Beyond the Worst Suspicions

On Aug. 3, 1966 TIME's Donald Neff, then a Saigon correspondent, interviewed Air Force Ace Major James Kasler--one of the legendary figures of the Viet Nam War--just after his 72nd mission. The story that went to press that week dubbed Kasler a "one-man Air Force" and perhaps the "hottest" pilot in Southeast Asia. Five days later, Kasler buckled into the cockpit of his F-105 Thunderchief for his 73rd--and last--mission. His plane was hit by ground fire, and he was forced to eject. He was held prisoner until a month ago. Last week Neff again interviewed Kasler, now a full colonel, at his home in Indianapolis, and filed this account of the intervening 6 1/2 years:

As soon as I was out, I knew I was hurt," says Kasler. "My right thigh was broken, and a piece of bone about eight inches long had split off and jammed into my groin. I landed near some paddies 50 miles south of Hanoi. About 15 villagers jumped me and tore off all my clothes except my shorts. Then they saw my leg. In about five minutes a medic came, gave me a shot and made a splint out of a banana tree. They put me in a fish net and started carrying me--when the planes came."

Word that he had been shot down had touched off a massive rescue effort by nearly 50 U.S. planes. But for Kasler the Viet Nam War was all over, and he wished that they would go away. He was in intense pain and very thirsty, but because of the presence of U.S. planes overhead his captors laid him in a ditch and hid him under banana leaves.

Once the planes had left, Kasler was lashed to a board and driven north in the back of a pickup truck. At each village, he says, "people would hit me and throw rocks and mud at me, and the guards would hit me in the mouth--I guess to show how tough they were. In one village, they gave a little girl a bayonet and took pictures of her holding it to my throat. Big heroine! When we reached Hoa Lo prison camp [the so-called Hanoi Hilton] they put me on a cement floor, and interrogators told me that I must write a 'confession of crimes against the Vietnamese people.' I refused."

His guards soon began to beat him. "I couldn't believe they would beat an injured prisoner. Later I found out that that was their technique to break you. You're most vulnerable when first captured and injured. I finally wrote something like 'We should seek peace at the peace table.'" His reward was a shot of penicillin.

Kasler's right thighbone had been set with an iron clamp when he reached Hanoi, but the leg continued to swell under his full body cast. The cast was finally removed and the leg lanced, but the infection spread and the leg puffed up to twice its normal size. For most of that first winter, he lay in fever, alternately freezing and roasting. His roommate, Air Force Captain John Brodak of St. Louis, gave up his own blanket to keep Kasler warm in the 40DEG nights. "I'm probably here because of his care," says Kasler. (Brodak, now a major, was released with Kasler.) Often the bandages were not changed for a week and a half. "It was horrible," says Kasler. "All the gore was running out, and flies and mosquitoes flocked to the wound. At one point the stench became so bad that we got a piece of oilcloth to wrap around the leg to hold down the smell." His weight dropped from 167 to 125 Ibs. When he asked to see a doctor for his draining leg, he was refused.

By mid-August 1967, the torturing of prisoners in Kasler's building began in earnest (he had been moved from the Hanoi Hilton to another prison in the capital, "the Zoo--that's what it reminded us of"). The Vietnamese had discovered that the Americans were communicating with each other by tapping on the concrete walls, and wanted to know who was guilty. Kasler certainly was. With the prisoners' special tap code, he said, he "could send a message through five rooms and get an answer back in ten minutes. We really got pretty fast at it." The price for being caught was high. Although his leg was still draining, Kasler was subjected to all manner of rope and iron tortures.

"They had these iron manacles with a screw that they could clamp on your wrists or ankles. They'd take your wrists, put them behind you and screw down those manacles to the bone. Then they'd take a rope and pull it through your upper arms and squeeze your arms together or pull them up. They had a lot of tricks."

Magoo. "Many men had their wrists broken and their arms dislocated. The sessions lasted about 45 minutes and they were always accompanied by beatings with fists, slapping on the ears so hard that eardrums were ruptured. The guards looked for any little infraction so they could beat you. Our guard--we called him 'Magoo' because he looked like the cartoon character, all squinty--was vicious. He used to come in the cell about twice a week and beat John Brodak and me. Sometimes he'd beat us for no cause, just open the door, come in and knock us around."

From the fall of 1967 through the spring of 1968, Kasler was tortured frequently by Magoo and an interrogator called "the Elf," because he was a wizened 75-pounder. Kasler was moved into solitary confinement, where he got little medical attention, even though his leg was still swollen and badly infected. But the worst was yet to come. The violent antiwar reaction in the U.S. that followed the Communist 1968 Tet offensive apparently convinced Hanoi that the war could be won by propaganda. A maximum effort was made at the Zoo to get prisoners to appear before various peace delegations and press conferences.

For Kasler, the harshest treatment began on June 25, 1968. He was called before an interrogator nicknamed "Spot" (because he had a white spot on the right side of his head). "He was cordial. He asked me to sit down, gave me a cigarette, asked me about my family--I'd been allowed one letter at that point. He said he was trying to select a man to celebrate the downing of the 3,000th U.S. plane to tell the American people the truth about the war and appear on TV. I said I wasn't the guy. He said I must. The Vietnamese people had saved my life, he said, had fed me. I said I owed him nothing.

"They demanded that I surrender. They hit me on the ears. They gave me the rope-and-irons treatment for 45 minutes, then had me kneel, then the irons again. I finally passed out. The third time they gave me the rope-and-irons treatment, I said, 'I surrender.'

