How a Navy sailor fell off his ship — then became a Vietnam POW hero

The latest headlines from our reporters across the US sent straight to your inbox each weekday Your briefing on the latest headlines from across the US Your briefing on the latest headlines from across the US SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “No one knows what they’re going to do under circumstances like that and Doug, who was from a tiny town in eastern South Dakota, barely got through high school, but he was a smart guy, and he figured it out,” says Marc Leepson, whose new book, the first biography of Hegdahl, The Unlikely War Hero: A Vietnam War POW’s Story of Courage and Resilience in the Hanoi Hilton, is out this month. And I think that’s something that people should know.” Funnily enough, while Hegdahl’s heroism originated in a brutal prison ironically nicknamed for a famous hotel chain, his early life played out in a different place also locally nicknamed “Hilton.” Hegdahl and his two brothers grew up living in and working in a hotel his parents purchased in downtown Clark, South Dakota – “which the locals nicknamed the Hegdahl Hilton, an ironic nod to the fact that it was far from fancy,” Leepson writes. He quotes a 1972 interview given by Hegdahl – who sought to escape the spotlight as time went on after his release – in which he says: “I was so mad about their propaganda that it became a personal war to think how I could mess it up.” open image in gallery Hegdahl and Alice Stratton in Washington, D.C., in 1988; following his release, Hegdahl began working as an instructor in the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape school in San Diego Bay, where he was ‘especially adept at giving advice on how to survive in a POW camp,’ writes Marc Leepson in his new book Hegdahl’s savviness and knack for memorization caught the attention and respect of superior officers in the POW camp – who ordered him to accept early release, which US military prisoners are forbidden from doing according to the established code of conduct. “Torture didn’t stop, but it did lessen significantly, and some of their strictures were taken away – for instance, communication.” Roger Shields, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for POW/MIA Affairs from 1971 to 1977, explains in the book that, after Hegdahl provided names to the Pentagon, “we told the North Vietnamese, ‘You are responsible for the salvation and the survival of these particular men,’ thereby putting the onus on the North Vietnamese in a way that had never been done before.” On the same day that Hegdahl participated in his first post-release press conference, speaking from Bethesda, Maryland, Ho Chi Minh died – prompting a change of leadership that also coincided with more pressure on the Communists from the Nixon Administration regarding treatment of POWs.