----------------------------
Wayne and his family currently reside in IA.
---------------------------------------------
Posted on: Monday, 31 July 2006, 03:00 CDT
'Hanoi Hilton' Memories: EX-POW RECOUNTS CODE THAT KEPT PRISONERS' SPIRITS
HIGH
By Greg Kocher, The Lexington Herald-Leader, Ky.
Jul. 31--The numbers and alphabet that Wayne Ogden Smith learned as a
student in Richmond became instrumental in keeping his sanity during five
years and two months as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.
While a POW at the infamous "Hanoi Hilton" -- the same prison that held John
McCain, now a U.S. senator from Arizona -- Smith tapped messages to
prisoners in neighboring cells as a means of communication.
"It was a 24-hour-a-day exercise," Smith said in a phone interview from his
Naples, Fla., home. "We tapped a huge amount of knowledge through those
walls. The key was, we wanted to make sure that we ... leaned on each other
and kept our spirits up. We wanted to make sure that we were positive. Your
well-being was the first order of business."
Now a retired corporate executive, Smith, 62, will return to Richmond this
week to be the keynote speaker for the Kentucky Veterans Welcome Home, an
event that invites veterans to partake of four days of entertainment,
military displays and recognition.
"Welcome home" will have special significance for Smith. It will be his
first trip to Madison County since his grandfather's funeral in 1967.
Smith grew up on his maternal grandparents' farm outside Richmond, near Lake
Reba. His father had abandoned the family when Wayne was 2; his mother
worked at JCPenney.
Smith and his sister attended the Training School at Eastern Kentucky State
Teachers' College, the forerunner of today's Model Laboratory School at
Eastern Kentucky University.
After attending grades 1 through 8 in Richmond, the family moved to
Louisville, where Smith graduated from Eastern High School in 1961.
He went through pilot training at Moody Air Force Base in Valdosta, Ga.,
graduating a few years before George W. Bush.
Smith had flown 21 missions over Laos, and was on his 69th mission over
North Vietnam when he was shot down on Jan. 16, 1968. He ejected from the
plane and landed in a tree 12 feet off the ground and about 25 miles outside
of Hanoi.
He was initially interrogated and beaten in the French-built prison, Hoa Lo,
which the POWs had nicknamed "the Hanoi Hilton." Later he was blindfolded
and taken to a location known as "the Plantation," where he was put into
solitary confinement.
"That's when you became pretty depressed and feeling sorry for yourself,"
Smith said. "I heard this scratching on the wall but I couldn't make out
what it was."
Some weeks later he was moved to a location known as "the Warehouse." He was
put in a windowless 8-by-10 room with a wooden door and small peephole, one
hanging lightbulb and brick walls covered with plaster. A 5-gallon bucket
was the bathroom.
He found a way to relay notes with the bucket. He was given the job of
dumping the contents into a cesspool, and switched lids to send notes to
other prisoners. The pencil-scratched notes were written on coarse toilet
paper, then folded and stuffed into the lids.
It was also in this location that he was given the key to the scratching and
tapping. A fellow prisoner yelled to him through a common drain, "Hey, new
guy! Tap code: Five rows, five columns, C and K are the same."
The taps were based on dividing the alphabet into five columns with A, F, L,
Q and V the key letters.
Prisoners would tap once for the five letters in the A column, twice for the
letters in the F column, and so on. After indicating the column, they would
pause for a beat, then tap one through five times to indicate the right
letter.
To tap the name "Wayne," for example, would be 5-2, 1-1, 5-4, 3-3 and 1-5.
"We could use that with a lot of variations," Smith said. "The most bizarre
one was in a place where they didn't have any adjoining walls so they had a
hard time communicating through the walls."
The guards were always coughing and hacking, so the prisoners used coughing,
spitting and sneezing as a form of communication.
Messages typically ended with "GBU," for "God bless you." To communicate
that meant two coughs-two coughs for "G," two coughs for "B," and a
wretching as though trying to hack up expectorant for "U."
"We had our own little shorthand," Smith said.
"What we did later was like going from the telegraph to the Internet.
Somebody discovered that if you put your little tin cup up against the wall,
you could yell through that cup and it had such a muffled sound that the
guards couldn't hear you. So we could actually talk through it.
"I still have my cup today. And it's got all these little holes in it. And
that made it not functional, so I had to take some rubber from my shoes and
stuff them in the holes so I could use it to drink with."
Communication was not only restorative to the soul of a lonely prisoner. It
was important for other reasons.
"We had to make sure that we had memory banks of all those who were known
alive. We had to memorize all the names and their conditions, in case any of
us made it back," he said.
Smith was finally released on March 14, 1973, having spent 1,882 days in
captivity. His captors gave him a pair of trousers, shoes and a little
jacket and put him on a bus to an airport.
"They read off our names and an airman grabbed me by the arm and escorted me
up the ramp," Smith said. "The engines never stopped. We were pretty subdued
at that point. I don't know why. All the people in crisp uniforms were
thrilled and shaking hands and all that.
"But I tell you, it didn't really become reality until the plane left
Vietnam and went over the Gulf of Tonkin, and the captain came over the
intercom and said, 'Feet wet, gentlemen. Welcome home.' And then there was
this roar" of jubilation.
"Feet wet" was a phrase that meant you were over water and no guns were
shooting at you, Smith said.
After the war, Smith was a pilot for Eastern Airlines. He joined Air
Products and Chemicals and held a number of executive assignments around the
country over 16 years.
He became president of B.F. Goodrich Chemicals, and retired in 1999 as
executive vice president of MidAmerican Energy, a company later bought by
billionaire Warren Buffett.
Today, Smith keeps busy with various community boards and activities in
Naples, where he lives with his wife, Jean. His son, Shawn, and daughter,
Shannon, live nearby.
He has never returned to Vietnam.
"I don't have any nightmares about it," he said. "I think when I talk about
it it's therapy. I don't think there is any such thing as a normal person.
We're all abnormal; it's just a matter of degree. So I think for those who
were relatively stable, it probably strengthens you. And for those who were
pretty unstable it had the opposite effect."
Reach Greg Kocher in the Nicholasville bureau at (859) 885-5775 or
gkocher1@herald-leader.com [mailto:gkocher1@herald-leader.com].
