What this airman did to survive at the Hanoi Hilton during the Vietnam War
Air Force Col. John Edward Stavast served as a pilot with the 11th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron in Vietnam when he was shot down in 1967. He served 5½ years as a prisoner of war before his release. His time in captivity included a stint at the infamous Hỏa Lò Prison, otherwise known as the Hanoi Hilton.
Stavast, who also served during World War II and died in 2004, spoke to the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project in 1984. In the lead-up to Veterans Day on Wednesday, November 11, 2026, here is an edited transcript of Stavast’s recollections during that interview.
“I felt we were fighting a good war, and I went over there in May of 1967. I was going over to be a tactical reconnaissance pilot in an RF-4C. Most of our missions went right alongside the border.
“We shouldn’t have been flying [on the day of my capture], but we had completed 90 missions over North Vietnam. Sixty of those missions had been over Hanoi. Once you get to 90, they would usually give you the rest of your hundred in pretty easy, counter-type missions in North Vietnam. However, this particular time, we were really short on combat crew-qualified aircrews, and so they told me to go. It was a mission from Thai Nguyen, which is where the steel mill was. That was going to be hit at 8:30 in the morning. And in the south, the north railroad was going to be hit at 8:45.
“I had a brand-new wingman who’d never been in North Vietnam before. Our target was [to] pick up the steel mill at Thai Nguyen, which was still smoldering and dusty, and smoke and dust were all down the railroad too. I don’t know how in the world they expected to see anything on the film. And all the damn gunners and everybody in the world was madder than the dickens, because they’d just gone through an air raid, and here comes a couple of snotty-nosed RF-4 pilots busting through their airspace and giving them a sonic boom, and they were mad.
“So everything was being thrown up at us. We were supposed to go in and give them post-strike photography of the two targets, and then pick up the bridge just north of Hanoi as an ancillary target. We were on our way into Thai Nguyen, and we’d just picked up speed. Thai Nguyen has some very dangerous SAM [surface-to-air missile] sites, and I had been fired at from Thai Nguyen before. I never was really that concerned about SAMs, because you always see them coming. They’re like a bolt of lightning, continuous, and they’re moving so rapidly that you can tell instantly where they’re headed.
“So at Thai Nguyen, we were going 1.25 Mach and accelerating, when this SAM blew up right behind my airplane. It really knocked the airplane and bounced it around. I said, ‘Oh, my God, we’ve been hit.’ And my wingman says, ‘What the hell was that?’ And he had his hood down, you know. I said, ‘Don’t worry about it. I think we just got hit by a SAM.’ He said, ‘Oh, my God, let’s get out of here!’ I said, ‘We’re going, man.’
“We were about 25 miles southwest of Hanoi, toward Hoa Binh, which is on the bend of the Black River, their first military camp on the Black River. And the airplane went out of control, and what happens when you lose all hydraulic pressure, the elevator, the slab, goes full nose down, which means the airplane goes full nose up. And we were still doing about 1.5 Mach, and that’s an awful thing to do to an airplane.
“It was way over nine Gs. I couldn’t see because of the Gs, and my G-suit wasn’t working properly, or I would have been able to see, but it happened so suddenly. The airplane went up. The right wing panel broke up, went right over our heads, and that’s the last thing I could see. The airplane was tumbling violently, and I was hollering at my wingman. I heard him go out and then I went out, got out of the airplane. And just after I got out of the airplane, it blew up. It just went bonkers.
“I’ve never seen an airplane do that. Then, of course, it spun. It was just going violently, just very rapidly, because it missed half its wing. It crashed into the ground and blew up again. There we were, floating down 25 miles southwest of Hanoi, in a very, very hostile environment, and thank God, the parachutes worked and everything.”
He and His Wingman Are Captured
“I was hurt when I landed, but I wasn’t hurt getting out of the airplane. I landed on my butt. My parachute was spilled by a tree. And I couldn’t avoid it. I was coming down in a grove of trees, and my parachute got spilled and then blossomed just before I hit the ground. I landed in bamboo shrubs. That cushioned my fall, but I still hit pretty hard on my bottom side. I was at such a point that I was not aware I was hurt. I was later on, but I wasn’t at the time.
