Unlikely Story

The Extraordinary Tale of Doug Hegdahl, the Youngest and Lowest-Ranking American POW in the Hanoi Hilton

BY Marc Leepson

Little-known fact about the Vietnam War: 271 U.S. Navy sailors were lost at sea in the waters off the coast of Vietnam from 1965-73. A good portion were thrown overboard during fires and explosions. Scores of others went over the side by accident, by malfeasance, or by their own desire to end it all.

Only one American sailor during the long war in Vietnam, however, went into the drink and wound up in a Prisoner of War camp in Hanoi: Seaman Apprentice Douglas Brent Hegdahl.

The incredible Vietnam War story of Doug Hegdahl, the youngest and lowest-ranking American POW captured in North Vietnam, began at around 4:30 a.m. on April 6, 1967. That’s when Hegdahl, 20, lay wide awake in his bunk below decks on the U.S.S. Canberra, a guided missile cruiser patrolling the coast of North Vietnam.

Doug Hegdahl had joined the Navy the previous fall not long after he’d graduated from high school in his hometown of Clark, South Dakota, population 1,300. It was the patriotic thing to do. Plus, as his mother told him more than once, if he joined the Navy, he wouldn’t get drafted and six months later find himself hacking through triple-canopy jungle fighting the Viet Cong.

CHS Library, Clark (S.D.) High School

He told the friendly Navy recruiter one steamy summer’s day in nearby Watertown that he wanted to see the world. Any place special, the recruiter asked with a smile. Hegdahl said he’d always wanted to see Australia. The recruiter handed him the four-year enlistment papers. Hegdahl signed on the dotted line. He took the oath in Fargo, North Dakota, at the Armed Forces Examining and Entrance Station, and shipped out to boot camp in San Diego.

After that, the Navy was supposed to send him for more training to be a postal clerk. But that never happened. The needs of the service in the escalating war in Vietnam took precedence. Instead, Hegdahl went home to Clark for Christmas leave, returned to San Diego, and soon thereafter shipped out.

In February, he found himself working a blue-collar job on the Canberra, a World War II-vintage guided missile cruiser on its third Vietnam War cruise in the Gulf of Tonkin. It would be the closest he’d get to the ship’s namesake country during his short Navy career.

Having grown up in land-locked South Dakota, Doug Hegdahl had never even seen the ocean, much less the inside of a big fighting ship. Not long after reporting for duty he realized that life on the Canberra was nothing like he’d envisioned it—and a far cry from life in the small town where he grew up.

He soon realized that he was a tiny cog in the Canberra’s Deck Division, the guys who did the grunt work, including swabbing the decks, painting everything that didn’t move, scrubbing toilets in the heads, and humping ammo.

As an ammunition handler, Hegdahl worked split-shift, twelve-hour days below decks wrestling gunpowder sacks and shells for the five-inch guns. He had to pull guard duty (watch) regularly, sometimes on the midnight-to-4:00 a.m. graveyard shift. Sleep became a precious commodity as he and the other Deck Division men worked literally day and night.

He grabbed sack time whenever he could. Spending all those hours below deck, Hegdahl sometimes forgot what day of the week it was—and even whether it was day or night.

He ate, slept, and worked in the dimly lit, smelly, overcrowded enlisted men’s quarters. Forget air conditioning; he lived every aspect of life alongside scores of other low-ranking enlisted men jammed together and most of the time stuck out of sight of the officers and NCOs.

Bettmann/Getty Images

Photo courtesy Naval Historical Center

Zero dark thirty on April 6, 1967. Doug Hegdahl 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. Harassment and Interdiction fire—H & I. Supposedly a spotter somewhere or a forward air control 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 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.

He’d heard those guns blasting away at night at targets in North Vietnam when he’d humped the shells and powder kegs below decks. But he’d never seen them in action. And guys who had seen night firing told him it was an amazing sight.

So, Hegdahl decided to take a look for himself. 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 to the gun line to take in his first night bombardment.

The kid from Clark made his way closer and closer to the booming guns along the narrow, teak wood deck. There was not a sailor in sight. He vaguely remembered an orientation session soon after he had come aboard when some salty old Chief warned him and the other new guys about going out on deck when guns were blasting. Something about the concussion blowing out your eardrums or even knocking you overboard.

The guns began roaring as he headed toward one of the massive five-inch gun mounts.

