Jeremiah Denton. When Hell Was in Session. Traditional P, 1982.
Many Americans of a certain age may recall Jeremiah Denton or at least recall what he did. He was a U.S. Navy airplane pilot who was shot down over North Vietnam and spent over seven years as a prisoner of war in the notorious Hanoi Hilton prison camp. He may be best known as the prisoner who repeatedly blinked the word TORTURE during a North Vietnamese press conference with supposedly humanely treated prisoners. He later served as a U.S. Senator from Alabama.
The experience of Denton and his fellow prisoners recorded in When Hell Was in Session brings new meaning to the word torture. The bodies of the men were twisted in all kinds of bizarre manners. As the reader begins to understand the scope and method the Communist captors used, the only thought is “who has the twisted mind to even think of these things?”
Pigeye [prisoners had nicknames for the guards who were otherwise anonymous]and one of the other guards grasped me, handcuffed my hands behind me, and then grunting and swearing began beating me severely…I reeled about the cell and fell down repeatedly. They kept pulling me to my feet and hitting me…Bloody nose, cut lips, blackened eyes, bruised ribs: the standard before the main event.…
He pulled my shirt sleeves down to protect my arms from scars…and then he and another guard began roping one arm from shoulder to elbow. With each loop, one guard would put his foot on my arm and pull, another guard joining him in the effort to draw the rope as tightly as their combined strength would permit. The other arm was then bound, and both were tied so closely that the elbows touched.…After about forty-five minutes, the pain began to subside and I began to go numb. I was too weak to sit up, and when I fell backward, the weight of my body spread my fingers so grotesquely that two of them were dislocated.…
They had cuffed a cement-filled 9-foot-long iron bar across my ankles, and Pigeye released the bar from the shackles and laid it across my shins. He stood on it, and he and the other guard took turns jumping up and down and rolling it across my legs. Then they lifted my arms behind my back by the cuffs, raising the top part of my body off the floor and dragging me around and around. This went on for hours. (64-65)
That was just one instance. At one point his legs were so swollen from tortures and edema that the shackles no longer fit around his ankles.
All I can think of is the verse from the Bible that speaks of consciences being seared with a hot iron (I Timothy 4:2). It is remarkable what evil people can do to other people.
The purpose of the torture was to somehow break the prisoners so that they would confess their political crimes and perhaps be released early. Denton is a gentleman and does not name any person who was released early for doing such things, but there were only a few.
Two he does mention—one was so badly tortured that he was near death and was released. The other feigned imbecility and was seen to be useless. That sailor, who actually washed ashore in Cambodia but was captured by Vietnamese operating there, had memorized the name of each of the 256 prisoners at the time, so on release he was able to let the Pentagon and prisoners’ families know who was there.
Denton himself was kept in solitary confinement for about four years of his ordeal. Still, the men developed a couple of tapping codes with occasional paper drops to communicate with each other. For the most part, they were able to encourage one another in spite of the tortures they endured.
Denton himself credits a spiritual experience while he was in solitary for giving him the vision and fortitude to make it through. While he considered himself a Catholic believer before, the Holy Spirit became real to him at one point when he realized he had to make a choice of whom to trust. His experience was reminiscent of Solzhenitsyn’s own conversion experience while he was in a Siberian labor camp as described in The Gulag Archipelago and Colson’s Loving God.
One other name that readers would probably recognize was that of James Stockdale. Denton was one of the early men shot down, and at first he was the ranking officer. Later Stockdale would take that role. Both men are examples of perseverance in great trials plus a certain doggedness. Stockdale would later run unsuccessfully for Vice President in the Perot candidacy. Stockdale would limp for the rest of his life as a result of tortures he received in Hanoi.
When Hell Was in Session is not for the faint of heart. Denton graphically describes the pain he endured. Denton notes that North Vietnam had subscribed to the Geneva Convention concerning the treatment of prisoners of war but claimed that captured enemies were war criminals and thus not covered by the treaty. People can justify all kinds of cruelty by twisting legalities to their tastes.
Much of the book covers the period from 1965 when Denton was shot down until 1969 when Ho Chi Minh died. That death made a big difference. After that, their captors fed them better and ceased most tortures. Ho’s death happened around the time that Nixon took the office of President from Johnson, so there may have been several factors contributing to the change. Denton felt that some of the wardens may have begun to fear reprisals for their treatment of the prisoners.
Denton also writes of a few political conversations he had with the North Vietnamese. He noted that their hard work would just end up in the hands of Russians (whom we see occasionally in the background) or party members. One replied that at least they had security.
He did have one occasion to have a priest hear his confession. The priest was obviously told by authorities what to say, and tried to steer the discussion to politics. While Denton was moved by the experience, he told the guards’ supervisor that he would only agree to confession again if the priest would not speak of politics. For any religious practitioner allowed under Communism, that was a no-go.
There are many other similar tales in this book. Denton was convinced, judging from the behavior of the guards and what he learned from newer prisoners, that if the allies had pursued victory in 1968 and 1969, the outcome of the war might have been different. Denton, after all, was shot down in 1965, so he was unaware of the antiwar demonstrations back in the States.
Denton’s testimony here goes along with many testimonies of victims of Communism in the Soviet Union such as Solzhenitsyn, Sharansky, Ratushinskaya, and even testimonies of Communists like Wolfgang Leonhard. There are fewer such testimonies from China, but they do exist such as The Heavenly Man and stories of Tibetans and Uighurs.
I am reminded of Winston Churchill’s observation that democracy is the worst form of government—except for all the others. Communism is evil. It enriches certain amoral members of the party at the expense of everyone else. And we have to admire the fortitude of such people as Denton, Stockdale, along with Solzhenitsyn, Brother Yun, and a host of others. Let us not forget.