Welcome to Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition has
retired US Air Force Colonel Ed Hubbard. He is a Vietnam veteran and spent
nearly seven years in captivity as a prisoner of war after being shot down in
July of nineteen sixty six. He is also a recipient of the Silver Star,
among many other awards. And Colonel Hubbard, thank you very much for
being with us today. It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Where were you born and raised? I was born and raised in Kansas City.
And was there a history of military service in your family? Uncles were
in World War Two, but not in my immediate family. Why did you
want to join the air I went to fly airplanes. How did you get
that desire? When I was a little kid, on the weekends we outside
of Kansas City, there was a Navy base where they did pilot training,
and on weekends with my parents found me to be too much trouble to handle,
they would take me out and set me out beside the fence at the
airport and let me sit and watch the airplanes all day and come back and
get me in the afternoon. And so I had great idea about flying airplanes
would be the only way I would want to go. And then when I
was at high school and I was dating girls, I used to take them
down to the Kansas City Airport and we would sit on the dike and one
of the airplanes were taken off right over the top of your head. It
was one of my most enjoyable dates was to take a girl down there,
or white blouse and when the seven or sevens take off, this black suit
come down and she covered with black stuff. How many second dates did you
get with that? But it was I loved airplanes. I'd love to go
sit and watch airplanes. I still do that to this day if I have
a chance. And it wasn't long before you became an officer, Well,
it was a little while. When I was seventeen, between my junior and
senior year high school, my brother and I were out driving around Kansas City
trying to find a job and we're not successful. And I heard a guy
on the radio say, joined the Air Force Reserve and see the world.
I said, now there's an interesting thought. So we drove out to the
nearest base and I joined the Air Force that day. And one with that
twenty fourth of June nineteen fifty five five, and what sort of duties did
you have in then? I was. I went through basic training and I
became a flight line mechanic, and I got to go work on airplanes.
And we had a shortage of people who enjoyed flying, and so I applied
and got a waiver and I became a flight engineer. And I flew as
a flight engineer on a C forty six and then for about a year,
and then I transitioned and flew for about five years on a C one nineteens.
And then when they we changed airplanes to the C one twenty four,
the big globe master required a panel engineer, and to be a panel engineer
you had to be at least a staff sergeant, and I didn't hold the
rank, and so I had to find a new job. I became a
loadmaster on a C one twenty four. About six months after that, I
got accepted in the Aviation Cadet program to go to navigators training in Waco,
Texas. Twenty first of August of sixty one, I went on active duty,
and July of sixty two I got my wings in my commission. From
there went flu airplanes and what were you flying? Well? When I was
going through nav training, it was flying T twenty nine, a trainer airplane.
And then I went from there to Sacramento, California, made their Air
Force base and went through navigator or bombardeer training for a year. And when
I left there that I went to Show Air Force Base in Sumter, South
Carolina, went through crew training for the RB sixty six photo reconnaissance airplane,
and I went to Europe, went to Alcanberry RF Alcanberry in about seventy miles
north of London and spent a little over two years flying B sixty six.
Is there that I went from there to Chambla Air Base in northeastern France and
flew for about nine months in the same kind of airplane. And then with
no warning at all, one day I was sent from Chamberle, France through
the United States long enough to drop off my family, straight to Clark Air
Base to go through Jungle Survival school, straight to Tocley Air Base in Thailand,
where I flew combat missions in North Vietnam. On my twenty sixth missis
I got shot down. What kind of missions were you assigned? We were
fine electronic reconnaissance, which is kind of a multifaceted. We were gathering a
limp information electronic intelligence information about the location of the SAM sites, so we
could because they were moving to SAM sites all the time, and so we
would get current information today and we would plaut the sam merns for the flights
tomorrow. And then we were also jamming all the radar sites that came on
the air and anytime missiles were lost, and we were calling the warning out
to all the other fighters that were in the area. Tell them where the
map had a grid on it with letter designators and something like Echo Gulf three
that was a little square on the map, a thirty mile square on the
map, and you say stovepipe red Echo Gulf three and it meant there's a
red, meant the airplane air the missile had been launched and it was in
the route. A time of flight from the missile to the from the ground
to the fighters at fifteen thousand feet was only about ten seconds. So it
was a very crucial call had to be met right now because the missile's already
airborne and the missiles coming at you at Mack three and what altitude did you
say you would do this. We were at thirty thousand feet. We were
orbiting up doing all this from thirty thousand feet. Actually, the day we
were shot down, we were flying around the circle up there, and we've
been up there for over half an hour. When they lost a salvo of
missiles. We'd already been fired at two or three times that day. Nobody,
we thought nobody could hit us. But unfortunately, the time of flight
for the missile to impact for us was only about twenty eight seconds. And
if you had him in sight, you could defeat them. You could turn,
and you can maneuver the airplane and you could defeat the missile because the
missiles going very very fast, and it has very small wings and so it
can't make a real hard turn where your airplane quit. So you just maneuver
the airplane until the missile was on the canopy. You can see it on
the canus spot on the canopy. And if you maneuver the airplane so that
the missile appears to be not moving, that's called the collision course. So
if you hold that position, it's going to fly right through your a canopy.
And so you wait until the missile got too large to beany to let
it get any closer, and he's pull up to a barrel roll you create
a donut in the sky and the missile would go right through the center of
the thing. So if you had him in sight, you could defeat them.