"They just continued torturing me. They pulled my arms until I passed out again. They made me write that I had sabotaged the Geneva Accords--it was the whole Communist line. They had this big deal coming up for the Fourth of July with a delegation from somewhere and they badly wanted me to appear before it." Kasler firmly resisted. At one point during a torture session, yet another interrogator pulled out a bunch of newspaper clippings from the U.S. showing all the peace demonstrations. "In one of the pictures, I saw way in the background two guys with American Legion hats holding a sign that said 'Drop the Bomb.' That really bolstered me."

The next morning the interrogator returned with a Caucasian. He was about 35 and six feet tall, black-haired, brown-eyed, and spoke idiomatic English. He was a specialist in torture. The prisoners called him Fidel because he seemed to be Latin, but no one really had any idea where he came from. He obviously was a high official of some Communist country, because he lorded it over the Vietnamese.

Fidel grabbed Kasler by the shirt and demanded, "Who knows you are resisting?" Kasler answered: "Nobody." "Then why?" asked Fidel. "For myself." Fidel promised treatment for Kasler's leg, better food and conditions if he would go before the July 4 delegation. "I refused. He ordered me back on my knees. My broken leg was still killing me. My arms were in irons behind my back. He worked on them with the rope for a while. Then he got a thin wire and wired my thumbs and hands together. He tortured me, working on the rope and wire and irons. After about 45 minutes I was punchy. But I found I had discovered a way to endure."

Shreds. "As long as I could concentrate on something else, it seemed as though I could stand the pain. I would start saying the Lord's Prayer, and when I forgot a line I would go back over it and over it. Finally Fidel knocked me over on the floor and asked if I surrendered. I said no."

The torture continued for days. Fidel would beat Kasler across the buttocks with a large white truck fan belt until "he tore my rear end to shreds." At one point Fidel said, "You are going to see a delegation if we have to carry you on a stretcher." For one three-day period, Kasler was beaten with the fan belt every hour from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., and kept awake at night.

"By noon the third day I couldn't keep control of my mind. I said I surrendered. They kept beating me on the hour until 6 p.m. By this time I had a gash over the eye where my head had hit the edge of the bed during one beating, my leg was throbbing and bleeding, my back was bloody. I signed a statement agreeing to do everything the camp commandant ordered."

Kasler was allowed to sleep that night. His mosquito net, which had been taken away, was given back, thus sparing him at least the torment of insect bites. For the next two days the guards kept asking him if he surrendered and each time he said that he did. But on the third day his strength was partly back and he answered no.

"I think I made a tactical error. It was around 7 a.m. on a Sunday. Four guards came in and put me on my knees. They began slapping me around. Soon they were using their fists, and one of them pulled out a fan belt and began beating me with it. One blow by a fist on the ear ruptured my eardrum. Blood was pouring down my head. A kick popped one of my ribs. They turned into mad dogs. They began smashing my head against the concrete floor, kicking my bad leg. It went on for three hours. I think some other guards finally had to stop them.

"I lay in a stupor for three days. I was in terrible pain. They had dislodged the iron pin in my leg during the beating, and it was shoved three-quarters of an inch up into my hip. My mouth was so bruised that I could not open my teeth for five days."

A week later Fidel asked Kasler if he surrendered. "I decided I'd say yes, and then resist when they asked me to do something." He was put in a room with fresh air, and given cigarettes and chewing gum. Though under threat of death, he communicated once again with his fellow captives. "The guys didn't recognize my old call signal, so I just kept sending my own name. Finally old Norm Wells [Lieut. Colonel Norman Wells had been one of Kasler's wingmen] came up in the next room. Boy, it was good to hear him."

But Kasler's leg continued to get worse, and his morale ebbed. "I started to go downhill rapidly. I lay on my bed all day, dreading when the food came around because I had to get up to get it at the door of my cell." Finally, in the winter of 1968, he was taken back to the hospital. X rays showed that an operation was necessary. One of the guards told him that his leg had to be amputated. The wound was cleaned out, however, the iron clamp removed and the leg was finally on its way to healing--nearly 2 1/2 years after it had been broken. In early February 1969, Kasler was returned to the Zoo, and got a roommate, Navy Commander Peter Schoeffel, who had been shot down in 1967. He had spent a total of 18 months in solitary confinement since his capture.

Killed. The torture continued through the spring and summer of 1969. But that July, under threat of more beatings, Kasler wrote one last statement "about the struggle of the great Vietnamese people." He was never tortured again, though others were.

By October 1969, conditions noticeably improved for the prisoners--but were still not good. Kasler and others were moved in December 1969 to the Hanoi Hilton, where there was a room called Heart Break. In it, new captives and men who had cracked mentally under torture were placed in stocks in their beds, unable to move. Three unbalanced Americans were held there. "We could hear them in our room. We pleaded with the guards to let them come to our cell, but were turned down. Two of them just eventually disappeared. We saw the other's name on a list of dead. All told, at least 15 men were either killed during torture or were not accounted for."

Sitting in his comfortable Indianapolis apartment last week with his wife Martha, Kasler, now 47, looked amazingly fit. He wears glasses and his hair is grayer. But he walks without a limp, and he still has a quick smile and a soft chuckle. He had already caught up with the latest fashions and was sporting bright blue bell bottoms. Touching his short hair, he chuckled and said that he planned to let it grow a bit. Despite all his pain, Kasler displayed remarkably little bitterness--except when he mentioned Fidel. "I'd like to meet him some day," he said softly. But for now, Kasler was looking forward to some rest and then spending a year at the Air Force War College. His goal: command of a wing (two squadrons) of fighter aircraft. At heart, he is still very much a fighter pilot.

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