The year was 1966 and this was Captain Jeff Powell’s
forty-second career mission in the air war over North Vietnam. He was flying about thirty miles
southeast of Hanoi in an F-105 Thunderchief, a supersonic aircraft carrying
almost half its weight in munitions.
His target was a bridge, a vital North Vietnamese supply line connecting
to the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Powell rolled down through a 10,000-foot cloud ceiling,
spotted his objective and released his weapons. Half the cement span disintegrated. When he tried to pull out of the
maneuver, the controls of his aircraft wouldn’t respond. Suddenly the sky around him turned a
bright white as the fuel tank under his left wing exploded. He ejected at the last possible moment.
A month later, Jeff Powell was blindfolded and trussed with
wire as he was being marched through the jungles and villages of North Vietnam
by night, his captors traveling under the cover of darkness to avoid being
spotted by American bombers or rescue planes. At one point, nauseous and feverish, he was hung from a
banana tree in a large village as the star attraction in a circus of
mockery. He was stoned and
urinated on by the villagers.
One month later, somewhere near the Gulf of Tonkin, Captain
Terry Jones had survived the destruction of his F-4 phantom by a surface-to-air
missile, ejecting only after trying every emergency procedure to regain control
of his plane. Floating through the
Vietnamese sky, he knew his only injury was a cut on his arm, but he was
terrified nonetheless. Beneath
him, excited villagers and militiamen were gathering in a rice paddy and were
shouting and pointing violently.
Some brandished sticks and machetes; others wielded guns and they were
pointed directly at him.
Six weeks later, Terry Jones was in a bamboo cage in the
jungle lying on his stomach with his feet in wooden stocks, his arms tied
behind him with wet ropes.
Following this tortuous confinement, he was taken to a temple in a
village and turned over to a North Vietnamese officer. The man had with him another American
pilot who looked close to death.
He was heavily bearded and emaciated. From there the two prisoners continued their march by night
through the jungles and villages of North Vietnam. Their final destination was Hanoi.
Thus Jeff Powell and Terry Jones, and many others like them,
came together to a place the America airmen called the Hanoi Hilton. It was a triangular building the size
of a city block, surrounded by a dry moat and twenty-foot walls studded with
sharp hunks of glass and topped with electric barbed wire. Upon arrival, the two pilots heard a
prisoner in solitary confinement from a cellblock called Heartbreak screaming
at the top of his lungs, “Oh, God!
Oh, God! Oh, my God!” The captive American had been bent over
backwards and tied so tight that his spine threatened to snap like a dry stick
at any moment because he would not give his captors information beyond his
name, rank, serial number, and date of birth. Jeff Powell and Terry Jones both went through Heartbreak. Every prisoner did upon their arrival
at the Hilton.
Major James Kasler arrived at the Hanoi Hilton with a broken
thighbone sticking into his groin.
He was beaten from 6:00 AM to 10:00 PM, each hour, for days on end. His head was smashed and his buttocks
ripped to shreds with fan belts.
His mouth was so badly bruised that he could not open it. One of his eardrums was ruptured. But Kasler found that when he recited
the Lord’s Prayer, concentrating intently upon the words, he was able to block
out the pain of his beatings and torture.
Captain James Ray, shot down on Mother’s Day, 1966, had been
in solitary confinement for two years.
Each day’s menu consisted of two servings of pumpkin soup with a lump of
pig fat in it. He shared his cell
with an army of ants, mosquitoes, and flies. It would have been easy to lose his faith and his mind, but
often and mysteriously, he would feel a presence from another world. He felt he was not alone. It was two years later that he learned
his family and church were praying for him back home in Texas at the precise
time he would feel this unexplained presence.
All the prisoners at the Hilton endured torture, seclusion,
loneliness, depression, and a strict regiment of rules over a four-year
period. In their isolation, yet
shared suffering, they developed a method of communication. A language was created based on the
Morse code. With their ears to the
walls and their bodies wrapped in blankets to keep the noise level down, the
prisoners communicated by tapping on the concrete dividers. The alphabet was translated into a 5X5
dot matrix in which each letter was represented by the placement of vertical
and horizontal wall taps. Once a
prisoner knew the code, he was connected to his fellow prisoners.
Via this network, the men taught each other Scripture. They also discovered the names of their
comrades and learned about each other’s lives and families. Through this method, they ascertained
who was being tortured and who was deathly ill. In this way they shared each other’s pain and could pray for
one another and support each other in an environment where they could not see
or touch.
Eventually church services and prayer meetings were
conducted through this acquired means of communication. The men learned to time the guard’s
perambulations through the prison.
When the patrols were out of reach, the tapping began. When the sentinels were close, the
tapping ceased. Every Sunday
morning, the senior officers thumped on the wall five times at the appropriate
moment. This alerted the prisoners
that it was time to worship. The
signal was “church call” and it was the highlight of each week for the
prisoners. It was the one moment
they looked forward to in a world of chaos, torment, and anguish.