Unfortunately, undercast had come in and so we had clouds below us,
and when the missiles came up, they were well on the way before we
could turn and find them, and then we didn't see them, and so
we didn't get hit directly. We just took some real close missies and very
loud explosion and shook the airplane pretty bad, and within a matter of thirty
seconds the airplane was on fire, and shortly thereafter the airplane started coming apart.
Six of us at the airplane. Five of us got out, five
us ejected. One guy died that day. We don't know exactly what happened,
but he would have been the last guy out of the airplane, so
we don't know. The airplane blew up shortly shortly after we got out,
and he probably was still sitting in the airplane where it blew up. Tell
me about ejecting and what it's different. First thing, you know, it
was the smoke coming in the cockpit and through the air condition around the canopy,
and you're training tells you the first thing you do when you see smoke
in a cockpit you go to one hundred percent oxygen. And when I reached
down to turn the hun percent auction, I the gauge said, we didn't
have any auction. That meant or oxygen can convert her in the belly of
the airplane had been damaged and the oxygen was gone. So at thirty thousand
feet, your time of useful consciousness is not very long, and so you
have to do something immediately. So the first thing after if you don't have
auxy next and you do is dump the pressurization and theoretically that's going to vacate
all the smoke. And that worked for about ten seconds probably, and then
the smoke just kept getting thicker and thicker. The design of the airplane,
beside my seat and the floor, there was a little door. You could
open the door up like this, and there's a outside of the airplane.
You can look at the bottom of the airplane. This door opens up this
way. This door on the outside comes down like that, and that steps
out. That's how you that's how you enter the cockpit of the airplane.
And so when you open the door on the inside, there's a handle there
you pull that in that jettison as the door makes a big, great,
big hole at the bottle of the airplane. And I opened the door on
the inside. The whole inside the airplane was on fire. So I didn't
reach down there and pull the handle. I just closed the door, and
I jettison my canopy to get rid of the smoke and everything. And when
I opened, when the canopy came off, you know, everything and the
cockpit goes out the hole except you until you pull the handle. But the
floor, the door kept came back up. I don't know if I locked
the door and not. Probably didn't. I just put it down, and
so when it opened up, then suddenly I'm sitting in this fireball. And
so I pulled the trigger ejected going about pretty closely straight down six ear a
mile an hour. And it's the wildest thing I've ever done in my life.
It's just absolute chaos because you come out there the winds going six hour
am mint hour when you enter the slip stream, and so you end over
in and flailing and all that and then about one point eight seconds later,
your parachute opens auto banket and go splat and you stop right there. So
you go from six ear a mile or stand still about a heartbeat and then
you hanging your shoot until you get to the ground. It was about twenty
three minutes to the ground coming down. I was ejected somewhere around sixteen thousand
feet twenty three minutes. Yeah, I went a long ride down. I
mean, I'm very small relatively speaking. Everybody gets the same sized parachute,
so depends on how much you weigh and know everything else, and so I'm
kind of small. Just took a long time to get to the ground.
You couldn't believe. And and people are shooting at you the whole time,
and you keep thinking, we'd love to get down a little faster, but
there's nothing to do other than jettison to shoot, which then you're going to
fall seriously and it's going to kill you when you hit the ground, So
you just sit there and hope for the best. Nobody hit me. That's
amazing. What else is going through your mind over those twenty three minutes,
although that's plenty well, I think the primary thing I kept looking around trying
to find the rest of my crew where they were. I know there are
six of us in the airplane. I assume that four guys in the back
of the airplane had downward ejection seats, and so the pilot and the navigator
are going to go up. The four guys back you're going to go down.
Because when I opened the door and the whole inside airplanes full of fire,
and they're back behind that, I assumed they jumped out before I did.
It turns out that wasn't true. I was the first one out,
and we think, we don't know, We'll never know, but we think
the pilot was the second guy out. And suddenly these four guys in the
back are in the airplane, but without any ability to fly the airplane.
And then they apparently got the message and started chat. We lost our radios
and our intercomm immediately when we were hit, so we didn't couldn't talk to
each other. You had to just play it by year. Now when you
hit the ground, well, let's talk about that. How did you hit
the ground? Well, I hit the ground pretty hard. I forgot to
You were supposed to deploy, You had a survival kit under your seat,
supposed to deploy that on a twenty foot lanyard so that it doesn't break your
legs when you hit the ground. But unfortunately, my mental capacity at that
moment seemed to be screwed up, and I didn't deploy it, so it
was still I was still sitting on my seat, or not my seat,
but on the survival kit. Probably in my best interests, as it turns
out, because I came down on a very steep cart of bamboo jungle,
and I mowed down about one hundred yards worth of trees. Was coming down
to that seat. Probably kept me from get a piece of bamboo stuck in
me somewhere. Now, you were able to evade capture at least for a
little while after I was out for about eight hours. I shot down at
eight o'clock in the morning and got captured about five in the afternoon. What'd
you do in those eight hours, Well, the first thing I did is
I got on the ground. I opened my survival kit that I hadn't deployed.
It was right there, and I opened that and had two cans of
water in it, and I took my survival knife and punched holes in the
top of the cans and drank both cans of water, and then I realized
that I got burned on my left arm. My left sleeve was gone and
I had been burned on the back side of my arm. And I didn't
know exactly what I had in the survival kit to put on that for,
you know, burn medicine. It turns out survival kits don't have burned medicine.
