Six Years in the Hanoi Hilton Read online

  Part One

  The Making of a Fighter Pilot

  HIGH FLIGHT

  Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

  And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

  Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

  Of sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things

  You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung

  High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there

  I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

  my eager craft through footless halls of air.

  Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

  I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

  Where never lark, or even eagle flew—

  And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod

  The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

  Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

  —John Gillespie Magee Jr.

  No. 412 squadron, RCAF

  (1922–1941)

  Chapter 1

  Baseball and BB Guns

  Spokane, Washington

  1953–1960

  When Jim dreamed, he dreamed of baseball. He lay on his bunk in the back of the house, tossing his ball in the air and catching it, and listened to games on the radio. There he stood on a diamond in Philadelphia, pitching for the Phillies, and the announcer was calling his name. Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Joe DiMaggio. . .and Jim Shively.

  For thirteen-year-old Jim, the future was clear—and it included a top spot in the major leagues. Jim practiced at least three times a day—before school, at recess, and after school, pitching and hitting in Dishman, his Spokane, Washington, neighborhood. Dishman looked like it came straight out of a 1950s movie: idyllic rows of picture perfect homes, fronted by bright green lawns precisely trimmed. Flowers and fruit trees lined every drive. Shiny Buicks or station wagons were parked in front of each garage—one car per home. The streets were filled with kids biking, shooting marbles, and playing sports.

  The Dishman grade school was just three blocks away, so Jim and his younger sister, Phyllis, rode their bikes or walked every day. More importantly for Jim with his big-time baseball aspirations, there was an empty field adjacent to the grade school. It hosted, six days a week, a work-up baseball game. The empty lot was completely void of grass and made up mostly of rocks, with bigger rocks for the bases, so the boys left every game with skinned elbows and bloody knees. Undeterred, every morning and afternoon they played, rain or shine, and also at recess.

  James Richard Shively was born on March 23, 1942, in Wheeler, Texas, a tiny town just twelve miles west of the Texas-Oklahoma border. He was his parents’ second son. His older brother, Harold Jr., had died, which Jim knew because he saw a picture of the grave one time, but the tragedy of his brother’s loss was off-limits for discussion. Before Jim’s first birthday, Harold and Jeanette picked up and moved to San Diego to join Jeanette’s parents on their chicken farm. That situation did not work out, and in 1946, at the end of the war, they moved again. They made their way up north and settled in the Spokane valley.

  It was a bit of an odd arrangement for those days, as Jeanette was the main breadwinner in the family. As far back as Jim could remember, she worked as a secretary and bookkeeper for the Steelworkers’ Union, a position she held for more than thirty years. She left the house early in the morning and came home and made dinner at night. She ran a tight ship, and everyone knew what was expected of them. For Jim that meant keeping his room clean, doing his outside chores, making good grades, and staying out of trouble. His mom set the rules, and his dad enforced them. Harold did not take matters of discipline lightly, and so for the most part, Jim complied.

  Jim’s dad held a variety of jobs. He worked as a molder in an aluminum plant, a delivery guy for Sunshine Dairy, and for a while he owned and operated a Conoco gas station. Jim never knew what happened to it. But his major line of business was remodeling the Shively home. It seemed his projects were ongoing, flowing one right into the next, with the house never actually reaching completion. One day Jim came home from school to find an entire wall knocked out and a dining room where the living room used to be. When that project was complete, Harold built a garage and then connected it with a new kitchen and a different dining room. Jim’s bedroom was at the back of the family home, in what had previously been a porch. His dad had closed it in and built some pine shelving and a pine bunk bed for Jim. When Harold ran out of space at ground level, he proceeded to hand-dig a basement under the house.

  Harold’s other preoccupation was saving money. He changed the heating system in their home frequently—from sawdust to coal, to oil, to gas, and back again, depending on what was cheapest to burn at the time. He also developed a rather ingenious method of irrigating their huge family garden, re-routing hoses in such a way that the water meter couldn’t read how much water they were using. Unfortunately, he was eventually found out and had to pay a big fine to the water company.

