May 21, 2024 • 10 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Larry Spencer tells the story of being one of the first POW's of the Vietnam war and surviving until war's end in both "The Zoo" prison and in the infamous Hanoi Hilton.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories up next, a
story courtesy of the Iowa gold Star Military Museum at
Camp Dodge. Larry Spencer served twenty five hundred and fifty
one days as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, six
days short of seven years. As one of the first
(00:30):
twenty POWs of the Vietnam War, Larry served longer than
any other Iowan. Larry passed away on May twenty first,
twenty twenty two. Here's our own Monte Montgomery with the story.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
On February eighteenth, nineteen sixty six, James t Ruffin and
Larry Spencer, who you're about to hear from, We're escorting
an Air Force reconnaissance plane over the Gulf of Tonkin.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
And then.
Speaker 4 (00:57):
A little series of things that all contribute to something
bad happening take place, Like we had an equipment problem
with our radios on the airplane. We were flying above
clouds and got separated from the other two airplanes that
we were with. We got on the radio and said, hey,
we got a problem. We're not sure whether to this
(01:18):
day whether anybody heard us or not, but if finally
we found a break in the clouds, could look down
and saw that we were over land, and we knew
that was a bad thing because we were supposed to
be out over the water. So we turned one hundred
and eighty degrees and headed east and it declared an emergency.
And the next thing that happened and heard a loud boom,
(01:38):
which it turns out was a surfaced air missile exploding
below and behind the airplane. I can remember thinking, oh my,
I'm going to be a pow. I looked over to
the side of the cockpit where I could look at
the mirror up by the pilot, and he gave me
a thumbs up, which usually means that's a good sign
(01:58):
that you know, we may obviously we have a problem,
but the thumbs up meant that I think we're.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Going to be okay.
Speaker 4 (02:05):
And the next thing I knew it got real windy
in the back seat. In this occasion, I think the
thumbs up meant I'm out of here. I broke through
the clouds in my parachute and came down. I was
about a quarter of a mile off the coast of
North Vietnam, and I could see some people putting a
log boat into the water while I was still in
(02:25):
my parachute.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
This boat came out, had two or three people in it.
Speaker 4 (02:30):
As I recall, there's certain universal language that is understood
no matter what language it's spoken in, and one of
them is when somebody with an AK forty seven sticks
it in your face, your hands kind of go to
the I give up position. I had a pistol which
I had jettisoned at sea, because I knew if somebody
had if it was me with my little pistol against
(02:53):
some well armed people, it was going to be a
real short war. So I didn't want any problem with that,
so I jettisoned my pistol before they picked me up.
They hustled me into this jeep, took my shoes off,
and I think I was tied up, and we blindfolded
and the jeep took off. It stopped a couple of
(03:14):
times during the course of the night, at what I
can only describe as a pep rally.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
I pulled into a little village.
Speaker 4 (03:20):
There'd be a whole bunch of people up there, hooping
and hollering, with some of the political leaders leading cheers
and fight songs, and they would get you out of
this jeep and march you around the village and call
you dirty names, I'm sure, and shake their fist at you.
And then half an hour later you'd be back in
the jeep and off on another jaunt, not knowing where
(03:41):
you were going, but pretty suspicious that it would be
to Hanoi. And the gates swung open and they marched
me into this what turned out to be the old
French prison building Hanoi in the eighteen hundreds, which became
known as the Hanoi Hilton.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Larry was also in that too, low nicknamed the Zoo
by those detained there.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
In this camp, the Zoo, there was a driveway that
came in and made a circular route around the inside
of the camp, and so if there were some senior
officers coming, they would get a working detail out to
sweep up the leaves and stuff and have it make
it have.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
A better appearance.
Speaker 4 (04:21):
That provided an opportunity to communicate with everybody that was
in the camp by the manner in which you swept
the streets with your broom and it's there's a communications
code called the tap code, which enabled whoever was sweeping
to pass information to everybody who was listening. And so
(04:45):
if the guy was sweeping, everybody in the camp could
hear him, and it was like a town crier. He
would tell you all the latest news that the guy knew,
and he'd be tapping it and anybody. All they had
to do was sit and listen, and you could get
the latest news. It might be sick months old, but
it was news to us. We had three different types
of soup. Over the course of a year. There was
(05:06):
four months of spinach soup, four months of cabbage soup,
and four months of pumpkin soup.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
Twice a day.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
You could almost mark your calendar by when the food changed.