And I somebody tried to explain to me one time why, But at
the time all I knew is I'd gone through jungle survival school. They say,
he cuts any abrasions, everything will get infected and you'll regret it.
And so I decided that we don't have to do something rather quick, and
so the only thing I found I had a little bottle of iodine, and
I had a top, a screw top, but it was on there with
paraffin so that it wouldn't leak, and I didn't have the ability to unscrew
it was a tiny little thing. I couldn't get a grip on it unscrewed.
So I stick my knife, went and just knocked the top off the
thing, pour it on my arm, which rendered me unconscious instantly. The
pain was unreal and I was out for some time, I don't know how
long, when I woke up and there are people shouting and shooting all around
me, and I couldn't see him, but I could hear a lot of
people yelling and screaming all around me. And SORRY grabbed the remainder of my
survival kit and I started climbing up the mountain. In survival school, they
said, when you're on the ground, get to the highest point, find
a clearing and sit down and wait to be rescued. And I thought,
I'll go for that. Turn out, nobody was coming. We had been
briefed if you're shot down north of the Red River, nobody's coming in because
they just couldn't fly in there it's too dangerous. And I was sixty miles
north of the Red River. But when you're on the ground and you're facing
captivity potentially or shot and killed, your brain doesn't allow you to accept that
you're not going to get rescued, and so you do everything to prepare to
be rescued, even though it's not going to happen. So I climbed a
hill of quite a way and I found a clearing about side of this room.
Maybe a little bit in this room that apparently lightning had struck and started
a fire, because there's a burned off area. And then I found some
bamboo that was all fallen down in a big pile, and I got underneath
that and hid. And probably eight or ten times that day I saw the
Vietnamese come through real close to me, but they didn't know where I was,
and they didn't find me, and so I knew it was flying.
The second time that day about one in the afternoon, so I knew the
air all the airplanes are coming back in the afternoon. So at one o'clock
Avenue and I've got my flares and my mirrors and my rock things, my
pistol, I got everything I could possibly carry. And when I started hearing
airplanes coming, then I went out in the middle of this clearing and started
preparing to be picked up. Called him all the radio. Nobody ever answered
me. I think they had probably they had a lot on their hands too.
They were flying into a bombing strike. After I had been standing in
this clearing for a little while, I look around and I'm completely surrounded by
Vietnamese and nobody had seen me. They're all firing their rifles up in the
air trying to shoot down the airplanes, and so now we had seen so
I just kind of melted into the ground and I crawled back back at my
little hiding place, and I was there for about another four hours before they
found me. A little black and white dog came and smelled me and started
barking, and pretty soon a guy would a gun came and he couldn't see
me, and he's probably at least as scared as I was. But because
he didn't know where I was, he couldn't see me, but he probably
assumed I had a gun, but he had a rifle when he kept going
looking all HI around because he got wrong and he was trying to get me
to stand up. Officially, I took my gun, put it in the
mud, and stood up. Was captured, him off to jail. That's
retired US Air Force Colonel Ed Hubbard, a Vietnam veteran who spent nearly seven
years as a prisoner of war. When we come back, Colonel Hubbard explains
what life was like as a prisoner in the so called Hanoi Hilton. That's
straight ahead. I'm Greg Corumbus and this is Veterans Chronicles. This is Veterans
Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition has retired US Air
Force Colonel Ed Hubbard, who spent nearly seven years as a prisoner of war
after being shot down in nineteen sixty six. Just before the break, we
learned about how he was forced to eject from his plane, his efforts to
evade capture, and what happened when he was finally taken into custody. Now,
Colonel Hubbard tells us what life was like when he got to the prison.
First thing they did they took everything I had. First I was they
tied me up, and then they realized they want to take me out of
my flight suit and everything, and they couldn't because I was tied up.
So they had to untie me to get my clothes off, and I was
down to my underwear and my socks, and I put a rope around my
neck, tied my arms together behind my back by the elbows, tied my
wrist together, and we walked for probably an hour, most of an hour
back down the hill that I had come up into the village where they came
from, not all the way down. They stopped and they said it's here,
and there were my boot tracks scorn up the hill, so they tracked
me by my boot tracks. You know, who would have ever thought to
turn around and walk backwards up the hill or take your boots off, And
so they knew I was up there. It was just a matter of time
they would eventually find me. Went sat in the village under a thatched hut
in the pig pen, as pig kept coming by and checking me out.
And I was there for about an hour, I guess, and then an
army guy came and looked me over, and he went away, and they
all went and had dinner, left me in the pig pen, tied to
the post with a little kid about ten years old with a great, big
long rifle. It was guarding me. After dark, they took me for
a walk through the general He started probably about eight o'clock at night. Walked
until sun up the next morning. Every time we would across the river,
we would walk across on a log, And every time we walk across on
the log, I'd fall into the river. As you get you don't balance
very well when you're tied up and blindfolded, and so I I was peaking.
I could see out under my blindfold, but I couldn't stay on the
log, and they just dragged me out of the river and we'd go on.
So finally it about five in the morning. I guess I was in
a place and there was another air raid because a lot of shoot and everything.
