Senate Select Committee - XXX

Operation Homecoming

To date, the United States' best opportunity to learn about the fates of unaccounted-for servicemen came in February and March 1972, when 591 Americans were returned during Operation Homecoming. Of the 591 POWs returned between February 12 and April 1, 1973, 457 returned from North Vietnam, 122 from South Vietnam, nine from Laos, and, following additional diplomatic negotiations, three returned from China.

In all, 566 were servicemen -- 325 were from the Air Force, 138 belonged to the Navy, 77 were Army and 26 were Marines. The 25 civilians were members of various U.S. Government agencies.

The Vietnamese listed 55 as having died in captivity; returning POWs put the number at 111. On April 13, 1973 the Pentagon announced that there was no evidence that any more U.S. POWs were still alive in Indochina. During this same period, however, the DOD's Homecoming Center at Clark Air Force Base (the Center) reported that returning POWs had provided information indicating that 156 servicemen "may have died in captivity".

POWs' View

In captivity, American servicemen made learning the names of fellow prisoners the highest priority and pledged to each other that they would all go home together.

Admiral James Stockdale, who won a presidential citation for his service to the U.S. while the senior officer held captive, said the pledge was central to POWs' survival, because it kept them going through unspeakable torture and other adversity:

In the matter of accountability for Americans in the prisons of North Vietnam, what appears to be chaotic to the outside after-the-fact investigators seemed by contrast comparatively orderly to the self-governing, self-accounting body of Yanks who spent considerable time there. Self-governing, self-accounting. That's important. It had to be a team operation.

We who struggled for years to maintain unity over self, keeping, memorizing, cross-checking names of all Americans physically sighted or whispered to or tapped with, we had stringent requirements to get into the system. It couldn't be hearsay, it couldn't be anything. The guy had to have been seen or whispered to or had some physical contact with somebody.

Found in those dungeons -- all of this activity found in those dungeons, a meaning of life centered on being your brother's keeper emerged, keeping a memorialized chronology of contacts and acquaintances that could some day, God willing, when papers and pencils were available, allow you to present to the world a history, in the worst case, of who was last known to be where.

There were four very tough years from late '65 through late '69 when many of us were in solitary most of the time, under the gun of a carrot-and-stick extortion and torture program, when the deepest fear in many of our hearts was to be stashed in isolation in some part of this prison or one of the satellites, where you could scream to the top of your lungs and nobody would understand English, to be stashed in isolation, there to expire by one means or another leaving no audit trail with your surviving comrades that might some day reach your family as a creditable account of your last days.

Morbid stuff, but real, and in the last instance, the trigger that in the strange high-mindedness of solitary existence drove many of us to be compulsive communicators, risking all, sometimes when you couldn't be sure the hall was cleared of guards, to get a position report out of who you were and what your predicament was, and we'd do that with that old shave and haircut and our code that was initiated, that message initiated by that second nature tap code we had so luckily inherited from the reconstructed faint memories of a fellow prisoner named Smitty Harris.

It was not part of a -- the Government never came up with that. This was prisoner-generated from a memory, from an enlisted prisoner in Korea that an Air Force captain named Smitty Harris remembered talking to him about. That was our lifeline.

What started in August 1964 with the imprisonment of Ev Alvarez in cell 24 off the Heartbreak Courtyard in Hoa Lo Prison in downtown Hanoi, he the first American air crewman captured in North Vietnam, grew over the years to hundreds of Air Force, Navy, and Marine pilots and back- seaters attuned to one another's presence only by that tap code, but kept not only in the hub of the North Vietnam prison system, this Hoa Lo Prison, but spilled over into a family of satellite prisons, some few within the city, but several in the countryside within a radius of some 60 miles from that old French prison, Ministry of Justice and its companion piece, Hoa Lo Prison. . . .

Americans were picked out, blindfolded and handcuffed, and shuttled around in Jeeps during the night, totally uprooted and taken away from what had become their dearest friends, clinging to that memory list of 100 or 200 or eventually 300 or more alphabetically arranged names of those they knew to have been seen, tapped with, or whispered with in that private American Hoa Lo universe of ours, while in the meantime our underground resistance organizations coalesced, became disciplined, resolute and effective, and then inevitably fell to purges and were dispersed when these organizations were compromised or became so effective that they threatened the commissar's fulfilling the propaganda quotas of the general staff.

Build an organization and have it torn down. Build an organization and have it torn down: That was the rhythm of our lives. The American prison population grew, the cycles continued, and familiar names kept popping up at Hoa Lo Prison. It was our loop, and the same names kept going round and round.

But it was the Son Tay Raid of November 1970 that prompted the North Vietnamese to bring them all -- all of these chickens out in the satellite camps back, all back to Hoa Lo Prison, where in January 1971 every American prisoner -- with two exceptions which I'll cover in a minute -- where every American prisoner who had ever been sighted, whispered to, tapped to by any other American over the last 6-1/2 years were all locked up in a ring of contiguous large cell blocks around the largest west courtyard of Hoa Lo Prison, and it's half the prison.