  Jim found it best to stay out of the way. He hung around outdoors with his baseball buddies, and if they weren’t around he found plenty to do on the Shivelys’ half-acre lot. Their backyard was home to chickens, all kinds of fruit trees, and at one time a young calf. The bountiful garden boasted enormous quantities of beans, corn, peas, beets, radishes, lettuce, potatoes, onions, and all kinds of berries. Jim loved the garden and even started a profitable business taking care of people’s yards when they went on vacation. He felt sorry for Phyllis, inside doing the dishes while he mowed the grass, tended the animals, and weeded the garden, chores which earned him a dollar per week.

  By the time he was twelve, Jim had caught a touch of his dad’s entrepreneurial spirit. That year he answered an ad in the back of Popular Mechanics magazine and sent in for a Christmas variety kit. He hopped on his Schwinn, loaded down with wrapping paper, greeting cards, and various decorative items, and set off door-to-door, selling his wares to all the housewives in the neighborhood. He stood to make a great commission if he sold the whole thing, and he did.

  BUSTED WITH A BB GUN

  Jim and Gary rode their bikes home from sixth grade in a great deal of worry. For Jim, this was just the latest in a series of BB gun transgressions. First he had accidentally shot out the neighbor’s window. Then, his friend David shot another neighbor lady in the rear while she was weeding her garden, and took off running, leaving Jim to take the blame. He had gotten out of that one by apologizing profusely and calling it, “a misfortunate accident.” This latest offense was not going to be so easy to explain.

  It had started innocently enough—Jim and Gary and their gang of buddies had the day off from school, so they were out tromping through the Dishman Hills with their guns. There was always something to do up there. They could make a raft out of sticks and leaves and float it on the pond. They could build a fort, shoot a squirrel, or throw rocks at a hermit tent and run away fast. On this particular day they hadn’t meant to cause any trouble, but they were startled in their roaming by a group of kids they didn’t know. Jim and his friends spent so much time exploring the hills that they considered them their own territory. As far as they were concerned, the other gang was trespassing. There was a small canyon dividing the two groups, and Jim and his companions had the higher ground. The Dishman gang wordlessly implemented their plan of attack, and it was a complete ambush. Within moments they had the smaller group on the ground, BB guns pointed at their heads. After a brief lecture Jim and his buddies let them go. Those guys would think twice before encroaching on their land again. Jim and his comrades-in-arms took off and forgot all about it.

  All would have been well and good, except one of the victims told his dad, who happened to be head of the Spokane County Juvenile Department. Jim and his buddies got called down to the principal’s office on Monday. The principal was going to call their parents, and he was giving the offending boys one day to confess before he did. Jim had a fe
eling this latest wrongdoing would throw his dad over the edge, so he waited until his mom got home from work to break the news. He gathered up his courage and went into the living room to face his parents as they enjoyed their after-dinner coffee. They sat quietly and listened while he confessed the whole story, and then his dad told him to go get his prized possession. Jim brought it back to him with bated breath, and watched while Harold broke it over his knee. That was the end of his BB gun.

  JUNIOR HIGH

  By the time Jim entered junior high, things in the little Dishman community had changed. Kids didn’t roam the streets after school anymore. One of the neighbors got a TV, and the rest of the neighborhood quickly followed suit. The arrival of the television marked the end of an era. It was such a big deal that they congregated at the neighbor’s house just to watch the test pattern and fiddle with the knobs. Work-up baseball couldn’t compete with modern technology. Jim showed up at the baseball field with his mitt, only to find it deserted in favor of The Mickey Mouse Club. His dad was the last to buy a television, but when he finally did Jim and Phyllis raced home to watch Milton Berle like everyone else.