And then they put me in the back of a truck and we went
for an all day truck ride. And then later that night I got put
into it. The only time in my life in prison, I was in
a bamboo cage, which everybody talks about bamboo cage. I never saw one,
he said once, and it was ibab be six or eight foot square,
was in the middle of a river, and so I was sitting in
the mud and the river. And then they took me off for my first
interrogation about eight o'clock that night. And do you know what a knee knocker
is? You ever been on a ship, a naval ship. The doors
don't go all the way to the floor. They have this thing you have
to step over. Well, that's how bamboo houses are built. They have
a thing that holds the frame of the door. So I walked into my
first interrogation, was tied up blindfold. It tripped over the knee knocker face
down in the mud. And when we had our first discussion, there was
a guy who had bright light shining, just like like this bright light shine
in your face, and he said, the name ranks here on number.
I gave him that, and he asked what kind of airplane I flew?
And I told him, sorry, I'm not allowed to tell you that.
You can't tell me, or you won't tell me. I said, it
doesn't make difference. I'm not going to tell you. And so he took
a gun of some kind and stuck it right up against my four It says,
now, tell me what kind of airplane you I got to blow your
head off. And I said, I won't tell you. What I said
it was impolite to say the least, which led to about an hour beating
by about ten guys, and they took me out, tied me up,
and tied me to the wall of a truck, and then rode in the
truck for the next Actually turns out I thought it was one day. It
was actually two days. I lost complete knowledge of where I was or how
long I'd been there, so I thought I arrived in Hanoi at the Hanoi
Hilton prison on Friday morning, and it was actually Saturday morning. But I
had a lot of hallucinations and everything, and I continue to have those until
an American and settled across the hall from He spoke to me, and it
was like throwing the lights, which all of a sudden hallucinations went away.
And he told me where I was, and he said, don't be standing
up kicking the door. That don't give them any more reason to beat you,
because they're going to beat you anyway. And so that was my first
contact with another American. Who was that prisoner, Jerry Coffee, Navy commander.
What did they do to you once you were there? Oh, they
tie you up, beat you, put your leg irons and put your arms
behind your back. And I have a scar on my left elbow where they
tied me that day. It was tied so tight they cut all the way
down to the bone. Took it over a year to heel. My arms
were completely paralyzed for the first seven months I was there from the elbows down.
How often did they do this? For the first two weeks they did
almost every day until you wrote what they were asking for. And unfortunately,
eventually I couldn't write much because I couldn't hold I couldn't hold a pen in
my hands between the two hands. But it was it was a pretty routine
occurrence for the first few weeks, and they would have you write something about
the wonderful bet of these people and the horrible Americans, and then they would
to ask you to write something saying that you weren't forced to write that,
and they say, I said, well, that's ridiculous. Don't you think
you did force me? And they said, would you want to force you
again? We were going to do that too, And so it was kind
of a It was kind of a weird experience that you couldn't quite comprehend that
humans were doing this to you. But after you've been there for a short
period time, you found out this is kind of routine and you learned to
deal with it. You mentioned how Jerry Coffee kind of snapped you back into
what your reality was at that point. But what are you draw on to
deal with this ongoing I think the thing that I kind of stuck in because,
probably because of my personality, it pissed me off to be treated that
way. I resented it. They tried to belittle you, They made bow
every time you saw Vietnamese and it's a very very difficult thing for Americas to
be put in that position, and you don't respond very well, and you
realize eventually the the more belligerent you become, the more you're going to get
beaten, and so you kind of try to back off as much as you
can, but at the same time, you didn't want to do what they
wanted you to do, and so it's a tricky balancing act that we learned
to deal with. For me for years, as we used to call that
sitting on the fence. That means you don't want to do anything that they
ask you to do, but you don't want to get beaten in the process.
And sometimes you'd fall off and you'd write something or say something that you
wish you hadn't and then you get back up on the fence, and then
you'd fall off on the other side. And it was a very challenge being
in prison. I would say, from my perspective, once you've been beaten
a few times and you recover. So when my arms came back, the
feeling came back in my arms and I could move my hands again. It
took seven months, but I realized how amazing the human body is and how
it can recover from terrible brutality. So once you realize you can be beaten
severely and still recover, that changes the way you play the game mentally.
It's a really real difficult situation. You have to mentally talk yourself into knowing
when you take this stand, they're probably going to beat you, and you
had to be prepared for that, and you have to be willing to live
with that. And if you write something that they want that you don't want
to write, you have to live with that to the kind of a guilt
feeling that you didn't do enough, which is harder. Probably the guilt.
We worried about that a lot more than we did. The beatings, you
know, became almost routine to the point that you didn't you didn't dread them
as much. They were never fun, but but it wasn't that big a
deal. The mental anguish wondering if you were going to get court martial for
what you had done in prison when you got home, that that trouble us
for a long time. Took us a long time to learn to deal with
that. We've heard a lot about the tap code. Also, how much
did that help to help you mentally, and then just for me, it
was that was the be all and end all, and I learned. I
learned the tap code the first week I was there, and I was in
charge of communications every cell I lived in the whole time I was in prison,
and it was important to me to be able to talk to other people,
to know what was going on and who was being beaten and why,
to know what lies they had told so you could support their positions and stuff
like that. So I probably spent one average, probably spent eight to ten
hours a day tapping on the wall. And then we got more proficient,
we learned better ways to communicate, but the tap coat was always kind of
the basis for everything we did. Did you learn how to tap the shortest
possible sentences you could think of? We we abbreviated the English language everything you
know, T Y was they every word you, letter you was u y
o U. But we learned how to I would call it prison shorthand.
And then you know some things t T was that we reduced everything down to
two letters or three letters the most he said there were upgrade in this communication.
