Book Review

The Unlikely War Hero: A Vietnam War POW’s Story of Courage and Resilience at the Hanoi Hilton
by Marc Leepson
Stackpole Books (December 17, 2024)
240 pages
Available in Kindle and hardcover

By Marc Yablonka

In the 1999 film Return with Honor, then Commander Jeremiah Denton, told documentarians, “We were tortured to give them something. But we didn’t give them anything. We made them torture us again. We gave them as little as we could the next time. The idea was to return with honor.”

And that is exactly what U.S. Navy Seaman Apprentice Douglas Hegdahl did, even though he didn’t want to at first because, in addition to returning with honor, the POWs’ codes also included “No Early Releases.” Just why Doug Hegdahl acquiesced and left before others who’d been captured before him is informatively and eloquently illuminated for readers in historian and Vietnam War veteran Marc Leepson’s latest book The Unlikely War Hero: A Vietnam War POW’s Story of Courage and Resilience at the Hanoi Hilton (Stackpole Books, 240 pp. $32.95 Hardcover, Kindle $31.00).

The reason why Doug Hegdahl agreed to an early release lay in the fact that he had an uncanny memory, which enabled him to memorize names, ranks and other information about of 254 fellow POWs/ After coming home in August 1969, Hegdahl shocked his debriefers by rattling off the names. With that vital information, 63 missing servicemen were reclassified to Prisoners of War.

How Doug Hegdahl came to be a POW was not the way most POWs were captured. He was not a pilot, and he was not shot down, as we learn in The Unlikely War Hero.

“Twenty-year-old Seaman Apprentice Douglas Brent Hegdahl lay wide awake in his bunk below decks on the USS Canberra, a guided missile cruiser patrolling the coast of North Vietnam in the South China Sea. The war in Vietnam had been raging for nearly three years,” author Leepson, who also serves as the Arts and Entertainment Editor of the VVA Veteran magazine, wrote.

The details of how Hegdahl, who was assigned as an ammunition handler on the Canberra, would have his life altered forever are described in graphically cinematic tones in An Unlikely War Hero.

Here’s how Leepson describes it: “Zero dark thirty on April 6, 1967. Doug struggled to get some sleep on his triple bunk mattress as the Canberra’s guns bombarded enemy positions more than a dozen miles away on the mainland. They called it Harassment and Interdiction fire—H & I. Supposedly a spotter somewhere or a forward air control (FAC) pilot sees something fishy on land, radios a report, and the guns start booming. It can happen any time, day or night. Who knew what they were firing at? Who cared, anyway?

“He’d spent that day below decks doing his job feeding the ship’s twenty-foot-long, five-inch guns in the aft ammunition handling room. He was a member of the crew that jammed the five-inch-round shells into the breaches of the guns, followed by two cloth bags filled with gunpowder. Then the gun crew would slam the breech shut and fire.”

Hegdahl’s ears and sleep were constantly invaded by the booming canons on the Canberra’s deck, blasting away in the dark at targets, whether real or not, off the coast of North Vietnam, but he’d never seen them from on deck. He’d been told by his shipmates that it was an amazing sight.

“So, Doug decided to take a look for himself,” Leepson writes. “He slowly rolled his six-foot, 225-pound body out of his cramped bunk, careful not to bonk his head on the metal rack frame just inches above him. He didn’t even bother to look for his thick, black-framed glasses. He stowed his wristwatch and wallet in his locker, and made his way up to the deck to the gun line to take in his first night bombardment.”

As Hegdahl walked toward the booming guns, he remembered a Chief’s orientation after coming aboard the Canberra. He warned the sailors about going on deck when the guns were being fired. “Something about the concussion blowing on your eardrums or even knocking you overboard,” as Leepson puts it

Hegdahl got closer and closer to the guns that were blasting away as he headed toward one of the massive gun mounts. “And the next thing I remember I was in the water,” Hegdahl said.

We learn that Hegdahl struggled to stay afloat, at one point beginning to sink only to bolt back to the surface because of the frigid waters of the South China Sea. After about four hours in the water, he realized that he couldn’t stay afloat much longer.

“Then he heard faint voices and an object closing in on him. He took off his white T-shirt and waved it over his head. He saw Vietnamese men on a primitive fishing boat.”

“It looked like a Viking ship coming through the swells,” Hegdahl said.

Hegdahl then raised his arms so the fishermen could see him. They pulled him aboard, took him ashore, and turned him over to the North Vietnamese Army.

