(VETERANS DAY FEATURE) Former POW Remembers His Time in the Hanoi Hilton

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Published on November 8 2018 10:25 am
Last Updated on November 8 2018 10:26 am

BY MARK DePUE, DIRECTOR OF ORAL HISTORY, ABRAHAM LINCOLN PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

Most of us avoid dwelling on the darkest, most painful corners of our lives. That is not the case for Gary Sigler of Auburn, Ill. During the Vietnam War, he spent six years as a prisoner of war in the notorious Hanoi Hilton. He has spent the rest of his life sharing the lessons he learned with anyone who will listen.

Lieutenant Sigler was a navigator and co-pilot for an RF-4 jet (the reconnaissance version of the Air Force’s workhorse Phantom) on his 92nd mission, flying low just west of Hanoi in April 1967. The pilot spotted the tell-tale sign of a surface-to-air missile speeding toward the aircraft. He took evasive action, but in the process clipped the top of a tree. The aircraft caught fire and Sigler was forced to eject; the Phantom, with the pilot still strapped in, plowed into a hill.

Sigler, suffering from severe burns and (unknown to him) a broken back, managed to evade the enemy for two days despite intense pain. Once captured, he was given very little medical care.

Thus began Sigler’s six-year ordeal, starting with a brutal interrogation. During the next couple of years, he was beaten, tortured and left in solitary confinement for months on end.

He described one of the most common methods of torture during an oral history interview: “The rope trick is where they tied elbows behind your back until they touched and then they would either tie your wrists together or they had handcuffs. … They’d put those on you and they’d squeeze them down until they cut off your circulation in your hands; that hurts a lot. Then they may slap you around a little bit. … That was the typical thing, the rope trick. Then they would beat on you. Sometime with gun butts, sometimes with fan belts. Sometimes… just fists.”

Sigler’s goal was always the same, to endure the pain and get back home. He never lost faith that the nation he loved would gain his release.

“I figured people have three aspects to their being. Physical, mental, and spiritual,” he said. “The physical you could do [with] exercises … and I walked a lot, too. I could walk diagonally across my cell, four steps that way, four steps back and that sort of thing. Spiritually, you tried to remember the things that you learned and you tried to develop a sort of sagacity about your religious beliefs and you very carefully examined yourself. And mentally, which was most of the time, you lived in your head.”

Gary devised ingenious ways to keep his mind occupied. He did calculus problems in his head, made up stories, wrote poetry, even designed a house in his mind, feature by feature.

Years after his release Gary and his wife built that house in rural Table Grove, Ill.

When asked to reflect on his time as a POW, Sigler shared this: “I believe that I have an obligation to tell my stories because the American people got me out, one way or another. I have an obligation to try to help people with something that I’ve learned.”

“Success is a journey, not a destination,” said Gary. “It is the progressive attainment of specific goals.”

“You’ve got to know who you are before you can do anything successfully,” Gary said, adding that POWs often learned that early “because pain and aspects of pain teach you who you are.”

Gary Sigler has shared those lessons countless times since his release in 1973 to civic organizations, school groups and many others. It is not easy for him to do so. The memories still can hurt. But 45 years later, he carries on with his self-appointed mission of educating us about the cost of freedom.

Mark DePue is the Director of Oral History at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. You can hear Gary Sigler’s entire story, as well as those of many other veterans, in the “Veterans Remember” section of the program’s websitewww.oralhistory.illinois.gov.