What were those? Well, when we first found out we could make
you could tap on the wall, but you didn't always have a common wall
with the guy that you wanted to communicate with. He might be in in
a different building. And we found out that you could get up on your
if you depend on how the configuration of your room. If you had a
slat at the top of your window, that was they had bars in the
windows, and then they bricked the windows up. Sometimes they left a brick
out at the top, so you had a little space there. Many of
the rooms had a vent hole that was up even higher, and you could
if you had two guys in the room, you could stand on the guy's
shoulders and you could get up to the vent hole. And so you get
up to the vent hole. And there are a lot of things that happened
in prison that are the origin and why Americans do things is unknown, but
it worked. You know what shaven haircut sounds like. That's how we call
the guy. If you wanted to talk to the guy in the next cel,
you go into the wall, and if he didn't do then you knew
it in an American and so he didn't tap on the wall anymore. But
we found out if you climb up your vent hole, put your mouth up.
Within a matter of seconds, faces would pop up in the vent holes
in the building next door, because everybody knew that cough was an American looking
out a hole somewhere, and sometimes it was under the door, sometimes it
was through the vent hole, sometimes the crack in the window, through the
shutters, but everybody knew that. So you can send tap code silently by
just sticking your hand up in the vent hole and going, that's an age,
that's an eye spells high. That's how simple it is. And we
could send that one hundred yards across the courtyard to the other side of the
camp. Yeah, all you had to do was make contact with a guy
once and then every day he knew to look at this little black hole in
the wall of a white building across the courtyard one hundred yards away, and
he knew at noon when because we I don't know if you are a where
they had a propaganda radio played twenty four hours a day, and every three
hours there was a b B B beep beep, And that's how we set
our mental watch. That was at six o'clock, twelve o'clock, three o'clock
around the clock. You know, we knew plus or minus a few minutes
of what time of day it was, and we reset our watch every day
with that sound. And so from noon till two o'clock roughly, we had
what we called the cista, and that was a period of time when the
guards all took a break and went to eat and everything, and we were
left alone to take a nap or do whatever you wanted to do. We
used that two hours to communicate, as that was the most important part of
our day. And so at noon you get up to your vent hole and
a guy one hundred yards away would come up in the vent hole wave to
you, and then you send tap good for two hours and you would get
all the information from his side of the camp and where from where I was
for a long time, I could see all the way across the camp.
I could get it. And then there's another building right over the wall,
right here, and there's another building over here. This is at the camp
we called the zoo. I could see the guy that lived in the garage,
I could see the guy that lived in the pool hall, and I
could see the guy that lived in the pigstye, all from the same window.
And so I would get this news and I would pass it to this
guy. He'd give me his news. I'd pass it to that guy and
he'd give me his update. And I pass it to this guy and he'd
passed me his news, and I'd pass it this guy and he'd passed me
his new news, and I passed it this guy. We needed to have
for hours and hours and hours, and so we weren't. We weren't.
I wouldn't say we weren't bored, but we really weren't. The first three
years before the beating stopped, you were never bored. You always had something
going on. Then later when things changed, we learned new, but we
learned all kinds of So I had a work program for a short period of
time and we were breaking up bricks with a sledgehammer out the courtyard. Was
every time you do, go ding ding ding ding ding, and a guards
are standing right there watching it. I have no clue. You're to communicating
with everybody in the camp through tap coat on breaking up bricks. So when
you had to go out and sweep the street, everybody we never figured out
why they did that. But I had a little bamboo broom. You go
out and sweep the streets, go you said, hide everybody in the camp.
As we got there longer, we found out that it took too long
to do that, and we invented a handcoat. A guy named Tom Browning
was in a cell over and the pigsty, and one day I got up
and peeking out the window. He got up and he went and it didn't
take a giant mental giant to figure out that's ABCD, and so we started
doing the handcoat. Well. In order to be up on the you had
to stand on this little narrow window ledge and hold onto the bar with your
arm, and if the guard came unannounced, you couldn't get your arm back
in the window quick enough to keep from being caught. We invented our version
of the deaf mute code that was a one hand code is ABC through the
alphabet, and you could do that and hold onto the bars with your hand
and send code with the other hand. And then after we'd been there for
a long time we got a lot smarter. We found out we all had
a little porcelain cup that we drank out of. And if you took the
bottom of the cup and put it against the wall, put your mouth in
the cup, put your hands like this, you could talk in the cup,
and you could guy on the other side of the wall has his cup
with the flat end all the ends of the wall, with his open end
against his ear, around his ear, and you can talk through eighteen inches
of concrete just as clear as you're talking and I'm talking to you. So
we learned a lot. The longer we were there, the smarter we got.
And so what I tied first time I tried to teach a tap cod
to a guy that didn't know it. I tapped on the wall and I
went dump tump, dump ump, and he tapped back, and I said,
who are you? And he tapped back, who are you? I
said, I asked you first. Well, turn out the guy didn't know
the tap code at all. He was mimicking what I was doing. And
so in order to teach him the tap code, I tapped once and he
tapped once. That I tapped twice, that I tapped all the way up
to twenty six. And when I did that, he banged on the voice
as I understand what you're doing. And in three days I taught him the
tap code using that incredibly difficult method. Four years later, I could have
put my cup against the wall and explained it to it. So it's called
the evolution of communication. Absolutely, that's absolutely fascinating. We didn't have a
whole lot else to do. Quite honestly, were you mainly talking about what
was happening in the camp? Were you talking about your lives back home?
