The front-page newspaper {photograph} was hanging on the morning of April 6, 1967 — a dramatic picture displaying the usS. Canberra firing at Communist targets from the warship’s place within the Gulf of Tonkin.

Little did these readers know – his shipmates actually didn’t – that one of many Canberra’s most junior sailors was struggling by these exact same waters that day.

South Dakotan Douglas Brent Hegdahl, who’d by no means seen the ocean earlier than becoming a member of the Navy within the midst of the Vietnam Struggle, had someway fallen from the ship. Simply 20 years outdated, he survived hours within the freezing Gulf earlier than North Vietnamese fishermen plucked him to security.

Then he was turned over to the Viet Cong – and so started his unbelievable journey because the youngest and lowest-ranking POW on the notorious Hanoi Hilton, the place Hegdahl pretended to be silly to his captors as he secretly collected data, displaying an ingenious aptitude for memorization, commentary and subterfuge.

Hegdahl memorized the names of 254 POWs, serving to to reclassify 63 service members from MIA to POW – not solely bringing solace to dozens of wives and households but in addition offering the navy with key intelligence, comparable to the precise deal with of the scary jail itself.

“Nobody is aware of what they’re going to do below circumstances like that and Doug, who was from a tiny city in japanese South Dakota, barely bought by highschool, however he was a sensible man, and he figured it out,” says Marc Leepson, whose new e-book, the primary biography of Hegdahl, The Unlikely Struggle Hero: A Vietnam Struggle POW’s Story of Braveness and Resilience within the Hanoi Hilton, is out this month.

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“He someway found out the way in which to outlive and did it towards all odds and succeeded towards anyone’s wildest expectations,” Leepson, 79 and likewise a Vietnam veteran, tells The Unbiased.

Memorizing names modified lives. “I imply, 63 names have been modified from ‘lacking in motion,’ which often means you didn’t survive, to ‘prisoner of conflict,’ which implies you probably did survive,” he says, including that Hegdahl was an “enlisted man” amongst fellow prisoners who have been “Naval Academy graduates, guys who’re pilots of large jet planes that flew off of decks of plane carriers and have been air aces within the sky.”

“And this 20-year-old child who was within the deck crew does this amazingly,” he says. “I believe it was one of the vital heroic acts not in fight throughout the Vietnam Struggle. And I believe that’s one thing that folks ought to know.”

Funnily sufficient, whereas Hegdahl’s heroism originated in a brutal jail mockingly nicknamed for a well-known resort chain, his adolescence performed out in a special place additionally domestically nicknamed “Hilton.”

Hegdahl and his two brothers grew up dwelling in and dealing in a resort his mother and father bought in downtown Clark, South Dakota – “which the locals nicknamed the Hegdahl Hilton, an ironic nod to the truth that it was removed from fancy,” Leepson writes.

Each his mother and father have been Lutherans hailing from Norwegian immigrant households, and Hegdahl loved one thing of an all-American midwestern childhood, swimming within the native pool and Boy Scouts when he wasn’t engaged on farms or on the household enterprise. He was generally known as a playful, well-liked sensible joker however didn’t apply himself at college, taking greater than 4 years to complete highschool and graduating at age 19 and a half. He was additionally a first-rate candidate for the draft as America continued its extremely controversial conflict effort in Vietnam; his mom satisfied him to affix the Navy earlier than he could possibly be conscripted, reasoning that it might be safer than in-country fight.

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After coaching in San Diego, Hegdahl bought despatched to the Canberra in February 1967 – and two months later discovered himself overboard. Nobody, together with Hegdahl, has ever been in a position to clarify how he ended up within the water. The 6-foot, 225-pound apprentice seaman remembered getting up from his bunk and forsaking his thick eyeglasses, earlier than going as much as the deck to look at the weapons firing at nighttime.

“I can’t inform you how I fell from my ship,” Doug stated after his launch. “All I do know is, I walked up on the deck. It was darkish and so they have been firing, and the following factor I recall I used to be within the water.”

Fortunately, the previous highschool athlete was a powerful swimmer. He treaded water for hours earlier than fishermen noticed and rescued him, then turned him over to the Viet Cong. Two days later, he discovered himself at Hỏa Lò, higher generally known as the Hanoi Hilton – the place US prisoners together with future presidential candidate John McCain have been brutally tortured throughout years of captivity.

“At first, the North Vietnamese interrogators figured Doug Hegdahl for a spy who concocted a doubtful story of falling off a ship within the Tonkin Gulf,” Leepson writes. “However he quickly satisfied them that he was something however a CIA spy; that he was, in truth, a lowly enlisted man who had no data about any Navy operational data that could possibly be helpful to them; and that he actually was blown off the deck of his ship.

