The North Vietnamese officials were gleeful as they presided over the propaganda-heavy release of three US servicemen in August 1969. The POWS had been issued pre-prepared speeches by their captors, instructed to lie about their treatment in Hanoi as the Communists sought to curry international favor.
Among the trio was Doug Hegdahl, an emaciated 22-year-old who had found himself at the Hanoi Hilton after falling off his warship near Vietnam.
This unlikely story was not the only distinguishing factor setting him apart from his fellow American POWs.
He was also the youngest and lowest-ranking – an apprentice seaman who had enlisted just six months before being imprisoned alongside shot-down fighter pilots and graduates of the United States’ top military academies.
But most impressive of all was that, unbeknown to his captors, he was in possession of critical intelligence that would go on to prove invaluable to the US government.
Despite the high stakes, as the ceremony wound down, Hegdahl sauntered over to the spot where he had seen one of the most authoritative prison officers set down his beloved cigarette holder – which all prisoners knew he treasured.
Without being seen, the brazen young sailor swiped it off the desk, pocketed it and left the country the following day.
Author Marc Leepson, who has now documented Hegdahl’s incredible story in a new book: The Unlikely War Hero: A Vietnam War POW’s Story of Courage and Resilience in the Hanoi Hilton, tells DailyMail.com: ‘I just thought that was almost like the perfect thing to do as your parting act of leaving the Hanoi Hilton.
‘If he had done that during captivity and gotten caught, there would have been hell to pay – I mean torture. So he saw his chance, he got it and he got out of there.’
Doug Hegdahl, born in South Dakota in 1946, had never seen the ocean when he joined the Navy at age 20, just months after graduating from high school. A few months after that, he fell from the decks of the USS Canberra in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the coast of Vietnam
Hegdahl spent nearly a year and a half as a prisoner of war but pretended to be stupid to his North Vietnamese captors – who were completely unaware that he was memorizing key intel such as prison addresses and POW names
The theft was Hegdahl’s latest act of defiance and subterfuge in the years-long campaign he had waged against the North Vietnamese.
Indeed, Hegdahl memorized the names of 254 prisoners, including dozens who had been previously classified as missing in action – which most likely meant dead.
‘What Doug did – taking this really risky, daring gamble by buffaloing the North Vietnamese – it resulted in the fact that the Pentagon was able to reclassify 63 Americans who’d been listed as missing in action to prisoner of war, meaning that they were alive, and they notified their families right away,’ says Leepson.
‘That might be an unprecedented act in warfare.’
It was an especially astonishing feat given that Hegdahl, who had never seen the ocean before joining the Navy, had graduated from high school in South Dakota not even a year before his capture.
It had taken him more than the usual four years to complete his secondary education, and Doug graduated at 19 in the spring of 1966.
He enlisted in the Navy that fall, reported to the USS Canberra in the Philippines in February 1967, and two months later somehow ended up overboard.
The warship had been firing from the water at targets within Vietnam before dawn on April 6, 1967; Hegdahl only remembers hauling his 6-foot, 225-pound frame from his bunk and going to the deck to watch the attack without his glasses.
‘I can’t tell you how I fell from my ship,’ Doug said after his release. ‘All I know is, I walked up on the deck. It was dark and they were firing, and the next thing I recall I was in the water.’
He treaded water for hours before he was fished from the sea and eventually handed over to the Communists. Even they found it hard to believe the apprentice seaman had simply fallen from his ship.
‘I had probably the most embarrassing capture in the entire Vietnam War,’ Doug admitted in a 1997 interview. ‘I found that my defense posture was just to play dumb. Let’s face it, when you fall off your boat, you have a lot to work with.’
Hegdahl was an apprentice seaman when he fell from his warship in April 1967; he’s always maintained that he’s unsure how he ended up overboard and last remembers being on the deck – without his eyeglasses – as the ship’s guns were firing at targets in Vietnam
Following his release, Hegdahl provided US authorities with the names of more than 250 POWs, including 63 service members who were reclassified from ‘missing in action’ – which frequently meant ‘killed.’ The sailor’s intel brought solace to the friends and families of dozens of servicemen
Hegdahl’s strategy ‘turned out to be the key to his survival,’ Leepson writes … even after he was ultimately transferred to the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison camp.
‘If he acted like an ignorant, uneducated, country bumpkin – and at the same time convinced his captors that he really did fall off a ship and wasn’t a CIA spy or a jet fighter pilot – they would more or less treat him benignly, and at the very least not subject him to the physical and mental torture they meted out regularly to the high-value Air Force, Navy, and Marine flyers who were shot down or crash-landed during combat missions over North Vietnam.’
So Hegdahl committed to the act whole-heartedly.
‘When they asked me to do something, I would ask them how to spell it,’ Hegdahl later said. ‘They [once] asked me, ‘How was the morale on your ship?’ And I [said], ‘Morale, how do you spell that? Is that a meat-packing plant in Iowa?’”
Guards began referring to him in the Vietnamese as The Incredibly Stupid One; all the while, Hegdahl was surreptitiously being brilliant.