Yeah, we talked about everything. We had twenty four hours a day with
nothing to do, and so we talked about everything. We talked about.
We had camp rules, we had our own created our own regulations. As
as we got more and more guys and we got more senior guys, they
created We created a wing, an air force and a non service wing of
organization. Each building was a squadron, and we talked about the rules.
We memorized the rules that everybody memorized everything. We passed the names of everybody
in the camp. Something that's never been officially sanctioned to be told, but
it's true. We communicated in coded messages in our letters to our family,
and it was done. They re challenge the people at this end, military,
the DoD, the CIA, whoever was operating this end of the coding
was doing with a computer. We were doing our head and you didn't know
when you're going to get the right but you knew someday you were going to
probably and so you would figure out what piece of small piece of information you
can put as a seven line letter form that you had to write on.
And if you wrote really small, you could get about one hundred and forty
words on the seven lines, and you encoded a message in there, and
then you memorize the message, and then you had to keep it in your
memorize and it be absolutely verbatim. And you might wait six months before you
got to write, but when you got a chance to write, you had
already written a letter in your head, and you know exactly what to put
on the paper. And when the messages came in from the other end to
us, then we had to decode them as you sat there. The guy
sit there with a gun watching you reading your letter, and you'll probably only
see the letter one time in your life, and so you have to decipher
the message while you're sitting there, and you get one tray, and we
learned how to do that. Everybody had their own method of doing it,
but it was a very very complex thing that it would take me an hour
to explain to how it even worked. But that's been class a fight up
until just a couple of years ago that we did that. Retired US Air
Force Colonel Ed Hubbard, a Vietnam veteran and a prisoner of war. In
just a moment, Colonel Hubbard tells us what it was like to regain his
freedom. I'm Greg Corumbas, and this is Veterans Chronicles. This is Veterans
Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbas. We're speaking with retired US Air Force Colonel Ed
Hubbard. He's been telling us about how his plane caught fire over Vietnam,
forcing him to eject. He soon became a prisoner of war for nearly seven
years. Hubbard now picks up his story by explaining how at first he did
not expect to make it out of the prison alive, and then he tells
us how he was finally freed. First five months I was there, I
knew I was going to die there, and then one day A convinced myself
otherwise, Meg turned the corner and never ever thought about it again. We've
heard from some other veterans who were there that Operation Linebacker two in late nineteen
seventy two seemed to be the best indication that you might be going home soon?
Is that how you saw it as well? Well? The bombing started
in April of seventy two. Then they started coming north the first time since
nineteen sixty eight. They came north of the Mekong to bomb Hanoi or bob
North Vietnam. So we knew there was something going on, we didn't know
what it was. On the thirteenth of May, twitter nine of us were
bundled up and tied up and blindfolded and putting trucks and driven up to the
Chinese border. And we were up there for almost a year, and so
we missed Linebacker. When did you find out that you would be free?
At about ten o'clock in the morning the day I got released. We knew,
we knew the Peace Tree had been signed, we knew that there were
rules had been laid out for our release and everything. The first one hundred
and fifteen guys were released on the twelfth of February of seventy three. I
was in that group because was the early shootdown. I was in that group
until the night before they left. They took two of us out and put
us across the camp, and we actually wound up staying there for another twenty
days the day we were supposed to be every fifteen days, we're going to
release another group. When it came our turn to be released, they brought
the food that morning in a big bucket and the guy and I another guy
and I were in charge of the food that day, and we poured the
food in the ditch, said we're not eating that crap going home today,
and later found out we weren't going home today, And so we had one
hundred and thirteen guys in the camp that weren't very pleased with us throwing their
food on the ditch. But four days later, Saturday, we started seeing
indications of just in the personalities of the guards that things were changing favorable in
our light, and actually four of us set up. We had a little
miniature cards we made out of scraps of paper. We sat up and played
bridge all night and Saturday night and Sunday morning everything came and we ate the
food as from we learned earlier not to throw the food. But somewhere around
ten or eleven o'clock in the morning, the guard came and opened their door
to our cell and Air Force Lieutenant colonel and his little blue suit walked in
he says, and you guys want to go home today. And two hours
later we were at the airport getting on the airplane when it happened. It
was all of a sudden, after almost seven years. What's that feeling like,
Well, it's the first thing is you don't believe it's happening. You
know they're going through the motions, but you're sure because they'd already four days
earlier. They had screwed it up somehow, and we didn't go anywhere,
and so we weren't really convinced that it was real. But they did take
us out of this prison and take us and put us on the bus and
take us to Geelam Airport. And we were standing there and we had all
these rules that we had made up. Things you will do and won't do.
One of the things you wouldn't accept any gifts from the Vietnamese on the
way out. You couldn't take flowers or anything. And so we all got
off the bus, that were twenty of us on the first flight, and
they gave all of us a bottle of beer and we all put it down
by our right foot when we marched off to go around the building to the
flight line. There's the twenty balls of beer standing there in formation very neatly,
and we went around the building and there was a pretty good sized crowd,
and there was a white stripe on the tarmac and while we were standing
there, this beautiful big airplane comes floating down out of the clouds onto the
runway. Its first time I'd ever seen a one forty one because they were
built. After we were gone, they read your name and when you stepped
across the line, you saluted the general and shook his hand and you were
free. They turned and it was when I got to the head of the
line. I was the second guy in the line, so when I got
up to the saluted the general. Then there was a lieutenant colonel and I
was a lieutenant, a first lieutenant where I was captured. So this lieutenants
we had a little a wall bag, you know, with these little bitty
bags, and he said, let me carry your bags, sir, And
I thought, this guy's a lieutenant car he's called me sir. I wondered
what rank I am, because we didn't know. I turned out I was.