The prison occupies about a square block, and this is almost a half a block, and there we were, a place we immediately named Camp Unity, 342 of us. That was -- the time was January 1971. . . .

There were some exceptions, Stockdale added, and some groups were kept separate:

Little did we 342, in our splendid isolation of that January 1971, know that a new mixture of American prisoners was being brought up to Hanoi, not just flight crews that had been the case all those first 6-1/2 years, but Army and Marine troops. Prisoners from South Vietnam and a few from Laos were being moved in unbeknownst to us and only known to Ted Guy.

We and these last were never mixed until Operation Homecoming was effectively underway, but by 1971 the war was in a new phase. Of course, more shot-down flight crewmen would join us in late '71 and '72, and particularly a few they took over in 1973, what I call the second air war in Vietnam. Three Marines, for instance, joined us, 24 Navy, and something just short of 100 Air Force, counting what were the B-52's. . . .

We memorized the shot-down pilots as their names came in, but my memory of them and their numbers is nowhere as vivid as those of my 6-1/2 year sample which I'm concentrating on, because that is the -- that's the centerpiece. That went all the way. Men who went through storms of isolation and torture and lost track of nobody. 351 of them.

We all came home together, as we promised each other we would, but it was 9 and not 8 that came home in body bags because Marine Warrant Officer John Frederick, alive and well at our muster in January of '71, died of an illness a year later. Ted Guy, of course, joined in and filled in wherever the number of living -- and kept the number of living at 342.

Nothing untoward happened to the additional 125 or so live pilots that joined us that last year -- no abductions -- and that group brought up the rear at Homecoming, which was designed to be first-in, first- out.

In addition to increasing the U.S. Government's information about life in prison, the returning prisoners brought painful news about the difficulties they faced even before they got to the prison system. As Stockdale testified:

Now, I've said nothing about Americans who died after they pulled the ejection handle or before they were captured, or after they were captured and before they got to the gate of Hoa Lo, and I expect there were many.

For most of my imprisonment, I carried the name of a Navy Lieutenant, Randy Ford, who one of my fellow prisoners at Hoa Lo told me he whispered to in the darkness at a holding point near Vinh on the way to prison. He said Ford was badly injured and [he] never caught sight of him, but the way he was moaning and barely talking, and probably would not make it to prison alive.

There were lots of people out there like that, I think. Ford did not [make it to the prison system], but I noticed -- I kept track. His remains were returned to the States.

Another witness, Donnie Collins, described the ordeals her husband, Thomas E. Collins III, suffered before getting to the prison system:

Tom doesn't talk about the war and what went on there. . . . But he did tell me that he went down just short of the target, which was a bridge. The airplane was rolling at 1,000 feet when we went out of it. He got his back- seater out. But he was almost -- the plane was almost upside down when he went out, which basically ejected him into the ground. It broke his back.

He crawled off under a bush and waited. The townspeople came out, not too happy to see him, but maybe thrilled too because they beat him severely. After they beat him severely, he was taken into the village and questioned. . . . When he ejected was the number-one time he could possibly have not made it to Hanoi. Number two time was when the villagers decided to beat him unmercifully.

The third time was when he was taken in and questioned, and refused to give any information. He was then taken out. He was beaten. That's the next time. Taken out and put in front of the firing squad the next time. He was then taken back in. At this time he was deaf. They had beaten him until they burst his eardrums. He was one total raw piece of meat from heat to toe, unable to walk, unable to move, unable to hear. They again questioned him. When he refused to answer anything except what he was supposed to answer, he was taken out again and lined up in front of the firing squad.

Now, this isn't enough. He survived all that. Two weeks later, they put him in a truck to take him to Hanoi, and on the way there the truck was bombed twice by our troops. Both times, he said, had they had a direct hit there was gasoline in the back of the truck where they were hauling barrels. He could have not made it both times.

Then -- that wasn't enough -- the truck fell through the bridge, dumping him into the river with his hands and feet tied. And just before he took his last breath they found him the deep river, in the dark of night, and pulled him out after fishing for him. He finally made it to Hanoi. . . .

During all this period of time, Tom could have been on the ground alive and never made it to Hanoi, and never made it to the prison system, and never made it into the name list . . . .

Once he was in Hanoi and caused trouble, he was moved from camp to camp. He was not really in the big system there. He was in every camp they ever had. They took him out and put him there because he was a good communicator and set up communications [among American POWs]. So, they never wanted him to be anywhere, so they just kept moving him from place to place and he was, at one time or another, in all 12 camps, and also in a cave.

He was kept many times in a cave of "one-steppers." And those of you who have been in Vietnam know what one- steppers are, which meant that he was just one step from death when fastened in the cave. At the time the peace agreement was signed he was not in Hanoi. He was up on the border and had to be brought back. . . .