He exhibited remarkable memorization skills, using songs such as Old MacDonald to help solidify the list of POW names in his head.
‘Two years later when Doug did his rapid sing-song blurting for his Pentagon debriefer after he came home, the guy said, “Can you slow it down?”’ Leepson writes. ‘To which Doug replied: “No, it’s like riding a bicycle; you tip over” if you stop or slow down.’
Hegdahl’s inane act enabled him to gather other intel, such as the exact location where prisoners were being held, and sabotage North Vietnamese efforts in other ways.
Fellow POW Richard A Stratton, a lieutenant commander of the USS Ticonderoga who was shot down during a recon mission in January 1967, described how guards, ‘because they thought [Hegdahl] was so stupid, let him go out during the siesta period and sweep.
‘I watched . . . and he’s sweeping and they’re ignoring him and he backed up to a Jeep or a truck and took the gas cap off and reached down for a little bit of sand and gravel,’ Leepson quotes Stratton as saying.
Hegdahl dumped the dirt into the gas tank, then did the same thing to another Vietnamese military truck.
Hegdahl was honorably discharged following the release, moved near the beach in San Diego and spent the majority of his career working as an instructor in the nearby Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) school
POWs maintained a chain of command within the prison camps, and Hegdahl was ordered to accept early release by his fellow prisoner, Lt Commander Richard A Stratton, pictured after release with Doug and his wife; Hegdahl initially refused, unwilling to leave while the others were denied freedom. The apprentice seaman eventually relented months later, however, in order to bring home invaluable information
Hegdahl was the youngest and lowest-ranking American POW at Hoa Lo prison, nicknamed the Hanoi Hilton, where most of his fellow prisoners were pilots, officers and graduates of US military academies
‘I’m not a mechanic, but I know that after he dumped the stuff in the gas tanks, those trucks had to be hauled out,’ Stratton said. ‘ In fact, one of them, a Jeep, had to be buried there. They couldn’t even haul it out.”
POWs organized and maintained chain of command throughout captivity while trying to abide by the code of conduct laid out for captured service members – give only name, rank and service number while avoiding any cooperation whatsoever with the North Vietnamese, regardless of what was promised.
‘The North Vietnamese regularly offered prisoners the opportunity to go home early, but they had to sign something that said they were basically a war criminal and maybe even that the Vietnam War was a crime, stuff like that,’ says Leepson, also a Vietnam veteran who served with the US Army.
‘Except for 11 others, none of them would do it … the other POWs looked down upon the ones who took early release – except Doug.’
This was because Doug, together with the incredible list of names and details in his head, was ordered by the in-camp US command to take the valuable intel home.
That order initially came from his friend Stratton – but Hegdahl refused. He was unwilling to leave when hundreds of others remained imprisoned under brutal and torturous conditions.
Then ‘months and months and months went by, and the situation changed, and Doug realized it would be best if he went home with this valuable information he had,’ Leepson tells DailyMail.com.
So Hegdahl, in August 1969, accepted early release along with two others.
When the trio returned home, they revealed the truly atrocious treatment of American POWs, increasing pressure on the North Vietnamese to better care for prisoners .
On the same day Hegdahl addressed media at a press conference in Maryland in the weeks after his release, Ho Chi MInh also died – another key contributing factor paving the way for change.
The North Vietnamese ordered about 50POWs, including Hegdahl, to attend a staged Christmas Eve party in 1968 for the benefit of friendly foreign journalists
Hegdahl, center, was released in August 1969 as part of a propaganda gesture of goodwill by the North Vietnamese; at the end of the release ceremony in Hanoi, when no one was looking, he stole the cigarette holder of one of the most feared interrogators as a final act of defiance
Leepson, a seasoned journalist and historical author as well as a veteran, had already been aware of Hegdahl’s journey before he began writing the book.
But the true depths of his fellow veteran’s journey and bravery astounded him as he researched further.
‘What Doug did as a 20-year-old kid, it increased my admiration for him ten-fold, if not more,’ he tells DailyMail.com. ‘It was a gutsy, gutsy thing to do, especially considering the consequences, which were very, very real.’
Hegdahl was honorably discharged following his release, and his parents back in South Dakota had shrewdly ensured his military paychecks were being invested while he was in captivity;.
He used the money to buy a home near the beach in San Diego and spent the rest of his career working as an instructor in the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) school in San Diego Bay, studiously avoiding the limelight in the decades after his much-hyped return.
Leepson, however, feels it’s important that Hegdahl’s remarkable contributions be remembered – and the response to the new biography from veterans and other readers indicates that there is wide appreciation and gratitude for the young sailor’s courageous (and ingenious) efforts.
‘It’s crazy,’ Leepson tells DailyMail.com, the day after the book’s official publication date. ‘We just sold out the first printing … they’re rushing a second printing.’
The author of 11 books, he’s been ‘flabbergasted’ – but gratified – by the biography’s popularity.
‘To tell this positive, uplifting story, a different kind of POW story … I’m very, very happy,’ he says.
‘And to read something positive about the American experience in the Vietnam War, I think, also has resonated with people.’