I had been promoted to major. So most of us that were there
for a long time got promoted twice while we were there. So anyway,
we walk out and got an airplane and closed the door and took off,
and once we were across the coast, the guy said, we're feet wet,
and if we lose all four engines, we're not going back, and
then everybody went kind of a zerk. It was. I don't remember how
far. It was a couple of three hours flight over to the Philippines,
and of course when we landed at Clark, we were met by ten thousand
people and nobody, but nobody would have ever known that was going to happen.
The entire base, all the families, everybody on the base was out
on the flight line with flags and signs and posters everything. It was a
really, really, really strange experience. You stepped up to the door of
the airplane, they read your name, You walked down the rant, saluted,
the four star generals met you there, went got on the bus.
They took you off to the hospital. So we were quarantined and the hospital
on the fifth floor. I was there for four days, and then on
the morning the fifth day, we took off from Clark forty one. They
were four guys, six guys and his airplane to carry four hundred troops or
six of us in their flight, nurses and stuff, and we flew from
Clark to Honolulu and then landing on Holloluluh in the middle of the night in
a rainstorm to refuel and flew nonstuff from from Honolulu to San Antonio, Atlanta.
At Kelly Air Force Base. Three guys got off there, we're going
to the hospital in Texas, and three of us continued to Saint Louis to
Scott Air Force Base where we were going to be in the hospital. What
was the family? Young and like a little strained, a little strange.
First thing, we got off the airplane, my wife and my son.
My son was two when I was shot down. He was nine now,
so he's a big kid. And they came running out on the flight line
and we hugged and everything, and then they put us in a staff car
and took us to the hospital. Because nobody knew what our condition was physically
or mentally, nobody knew what to do with us. We were quarantined in
our room and you can only see one person time. So my wife came
in and talked to me a while, and then my son came in and
talked to me. Then my mother came in, Then my father came in,
Then my mother in law came in, Then my father stepfather in law
came in, and then my older brother came in, and finding my younger
brother came in. So you get just a few minutes with each person.
And it's about eight or nine o'clock at night, so it didn't take them
long, and they ushered everybody out except my wife. My wife was allowed
to stay for about an hour and then she left. And then you have
to remember we left hand Away on Sunday morning, and this is Thursday night,
and I hadn't been asleep yet since last Sunday, and we were running
on such a high level of a drum and we just you couldn't go to
sleep. No matter what they gave us sleeping pills on the airplane, nobody
could go to sleep. So I'm up on and around in my hospital room,
and I'm in my underwear, and I'm shaving, and I've got half
my face shaved. And there was a knock on the door, and I
opened the door and there were five four star generals standing there, the Chief
of Staff of the Air Force and his entourage, and they came by at
three in the morning and said, I'm sorry. We were supposed to be
here when you were playing Landed last night. We didn't get here, and
we just want to see how you're doing. I said, I think I'm
doing pretty darn good. I said, you know, I'm half shaved.
I'm sorry about that. So I walked down the hall of hospital to lounge
and got up, eat a cup of coffee, and set And the only
time my life ever been in a room full of generals, and we're sitting
there in my underwear with shavings up on one side of my face. It
was it was a little different. But they stayed for a little while,
and then they went checked on somebody else, But it was it was a
different I was in the hospital there for ten days, had a couple of
surgeries while I was there, and then came home to where my family had
been. Do you have lingering injuries? No, man, nothing. I
had a broken wrist, and beyond that had I'd had many, many,
many boils, but pretty much everything had cleared up by the time I got
home. I was medically grounded for a year for a variety of odds and
ends. But nothing critical other than my left wrist had been broken, and
I did a bone graph on my wrist. Most Americans will never know what
it's like to lose their freedom. You have lost it, and you obviously
got it back. How do you describe what that's like? Well, did
you know I was just in Vietnam? No, I did last month.
About a year ago. I got wind of a tour that was going to
Vietnam for the fiftieth anniversary of our captivity or release. And so when I
got the itinerary and I looked at it, I realized the tour ended in
Hanoi on the fourth of March, which is fifty years to the day from
the day I was released. And so my wife and I went on this
tour, and there were two of us, a guy named Wayne wit L
who lives up in Atlanta, who he and I were both released on the
fourth of March, and so we went, and there were seven former prisoners
on this tour was an eighteen eighteen day trip. Bill Shanko was shot down
in the day before Christmas of sixty five. He was on the trip.
I was shot down in July of sixty six. Wayne was shot down in
July of sixty seven, and then the other guys were all part of a
linebacker, so it was a very interesting group of people. So we went
to Saigon and spent four days, and we went up the Mekong River on
a boat into Cambodia and went to Anger Watt did. Then we flew over
to Hanoi for four days, and then on the fourth of March, fifty
years to the day from the first time we walked down in prison, we
walked out the front door of the prison again. And so everybody I knew
said that has to be incredibly emotional experienced, and it actually, in my
mind it wasn't as emotional as I thought it might be what I did,
as I spent the whole day thinking about how much I have done in the
last fifty years that I would have missed if I hadn't got out of jail.