You can take your pumpkin soup and mash up the pumpkin,
put rice in with it. If you're having rice, or
if you're having bread that day, you tear your bread
up into little pieces, put it in the soup, stir
it all up, and you and visualize it as a
Hungarian goulash or macaroni and cheese or whatever. It's still
(05:35):
going to taste the same, but it helps you mentally.
As your grandmother used to tell you, you don't have
to like this. All you have to do is eat it.
And most days you didn't go out of the room
for anything but the thing that you have to keep
in mind is that when you wake up in the morning,
you have no idea what that day holds. I'm sure
(05:56):
our blood pressure jumped thirty or forty points when a
guard would come to the on the walkway outside your
room and just rattle the keys to the door, because
if they came to the door, opened the door, pointed
at you, or gave you the whatever Vietnamese name they
had assigned to you, it was a Vietnamese word. I
(06:17):
have no idea to this day the name that they
gave me meant. It may have been dirty dog or
something like that. If they told you to put your
shirt on and your pant long trousers on, that you
were going off to see somebody that was not good.
Nothing good ever happened when you went out, and nothing
could ever happened at night.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
Either. You were mistreated.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
It was more so in the first years in the second,
but the Vietnamese were very willing to utilize physical discomfort
when they deemed necessary. There were times when well, there
were a couple of escape attempts and that started purges
that would last for months at a time where people
were brutally tortured. But it was not something that happened
(07:00):
every day. Sometimes you thought it was going to and
they certainly tried the psychological thing of telling you, okay,
if you don't do what we want you to do here,
you know, we're going to beat you up. And the
threat that they would most often try to use orgs
say well, someday when the war ends, if you don't cooperate,
we're not going to let you go.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
We're going to keep you here.
Speaker 4 (07:20):
I don't think anybody believed them, but it was always
something in the back of your mind. But yes, physical
torture was a part of the experience, but it didn't
happen every day. On July sixth of nineteen sixty six,
the United States conducted air raids in Hiphong and Hanoi
(07:40):
for the first time. That was a significant step as
far as the Vietnamese concerned. They to think that the
United States would bomb a target in Hanoi made them
very angry, and so that night they took most of
the people from this camp, the zoo and some people
from another camp. There were less than one hundred prisoners
(08:00):
total at that time. They took about fifty five or
sixty of us, and we were blindfolded We didn't know
where we were, but they took us to downtown Hanoi.
They got you out of the truck, you hand keppted
you to one other prisoner, and you were sitting on
the floor on the street here out in the middle
of this residential area. They had Vietnamese soldiers on both
(08:25):
sides of this line of people. And when they took
the blindfolds off and told you to stand up, and
you were walking, they turned a corner and the streets
were lined. It was like a Fourth of July parade.
And the streets were lined with people six seven deep
in rows on both sides calling you bad names. And
(08:45):
it's a really wonder that somebody didn't get killed in
that what we came to be known as the Hanoi March.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
The cadres were trying to.
Speaker 4 (08:54):
Keep the people back from throwing rocks at us and
hitting you over the head with shoes. It's a wonder
somebody didn't get a knife stuck in their back when
that was going on. It ended up a couple hours
later at a soccer stadium in downtown Hanoi, and when
they opened the gates of the stadium to try to
get the prisoners in here. There was a surge of population,
(09:15):
of civilian population any only that just burst right through
the gates.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
At the same time.
Speaker 4 (09:19):
They ended up with all the Americans sitting out in
the middle of the soccer field with soldiers all around
us trying to get the while they tried to get
all the civilians out of here. February twelfth was the
first day of prisoner release in accordance with the agreements
that were signed in Paris at the end of January
nineteen seventy three. And then in my personal case, I
(09:42):
was on the first airplane home from Clark Air Force
Base on Valentine's Day of nineteen seventy three. There were
twenty guys on the first airplane home, and I had
the good fortune to be one of them. The adjustment
process to life in the seventies was pretty remarkable in
its that was quite an experience as well. Fortunately for us,
(10:05):
the one thing that everybody could agree on about the
Vietnam War is that they were glad to have us home.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
And a great job on the editing by Monte Montgomery
and a special thanks to the Iowa GoldStar Military Museum
at Camp Dodge for graciously allowing us to air this audio.
