The Incredibly Stupid One
TIL about Douglas Brent Hegdahl III , a former US Navy sailor who was held as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War.
As a fresh high school graduate from a family of farmers, Hegdahl was excited to experience the world outside of South Dakota. He jumped in head first when the Navy came recruiting, and soon found himself deployed to the USS Canberra as an ammunition handler.
In 1967, the United States was deeply enmeshed in the Vietnam War. The Canberra was assigned to the South China Sea to provide support with her 5-inch and 8-inch guns. During one nighttime bombardment, Hegdahl went out onto the deck of the Canberra. One of the lessons from safety training is to not be on deck when the guns are firing–you don’t want to end up with ruptured eardrums, or even blown off the ship. Hegdahl missed that particular lesson. The firing of the Canberra’s guns knocked Hegdahl overboard into the Gulf of Tonkin.
Five hours later, Hegdahl was picked up by locals who took him to the “Hanoi Hilton”, the prison that Hegdahl would call home for two years. Hegdahl quickly realized what was at stake. When the Vietcong asked him to write an anti-war statement, Hegdahl happily agreed with But there’s a catch. and informed his captors that he didn’t know how to read or write.
The Vietcong assigned a tutor to teach him sentence structure and penmanship, but Hegdahl’s theatrics convinced his captors that he was too dumb to learn even the basics. Eventually, the militiamen gave up. They assigned him to courtyard cleaning, a rare level of freedom for a prison with a penchant for solitary confinement, and gave him the nickname, “The Incredibly Stupid One”.
In the following two years, Hegdahl memorized the names, identifying characteristics and social security numbers of 256 prisoners of war to the tune of “Old MacDonald had a Farm”. The extra freedom he was given due to his perceived stupidity allowed him to act as a messenger courier for other prisoners, and he even found time to disable five enemy trucks. At one point, he managed to convince the Hanoi Hilton guards that he needed new glasses, and memorized the path from the prison to the city of Hanoi. In 1969, he became the only prisoner of war who was ordered by a senior officer to accept an early release so that he could provide the information he had painstakenly memorized to the US government.