November 12, 2024 • 10 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Larry Spencer tells the story of being one of the first POWs 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 (00:54):
And then 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
(01:17):
whether to this 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, which it turns out was
(01:40):
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 that you know, we
may obviously we have a problem, but the thumbs up
(02:02):
meant that I think we're going to be okay. 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
(02:24):
into the water while I was still in my parachute.
This boat came out, had two or three people in it.
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
(02:45):
I had jettisoned at sea, because I knew if somebody
had if it was me with my little pistol against
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
(03:10):
and the jeep took off. It stopped a couple of
times during the course of the night, at what I
can only describe as a pep rally. I pulled into
a little village. 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
(03:31):
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 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 eighteen hundreds,
(03:56):
which became known as the Hanoi Hilton.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Larry was also and that too low nicknamed the Zoo
by those detained there.
Speaker 3 (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 a better appearance. That provided an opportunity to
communicate with everybody that was in the camp by the
(04:27):
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 if the guy was sweeping,
everybody in the camp could hear him, and it was
(04:49):
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 six months old, but it was news to us.
We had three different types of soup. Over the course
of a year. There was four months of spinach soup,
four months of cabbage soup, and four months of pumpkin soup.
(05:12):
Twice a day. 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
(05:34):
or whatever. It's still 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 our blood pressure jumped thirty
(05:58):
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 have no idea to this day.
Well the name that they gave me meant. It may
(06:20):
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. Either.
You were mistreated. It was more so in the first
years in the second, but the Vietnamese were very willing
(06:42):
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 every day. Sometimes you thought it
(07:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
To let you go.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
We're going to keep you here. 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 for the first time.
(07:41):
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 a hundred prisoners total at that time. They
(08:02):
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
(08:23):
had Vietnamese soldiers on both 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 it's a really wonder that somebody
(08:47):
didn't get killed in that what we came to be
known as the Hanoi March. The cadres were trying to
keep the people back from throwing rocks at us and
hitting you over the head with shoes. It's a wonderful
somebody didn't get 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
(09:10):
opened the gates of the stadium to try to get
the prisoners in here there was a surge of population,
of civilian population any only that just burst right through
the gates. At the same time. 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
(09:33):
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 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.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
One of them.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
The adjustment process to life in the seventies was pretty
remarkable in itself. That was quite an experience as well.
Fortunately for us, 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 (00:54):
And then 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
(01:17):
whether to this 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, which it turns out was
(01:40):
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 that you know, we
may obviously we have a problem, but the thumbs up
(02:02):
meant that I think we're going to be okay. 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
(02:24):
into the water while I was still in my parachute.
This boat came out, had two or three people in it.
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
(02:45):
I had jettisoned at sea, because I knew if somebody
had if it was me with my little pistol against
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
(03:10):
and the jeep took off. It stopped a couple of
times during the course of the night, at what I
can only describe as a pep rally. I pulled into
a little village. 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
(03:31):
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 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 eighteen hundreds,
(03:56):
which became known as the Hanoi Hilton.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Larry was also and that too low nicknamed the Zoo
by those detained there.
Speaker 3 (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 a better appearance. That provided an opportunity to
communicate with everybody that was in the camp by the
(04:27):
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 if the guy was sweeping,
everybody in the camp could hear him, and it was
(04:49):
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 six months old, but it was news to us.
We had three different types of soup. Over the course
of a year. There was four months of spinach soup,
four months of cabbage soup, and four months of pumpkin soup.
(05:12):
Twice a day. 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
(05:34):
or whatever. It's still 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 our blood pressure jumped thirty
(05:58):
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 have no idea to this day.
Well the name that they gave me meant. It may
(06:20):
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. Either.
You were mistreated. It was more so in the first
years in the second, but the Vietnamese were very willing
(06:42):
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 every day. Sometimes you thought it
(07:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
To let you go.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
We're going to keep you here. 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 for the first time.
(07:41):
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 a hundred prisoners total at that time. They
(08:02):
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
(08:23):
had Vietnamese soldiers on both 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 it's a really wonder that somebody
(08:47):
didn't get killed in that what we came to be
known as the Hanoi March. The cadres were trying to
keep the people back from throwing rocks at us and
hitting you over the head with shoes. It's a wonderful
somebody didn't get 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
(09:10):
opened the gates of the stadium to try to get
the prisoners in here there was a surge of population,
of civilian population any only that just burst right through
the gates. At the same time. 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
(09:33):
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 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.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
One of them.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
The adjustment process to life in the seventies was pretty
remarkable in itself. That was quite an experience as well.
Fortunately for us, 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
Host
Lee Habeeb
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