“[My wingman] came down about two miles west of me. I wanted to get out of that airplane before it ran into the ground. I would estimate—and the wingman said he didn’t see us get out—but he said the airplane went out of control [when] we were right at 12,000 feet. It doesn’t take very long to cover 12,000 feet when you’re doing 1.5 mach.
“They announced that [my wingman] had been captured that very night. They got him about 2 o’clock in the afternoon. I heard the gunshots going off, and I said, ‘Oh, my God, they’ve killed him.’ And then I was on a path, a trail, obviously a well-traveled trail along a little stream, and then I heard people coming, so I had to quickly gather my wits and get rid of my parachute. All I did was try to pull it out of the tree, which I couldn’t do because it was stuck in this bamboo stuff.
“I could hear villagers coming up from the village; they had seen me come down in the parachute and they were going to capture me and collect the reward. But I ran up a hill with my water, and my gun and my two radios, one of which was badly smashed; I didn’t realize that until I got to the top of the hill. I was hiding in some bushes when these people came up, ‘GI, GI. You OK, GI?’
“I was hiding under these bushes, and they went right by me. It got really quiet for a long time. And I pulled out my radio and I was almost afraid to use it, because it was so quiet, I was afraid somebody would hear me two miles away. But I couldn’t get a thing on the radio, and nobody was calling me. I found out later that they had decided not to send any rescue mission up that area, because they had only just lost a helicopter there a week before.
“Well, about 9 o’clock that night, it was getting dark. There was a full moon, and I was thinking about moving out and heading south, when all of a sudden, [I heard something]. And I said, ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ It was the regular army people coming up looking for me, and they were really combing the area. And the next thing I knew, there was an AK-47 pointed right at me and hitting me in the chest. The guy says, ‘Up, up!’ So I put my hands up,and I was captured.”
“The first week was difficult. There were difficult times, and most of them involved either what we called purges or torture of some sort or another. But this first week was extremely difficult and, of course, included constant torture. For seven days and seven nights, I was tortured in a place they called the Blue Room. And some of their methods were extremely ingenious. The interrogator bragged that they would not leave any scars; however, they did. I have scars on my arms, back, [and] buttocks.
“[My interrogator] was a pretty good-sized guy, and he spoke beautiful English. Most of the time he had two big helpers, and sometimes he had three people in there. And their job was to punish you when you failed to answer one of his questions. He never touched me, but he directed everything that happened. As an example, they’d get mad at you and put you on your knees with your hands over your head, or sometimes your hands would be tied behind you. If you didn’t answer a question or refused to do something, they’d give you a judo chop to the side of the head.
“They didn’t want information, especially. What they wanted us to do was confess our sins, our crimes, and to confess being a war criminal. They wanted us to sign a piece of paper [and confess]. And they wanted us to write letters to the GIs down south and tell them that they were fighting an illegal, wrong war, and they wanted us to write letters to our senators back in the United States and tell them that we were victims of their war, and I wouldn’t do that. Every time they wanted me to do something like that, I’d get so damn mad at them that I wouldn’t do it.
“One other thing they did want [was], they wanted me to list the names of the men in the squadron when I was shot down. And I didn’t do that. As soon as they started beating up on me because I wouldn’t do it, I forgot their names as a self-protection mechanism, I suppose. A psychiatrist that talked to me at March Field [in California] said it was not an unusual occurrence.
“When I was carried to a cell, the guard spoke English. He was a very gentle man, an older guy, and all he was supposed to do, I suppose, was to keep us from getting sick, because we’d not had any food, and all we’d had was a glass of water. This is fairly typical of some other guys that I’ve talked to. A glass of water a day. They finally got enough other people shot down that they had to get me out of there and go to work on somebody else. Just before they released me, I was nearly ready to sign one of those damn fool confessions. But I never really had to, and I’m very, very thankful for that.”
“It’s Just Fantastic Pain”
“One of the things that most everybody experienced was what we called the suitcase trick, where they’d take wide nylon straps and wrap you up, starting at your ankles, and they come up around your calves, through your groin and back around, clear around your back, and then around your front, like this, and then around your wrists, like that, and then they can pick you up like you’re a suitcase. You can’t breathe, and it’s one of the most terrifying things.
