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Doug Hegdahl
was interviewed as part of a show on POWs on the Discovery or
Military Channel
THE
INCREDIBLY STUPID ONE”
(SN
HEGDAHL, USS CANBERRA – PRISONER OF WAR)
By Dick “Beak” Stratton, Captain, USN (Ret.)
It was a warmer than usual summer day in Clark, South
Dakota, when a rather large and ungainly young man, a
recent high school graduate, set about finding his way
in the world. The salivating Navy recruiter asked the
youngster what it would take to have him sign up: “why,
I’d like to go to Australia.” It was as good as done.
After all, in 1966, if you were lucky enough to ship out
on the USS Canberra, more likely than not, during the
course of your hitch, there will be a port call to
the ship’s namesake—Canberra, Australia.
This young man came from a solid, patriotic
Norwegian Lutheran stock that believed when your
country called, you answered. You did not go to the
bus station but to the recruiting station. You did
not go to Oxford, you went to Vietnam. So Douglas
Brent Hegdahl III shipped out to boot camp
at San Diego, where he slept through the Code of
Conduct lectures since he would not be fighting in
the trenches. Lo and behold, he did get orders to
the USS Canberra. At that time Canberra, with 8-inch
guns mounted on the pointy end and missiles on the
round end, was assigned to steam with
the Gulf of Tonkin Yacht Club in the South China
Sea off the coast of Vietnam. (And, yes, she did
have Canberra, Australia, on her Port of Call list.)
Doug’s battle station was the aft ammunition
handling room for the 5-inch guns, located aft
in the bowels of the ship. One morning he had
the 0100 watch while the Canberra was steaming
down the coast of North Vietnam firing its
8-inch guns against targets of opportunity
(bicycles, water buffalo and occasional trucks)
on Highway 1. At about 0330 he rolled out of the
rack. Being a prudent farm boy, he locked all
his valuables in his locker and then proceeded
to go out on deck for a breath of fresh air
before manning his battle station.
Now there is a non-repetitive exercise in
the surface Navy called “going out on deck
when big guns are firing.” If the concussion
does not blow you over the side, it will at
least blow out your eardrums. But Doug must
have slept through that safety lecture. He
doesn’t know what happened. Either not being
night-adapted, or being without his glasses,
or concussion did it, he ended up going arse
over teakettle into the South China Sea
about three miles offshore with no life
preserver, no identification, no nothing.
Meanwhile he watched the Love Boat merrily
steaming over the horizon, firing at the
coastline and never missing him for two
days.
There is not much to do in the South
China Sea at 0345. He took off his
boondockers and hung them around his
neck in case he needed them when he
reached shore. He stripped off his
dungarees, zipped up the fly, tie off
the cuffs and popped them over his head,
as he was taught, to make a life
preserver. He reports back to you that
it doesn’t work. (He missed the part
about old dungarees, with holes, out of
the Lucky Bag would have to be kept wet
if they were to hold any air at all.) So
he put on his trousers, socks and shoes.
(Sharks? Sea snakes?)
Somewhere along the line he had
heard that drowning was a “nice way
to die;” so he thought he would try
it out. He put his hands over his
head and down he went—bloop, bloop,
bloop. Now both he and I had heard
the myth that when drowning you
would get cuddly, warm, all the nice
things in your life would flash by
in your mind and you would go to
your eternal reward to the sound of
music (harp?). Doug resurfaced and
reports back to us that it is all
malarkey: there are no movies, there
is no music and it’s colder than
Hell!
As dawn came he started swimming
away from the sun, hopefully
towards shore. He could see the
haze of land, but the harder he
tried, the further back it
receded. So he just rolled on
his back, playing like a whale,
humming a few tunes and saying a
few prayers. Notice he never
gave up. How many people have we
been exposed to in the course of
our lives, in a situation like
that would have just plain given
up? About 1800 that same day, a
Vietnamese fishing boat came by
and hauled him out of the
water—some twelve hours later.
Even those peasant fishermen
could figure out that this
moose would never fit in the
cockpit of an A4 Skylark.
They turned him upside down
and inside out which
garnered them absolutely
nothing. Remember, he had
prudently left everything
back on the ship in his
locker. Picture yourself
being tortured to admit you
were a CIA agent who entered
the water
in Coronado, California to
swim ten thousand miles
across the Pacific to
infiltrate their shores!
When the authorities got
him ashore, they showed
Doug piles of materials
allegedly written by
Yankee Air Pirates who
had been captured before
him.
