Surviving Hell - A POWs Journey

There are bad days at work, and then there is being shot down over North Vietnam, injured during the ejection, captured by the enemy and informed—without the benefit of a calendar invitation—that the next six years will be spent as a prisoner of war. Surviving Hell is Leo Thorsness’s extraordinary account of captivity in the notorious “Hanoi Hilton,” where the accommodation was basic, the management actively hostile and complaints concerning the service were not encouraged.

Thorsness was already an exceptionally courageous United States Air Force pilot. On 19 April 1967, flying an F-105 Thunderchief, he attacked enemy MiGs threatening two American airmen who had ejected from their aircraft. He destroyed one MiG, engaged several others and repeatedly put himself in danger to protect fellow aviators. The action would earn him the Medal of Honor—although, in one of bureaucracy’s more unusual delivery arrangements, he did not officially receive it until after his release.

Eleven days later, Thorsness was himself shot down. He was captured and taken into the North Vietnamese prison system, beginning six years of interrogation, torture, deprivation, isolation and agonising uncertainty. The title therefore employs the word “journey” in its broadest possible sense. This was not the sort involving attractive scenery, complimentary refreshments or a mild dispute about whether somebody had reserved the window seat.

What followed was a battle fought without aircraft, weapons or anything resembling normal freedom. Thorsness and his fellow prisoners resisted their captors through discipline, solidarity and countless small acts of defiance. Refusing to cooperate could mean punishment or solitary confinement, yet maintaining some control over one’s thoughts and conduct became a way of preserving identity when almost everything else had been taken away.

Communication between prisoners was achieved through coded tapping on walls. By this means they exchanged information, encouragement, jokes, poetry and the reassurance that someone else remained alive on the other side. Thorsness memorised long passages sent through the tap code, turning his own mind into a private library that could not be confiscated during a cell inspection. It was an ingenious system, although one suspects the average reader will emerge newly appreciative of telephones.

The memoir describes not only the brutality of captivity but also its vast stretches of boredom. Hours of terror might be followed by days in which virtually nothing happened, leaving prisoners alone with pain, hunger and their thoughts. Survival required more than physical toughness. It demanded routines, mental exercises, humour and an ability to find significance in events that, under ordinary circumstances, would have seemed magnificently trivial.

Thorsness writes about the other prisoners as individuals rather than decorative figures in a general tale of heroism. Their personalities, weaknesses, eccentricities and methods of coping mattered enormously within the confined society of the prison camps. Men supported one another, argued, communicated through walls and developed ways of resisting without always knowing whether their efforts were visible beyond the next cell.

Among the book’s most remarkable details is how Thorsness learned, through a coded message tapped from another prisoner, that he had been nominated for the Medal of Honor. The award had been kept secret because American officials feared that publicising it might cause his captors to treat him even more harshly. Being told through a prison wall that your country considers you a national hero must rank among history’s more complicated pieces of good news.

Despite its subject, Surviving Hell is not unrelentingly grim. Thorsness writes with humour, clarity and a keen eye for the oddities of human behaviour. The humour never disguises what happened; instead, it demonstrates one of the means by which the prisoners endured it. When circumstances become completely absurd, laughter may be the final possession that authority has not yet managed to inventory.

This is a memoir of courage, but not the polished, effortless courage commonly manufactured after the event. Thorsness shows endurance as a succession of choices made while frightened, injured and uncertain of the future. He also examines loyalty, faith, memory and the determination to return home as the same person—or at least a recognisable version of him—after years spent under conditions deliberately designed to break him.

Published by Encounter Books in 2008, Surviving Hell is a powerful and surprisingly approachable account of the American POW experience during the Vietnam War. It will interest readers of military history, aviation, biography and human survival, as well as anyone who has ever described a delayed train as “absolute hell” and might now wish quietly to revise that assessment.

This copy is in Good condition. It has evidently experienced the ordinary indignities of second-hand-book life, but nothing remotely comparable to the events recorded inside it. It remains sound, readable and ready for many more years of considerably more peaceful service.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, where captivity is limited to the time spent waiting on our shelves and every volume is eventually eligible for release. No coded tapping is necessary: simply place an order through the conventional channels.

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