And so it's kind of a look back and say, you're the luckiest
guy world because I've been all over the world. I've been the eighty four
countries since I got out of jail. I've been to Africa and photos faris
nine times millions of things that I've been able to do that I would not
have gotten to do if I had got out of jail. So it's it's
a pretty important day in my life. That's the day I was born the
second time, as I see, so I just turned fifty last March in
my second life. That's right, that's right now. You stayed in the
Air Force, of course, and from what I understand, you became well
known for improving different things on a grand scale, basically productivity and performance.
They kind of gave you some of the more struggling areas of the Air Force
and you turned them around. What was the key to that? Well,
the key to that is to believe that there's a solution to the problem and
then be willing to do whatever's necessarily. Actually Ted and I were just talking
about some of the problems in Fort Wall and Beach that could have been solved
thirty five forty years ago if somebody would have listened. I used to be
head of the transportation committee for this Chamber of Commerce, and at the time
I suggested a way to solve the traffic problem here was to build an elevated
highway over this town so people could go through here at seventy miles an hour.
The idea was turned down by the Florida Department Transportation because they said,
we already have three potential plans. If you add a fourth, it take
us another fifteen years to implement all the plans. Well, it turns out
now we're down the road forty years to the month almost and they still haven't
implemented the plan. And so in the Air Force, I had a better
position because I didn't have to ask permission to do things that were more intelligent.
I just did them. And if I offended somebody along the way,
like my two star commander, I would explain to anybody, said, this
is a problem we've had in the Air Force. I know how to fix
it, and I will show you how to fix it if you'll just let
me try. And so I was allowed to try. Sometimes I didn't ask
for permission because I'm a firm believer in the adage that it's easier to get
forgiveness than it is to get permission. And so if I had something I
thought needed to be done, I invented hands on motorcycle training. We were
killing a number of people airman crashing and motorcycles at Egglin, and so we
implemented a mandatory hands on training for a week and when the general said,
how did you get authorities to do that? And I said, I just
made it up, as nobody's challenged it. And so it's working, and
we reduced the loss of lives by a significant number. And we were crashing
government vehicles through stupidity, and we found a way to make that painful.
And we used at one guy as an example by rule by Air Force rules,
I can take his pay if he's out doing something not very smart and
it crashes the vehicle and destroys it, I can make him pay for it.
And so I did that, and I put it on the front pages
of the bait based newspapers. So everybody on the base understood the severity of
the punishment if you did something stupid, and we were able to reduce the
mishapperate in government vehicles by about ninety five in one year. And so it
was a belief that we developed in prison. We knew we had problems to
solve in prison. We knew problem solving in prison was not optional. If
you didn't solve problems, you're going to die. And so we learned how
to step up and say this is a problem we have to find a solution,
and we became very, very creative. Watching the Vietnamese make things out
of bamboo is probably one of the most fascinating things that were done. You
find out that you can make virtually every single thing you need in the world
out of a piece of bamboo with a machete. And so we just watched
and we observed, you know, how things got done. Given your long
and distinguished career and all you went through as a prisoner of war, what
are you most proud of from your time in the service? I think the
realization that what we learned in prison was remarkably important and to not do something
to utilize that is a terrible waste of that seven years. And so about
thirty five years ago I started speaking to Air Force events and over the time
I've talked over four million people in the last thirty five years about how to
solve the issues that face our country. And so, I guess the one
thing I gained prison most important thing ever happened in my life. It taught
me how to learn to deal with the world as it is, not as
you wish it was, and find out what the problems are and then seek
a solution and don't be afraid. If somebody challenges you, don't be afraid
to show them how it works. My favorite quote is, you can't do
that because I wrote a book one time. For a year, the guy
that was my boss told me every day something I couldn't do, and I
logged it into my book and at the end of the day, I would
write when I got finished, and I gave him the book as a farewell
president when I left, I said, this is a book I wrote on
your watch. All the things you said couldn't be done that have all been
done. And so it's a level of confidence. Some people that used to
work for me said, you're the most arrogant person I ever met, And
I said, but I get a lot done, and so I don't know.
I'm not here to win a personality content. I'm here to accomplish what
we came here to do at a better cost. God said, you know,
at a nutshell, every day I see things that are being done that
I think are ignorant, and so I take time out to explain to people
why I think it's ignorant and how I think they might approach it. It's
been very, very successful in talking in industry about why do you do it
this way? And I created a seminar called Adult Conversations, and that means
every single person that works here is an adult, and every one of them
has an idea or opinion, and if you're not listening to that, you're
wasting their time. You're paying him for physical labor, but you're not paying
him for their mental capacity. And when you start doing that and bringing people
in and say tell me how you would solve this problem, and everybody knows
everybody's got an opinion, and if you don't listen to him, you're wasting
your time. You're spend a lot of energy not solving the problem. Thank
you, sir for your time, and most of all, for your service
and your sacrifice for this great country. I always say it's my pleasure.
It wasn't something I'd care to do again, but it's probably the most important
thing ever happened to be getting shot down. So I had to go learn
how to deal with the world. And it's changed my world forever, and
I've changed you four million people. Retired US Air Force colonel and Hubbard it's
a Vietnam veterans spent nearly seven years in captivity as a prisoner of war after
being shot down in July of nineteen sixty six. He's also the recipient of
the Silver Star, among many other honors. I'm Greg Columbus. This is
Veterans Chronicles. Hi, this is Greg Corumbus, and thanks for listening to
Veterans Chronicles, a presentation of the American Veterans Center. For more information,
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