(95% of those captured
in North Vietnam had
been tortured, were
not offered the option
of death, and were
made to give more than
Name, Rank, Serial
Number and Date of
Birth sequence
permitted by the
Military Code of
Conduct and required
by International Law.)
Doug recognized that
something was amiss,
but, as he said later,
“Geeze, they’re
officers, they must
know what they are
doing.” So he decided
his best ploy was to
pretend to be stupid.
He got them off
target by
comparing farms
in North
Vietnam and South
Dakota. He didn’t
realize that even
then the
Communists were
categorizing him
to gauge his
usefulness to
their cause. His
dad had about ten
motel units,
numberless
vehicles and all
kinds of land—but
no water buffalo.
No water buffalo
meant in
Vietnamese
parlance that he
was a “poor
peasant.” This is
just as well, as
Communists had
murdered over 20
million “rich
peasants” in their
various
revolutions,
because those
folks are
unreconstructed
capitalists. A
little miffed at
first, Doug caught
on right away—he
is a quick
study—it was to
his advantage to
play out the poor
peasant act to the
bitter end.
Tired of the
verbal jousting
the Communist
cadres told him
that he would
have to write
and anti-war
statement for
them. He
joyously agreed.
The
interrogators
were
dumbfounded.
This was the
first Yankee to
agree to do
anything without
being tortured
first. They
brought out the
paper, ink and
pens. He admired
them all and
then stated:
“But one small
thing. I can’t
read or write.
I’m a poor
peasant.” This
was quite
credible to the
Vietnamese since
their poor
peasants could
neither read nor
write. So they
assigned a
Vietnamese to
teach him
penmanship,
spelling,
grammar and
sentence
structure.
Immediately his
learning curve
went flat.
Eventually, the
interrogators
gave up in
disgust; writing
a confession for
him and having
him sign it in
an illegible
scrawl. He
admitted to the
war crime of
shelling the
presidential
birthplace of Ho
Chi Minh and
signed it as
Seaman
Apprentice
Douglas Brent
Hegdahl III,
United States
Navy Reserve,
Commanding
Officer, USS
Canberra. No one
has ever seen
this piece of
paper.
Doug was
shuffled
around from
pillar to
post, since
his captors
didn’t know
where he
would fit
into their
propaganda
plans. One
mistake they
made was to
put him in
for a while
with Joe
Crecca, an
Air Force
officer who
had
developed a
method of
creating the
most
organized
memory bank
we possessed
to record
the names of
pilots shot
down and
imprisoned
in Vietnam.
Joe took
this young
Seaman and,
recognizing
the
potential,
painstakingly
taught Doug
not only 256
names, but
also, the
method of
memorizing,
cross-referencing
and
retrieving
those names.
It was no
easy task
that Joe set
for himself
for it was
not
intuitively
obvious to
Doug the
value of
such mental
gymnastics.
It was a
hot
summer
day when
I first
met
Doug. I
was in
solitary
confinement
again.
The
Communists
did not
care for
me,
which
was OK
because
I didn’t
like
them
either.
My cell
door
opened
and here
was this
big
moose
standing
in his
skivvie
shorts
(prison
uniform
of the
day).
“My name
is
Seaman
Douglas
Brent
Hegdahl,
Sir.
What’s
yours?”
It is
awful
hard to
look
dignified
when you
are
standing
in your
underwear,
knock-kneed,
ding-toed,
pot-bellied,
unwashed
and
unshaven
for 100
days.
I automatically
recited,
“Dick
Stratton,
Lieutenant
Commander,
USSTiconderoga.”
Immediately
I saw
that I
probably
made a
mistake
as his
eyes
rolled
back in
his head
and you
could
see what
he was
thinking:
“Cripes,
another
officer!”
But
notice
that
instinctively
he asked
the
critical
and most
important
question
for
survival:
“Who is
your
senior?”
The rule
we lived
by was:
“If I am
senior,
I will
take
charge;
if
junior,
I will
obey.”
The
Communists
took
a
siesta
for
two
hours
every
afternoon
which
was
a
good
deal
for
us
as
we
were
free
from
torture
and
harassment.
I
was
laying
on
the
floor
on
my
bed
board
and
Doug
was
skipping,
yes,
skipping
around
the
room.
I
asked:
“Doug,
what
are
you
doing?”
