Eleven Letters Honor POW's Hidden Wound

As we made our dive for the ground.

We were out of control -- we started to roll.

The earth was spinning around . . .

They yanked their ejection fuses, and cannon shells exploded under their seats, rocketing them out to parachute toward tangled vegetation 1,000 feet below.

Collins's vertebrae compressed like an accordion when he hit ground. Villagers seized him and later led him blindfolded down a road, hobbling. "I just shouted, 'Al, you around here?' " Collins remembers. "And I heard him, a couple hundred yards behind me. He yelled, 'Yes!' Then they beat me up a little, and we kept going."

They were separated two days later. They were shuffled through different camps and didn't see each other again for 7 1/2 years.

Getting the Word

Bob Brudno was in his fraternity house at Tufts University when he heard the news.

Missing in action -- at least there was some hope. Then hope became a daily, then weekly, then monthly ordeal.

As the number of planes shot down more than tripled from 1965 to 1966, people knew pilots were being held prisoner. But U.S. officials instructed families to stay quiet, advising them that publicity might prompt punishment in the camps or make the POWs pawns in peace negotiations. So the Brudnos waited in silence, writing to Alan and waiting for responses that never came.

Then on Feb, 10, 1966 -- Bob's 21st birthday -- Debby got a letter confirming that Alan was alive.

"It's your birthday present," Debby remembers telling Bob.

More than a year later, they learned that Alan's wit had survived, too. Bob, then in the Navy, got a call from the Pentagon. Prisoners had been recorded reading forced statements on Radio Hanoi. They had been given a Christmas dinner, and the North Vietnamese wanted to publicize that. Bob heard his brother's recorded voice:

"It was a BFD," Alan said in a singsong voice, a thick strain of sarcasm imparted. "That's 'Big Fine Dinner' in Brudno talk."

The acronym told Bob it was definitely Alan. He told his mother that a "BFD" was a Brudno staple: The B stood for big, the D stood for deal, and the F -- that was a modifier his mother would never condone.

"Oh, that is terrible," Ruth Brudno said, Bob recalls. "I told you boys never to use that word."

A Bright Spot

When their blindfolds were removed, prison mates Alan Brudno and Navy Lt. Cmdr. Bill Tschudy found themselves handcuffed together on a hot July night in 1966 in downtown Hanoi, at the very front of a line of 52 POWs.

The North Vietnamese had threatened to try the captured pilots for the massacre of civilians. Now the prisoners were paraded in front of an angry public.

Guards with bayonets lined the prisoners' flanks as crowds pressed closer. Bottles, batteries and gobs of spit arched over the guards. Fists and feet connected. Finishing the two-mile gantlet, almost all the prisoners were bruised, many were bleeding and some had lost teeth.

Scattered reports appeared in the international media the next day. "The Hanoi March" prompted the first serious public discussions of POW treatment. From the United Nations to the Vatican, the treatment was denounced. The North Vietnamese rescinded threats of trials.

But the prisoners had no way of knowing. Brudno and Tschudy returned to Briarpatch, a camp about 35 miles west of Hanoi, to the brick huts and 10-by-7-foot pens with no electricity and a metal bucket for a latrine. Food was a scoop of rice and cabbage soup, twice a day, which dieticians later estimated provided 700 calories a day.

By August, prisoners recalled, their captors tied their wrists behind their backs, stretching their shoulders and pushing their heads forward for long spells, to coerce them to confess to crimes.

Against horrors so chilling, the spirit was willing

But the flesh was too weak to withstand.