The front-page newspaper {photograph} was placing on the morning of April 6, 1967 — a dramatic picture displaying the united statesS. 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 means of 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 Warfare, had someway fallen from the ship. Simply 20 years previous, he survived hours within the Gulf earlier than North Vietnamese fishermen plucked him to security.

Then he was turned over to the North Vietnamese – 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, statement 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 additionally offering the navy with key intelligence, similar to the precise deal with of the dreaded jail itself.

“Nobody is aware of what they’re going to do underneath circumstances like that and Doug, who was from a tiny city in jap South Dakota, barely received by means of 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 Warfare Hero: A Vietnam Warfare POW’s Story of Braveness and Resilience within the Hanoi Hilton, is out this month.

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“He someway discovered the way in which to outlive and did it in opposition to all odds and succeeded in opposition to anyone’s wildest expectations,” Leepson, 79 and in addition a Vietnam veteran, tells The Impartial.

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 battle,’ which suggests 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 big 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 some of the heroic acts not in fight through the Vietnam Warfare. And I believe that’s one thing that individuals ought to know.”

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

Hegdahl and his two brothers grew up residing in and dealing in a resort his dad and mom 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 dad and mom 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 referred to 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 battle effort in Vietnam; his mom satisfied him to affix the Navy earlier than he could possibly be conscripted, reasoning that it could be safer than in-country fight.

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After coaching in San Diego, Hegdahl received despatched to the Canberra in February 1967 – and two months later discovered himself overboard. Nobody, together with Hegdahl, has ever been capable of 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 observe the weapons firing at midnight.

“I can’t inform you how I fell from my ship,” Doug mentioned 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 subsequent 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 North Vietnamese. Two days later, he discovered himself at Hỏa Lò, higher referred to 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, actually, 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 enjoying it dumb once 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 in opposition to the enemy as he dutifully memorized names supplied by different prisoners.

“I had in all probability probably the most embarrassing seize in the complete Vietnam Warfare,” Hegdahl mentioned 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, if you fall off your boat, you may have quite a bit to work with.”

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Leepson’s e-book outlines how, whereas sweeping the yard, Hegdahl was additionally sabotaging North Vietnamese automobiles by surreptitiously pouring sand and gravel into gasoline tanks. On multiple 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 slightly little bit of freedom in comparison with many of the guys, and he was capable of scout round and look and report again on torture, and he came upon the deal with of the Hanoi Hilton,” Leepson tells The Impartial.

Hegdahl and his imbecile routine persistently thwarted propaganda tasks by the North Vietnamese, together with an try and 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 an alternative enjoying up and appearing out throughout what ought to have been scenes.

“He received the villagers, who have been imagined to be like extras within the film … all on his facet, and so they have been laughing and joking, and he was capable of frustrate the director to the purpose that it by no means received made,” Leepson tells The Impartial.

He quotes a 1972 interview given by Hegdahl – who sought to flee the highlight as time went on after his launch – through which he says: “I used to be so mad about their propaganda that it turned a private battle to assume how I may 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 just 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 residence in 1967 with very important data.

“He helped with the intel and, along with the names  … [Hegdahl’s work] was a part of the rationale 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, but it surely did reduce considerably, and a few of their strictures have been taken away – as an example, 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 supplied names to the Pentagon, “we informed the North Vietnamese, ‘You might be liable for the salvation and the survival of those explicit males,’ thereby placing the onus on the North Vietnamese in a approach that had by no means been completed 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 strain on the Communists from the Nixon Administration concerning therapy of POWs. (The ultimate prisoners would finally be launched in 1973.)

Hegdahl joyously reunited together with his household upon his return, and his dad and mom 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 the right way to 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 through 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 may recall Hegdahl’s lectures with virtually crystalline readability,” he continued. “His feedback, recommendation, examples and tales – greater than the rest – noticed me by means of extreme interrogations and helped me preserve my sanity, dignity, and secrets and techniques intact. Due to Doug [and my service in] the Marine Corps, I used to be properly 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 a long time after his savvy POW tips made invaluable contributions to the battle effort.

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