“The other thing that they did with me is that they have what we called long spikes, and it looks like a giant needle that somebody would sew with. They’d put leg irons around you, and they’re like V-bolts, like this, and they put those on the needle. Then it’s got a hole in one end, and they put it on a hook and lift you up by your ankles, one side at a time. A lot of people had their ankles broken; why my ankles didn’t break is beyond me. It’s just fantastic pain. Drives you crazy.
“If they put bamboo under your fingernails, that’d be a scar for life. They bragged, ‘We won’t leave any marks on you. Nobody will ever believe you if you say you were tortured.’ But they did. They broke this right arm in that suitcase trick, and my right ear is… I had a brain concussion, skull fracture, from that chopping, and my right ear is totally deaf. It was really severe. That’s the worst time I had in prison.
“I was shot down in September of 1967. I was received into their camps right in the middle of one of their communications purges, when they were trying to get everybody to confess that they had been communicating with other Americans, which was strictly against the rules. It was strictly against the rules to speak out loud, to tap on the wall, to communicate in any way, shape, or form. We didn’t have any papers. We didn’t have any pencils.”
Losing 90 Pounds in Captivity
“When the bombing was going on, we were well aware of that, and then the bombing was restricted in March. I think it was March or April of 1968. The Vietnamese told us that the war was almost over and pretty soon we would go home. So now, since we have treated you with such humane and lenient policy, why don’t you do this and why don’t you do that?
“Nobody fell for that malarkey, but we were very disappointed when the bombing stopped. I didn’t figure that stopping the bombing of North Vietnam was going to stop the war, because the Vietnamese people just aren’t that way. As soon as you stop fighting them, then they figure that’s a sign of weakness, and that’s exactly what they thought.
“When I was shot down, I weighed 195 pounds, and when I came out, I weighed 105. When I turned sideways, you couldn’t see me. We were charged to keep our morale high. It was in our best interests, and the people that didn’t and the people that lost out and went on starvation kicks, some of those guys died over there.
“Because once you start starving your brain, which is the first thing that goes, you get into a dilemma. Your brain starts to think that you’re more and more of a hero, because you’re starving yourself to death. The more you starve yourself, the more your brain keeps the dementia up, and the guy finally starves to death. I can think of a couple of guys that that happened to.
“Ed [Edward] Martin, who’s now the commander in chief of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean, was my roommate for nearly three years. We’d have an occasional argument, but most of the time, we wouldn’t argue. We’d catch ourselves starting to argue about some petty damn little thing, and we’d stop and say, ‘Hey, listen, Ed. This is dumb.’ Or he’d say, ‘John, what the hell. It’s not worth it.’ And we got to the point where if one of us snored, the other one wouldn’t say anything about it. No point in it. We made up our minds. We were going to exercise every day, and we did. And had our naps, and we worked problems. And we had some pet ants and little spiders.
“When they were bombing Hanoi, we were up on the Chinese border, 120 miles away, and we could hear it just like it was right across the street. But in any event, that noise went on and on and on, and we were all awakened, tapping on the wall, ‘What in the hell is going on? My land, they’re really having a battle over there!’ Finally it quit, everything went quiet. And then we heard sirens, and then it all went quiet, so we went back to sleep. The next day, 6 o’clock in the morning, right after the gongs had gone off, the guards were there. ‘Wrap up! Wrap up!’ Which means, wrap all your stuff up. And we didn’t have a whole hell of a lot to wrap up. You’d wrap up your blanket and wrap up your rice mat, grab your pot and cup and get ready to move. That’ s when they moved us all back into Hoa Lo [aka the Hanoi Hilton], into the central prison, the first time we’d been in that place all together.”
Life at the Hanoi Hilton
“They took us all to Hoa Lo, and we are in this great, giant room with 26 other people, 27 of us in that room. And it was fantastic. Here we’d been, two of us, like this, for almost three years, and all of a sudden, we’re in this great, big room and it had beds, like this, but the beds were slanted down on either side.
