missing in Action,” learned that their men were still alive. 

 

Over the next three years, Dough Hegdahl visited as many of the families of the men still captive as he could find.  He was at Clark AFB in the Philippines when the POWs returned in 1973.  He wanted to know one thing – did the men he grew to love think that he was a coward for accepting early release?  Only then did he learn that because of the information that he provided, and the details of the abuse, treatment of our prisoners in North Vietnam significantly improved in the months following his release.  Not only did they not think Dough Hegdahl a coward, they honored him as a true hero.

 

Isn’t it ironic that in the stratified world of the US military, where position is defined by a set of rank insignia, that the two men held up as heroes by the prisoners in Hanoi were the two most junior men there.  Both Dough Hegdahl and Lance Sijan did all they could in the awful circumstances in which they found themselves.  That’s what made them heroes to the men who we call heroes.  

 

“Fly high & roar loudly”

 

dirk