He
paused
for
a
moment,
looked
me
in
the
eye
and
cryptically
said:
“Skipping,
Sir”
and
continued
to
skip.
A
stupid
question,
a
stupid
answer.
After
a
moment,
I
again
queried:
“What
ya
doin’
that
for?”
This
stopped
him
for
a
moment.
He
paused
and
cocked
his
head
thoughtfully,
smiled
and
replied:
“You
got
anything
better
to
do,Sir?”
I
didn’t.
He
continued
skipping.
I
guess
he
did
learn
one
thing
from
boot
camp.
You
can
say
anything
you
want
to
an
officer
as
long
as
you
smile
and
say
“sir.”
One siesta period he said: Hey, Beak, you went to college and studied government; do you know the GettysburgAddress?” We got a brick (no paper or pencils for the criminals) and started to write it out on the tile floor until we got it correct. Then he stopped me with the question: “Can you say it backwards?” Well, who would want to say theGettysburg Address backwards? Certainly not the Jesuits at Georgetown and especially not me. Doug could say it backwards, verbatim, rapidly. I know because I could track him from the written version we had on the floor.
“So what?” you might say. The so what is that when they threw him out of Vietnam, and throw him out they did, he came out with 256 names that Joe Crecca had taught him memorized by service, by rank and alphabetically; next to each name he had a dog’s name, kid’s name or social security number to verify the quality of the name which we had picked up by tap code, deaf spelling code or secret notes. He still has those names memorized today and sings them to the tune of “Old MacDonald Has a Farm.” One of our intelligence officers asked him if he could slow the recitation down to make for easier copying. Doug replied “No” that it was like riding a bike, you had to keep moving or you would fall off. If it weren’t for Joe Crecca, Doug and our government would not have had those names until the end of war five years later.
In trying to get people to accept early propaganda releases, the Communists would have some “good cop” interrogator like the ones we called the “Soft Soap Fairy” talk to the prospect and sound him out for pliability. They got Doug one day and asked what we eventually learned to be the lead question: “What do you want more than anything else in the world?” The answer of the weak and willing was : “To go home to my family.” Doug thought for a long time, then cocked his head with a smile and said> “Why, I’d like a pillow, Sir.” This was not an unreasonable response since we had no pillows on our cement pads or bed boards. However, the response sure confounded the enemy. They eventually came up with a name for Doug amongst the guards and interrogators: “The Incredibly Stupid One.” His original resistance ploy had paid off.
Because they thought him stupid, they would let him go out in the cell block courtyard during the siesta to sweep up the grounds period monitored by only one sleepy, peasant guard. I thought that was great since it kept him from skipping and I could get some rest. However, curiosity got the better of me and I started to watch him through a peephole we had bored in the cell door. He’d go sweeping and humming until the guard was lulled to sleep. Then Doug would back up to a truck, spin the gas cap off the standpipe, stoop down and put a small amount (“Small, because it’s going to be a long war, Sir.”) of dirt in the gas tank and replace the cap. I watched him over a period of time do this to five trucks.
Now, I’m a liberal arts major who shot himself down, so all I can do is report what I saw. There were five trucks working in the prison; I saw Doug work on five trucks; I saw five trucks towed disabled out of the prison camp. Doug Hegdahl, a high school graduate from the mess decks fell off a ship and has five enemy trucks to his credit. I am a World Famous Golden Dragon (VA 192) with two college degrees, 2000 jet hours, 300 carrier landings and 22 combat missions. How many enemy trucks do I have to my credit? Zero. Zip. Nada. De Rien. 0. Who’s the better man? Douglas Brent Hegdahl, one of two men I know of who destroyed enemy military equipment while a prisoner of war.
Later on, Doug, having left his eyeglasses on board Canberra, discovered that he had difficulty linking up isolated cell blocks throughout the prison compound with his defective distance vision. So he went to the authorities and asked if he could read some of their propaganda. They were delighted. Here was a prisoner, without being tortured, volunteering to read their swill.
But then Doug cautioned them with his: “Small thing [They never learn]; I cannot read without glasses.” So they trolled out a dime store clerk who fitted him with glasses by trying one on after the other until Doug said he could see. His near vision was OK. Unbeknownst to the clerk, he was fitting Doug for distance vision, Now, in between sweeps and gas tanks he was able to link up cell blocks not only by sweeping in code but now also using the deaf spelling code.