At one point, when an American Congressman suggested to General Giap that the best thing to do was to put an American in every city in Vietnam so that they would not bomb North Vietnam, they took that to heart and fastened Tom and a few of the other POWs to the power plant to make sure that the Americans didn't bomb that. He hung there until he nearly died with the French handcuffs cutting into his wrists. When he was at the point of death from starvation, they took him down and moved him in. He came very close at that moment, as he did every day of his life, to not surviving.

Tom only survived because he is the toughest human being inside that I have ever known. If I had to go to hell today and only had one person I could choose to take with me, I would take Tom and go gladly.

Debriefings

Phase I of Operation Homecoming was the POWs' repatriation. The exit point for all but nine returned POWs was Hanoi.

Phase II of Operation Homecoming was debriefing at Clark Air Force Base by the Joint Debriefing and Casualty Reporting Center (JDCRC), under the direction of CINCPAC. JDCRC had representatives from each military service. Civilian and foreign returnees were debriefed by the Service with which they were associated or by members of the U.S. Embassy, Manila. Each Service handled its own debriefings, differing in approach, but following common debriefing instructions. The Army and Marine Corps used professional intelligence debriefers whose sole job was debriefing. The Navy and Air Force used a combination of escort and debriefer. The Navy used only Air Intelligence Officers. Air Force escort/debriefers were not chosen from specific specialties.

The Committee attempted to examine the process of debriefing returning POWs at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, and again when they returned to the U.S. to determine:

the objectives of the debrief program;

its planning -- what assets were devoted to the task and how were they organized, deployed and funded?

its implementation -- how adequately DoD debriefed the POW returnees and how well they processed the POW/MIA debrief reports. What all-source information was requested and collected by DIA as a result of the debriefs? How were leads (such as names, photos, etc.) followed? How fully were the debriefing results reported to the Executive Branch and Congress?

DIA made no final report aggregating the results of the individual debriefings after Operation Homecoming. While DoD has provided a substantial amount of material to the Committee, the collection suffered with the passage of time. Without a final report, and without complete files and access to information, it is difficult to fully assess the adequacy of Operation Homecoming debriefings nearly 20 years after the fact.

The returnees were processed in five cycles. Each group consisted of 20-150 returnees, arriving at 8-10 day intervals. The debriefs were transcribed, edited by the senior officer of each service, and transmitted. When a returnee's debriefing was completed, the intelligence packet, including the debriefing tape, transcribed debrief and/or assessment report, would be assembled and sent by the escort officer for relay to the appropriate CONUS hospital.

A summary of the debriefings included:

Returnees Debriefed:

USAF - 324

USN - 138

USA - 71

USMC - 22

US Civilians - 23

Thai Civilians - 2

German Civilians - 2

Canadian Civilians - 1

Total - 583

Returnees Not Debriefed

USAF Medical - 1

USMC Higher HQ directed - 4

USA Higher HQ directed - 6

Total - 11

The committee learned a great deal about the debriefing process from the testimony of Admiral and Mrs. Stockdale -- among them that POW wives were never debriefed by DIA, and that Admiral Stockdale's debriefing was limited to his 52-hour initial debriefing.

Senator Daschle: . . . ..Do I understand, Mrs. Stockdale, that you have never been debriefed officially by the Federal Government?

Mrs Stockdale: I think you understand correctly, yes never.

Senator Daschle: And Admiral Stockdale, to what extent have you been debriefed, even in subsequent years, by DIA, by anybody, as we try to put together our best information?

Admiral Stockdale: Nothing but my initial debrief, which was rather extensive.

Phase III debriefings were conducted in the United States.

A symposium was held June 20-23, 1973 to discuss lessons learned. The panelists thought the debriefings were accomplished without major problems, although some debriefers complained that emphasis was placed on familiarization with the POWS background and insufficient stress was given to basic debriefing techniques. Rapport between the POW and his debriefer facilitated the flow of information. Each service attempted to first establish an effective working relationship. The Navy allowed the debriefer to escort the POW from Clark Air Force Base to the U.S., hoping that this would cement a working relationship. The Army and Marine Corps sought to achieve good rapport by matching the debriefer and POW by rank, background and interest. Debriefers were primary collectors of all available data.

While in captivity POWs had designated certain POWs to serve as "memory banks," this created initial pressure because many early returnees were hesitant to discuss information which they had not been directed to gather and commit to memory. This stumbling block was removed when senior POWS directed them to relate their entire experience to debriefers.

Suspicions have surrounded the debriefing of returned POWs for nearly 20 years, primarily because access has been restricted based on debriefing agreements with the returnees. Did the government leave men behind? Did key officials know it? Were the returnees told to not report certain information? Was the prison system a closed circle of knowledge; could there have been separate prison systems not known to the returning POWS? Was the American public told the truth?