  HIGH SCHOOL

  In 1956, Jim started high school at West Valley. He was nervous at first, because Gary had moved away the summer before, so Jim didn’t have a best friend. But high school turned out to be the time of his life. Not only did he excel academically, he was voted most popular and elected class president three years running, despite the fact that he spent a considerable amount of time in the vice principal’s office—usually for sneaking off campus to smoke.

  In 1950s fashion, the school set up a juke box in the girls’ gym and let the students dance at lunch. Jim was a great dancer and a much sought-after partner. He had lots of dates, but during his senior year he dated someone special, a cute cheerleader three years his junior, named Nancy Banta.

  One teacher in particular made a formidable impression on Jim: the legendary Jud Heathcote. Heathcote went on to coach Magic Johnson at Michigan State University, including the 1979 National Championship Team, but he started his career coaching basketball and teaching geometry at West Valley High School in Spokane, Washington. He was a great coach and a gifted mathematician, but he was most famous for his outrageous temper. In the classroom, he was not above throwing chalk at students who failed to grasp key concepts, like the unfortunate basketball player who failed to understand a geometry lesson. Heathcote hurled his chalk across the room at the player, hollering, “G*@ dammit, Roger, why do you have to be such a stupid idiot?”

  He was also the freshman baseball coach. Jim played baseball for Coach Heathcote his freshman year, and one game marked him forever. West Valley was competing against Lewis and Clark High School at Hart Field. It was a close game and someone had doubled, and Coach Heathcote put Jim in as a pinch runner, second base, and he got picked off at second. Coach was irate. His face turned red and he coughed and spat, unable to get his choice words out fast enough. After he had unleashed his fury, he forbade Jim to speak and moved him to the end of the bench, where Jim sat for the remainder of the season.

  The real terror, though, came after the game. Coach was also the bus driver, which made for a terrifying ride when they lost the game.

  By his senior year, Jim had realized he was not a great athlete. His baseball dreams had been dashed by Heathcote, so he took up as a box boy at Rosauers Supermarket, working thirty hours a week after school and on weekends. He made one dollar an hour, and what he didn’t spend on cigarettes he put into savings for a car. He sacked groceries, stocked shelves, swept and dusted, and since the store couldn’t sell beer or wine on Sundays, on Sunday mornings he took a big roll of butcher paper and taped it from one end of the cooler to the other to hide the alcohol.

  Jim graduated in 1960 with high honors, and planned to study architecture at Montana State University. But sometime during his senior year his mom suggested he apply to the Air Force Academy, because he could get a free education there. Jim wasn’t too keen on the idea, but he had been raised to be obedient. It was a very political process, and Jim relied on the fact that he probably wouldn’t get an appointment.

  He applied nonetheless, enduring an extensive physical exam at Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane and a grueling fitness test at McChord Air Force Base near Tacoma. In the end, Jim came in second on Senator Henry Jackson’s list of candidates. That meant he would not be going, and Jim was relieved. At the last minute, though, the number one guy withdrew his candidacy. Jim got a letter saying he had been accepted to the United States Air Force Academy. He had no desire to attend, but there was nothing he could do. He was committed.

  This twist of fate would set the course for the rest of his life.

  Chapter 2

  “What Did I Get Myself Into?”

  The Air Force Academy

  Colorado Springs, Colorado

  1960–1964

  “Get your chin in!”

  “Stand at attention!”

  “MARCH, you son-of-a- b****!”

  His “welcome” was far from welcoming. Jim hadn’t known what to expect from the United States Air Force Academy, but he had not expected this. From the second he crossed the threshold, they were screaming at him.

  He didn’t know how to march, but no one cared. The upperclassmen in their starched khakis, white gloves, and dress hats simultaneously shouted at him and called him names. They were barking orders but he had no idea what they meant. He looked around bewildered and tried to imitate the other cadets. Somehow he managed to double-time off to the basement, where someone threw a duffle bag at him. He filed through an assembly line and filled his bag with standard issue fatigues, combat boots, and an M1 rifle. Back in the pack and clueless, he marched with the crowd, wondering where they were leading him. He found himself at the academy barber, where someone sat him down and, without a word, shaved off his hair.

