The Saintly and the Sadists

AFRAID of jeopardizing the release of the remaining prisoners in Viet Nam, the recently returned P.O.W.s have said little about their ordeal. But a few have revealed enough to give an idea of what they suffered.

Navy Captain James A. Mulligan was imprisoned for seven years. Last week in an interview with TIME Correspondent Arthur White, he would describe only his final year (at the "Hanoi Hilton"), when conditions had much improved. He shared a small, heatless room with two other P.O.W.s; a connecting room housed another three. Food was far from ample: a breakfast of French bread with either milk or sugar; a lunch of soup with a morsel of fish or vegetable; and an equally light supper. The only excitement was listening to "Hanoi Hannah," a local propagandist, blaring out of loudspeakers.

On Sundays, a group of P.O.W.s held an improvised church service enlivened with patriotic songs as well as hymns. Religion was a strong bond among these prisoners. One of their major projects was to reconstruct a Bible from memory; anyone who could recall biblical passages contributed. Said Air Force Major Norman McDaniel, who has been praised as a "Gibraltar of guts": "Most of my fellow prisoners had faith in God. When the going got tough, then came the test to see if we were worthy."

For diversion, the P.O.W.s conducted what they called "special activities." One of them would narrate an episode from his life or discuss a skill he had learned or a person he had known. Recalls Mulligan: "I described the textile mills in Lawrence, Mass., where I grew up, the political picture there, the school system, everything I could remember."

Spirits soared when Hanoi was bombed in December. "It was spectacular," says Mulligan. "We saw explosions and realized they were working hard to wind things up. I knew the war would end when the B-52s came. I said it was just a matter of time and I'd be going home." He is bitter about Antiwar Protesters Jane Fonda and Ramsey Clark who visited Hanoi. "They didn't help us; they hurt us."

Air Force Colonel James Robinson Risner echoed that complaint: "Communist morale went up and down along with the amount of protests and antiwar movement back in the States. Beyond any doubt, those people kept us in prison an extra year or two."

Two civilians who worked for the Agency for International Development, Richard Utecht and Douglas Ramsey, were willing to discuss their imprisonment by the Viet Cong in South Viet Nam, painting a far grimmer picture than Mulligan's. Utecht, 48, recalled his five-year ordeal with little rancor. He told TIME Correspondent Peter Range that he was seized in Saigon by the Viet Cong during the Tet offensive. For the rest of his captivity, he was marched more than a thousand miles around an area northwest of Saigon--a Viet Cong tactic to avoid being discovered.

When camp was pitched for any length of time, each P.O.W. was locked up in an 8-ft.-by-8-ft. cell constructed of green logs. The prisoners did not eat much worse than their captors: rice for every meal supplemented by the meat of anything that ran or crawled--snake, dog, tiger, rat, anteater. A delicacy was elephant blood soup. "Jungle meat can be real good," says Utecht. "One day I tried to cut into a ball of meat. It suddenly spread out, forming a hand. It was a monkey's hand. Yes, I ate it."

When he was first imprisoned, Utecht was threatened with death, but later his captors were not often deliberately cruel. Hardest to bear were the forced marches at night. Whatever the Viet Cong could not load on bicycles ("They looked like camels with wheels"), they packed on the backs of prisoners. Once Utecht collapsed from pain and exhaustion. A guard threw a rope around his neck and forced him to walk along until he passed out. Luckily, a Viet Cong doctor stayed behind to help him the rest of the way to camp.

One day the Viet Cong took a few shots at a U.S. plane as it passed over a village. An hour and a half later, U.S. jets swooped down to strafe and bomb, hitting some villagers. After the raid, townspeople menaced the prisoners with clubs and pitchforks. "They would have killed us if the guards had not stopped them. I saw women holding little children saturated with blood."

Disease--dysentery, malaria, beriberi--Was always a threat. Guards insisted that prisoners put down their mosquito netting at night. Occasionally P.O.W.s received injections--with painfully dull needles--of quinine and vitamins. Three weeks before their release, rations were doubled and the P.O.W.s were given straw mats for bedding; Utecht sensed that his imprisonment would soon end. As a souvenir, he smuggled out a leg chain that was used to shackle prisoners.

Douglas Ramsey, 38, was delivering rice to refugees in Hau Nghia province when the Viet Cong grabbed him. The guerrillas, he recalls, turned out to be "almost friendly." As he traveled with them, he noticed that they seemed to know to the minute when the routine of enemy artillery firing would begin and when it would end. After one ambush, Ramsey estimated that they exaggerated the casualties four or five to one in reports to their superiors.

Beri-Beri. Once he was shifted to rear echelon forces, he was treated more harshly. "At one point, I was told that if I had a nightmare and cried out once more in my sleep they would shoot me." The behavior of his captors varied considerably. "The range went from the saintly to something out of the Marquis de Sade. Some I would invite into my own home. Others I would like to take back of the woodshed and only one of us would return." There was the doctor who saved his life when he went into convulsions after bouts with malaria and beriberi. There was also the guard who scattered peanuts among chickens when protein was desperately needed by the P.O.W.s.

Kept in solitary confinement for six of his seven years' imprisonment, and often locked in leg irons, Ramsey was subjected to frequent indoctrination. He supplied some antiwar statements but they were too ambivalent to be printed or broadcast for propaganda purposes. The opposition that he expressed to the war, he believes, was within "my Constitutional prerogatives as an individual. When I got out, I discovered that the Administration had made many of the changes I was concerned about: the movement from the atmosphere of the Crusades to that of the Congress of Vienna, from religious fanaticism to Metternich." In keeping with the sober realism of many of the P.O.W.s, he makes no claims for himself beyond those of common sense. "I do not particularly care for retroactive heroism."

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