The Vietnamese were big on token propaganda releases of prisoners to make various peace groups look good and our government look impotent. They would try to pick people who had not been tortured or in jail long enough to look emaciated. Usually they were volunteers, violators of direct orders from their Seniors and traitors to our cause of resistance. These releases always were of three at a time. The magic of the number three was always a mystery to us. As our leaders exercised greater internal communications and controls, it became harder for the Communists to make up a propaganda release party. Seeking to round out the number they finally turned to “The Incredibly Stupid One” who, although not volunteering, was certainly too dumb to do them any harm.
As part of this conditioning they had both Doug and I examined by “the Doctor.” This was a female soldier we saw through a peephole we had in the door get briefed up and then dolled up like a physician. The physician made a grand entrance worthy of a world-famous brain surgeon. The effect was somewhat spoiled by the face mask protecting her chin rather than covering her mouth; she really had no ideas what the face mask was for. The exam, after looking in all the holes in your head and listening your heart, consisted of “feeling you up” under the guise of palpitating your internal organs while the translator asked, “The Doctor wants to know if you miss your wife (girlfriend)? Wouldn’t you like to be with her now?”
Then they would pull Doug out for interrogations sounding him out for an early release. They told him not to tell me as I was an officer who did not care about his welfare like they did. They informed him: “Stratton would never even speak to you if you were in America.” Doug would come back from each go around and immediately tell me everything that was said. One time he plaintively asked: “Beak, you’d speak to me if we’re home now, wouldn’t you?”
They started to try to fatten us up with large bowls of potatoes laced with canned meat. No one else in the prison was getting it. As a result I told Doug we couldn’t take it. We could either not touch it and turn it back in; in which case the guards would eat it. Or we could dump it in the slop bucket so that no one could eat it without getting sick. Doug thought this was a bit on the scrupulous side, but went along with it. I told the Camp Commander that under no condition would I accept an early release even if offered and if they threw me out I’d have to be dragged feet first all the way from Hanoi to Hawaii screaming bloody murder all the way. It was time to cut to the chase. Doug would have to go.
Doug did not want to go. We finally told Doug that as long as he did not have to commit treason, he was to permit himself to be thrown out of the country. He was the most junior. He had the names. He knew firsthand the torture stories behind many of the propaganda pictures and news releases. He knew the locations of many of the prisons. It was a direct order; he had no choice. I know, because I personally relayed that order to him as his immediate senior in the chain of command.
Well throw him out they did. The 256 names he had memorized contained many names that our government did not have. He ended up being sent to Paris by Ross Perot to confront the North Vietnamese Peace Talk Delegation about the fate of the Missing in Action. He entered the Civil Service and is today a Survival School instructor for the U.S. Navy and the James B. Stockdale Survival, Evasion, Resistance, And Escape Center (SERE), naval Air Station, North Island, Coronado, California. And yes, he can still recite those names! You can watch him do it on the Discovery Channel special on Vietnam POWs—Stories of Survival.
A while after Doug had been released, I was called over to an interrogation. It was to be a Soft Soap Fairy kind of gig since there were quality cigarettes, sugared tea in china cups, cookies and candy laid out on the interrogation table. A dapper, handsome Vietnamese, dressed in an expensive, tailored suit and wearing real, spit-shined wingtip shoes, came into the room with a serious look on his face—all business. “Do you know Douglas Hegdahl?” “You know I do.” “Hegdahl says that you were tortured.” “This is true.” “You lie.” Rolling up the sleeves to my striped pajamas (prison mess dress uniform), I pointed to the scars on my wrists and elbows and challenged: “Ask your people how these marks got on my body; they certainly are neither birth defects or the result of an aircraft accident.” He examined the scars closely, sat back, stared and stated: “You are indeed the most unfortunate of the unfortunate.” With that he left the interrogation leaving me with all the goodies. Upon release I compared notes with Doug and we determined that time frame was the same time he accused the Vietnamese in Paris of murdering me [I had not written home once writing became voluntary] for embarrassing them in a Life magazine bowing picture. Thanks to Doug, despite the scars on my body, the Communists had to produce me alive at the end of the war.
“The Incredibly Stupid One,” my personal hero, is the archetype of the innovative, resourceful and courageous American Sailor. These sailors are the products of the neighborhoods, churches, schools and families working together to produce individuals blessed with a sense of humor and the gift of freedom who can overcome any kind of odds. These sailors are tremendously loyal and devoted to their units and their leaders in their own private and personal ways. As long as we have the Dougs of this world, our country will retain its freedoms.
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