“And the next thing I remember I was in the water,” Hegdahl later said, “and I can’t tell you how I fell from my ship. All I know is, I walked up on the deck, it was dark and they were firing, and the next thing I recall I was in the water.”

Said water being the Gulf of Tonkin. Just the clothes on his back—no life preserver, no ID, no glasses. He screamed for help as loudly as he could. But it was pitch dark, the guns were roaring, and not a soul was on deck.

“I remember seeing the ship a long time afterwards as I was treading water,” Hegdahl said. Then the Canberra was gone over the horizon. No one on board knew he had gone overboard. They wouldn’t realize he was missing till morning muster later that day. When Seaman Apprentice Hegdahl did not turn up at the muster, the officers ordered a search of the ship. Ninety minutes later, the search ended. No Hegdahl. After making a second search, the ship’s officers came to the conclusion that he’d gone over the side.

Doug Hegdahl was a big, strong guy who wrestled heavyweight and played on the football team at Clark High. And he was a good swimmer. But the tide was strong. It took him toward the shore away from the ship. He treaded water. He took off his boots—your standard-issue heavy black Navy boondockers—and tied them around his neck with the laces because he’d need them when he got to the shore. He remembered survival training and managed to wriggle out of his Navy dungarees, tie them at the cuffs, and wrap them around his head—a primitive life preserver.

Malcolm McConnell Collection/Texas Tech University

It didn’t work. The pants had holes in them. He wrangled them back on.

After a few hours of drifting, Hegdahl could hardly move his arms. He felt defeated. He stopped treading water. He began to sink. But as he descended, the cold water brought him back to life with a jolt, and he somehow fought his way to the surface.

Dawn came on the South China. Hegdahl summoned the energy to start swimming toward what he thought was the shore. But he couldn’t seem to get any closer to the speck of land he glimpsed on the horizon. He gave up and rolled on his back. He floated, staring at the sky. He worried about sharks. He began to pray.

After about four hours in the water, exhaustion set in. He knew he couldn’t stay afloat much longer.

Then Doug Hegdahl heard faint voices and an object closing in on him. He took off his white tee 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 later said. He managed to raise his arms. They saw him, hauled him in, brought him to the shore—and turned him over to the North Vietnamese Army.

“I didn’t think of myself as being captured,” Doug Hegdahl later said. “I thought of myself being rescued.” It was “probably the most embarrassing capture in the entire Vietnam War.”

A joke later went around the prison camps in Hanoi. Hegdahl, the Navy, Marine, and Air Force flyers said, held the record among the men held by the North Vietnamese for the lowest-altitude bailout.

Two days after being pulled out of the sea Doug Hegdahl found himself in the infamous H?a Lò (“WHA-low”) POW camp, the one U.S. prisoners sarcastically referred to as the Hanoi Hilton. The youngest American prisoner captured in North Vietnam, and the lowest-ranking imprisoned American there, he would be held for more than two years. But after Hegdahl come home in 1969, the young South Dakotan wrote his way into the Vietnam War history books.

At first, the North Vietnamese interrogators figured Doug Hegdahl for a spy who concocted a dubious tale of falling off a ship. But he soon convinced them that he was a lowly enlisted man who had no knowledge about any Navy operational information that could be useful to them, and that he really was blown off the deck of his ship.

True enough. But he also conned the North Vietnamese into believing that he was a bumbling fool by playing dumb when they interrogated him—so much so that guards began calling him “The Incredibly Stupid One.”

But Doug Hegdahl was far from stupid. “Falling off a ship was a dumb thing to do,” former POW Everett Alvarez, Jr. said in 2023, but when he got to Hanoi, Hegdahl “was playing dumb. He was a smart kid.” He “was dumb like a fox,” fellow POW Gerald Coffee added.

How smart? For one thing, Hegdahl quickly figured out that it would be to his advantage to act the village idiot. For another, he had an astounding memory. When his fellow prisoners—nearly all of them experienced pilots and navigators—realized that, they ordered him to do what many others in the Hanoi Hilton were doing: memorize the names of as many fellow POWs as he could, along with their ranks and services and any other bits of personal information they could scrounge up. He obeyed orders and set about gathering that info. It took more than two years.

The North Vietnamese gave precious little information to the world about the men imprisoned in the Hanoi Hilton. Washington had no idea exactly how many American men listed as missing in action wound up as Prisoners of War in the antiquated, hellish, former French colonial prison complex in and around Hanoi. Nor did their family members back home.