“We had a big window, the first time we ever had a window. It had bars on it, but it was so high, you couldn’t see out of it. Well, we soon found out the whole place was a quadrangle of rooms like that. Some rooms had as much room for as many as maybe 50 people in one room. When we finally got organized, which was about two days later, we named this squadron over here Zero. Then my squadron, Squadron One. I was the commander of Squadron One. They called us SCOs.
“My main job then became the camp communicator; my squadron’s job became the camp communicators. So we could pass messages, because we were the only room that Zero could get in touch with, to communicate with, and the only way we could communicate with them… We tried tapping through the wall, but the wall was about 20 feet long. There was a connecting wall with a door-archway through it, so we finally started just talking to them. We’d try to clear the area, as best we could, during siesta time, and we’d just talk to them, and they’d talk back to us.
“We knew what time of day it was, because the church clock would bong. The only time it bonged was on the hour. It wasn’t one of those half-hour jobs. And it was a cruddy bong, but it was a bong. You could tell it was a clock, coming from a clock somewhere. And when we were down to the Zoo, we could tell what time it was only by the radio programs. We finally got to memorize the radio programs. Nobody in Vietnam owns a radio. Maybe they do now, but in those days, probably everybody would rely only on the state radio, and the state radios were posted on posts, in the streets, on the corners.
“It would go, ‘Bongggg, bongggg, bongggg,’ five times, and we knew it was 5 o’clock in the morning. And now would come the propaganda, and yippity-yappity blub blub blub, you know, all the news and jazz like that. There was news for hour after hour after hour. And the first time they had any music on the program—the radio would shut down at noon, and then everybody would have a siesta until 2 o’clock. And then at 2 o’clock the radio would be on, and it would go, ‘Bongggg, bongggg,’ and then they’d play about a half-hour with music.
“It was all Vietnamese. It was just aimed at the camp, so we got the full blast of it. How those people live with that crap is beyond my comprehension. You got the radio, whether you wanted it or not.”
‘A Fantastic Amount of Bombing’
“The first time we were in Hoa Lo, in what we called Camp America… I was in Squadron One. And we couldn’t see an awful lot of things going on, but we could see and hear the antiaircraft. We’d all have to get down, lay on our beds, and there’d be a guard up in the window with his AK-47 in case we wanted to have a riot during an air raid, which was dumb, I thought. Who wants to riot during an air raid? Anyhow, they would be bombing fairly close, and they were having dogfights, and we saw a MIG get shot down right out through that window. We were just yelling, ‘Yay!’
“Two F-4s shot him down. And it was a lot of fun. Lot of times like that. Then when we went back to the Zoo, the bombing continued, the raids continued up there, with fighters. We went back to Hoa Lo for a very brief period of time, and they started bombing. One night, we heard a fantastic amount of bombing going on; it was obviously a B-52 raid going on, and they moved us out of that camp up to the mountains. It was right across from the Chinese border.
“As a matter of fact, we were right on the other side of the border from an artillery impact area. And it was a camp built for Americans, because all the buildings were facing at different angles, and you couldn’t look out of one vent and see into another vent. But their carpenters had not gained any proficiency, because the doors still had these great wide cracks, and we would communicate between the doors. In 1972, I was the [senior ranking officer] up there. I had been SRO in five different camps; this was my fourth camp, because I was SRO at the Plantation, too.
“I had my communications guys go to it and try to establish contact with everybody, and within 72 hours, we had established contact with every other building in that camp. Just with finger flashing.
“The Vietnamese had told us quite a few times that the war was going to be over soon, and we’d be going home. So why don’t you do this, and why don’t you stop acting like that? When the time came for us to [be] aware of what was going on, we were aware that the bombing had stopped down in Hanoi. Like I said, we were a hundred and some miles north of it, but when a B-52 drops a load of 500-pounders or thousand pounders, you can hear it for a thousand miles.
“The treatment up there got better and better, and they let us outside to mingle, all the buildings. We did not have to have a communications team again, because they would let all the buildings out. This was in January of 1973. Then we were getting better food; we were getting tinned fish, you know, canned fish from Russia, Russian mackerel. Oh, was that good! We knew the war was over. Once in a while, we’d have a nice fresh loaf of bread to eat with that fish, and then when they ran out of fish, they started giving us water buffalo meat.