And as he said, simply hearing the keys of the
guards instilled fear into the prisoners. Nothing good happened when
you left your cell. Little good happened at night. Unimaginable
(10:36):
what men like this went through. Nearly seven years Larry
Spencer served as a prisoner of war. His story here
on our American Stories
And we continue with our American stories up next, a
story courtesy of the Iowa gold Star Military Museum at
Camp Dodge. Larry Spencer served twenty five hundred and fifty
one days as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, six
days short of seven years. As one of the first
(00:30):
twenty POWs of the Vietnam War, Larry served longer than
any other Iowan. Larry passed away on May twenty first,
twenty twenty two. Here's our own Monte Montgomery with the story.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
On February eighteenth, nineteen sixty six, James t Ruffin and
Larry Spencer, who you're about to hear from, We're escorting
an Air Force reconnaissance plane over the Gulf of Tonkin.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
And then.
Speaker 4 (00:57):
A little series of things that all contribute to something
bad happening take place, Like we had an equipment problem
with our radios on the airplane. We were flying above
clouds and got separated from the other two airplanes that
we were with. We got on the radio and said, hey,
we got a problem. We're not sure whether to this
(01:18):
day whether anybody heard us or not, but if finally
we found a break in the clouds, could look down
and saw that we were over land, and we knew
that was a bad thing because we were supposed to
be out over the water. So we turned one hundred
and eighty degrees and headed east and it declared an emergency.
And the next thing that happened and heard a loud boom,
(01:38):
which it turns out was a surfaced air missile exploding
below and behind the airplane. I can remember thinking, oh my,
I'm going to be a pow. I looked over to
the side of the cockpit where I could look at
the mirror up by the pilot, and he gave me
a thumbs up, which usually means that's a good sign
(01:58):
that you know, we may obviously we have a problem,
but the thumbs up meant that I think we're.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Going to be okay.
Speaker 4 (02:05):
And the next thing I knew it got real windy
in the back seat. In this occasion, I think the
thumbs up meant I'm out of here. I broke through
the clouds in my parachute and came down. I was
about a quarter of a mile off the coast of
North Vietnam, and I could see some people putting a
log boat into the water while I was still in
(02:25):
my parachute.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
This boat came out, had two or three people in it.
Speaker 4 (02:30):
As I recall, there's certain universal language that is understood
no matter what language it's spoken in, and one of
them is when somebody with an AK forty seven sticks
it in your face, your hands kind of go to
the I give up position. I had a pistol which
I had jettisoned at sea, because I knew if somebody
had if it was me with my little pistol against
(02:53):
some well armed people, it was going to be a
real short war. So I didn't want any problem with that,
so I jettisoned my pistol before they picked me up.
They hustled me into this jeep, took my shoes off,
and I think I was tied up, and we blindfolded
and the jeep took off. It stopped a couple of
(03:14):
times during the course of the night, at what I
can only describe as a pep rally.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
I pulled into a little village.
Speaker 4 (03:20):
There'd be a whole bunch of people up there, hooping
and hollering, with some of the political leaders leading cheers
and fight songs, and they would get you out of
this jeep and march you around the village and call
you dirty names, I'm sure, and shake their fist at you.
And then half an hour later you'd be back in
the jeep and off on another jaunt, not knowing where
(03:41):
you were going, but pretty suspicious that it would be
to Hanoi. And the gates swung open and they marched
me into this what turned out to be the old
French prison building Hanoi in the eighteen hundreds, which became
known as the Hanoi Hilton.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Larry was also in that too, low nicknamed the Zoo
by those detained there.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
In this camp, the Zoo, there was a driveway that
came in and made a circular route around the inside
of the camp, and so if there were some senior
officers coming, they would get a working detail out to
sweep up the leaves and stuff and have it make
it have.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
A better appearance.
Speaker 4 (04:21):
That provided an opportunity to communicate with everybody that was
in the camp by the manner in which you swept
the streets with your broom and it's there's a communications
code called the tap code, which enabled whoever was sweeping
to pass information to everybody who was listening. And so
(04:45):
if the guy was sweeping, everybody in the camp could
hear him, and it was like a town crier. He
would tell you all the latest news that the guy knew,
and he'd be tapping it and anybody. All they had
to do was sit and listen, and you could get
the latest news. It might be sick months old, but
it was news to us. We had three different types
of soup. Over the course of a year. There was
(05:06):
four months of spinach soup, four months of cabbage soup,
and four months of pumpkin soup.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
Twice a day.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
You could almost mark your calendar by when the food changed.