“I didn’t think of myself as being captured…I thought of myself being rescued,” Hegdahl later said.

Two days later, Doug Hegdahl found himself in the Hanoi Hilton. Immediately, his interrogators, not believing his story of falling overboard, took him for a spy. But very soon, they realized that they had a low-ranking enlisted man on their hands who had no information on Navy operations to offer then. He was no CIA spy.

How he convinced them is one for the history books.

“He conned the North Vietnamese into believing that he was a bumbling fool by playing it dumb when they interrogated him—so much so that the guards starting referring to him as `The Incredibly Stupid One,’” Leepson writes. “But Doug Hegdahl was far from stupid.”

Everett Alavarez Jr., the first and longest held POW at the Hanoi Hilton, and Gerald Coffee, weighed in on that in The Unlikely War Hero.

“Falling off a ship was a dumb thing to do,” Alvarez Jr. said, “but Doug was playing dumb. He was a smart kid.”

“Dumb like a fox,” added Coffee.

Because Hegdahl played dumb, that saved him from being subjected to the same level of physical or mental torture as his fellow prisoners, but he certainly witnessed it, which was undoubtedly traumatic in itself.

Ev Alvarez’s own accounting of his time in the Hanoi Hilton in his book Chained Eagle: The Heroic Story of the First American Shot Down Over North Vietnam describes his torture.

“J.C. [one of the guards], flung the door open, and, accompanied by other guards holding rifles and fixed bayonets, stormed in. While some of them held Tom [Barrett, Alvarez’s cellmate] at bay, J.C. motioned me outside and quickly set upon me, lashing out with clenched fists and pounding my head and body with wild swings. A succession of swings slammed into my jaw and I felt it give as I tried shielding my face with open hands.”

Hegdahl was subjected to long periods of solitary confinement, limited food and water, and, at one point started to escape. However, a sleeping guard awoke and forced him back into his cell. His transgression was apparently never brought to the attention of interrogators.

He was also the “star” of a propaganda film that was never released. It proved to be an incident during which Hegdahl got back at his captors, as this passage details:

“The following morning a Vietnamese film crew showed up and set up on the beach. A crowd of friendly village women, older folks, and small children showed up and the documentary’s director ordered them to line up on both sides of a path leading to the shore. He told Doug to run, shoeless, down the gauntlet, reenacting what the director guessed was what happened after Doug hit the shore about a year earlier,” Leepson writes.

“The jolly villagers pretended they were angry as Doug did his shoeless perp trot. The director then moved the villagers to the water’s edge to watch the next scene, which would be Doug arriving, dazed and confused, on shore after being rescued by militiamen. The director told Doug to wade out into the water, get into a small boat sitting close to the shore, then jump out and dejectedly march to shore and into the clutches of armed militiamen.

“But Doug had another idea. When he jumped out of the boat, he returned toward the beach with his head held high and a look of steely determination on his face.

“The infuriated director sent Doug back into the water a second time, but Doug marched back to shore with a big grin on his face waving to the civilians gathered there who greeted him with big smiles.

“That didn’t work for the director, so he changed the script and told two actor/militiamen to take custody of Doug in the shallow water and ordered Doug to pretend to struggle with the men, then give up, and dejectedly traipse back to shore.

“But the former high school heavyweight wrestler flipped the script again. He waded out, saluted the men with his left hand, then pushed one aside and grabbed the other one and held him under the water for a few seconds, then let the guy go. Doug later said that the director screamed obscenities at him, but the crowd of extras loved the show he put on”

“I acted like I was really ‘Uncle Tomming’ it all the way, running all over the place, [pretending to try] to get it right,” Hegdahl later said.

“The day at the beach ended with Doug `chattering and laughing’ with the village children—and even posing for a picture with a small child on his shoulders. The disgusted director called off the shoot. There was no beer on the long ride home, the propaganda film never got made, and Doug was dumped back in solitary.”

Hegdahl was ordered by his commanding officer to return home in order to share the valuable information he had acquired at H?a Lò, and was released with two other POWs on August 5, 1969.

As with his previous Vietnam War-related book, Ballad of the Green Beret, about the life of Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler, singer/songwriter of the hit song “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” Marc Leepson delves deeply into the captive experiences of Douglas Hegdahl and many of his fellow POWs in The Unlikely War Hero. It’s a book that will enrich the personal libraries of anyone who served in Vietnam, others old enough to remember the war, or those who are teaching and studying it today.