![]() ![]() The friend arranged for the former prisoner and the photographer to connect. Later, on a visit to Berlin, that friend went to see Billhardt’s work - and there, hanging on the wall, was a picture of Wayne Waddell, taken the day of the Pilots in Pajamas filming. ![]() Years later, at a cartoon and photography convention, a friend of Waddell’s happened to meet the son of one of the German photographers, Thomas Billhardt, the man with the still camera. But the story of the photograph doesn’t end there. “Elation, sadness, humor, sarcasm, excitement, depression-all came through.Waddell was released on March 4, 1973. “Our tapping ceased to be just an exchange of letters and words it became conversation,” recalled former POW James Stockton. ![]() It enabled prisoners to establish a command structure, keep a roster of captives, and pass information. The code was based on two-number combinations that represented each letter. They drew strength from one another, secretly communicating via notes scratched with sooty matches on toilet paper, subtle hand gestures, or code tapped out on their cell walls. Some played mind games to keep themselves sane, making mental lists or building imaginary houses, one nail at a time. “It’s easy to die but hard to live,” a prison guard told one new arrival, “and we’ll show you just how hard it is to live.”Īmerican POWs in Vietnam struggled to survive horrid conditions, physical pain, and psychological deprivation, often for years on end. Prisoners were variously isolated, starved, beaten, tortured, and paraded in anti-American propaganda. American POWs gave them nicknames: Alcatraz, Briarpatch, Dirty Bird, the Hanoi Hilton, the Zoo. In North Vietnam alone, more than a dozen prisons were scattered in and around the capital city of Hanoi. From 1961 to 1973, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong held hundreds of Americans captive in North Vietnam, and in Cambodia, China, Laos, and South Vietnam. ![]()
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