There are a couple pieces contained in this brief inadequate account that have been worth telling for many years. They are long overdue, since they both retain some minor mysteries. Those stories were sheltered in other labor, deferred for the telling of other tales of other mysteries.
The first is a tip of the Navy topper to Seaman Apprentice (E-2) Douglas B. Hegdahl, a former Navy sailor who was held as a Prisoner of War (POW) during the conflict in Vietnam. He was known widely in the small Navy community of aviation personnel required to attend what was known as Search, Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE) School. The school had been developed due to the aviation community’s unique vulnerability to being shot down over enemy held territory. The skills taught there included evasion on the ground, survival while being hunted, resistance when possible and escape when opportunity permitted. Training included communications skills with other POWs while in captivity, and collection of information that could be useful in accounting and rescue operations. They were rated as highly useful to those who were captured in those circumstances. As the Air Intelligence officer for a Navy Fighter Squadron (VF-151) I had the opportunity to go through the West Coast SERE School at Warner Springs, CA, in 1978.
The official story for Doug was that he was knocked off the USS Canberra (CA-70) while serving as an ammunition handler and trying to get a better view of the consequences of the concussion of guns from the line in the Gulf of Tonkin. He is then said to haveuswam for about five hours before being found by fishermen and turned over to the North Vietnamese Forces. Curiosities begin at that point, since there was no report of his missing status on Canberra, which normally would have resulted in a “man overboard” drill and a search along the navigational trace of the ship.
Once in custody of Vietnamese forces, Hegdahl was taken to the infamous Hỏa Lò Prison, nicknamed the “Hanoi Hilton,” where many American POWs were detained and tortured.
The Vietnamese believed that he was agent or commando, mostly because his story about being blown overboard wasn’t convincing enough for them. Absent guidance from any American prisoner, Hegdahl reacted to his situation by pretending to be an illiterate fool. Despite torture, he used his accent and his country manners to be more convincing and eventually succeeded in convincing his captors of his status, and the Vietnamese even started calling him “The incredibly stupid one.”
After his early release by the Vietnamese, approved by POW leadership, he was able to provide the names and personal information of about 256 other POWs as well as revealing the conditions and brutality in the prison camp. His flawless memories not only of information on the list of captured Americans but of all Vietnamese activities and locations to which he was exposed is an indication that the official story was not complete.
It will be worth telling.
The other hero is one who demonstrates the astonishing power of intelligence motivated by courage. Her name is Hedy Lamarr and her story is one of the most remarkable we have ever encountered. It pops up periodically since she achieved fame in one of her lines of endeavor as a film star. The other part is lesser known, but most recently posted on the Facebook page devoted to US Navy Ships & History by a member named Chuck Ippolito.
Like all who know one side of Ms Lamarr’s history, she was a lovely cinema star whose beauty set a standard that brought praise as “the most beautiful woman in the world.” As a sailor, Chuck styled his description of her as the “Female bad ass of the day: Body of a Goddess and the brains for war.”
In the picture above, Hedy was a 26-year old beauty queen, thriving in Hollywood. Then, in September 1940, a German U-boat sank a cruise ship trying to evacuate 90 British schoolchildren from the UK to Canada. 77 of the children drowned. Lamarr had been raised as a Catholic, but had been a Jewish immigrant from Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938. The only child of a famed industrialist, he poured knowledge of engineering and technology into her willing and capable mind.
The deaths of the fellow refugee children killed by the Nazis hit her hard. She fought back by applying her engineering skills in radio frequencies to development of a sonar sub-locatorused in the Atlantic for the benefit of the Allies in the hunt to destroy growing U-Boat threat. The applications of her technology were far reaching and led beyond the immediate military needs to assume a central role in evolving communications. Her work became the bedrock on which modern technology functions.
The principles of her work are now incorporated into modern Wi-Fi, CDMA and Bluetooth technology. The education that enabled her research and development and the means by which she did so is a story well worth further investigation. She was recognized after her passing. But her capabilities and achievement span both the artistic and scientific realms. Her presence in the world of cinema, but more importantly in the world of technical advance that has made our world possible. We will try to get to a way to tell it in a manner commensurate with the scope of her achievement.
But those are two stories of heroes you may not know, along with the stories you may not have encountered yet. They are worth remembering, if only because the dumbest son-of-a-bitch in the world was one of the smartest, and the most beautiful women who ever lived was smartest enough to invent our new world in between takes on center stage.
Copyright 2022 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com