  DOOLIE SUMMER

  As anyone who has been through the first grueling months of a U.S. military academy education knows, the training was rigorous. Every day that summer the cadets were up at 5:30, in bed at 10:00, and on the run constantly. The new cadets walked on the right side of the hall, and if they encountered upperclassmen, they were to square themselves against the wall with a respectful “By your leave, sir,” waiting for permission to continue on their way. Every day consisted of military classes: instruction on assembling and disassembling the M1 and learning its various pieces, shooting at the rifle range, and drills. They pushed the limits of their physical fitness with jumping jacks, push-ups, and nonstop running.

  The Air Force Academy calls its freshman “doolies,” a derivative of the Greek word duolos meaning “subject” or “slave.” Jim quickly learned what it meant to be a doolie, and from the first day he hated it.

  Every doolie was issued a book called Contrails, containing important information on the Air Force Academy, the United States, and the Air Force. They were to commit to memory various points of knowledge, including every Air Force aircraft (those currently in inventory and any previous aircraft), the manufacturer, top speed, maximum altitude, number of engines, the engine manufacturer, and the armament. At any time a doolie might be asked to compare the elevation of Colorado Springs to Annapolis or West Point, or to recite General George Washington on the use of profanity during the Revolutionary War, or to quote General Spaatz about the Air Force. It was endless.

  Most of the quizzing went on at mealtime, a supposedly “family-style” affair with ten people to a table. But the tables had a definite rank order. The doolies sat at the end, served the food, and ate only when the upperclassmen had taken what they wanted. Doolies served the upperclassmen at their tables, announcing the arrival of each dish: “Cadet Smith, Sir, the potatoes have arrived, Sir, would Cadet Smith or any other cadet at the table care for potatoes, Sir?” During each meal the doolies sat at attention on the front three inches of their chair, answering questions and carefully replacing their forks at a forty-five-degree angle on th
eir plate after every bite. They were not allowed to look anywhere except down at their plates, unless someone was speaking to them. Throughout every meal, the upperclassmen would quiz them relentlessly on Contrails, leaving them virtually no time to eat.

  The new cadets were dizzy—and not just from lack of sleep, rigorous training, and constant badgering. At 7,200 feet, the elevation in Colorado Springs took some adjustment. To make matters worse for Jim, his squadron had been assigned to the top floor. On the first day, as they ran up six flights of stairs with two bags each of heavy gear, someone in front of him passed out. Jim bent down to help him, but was curtly instructed to leave him there and run on. All he could think was, “Good Lord, what did I get myself into?”

  It got worse at shower time. Every night the cadets endured a ritual called “shower formation,” standing in line in the hall in their skivvies with a towel and a soap dish. Only five or six guys could go in to the showers at a time, so while the rest waited their turn they performed calisthenics, push-ups, and torture squats in fifteen-minute intervals. When their turn finally came, each cadet had only three minutes to shower. Coming back out they reported to the officer, “Sir, I had a bowel movement, I’ve checked my feet for blisters, I’ve showered, and I’ve shaved.” After all that, they could finally go to bed. Taps was the only peace they had all day.

  The worst came near the end of the summer. In the blistering heat, the doolies were taken into the surrounding mountains for a week of survival training. Part of the training involved learning to survive on very little food. They barely ate all week. When they returned to the academy, the doolies were welcomed with a huge steak and potatoes dinner. They positively gorged themselves. To their horror, they were ordered directly after the meal to run laps outside in the heat. Most of them, including Jim, vomited their welcome meal right back up. After that, Jim nearly threw in the towel. But he was afraid of what his parents would say and what the neighbors would think if he came home. He didn’t want to let anyone down. Besides, anyone at the Academy who gave up or fell ill (or pretended to fall ill) got a double ration of hell the next day. So he pulled himself together and determined to make it through the summer, hoping that things would get better in the fall when there would be more focus on academics.