“However he additionally conned the North Vietnamese into believing that he was a bumbling idiot by taking part in it dumb after they interrogated him – a lot in order that the guards began referring to him as ‘The Extremely Silly One.’”

Hegdahl’s ploy – and the humorousness he managed to cling to – helped him glean data and work towards the enemy as he dutifully memorized names offered by different prisoners.

“I had in all probability probably the most embarrassing seize in all the Vietnam Struggle,” Hegdahl stated in a 1997 interview Leepson quotes within the e-book. “I discovered that my protection posture was simply to play dumb. Let’s face it, while you fall off your boat, you’ve gotten quite a bit to work with.”

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Leepson’s e-book outlines how, whereas sweeping the yard, Hegdahl was additionally sabotaging Viet Cong autos by surreptitiously pouring sand and gravel into gasoline tanks. On a couple of event, he was taken away from the jail to help numerous North Vietnamese propaganda efforts, permitting him to pinpoint and memorize Hanoi Hilton’s precise location.

“He was given just a little little bit of freedom in comparison with a lot of the guys, and he was in a position to scout round and look and report again on torture, and he discovered the deal with of the Hanoi Hilton,” Leepson tells The Unbiased.

Hegdahl and his imbecile routine constantly thwarted propaganda initiatives by the Viet Cong, together with an try to re-enact his watery seize on movie. Leepson laughs about “the way in which he outfoxed them.”

Directed by a propaganda filmmaker and surrounded by villagers serving as extras, Hegdahl repeatedly pretended to not perceive directions, as a substitute taking part in up and performing out throughout what ought to have been scenes.

“He bought the villagers, who have been alleged to be like extras within the film … all on his aspect, and so they have been laughing and joking, and he was in a position to frustrate the director to the purpose that it by no means bought made,” Leepson tells The Unbiased.

He quotes a 1972 interview given by Hegdahl – who sought to flee the highlight as time went on after his launch – during which he says: “I used to be so mad about their propaganda that it turned a private conflict to suppose how I might mess it up.”

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Hegdahl’s savviness and knack for memorization caught the eye and respect of superior officers within the POW camp – who ordered him to simply accept early launch, which US navy prisoners are forbidden from doing in accordance with the established code of conduct.

Hegdahl refused a direct order the primary time however finally relented, and he went house in 1967 with very important data.

“He helped with the intel and, along with the names  … [Hegdahl’s work] was a part of the explanation that, within the fall of 1969, the North Vietnamese, and I write about it within the e-book, modified the therapy of prisoners for the higher,” Leepson says. “Torture didn’t cease, nevertheless it did reduce considerably, and a few of their strictures have been taken away – as an illustration, communication.”

Roger Shields, who served as deputy assistant secretary of protection for POW/MIA Affairs from 1971 to 1977, explains within the e-book that, after Hegdahl offered names to the Pentagon, “we advised the North Vietnamese, ‘You’re chargeable for the salvation and the survival of those specific males,’ thereby placing the onus on the North Vietnamese in a means that had by no means been performed earlier than.”

On the identical day that Hegdahl participated in his first post-release press convention, talking from Bethesda, Maryland, Ho Chi Minh died – prompting a change of management that additionally coincided with extra stress on the Communists from the Nixon Administration relating to therapy of POWs. (The ultimate prisoners would finally be launched in 1973.)

Hegdahl joyously reunited along with his household upon his return, and his mother and father had ensured his navy paychecks have been invested throughout his time as a POW – permitting him to purchase a house close to the seaside in San Diego, the place he determined to construct his life. The veteran started working as an teacher within the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) college in San Diego Bay, the place he was “particularly adept at giving recommendation on how you can survive in a POW camp,” Leepson writes.

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Amongst his college students was William J. Dougherty, a CIA officer who was held captive with 51 others on the US Embassy in Tehran throughout the Iranian Hostage Disaster of 1979.

“I’ll by no means, ever overlook Doug Hegdahl,” Dougherty wrote in a 2001 e-book about his ordeal.

“I might recall Hegdahl’s lectures with virtually crystalline readability,” he continued. “His feedback, recommendation, examples and tales – greater than anything – noticed me by extreme interrogations and helped me preserve my sanity, dignity, and secrets and techniques intact. Because of Doug [and my service in] the Marine Corps, I used to be effectively ready for the Iranians.”

Doug retired from SERE in 2001, persevering with to experience his privateness and luxury in his adopted seaside metropolis – greater than three many years after his savvy POW methods made invaluable contributions to the conflict effort.

“On a macro viewpoint, that can be actually important, moreover this particular person story of braveness not below fireplace, braveness in these horrible situations the place he might have been tortured to inside an inch of his life or worse,” Leepson tells The Unbiased. “He wasn’t – nevertheless it was a gutsy factor to do.”