After Hegdahl had filed a mountain of information in his brain, his commanding officer (the POWs organized an unofficial chain of command behind bars) ordered him to accept an early release, which the Vietnamese regularly offered to POWs they wanted gone for propaganda purposes. That way he could give that vital information to the Pentagon.

Hegdahl refused. He felt it wasn’t right to leave when hundreds of others were still imprisoned. The officer understood, but insisted, and eventually Hegdahl complied.

In early July 1969, Seaman Apprentice Hegdahl and two other POWs—severely wounded Navy pilot Robert Frishman and Wesley Rumble, an Air Force captain with a serious back compression injury—were taken from their cells for a few weeks of “fattening up, sunning and indoctrination,” as a 1998 Pentagon study put it. On August 5, the North Vietnamese turned them over to a group of American antiwar activists who had flown to Hanoi for the occasion.

The Vietnamese had taken them from their cells that morning and put them—clad in dungarees, open-collar, off-white shirts, and rubber sandals—into a van that sped off to Hanoi’s Gia Lam Airport. North Vietnamese prison guards escorted the party onto a plane heading to Vientiane, the capital of Laos. After it touched down, U.S. Embassy officials came on board to confer with the three released POWs. Then everyone disembarked.

When the men stepped onto the tarmac, reporters mobbed them. Frishman answered questions. All Hegdahl said was that he mainly spent his time sweeping the camp, smoking, and listening to North Vietnamese propaganda on the radio. Not a word about the 254 names he’d memorized.

Hegdahl, Frishman, and Rumble then flew to Bangkok, where they were taken to the U.S. ambassador’s guest house. They were given new clothes—and steaks and beer. Hegdahl still didn’t say much for the record.

Then came a flight to New York’s Kennedy International Airport, before a hop to Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C. The Navy flew Doug Hegdahl’s parents and Frishman’s wife and parents to New York to greet them. Everyone was grinning broadly when they faced reporters on the windy tarmac after deplaning at Kennedy.

After that homecoming, Hegdahl met with his military debriefers. He shocked them when he began rattling off the names of 254 men. Hanoi had admitted holding only a few dozen, although the U.S. military had reliable intel on scores of others.

The debriefing officer couldn’t believe what he heard, so he told Hegdahl to name all the POW lieutenant colonels. Hegdahl took a deep breath, closed his eyes, opened them, and the names came pouring out rapid fire.

The debriefer said, “Can you slow it down,” Hegdahl later remembered. “I said, ‘No it’s like riding a bicycle, you’d tip over’” if you stopped. So, the debriefer asked him to recite all the names again and turned on a tape recorder so he could later get them all on paper.

With that, the Pentagon soon “changed the status of 40 people from missing [in action] to Prisoner of War,” Hegdahl said in 1973. He was wrong; the total of new names actually was 63.

But that’s not all. In addition to divulging the names, Hegdahl, Frishman, and Rumble (who also had a list of memorized names) told the Pentagon about the systematic torturing of the American POWs in Hanoi and Hegdahl reported many hitherto unknown details about life inside the Hanoi POW camps.

Photo courtesy Dick Stratton/Personal collection

Doug Hegdahl “had first-hand information about the torture, how it was done, to which people it was done,” former POW Dick Stratton said in 2019, “and the locations of various places around” the camps. “He was able to verify that for the intelligence community. And bring back all of those names.”

That critical information contributed to the Nixon Administration heating up its pressure on North Vietnam in the fall of 1969 to follow the 1949 Geneva Convention’s rules on humane treatment of POWs. Remarkably, within weeks after the former POWs were debriefed, the North Vietnamese greatly curtailed routine torturing and life in the camps improved significantly.

Other factors were at work, but there’s no doubt that the new information provided by Doug Hegdahl was an important factor in North Vietnam’s decision to make life immeasurably easier for the hundreds of POWs held in Hanoi—and gave great comfort to 63 families who learned that their loved ones were alive.

As a U.S. Navy historian put it: The North Vietnamese “made a bad mistake when they released Doug Hegdahl.”

This is an excerpt from The Unlikely War Hero, Arts Editor and Senior Writer Marc Leepson’s new slice-of-life biography of Doug Hegdahl.

https://www.amazon.com/Unlikely-War-Hero-Vietnam-Resilience/dp/0811772926

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