Our captors in Hanoi went to considerable lengths to keep us in the dark. They didn’t restrict our access to all news but were selective about the information they allowed to reach us. They routinely apprised us of antiwar protests, race riots, assassinations and the like. Reports were usually piped into our cells during Hanoi Hannah’s “Voice of Vietnam,” an often unintentionally funny, if repetitious, daily broadcast about America’s manifold sins and woes.
“American GIs, don’t fight in this illegal and immoral war,” Hannah would plead, while cheerfully regaling us with victories by the people’s liberation forces and the latest evidence that the United States had become a dystopian society.
Like much of the treatment we received in prison, propaganda was intended to discourage us and weaken our will to resist. By portraying America as so beset by turmoil that it had become a different country than we remembered, a country that had forgotten us, our captors hoped to convince us that whether we remained imprisoned or went home, whether we lived or died, were entirely their decisions.
It rarely succeeded, but our morale, if not our will to resist, suffered under our steady diet of grim news. Every morsel of good news we managed to obtain brought immense pleasure. Although we didn’t wish for more Americans to be captured, neither did we want to waste a moment before learning what they knew. Newly captured prisoners were probably perplexed to be insistently pressed for uncensored information about the war and home as they struggled to come to grips with their new circumstances. Prison is hell on good manners.
Once in a while, the Vietnamese unwittingly let a little good news slip by. One evening, Hannah played a clip of a speech by a prominent American opponent of the war. It was a quick, throwaway line in a long list of diatribes about the war and the president. But we all caught it. The quote was something like:
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