Sebastian Gorka - Why We Fight - Why We Fight - Defeating America's Enemies - With No Apologies

But then it happened. The radar lock alarm flashed and the klaxon blared. On and on for an interminable twenty seconds until a Soviet-designed missile denoted in the sky between McDaniel’s A-6 and his wingman. Shrapnel tore into his hydraulics, he lost control, and the plane headed into a nosedive. At two thousand feet, McDaniel ejected. His parachute tore during the descent, and he crashed into the jungle trees below, coming to a violent halt forty feet above the ground.

Dazed and bruised, he climbed up the rigging of his trapped parachute until the branch it was caught on snapped. His fall badly injured his knee and crushed two vertebrae. And there he lay, with a pistol and a bottle of water, in a country where everyone around him wanted to kill any American he found.

Over the next two and a half days, hearing the whistles of the villagers around him who had been sent out to look for downed pilots, he tried to evade capture. Monsoon-like rain came and went, and he saw US planes searching for him and others who had been brought down. Out of water and covered with leaches, he waited for the navy to send a helicopter to airlift him before the Viet Cong found him. In desperation, he turned to the Lord, reciting the simple prayer of thanks his parents offered every night before dinner back home in North Carolina.

Red was the eldest of eight. His parents were people of faith but not regular church-goers; they didn’t have the money to dress the whole family adequately, as they saw it, to honor God. In his freshman year at Campbell Junior College, Red found organized religion, and he became a deacon in a Southern Baptist congregation. Then he met Dorothy, whose father was a Baptist minister. Both the pastor and his daughter had a remarkable trust in God that was more sophisticated than his parents’ simple belief in the goodness of the Creator. Red arrived at the understanding that Christ was real, a man of history. But more than that, the Son of God who had given of himself to all men, including Red. This understanding of God would be the secret to his survival of the horrors to come.

The rescue never came, and eventually, with the help of local villagers, the Vietnamese forces found McDaniel and took him prisoner. So began a six-year ordeal. They beat the dehydrated, injured pilot with rifle butts and struck him in the face as they led him on his painful march to Hoa Lo, the dreaded “Hanoi Hilton.”

At the most infamous Vietnamese prison camp, the interrogations began immediately. Following his training and international law, McDaniel refused to share anything beyond his name, rank, date of birth, and service serial number. The first method of torture—the “ropes”—was simple and viciously effective. The prisoner was suspended by his wrists, which were bound behind his back, a position that placed a horrible strain on his shoulder sockets. [2] This method is strikingly similar to the one my father suffered in the basement of the communist secret police headquarters in Budapest, although he was bound with wire rather than rope. The human body has been the same anatomically for millennia, thus it is unsurprising that torture methods have evolved little over time. This position was held until the pain peaked. At that point, to exert maximum psychological pressure, before the next question was asked, the pressure would be released. If the pow offered no more than the legally required minimal answer, the torture was repeated.

Through it all, McDaniel resisted. He would bite down hard on the shoulder that hurt less to transfer the pain and attention away from the limb that hurt more. When the guards had walked away, he would do the same by banging his head against the wall, hoping to open a wound so blood would trickle into his mouth and relieve his burning thirst.

His Vietnamese captors pressed on, demanding that he divulge secrets about the latest US missile, where the navy would run its next set of missions, the strength of the deployed units—anything that could help them kill or capture more of his compatriots. The pain mounted and he lost control of his bodily functions, but McDaniel refused to divulge anything sensitive, pretending to go unconscious and then babbling seemingly important information that was in fact wholly fictitious.

After the first week, McDaniel had lost the use of his right hand from the repeated brutalization, and his right ankle had swollen around his iron shackles. By this time, the dreadful truth was clear: there was a great difference between Americans and their enemy. These people clearly enjoyed inflicting pain. For them, cruelty wasn’t unusual. It was something that occurred against regulations when a unit that had seen too much horror succumbed to a collective psychosis and snapped. For the guards and interrogators of the Hanoi Hilton, this level of inhumanity was the norm, “standard operating procedure.” This was simply what one did to an enemy combatant. And those who applied the brutal techniques of torture were not appalled by what they were inflicting. They liked to hurt their fellow man. Repeatedly. For days, weeks, months, and eventually for years.

And the brutality was not meted out only on the captive Americans. The Vietnamese prison guards reveled in maltreatment of animals. Pigs were deliberately blinded to make them more docile and controllable. Dogs, which were kept in the prison for their meat, were chased by their captors bearing clubs and bricks, until they stopped trying to escape and were killed, their meat now “tenderized” by the sport of chasing them. Sport was also made of dousing the numerous rats in the camp with gasoline, igniting them, and watching the rodents run until the flames killed them. Just for entertainment.

As the days progressed, McDaniel ended up in solitary confinement. Broken physically, he faced mounting psychological pressure as he tried to regain a scrap of strength, all the while hearing the screams of his tortured countrymen throughout the prison. Now the question became: How long can I hold out? When will I break? Because he knew worse was to come. He knew that what he had gone through was just his “baptism in torture.” It was when he realized that it was it only the beginning that he started to pray, begging the Lord to give him strength in his solitude. After two weeks, the answer came.

McDaniel was escorted out of solitary to what he expected would be another round of relentless torture. Instead he was taken to a communal area. There on the floor lay a man, another badly wounded American. McDaniel felt sorry for him immediately, unmindful of what a pathetic and desperate sight he himself was. His fellow prisoner later told him, “When I walked in I looked like a man sixty-five years old [he was in his thirties], with boils all over my body, dangling right hand, left leg dragging from the knee, and stooped from my torture on the ropes.” [3] Scars & Stripes , op. cit.

Nevertheless, McDaniel’s prayer had been answered. Not only did he now have company, it was a friend, his fellow pilot Lieutenant Bill Metzger, who had been shot down just before McDaniel’s plane was hit. But Metzger, supine and helpless, was clearly critically wounded, a massive shrapnel wound along one leg and his arms suppurating from multiple lacerations. That is when Red understood. Expending all his remaining strength, he picked up his friend and laid him on a plank bed. He had a mission—not from the Joint Chiefs, not from the Ready Room of his home carrier, but from God—to help his fellow man who was in an even worse state physically and spiritually than he was. He was there for a reason: to minister to those who needed him and who were unable to help themselves.

For the next three months, McDaniel ministered to his friend and others who needed his support, physically and spiritually. He realized that even when medical help was unavailable, a soul could be sustained and hope kindled. Communication was key. As prisoners were moved around and split up, staying connected to one another was crucial to maintain the morale to survive. Just knowing a friend was nearby could keep a man stay alive.