You can take your pumpkin soup and mash up the pumpkin,
put rice in with it. If you're having rice, or
if you're having bread that day, you tear your bread
up into little pieces, put it in the soup, stir
it all up, and you and visualize it as a
Hungarian goulash or macaroni and cheese or whatever. It's still
(05:35):
going to taste the same, but it helps you mentally.
As your grandmother used to tell you, you don't have
to like this. All you have to do is eat it.
And most days you didn't go out of the room
for anything but the thing that you have to keep
in mind is that when you wake up in the morning,
you have no idea what that day holds. I'm sure
(05:56):
our blood pressure jumped thirty or forty points when a
guard would come to the on the walkway outside your
room and just rattle the keys to the door, because
if they came to the door, opened the door, pointed
at you, or gave you the whatever Vietnamese name they
had assigned to you, it was a Vietnamese word. I
(06:17):
have no idea to this day the name that they
gave me meant. It may have been dirty dog or
something like that. If they told you to put your
shirt on and your pant long trousers on, that you
were going off to see somebody that was not good.
Nothing good ever happened when you went out, and nothing
could ever happened at night.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
Either. You were mistreated.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
It was more so in the first years in the second,
but the Vietnamese were very willing to utilize physical discomfort
when they deemed necessary. There were times when well, there
were a couple of escape attempts and that started purges
that would last for months at a time where people
were brutally tortured. But it was not something that happened
(07:00):
every day. Sometimes you thought it was going to and
they certainly tried the psychological thing of telling you, okay,
if you don't do what we want you to do here,
you know, we're going to beat you up. And the
threat that they would most often try to use orgs
say well, someday when the war ends, if you don't cooperate,
we're not going to let you go.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
We're going to keep you here.
Speaker 4 (07:20):
I don't think anybody believed them, but it was always
something in the back of your mind. But yes, physical
torture was a part of the experience, but it didn't
happen every day. On July sixth of nineteen sixty six,
the United States conducted air raids in Hiphong and Hanoi
(07:40):
for the first time. That was a significant step as
far as the Vietnamese concerned. They to think that the
United States would bomb a target in Hanoi made them
very angry, and so that night they took most of
the people from this camp, the zoo and some people
from another camp. There were less than one hundred prisoners
(08:00):
total at that time. They took about fifty five or
sixty of us, and we were blindfolded We didn't know
where we were, but they took us to downtown Hanoi.
They got you out of the truck, you hand keppted
you to one other prisoner, and you were sitting on
the floor on the street here out in the middle
of this residential area. They had Vietnamese soldiers on both
(08:25):
sides of this line of people. And when they took
the blindfolds off and told you to stand up, and
you were walking, they turned a corner and the streets
were lined. It was like a Fourth of July parade.
And the streets were lined with people six seven deep
in rows on both sides calling you bad names. And
(08:45):
it's a really wonder that somebody didn't get killed in
that what we came to be known as the Hanoi March.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
The cadres were trying to.
Speaker 4 (08:54):
Keep the people back from throwing rocks at us and
hitting you over the head with shoes. It's a wonder
somebody didn't get a knife stuck in their back when
that was going on. It ended up a couple hours
later at a soccer stadium in downtown Hanoi, and when
they opened the gates of the stadium to try to
get the prisoners in here. There was a surge of population,
(09:15):
of civilian population any only that just burst right through
the gates.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
At the same time.
Speaker 4 (09:19):
They ended up with all the Americans sitting out in
the middle of the soccer field with soldiers all around
us trying to get the while they tried to get
all the civilians out of here. February twelfth was the
first day of prisoner release in accordance with the agreements
that were signed in Paris at the end of January
nineteen seventy three. And then in my personal case, I
(09:42):
was on the first airplane home from Clark Air Force
Base on Valentine's Day of nineteen seventy three. There were
twenty guys on the first airplane home, and I had
the good fortune to be one of them. The adjustment
process to life in the seventies was pretty remarkable in
its that was quite an experience as well. Fortunately for us,
(10:05):
the one thing that everybody could agree on about the
Vietnam War is that they were glad to have us home.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
And a great job on the editing by Monte Montgomery
and a special thanks to the Iowa GoldStar Military Museum
at Camp Dodge for graciously allowing us to air this audio.
And as he said, simply hearing the keys of the
guards instilled fear into the prisoners. Nothing good happened when
you left your cell. Little good happened at night. Unimaginable
(10:36):
what men like this went through. Nearly seven years Larry
Spencer served as a prisoner of war. His story here
on our American Stories
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