“We were getting the idea that things were getting better, and they were trying to put some [weight on us]. And when we went back down to Hanoi, things were worse down there because the food shortages in Hanoi were pretty fantastic. And we went back to rice and green weeds a lot of times, and pumpkin. Pumpkin is what saved our lives. There was a lot more nutrition in pumpkin than I had ever known about.”
The Signing of the Paris Accords
“In any event, when we got back down to the Plantation, they kept us all locked up again. And then the camp commander wanted to talk to me. They always knew who the SRO was. This was the same camp commander that had had me spanked with a fan belt some three or fours years previously. He told me in not perfect English but pretty damn good, ‘I want you to invite all of your people to come outside at 10 o’clock.’ I said, ‘Well, do you mean to tell me that it’s now legal for me to communicate with them?’
“He says, ‘Yes. Now you can communicate. Now you must tell them, tomorrow morning, you come out in the courtyard by the volleyball court, and you will stand in ranks and you will be very, very quiet, and you will not speak, and you will hear what I have to tell you.’
“I said, ‘OK.’ So I passed the communications all up and down the rooms of the Plant, and the next morning, sure enough, 10 o’clock, the guards were there opening the doors. We hadn’t had breakfast yet, and usually we had breakfast by 10 o’clock. And we all go outside and stand; I told everybody to be quiet, you know, just get over here, form up. Seeing people we hadn’t seen, we knew, but we hadn’t seen them before, and wondering who the heck they were. And then the camp commander made the announcement that the Paris Accords had been signed and that we would be leaving Vietnam on March 14, 1973, in American airplanes.
“They had the C-141s, two of them sitting down at the far side of the field, and we got off the bus. The Vietnamese officer in charge would call your name, and you’d walk up and you were supposed to salute him, but none of us did. And then he’d say, ‘You are now released to American control.’ And then we went over and saluted the colonel who was waiting there to greet us, and shook his hand, and boy, that was a happy experience.
“They had two people on each airplane to escort us. They had milkshakes on board that thing, and anything we wanted, almost, except they·didn’t have hot hamburgers or hot dogs. But they were afraid to let us have anything to eat, because everybody’d been told that we shouldn’t eat right away, that we ought to be given a bland diet. That was the biggest mistake anybody’d ever made. They’d have darn near had a revolution on their hands in that hospital when we got to Clark Field [in the Philippines].
“I was [at Clark] for three days and nights. And there they introduced us to American food, a little bit of wine, a shopping trip to the PX. They were very leery of us getting loose, because everybody knew we were coming back through there. There was obviously some communist agitators outside the gate, probably trying to start trouble. But we had a PX shopping spree. My first meal consisted of about five eggs over easy, two steaks, and a big bowl of ice cream, and a couple of glasses of milk. And no, it did not make me sick, not a bit.
“There, we went through the examinations, and that’s where I found out that I had a broken back and had broken my arm. I knew my arm was really badly hurt, because I couldn’t use it for a long time. I also had a skull fracture and most likely a brain concussion.”
Talking to His Family at Last
“Then the biggest, probably the most exciting thing that happened, was there was a lot of mail waiting for us there at Clark from everybody in the world and our families. They had arranged for phone calls, and I got to talk to my wife, Shirley, about three times. Shirley kept asking me what I’d been eating, and I told her what I’d been eating, and she said, ‘You shouldn’t eat all that junk! You’ll just make yourself sick.’ And her sister Marilyn was with her, and she says, ‘Shirley, stop telling him not to eat! The poor guy’s been starving to death for 5½ years!’
“Then I talked to my parents in Colorado and got a couple of things done on my tooth. One of my teeth was broken, and they put that temporarily together. And then the flight from there to March Field in California wasn’t that boring, because we had all the magazines we wanted. I got to see my first copy of U.S. News and World Report, which is my favorite periodical. And also, my escort officer—every one of us had an escort officer, coming out of there, and this guy, Jim Steinbrenner, was really a super guy. He had found out from somebody that I was a geography nut, and that I really liked the Rand-McNally road maps. And he’d bought me one.”
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