The service would begin with the tapping of a prayer and
upon its conclusion each man would recite to himself the Lord’s Prayer or the
23rd Psalm. These
portions of Scripture were recounted from memory – there was no Bible in the
prison during these years – and taught during the week and passed from one
prisoner to another via the rapping conduit. Following the Scripture reading, the prisoners would sing
silent hymns and conduct private prayers.
After the reflective worship, the sermon would be preached. Then the service was brought to
conclusion with the singing of the Doxology followed by a prisoner tapping the
closing prayer. The services took
the majority of the day to complete.
In November of 1970, conditions improved somewhat. After an unsuccessful American rescue
attempt, the North Vietnamese decided for security reasons to move POW’s from
other prison camps to the Hanoi Hilton.
To make room for the influx, new cells were partitioned off; men were
finally moved out of solitary confinement and into large, open cells that could
accommodate up to sixty prisoners.
For the first time in four years, the prisoners could finally see each
other and talk face to face. No
longer was the tapping language needed. Now they could finally worship God together in one place.
For years the prisoners had asked for a Bible, and for years
their request was denied. Then in
December of 1970, one month after they were united, the English-speaking
interrogator brought a Bible into the cell and the men gathered around it and
for a moment they stood in stunned silence. Then they began to weep. In front of them was the written Word of God, the source of
all hope, of all life, of all power.
Jeff Powell was the first to pick it up and through his tears read the
Christmas story aloud, then several Psalms, then the Sermon on the Mount. The men were not sure how long they
would have the Bible or whether they would ever see it again, so James Ray
turned to 1 Corinthians 13 and memorized the chapter. The Bible was in the cell for two hours.
In the spring of 1971, some four months later, the prisoners
saw the Bible again. The North
Vietnamese permitted three prisoners to copy the Scriptures for one hour a week
under direct supervision. James
Ray was one of the three. He sat
on a wooden chair at a wooden table and with a guard at his side began copying
the Sermon on the Mount. During
the five weeks the program lasted he managed to copy much more than Jesus’ most
famous sermon. Each day when he
brought the precious words back to the cell, Ray’s cellmates recopied the words
in the crude fashion they had devised for other writing: on toilet paper
rations with brick dust ink and quill pens. They recopied the verses because each week Ray had to return
his previous week’s copy before he could transcribe more.
Eventually, on the condition that the prisoners follow an
approved format, the North Vietnamese allowed as many as thirty men at a time
to meet together for formal church services. More often than not, these services would be interrupted and
the men would be thrust back into their cells. However, on one occasion they were able to worship uninterrupted
and with no overseer monitoring their every word and action. And this unexpected liberty allowed the
prisoners to experience a service they would never forget.
Captain Tom Curtis woke up early on Easter Sunday, 1971 and
studied the notes and verses that he and James Ray had assembled the previous
evening. Curtis looked at the roomful
of sleeping prisoners around him.
Twenty-eight men. All of
them pilots. How had they managed
to survive in this place?
At about ten o’clock Curtis stood in front of the drab
eastern wall and called the service to order. Several of the men limped while getting up. Others writhed in pain as they
struggled to take a seat in the semi circle near the Captain. Once each captive flyer was in place, a
quartet of prisoners sang The Old Rugged
Cross and then everyone joined in Amazing
Grace. Curtis recited the
version of the Passion of Christ that the men had patched together from
somewhat faulty memories, “And when they had bound Him, they led Him away and
delivered Him to Pontus Pilate.
And they stripped Him and put a crown of thorns on His head, and spit on
Him and hit Him. And they said,
‘Crucify Him.’” As he listened to
the familiar words, Curtis thought of the experiences they had all shared:
being bound, chained, spit upon, whipped, lashed to trees, and stoned.
One of the airmen then handed the Captain several pieces of
bread that had been saved from their previous day’s rations. “And He took the bread, and when He had
given thanks, He broke it and gave it to His disciples saying, ‘Take, eat. This is My body that is broken for you,
do this in remembrance of Me.’ ”
The bread was passed and quietly eaten. Then Curtis repeated the verses about the cup – “This is My
blood shed for you.” These men
know about blood, Curtis thought.
Their own blood flowing from open wounds, from lacerations and ruptured
eardrums, from torn out fingernails – blood that seeped through every makeshift
bandage swathing their frail bodies.
Now they all thought about Christ’s blood, shed for them.
The cup of carefully saved seaweed soup was passed. Someone quietly hummed Amazing Grace. As Curtis brought the cup to his lips, he trembled and began
to weep. He wondered if they had
any right to identify their suffering with Christ’s. But then wasn’t their presence in this place, alive against
all odds, a sign of Christ’s continuing presence with them? Suddenly he recalled Jesus’ words, “I
will build My church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.” They were part of that church, a part
of the broken body of Christ in every way. Yes, the church had prevailed, for here they were,
worshipping God in the jungles of a world gone mad. Against all odds, God’s presence was alive in what was
otherwise a living hell.
This story was adapted from
“Loving God” by Charles Colson.
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