Jeremiah Denton

Born July 15, 1924
Mobile, Alabama

U.S. Navy pilot and prisoner of war during the Vietnam War

Jeremiah Denton was one of the best-known American soldiers to be captured by North Vietnam during the Vietnam War. He was shot down over North Vietnam in 1965 while leading a squadron of navy jets on a bombing run. After his capture, he spent the next seven years and eight months as a prisoner of war (POW), enduring years of torture, isolation, and near starvation at the hands of the North Vietnamese. After his release in 1973, Denton wrote When Hell Was in Session, a gripping account of his years in captivity. Seven years later, he was elected to represent his native Alabama in the U.S. Senate.

Chooses a military life

Jeremiah A. Denton, Jr., was born on July 15, 1924, in Mobile, Alabama. He was the son of Jeremiah A. Denton, Sr., a businessman, and Irene Claudia (Steele) Denton. Young Jeremiah became interested in a military career at a relatively early age. In 1943 he entered the U.S. Naval Academy, from which he graduated four years later. During his third year at the academy, he married Kathryn Jane Maury, with whom he eventually had seven children.

In 1947 Denton joined the U.S. Navy. As the years passed, he climbed steadily up through the ranks and became known as a top military pilot. He also continued his education during this time, taking classes at the Armed Forces Staff College (1958–59), the Naval War College (1963), and George Washington University, where he secured a master's degree in 1964. A few months later, Denton was transferred to Southeast Asia, where U.S. military forces were fighting to prevent a Communist takeover in South Vietnam.

South Vietnam had been created only a few years earlier, when Vietnamese forces ended decades of French colonial rule. The 1954 Geneva peace agreement that ended the French-Vietnamese conflict created two countries within Vietnam. Communist forces who had led Vietnam to victory over France were given leadership of North Vietnam, while South Vietnam came under the control of a U.S.-supported government that was supposed to establish a democracy.

The Geneva agreement provided for nationwide free elections to be held in 1956 so that the two sections of Vietnam could be united under one government. But U.S. and South Vietnamese officials refused to hold the elections because they feared that the results would give the Communists control over the entire country. North Vietnam and its allies in the South—commonly known as the Viet Cong—responded by launching a guerrilla war against the South. When these attacks pushed South Vietnam to the brink of collapse in the mid-1960s, the United States escalated its involvement in the conflict. Before long, America had assumed primary responsibility for both the ground war in the South and the air war against the North.

Captured and imprisoned by the enemy

When Denton arrived in Vietnam in late 1964, he was assigned to the USS Independence, a massive aircraft carrier stationed in the South China Sea. On July 18, 1965, Captain Denton led a squadron of U.S. Navy planes on a bombing raid to destroy enemy positions near the city of Thanh Hoe in North Vietnam. In the middle of the mission, Denton's plane was struck by enemy fire. He bailed out of the plane before it crashed, parachuting into the nearby Ma River. Once he landed, however, he was quickly captured by the North Vietnamese and dragged to one of their prisons.

Denton spent the next seven years and eight months as a prisoner of war in a number of North Vietnam's most notorious prison camps, including the "Hanoi Hilton," the "Zoo," and "Alcatraz." During the first four years of his captivity, he endured torture on a regular basis. On one occasion, he was tortured continuously for ten solid days and nights when he refused to give the guards some information they wanted. In addition, Denton spent month after month alone in a cold and dark coffin-sized cell, where he struggled with tremendous feelings of isolation, fear, and despair.

Denton sends important message on television

But despite the horrible conditions he was forced to endure, Denton resisted his North Vietnamese captors in a variety of ways. As one of the top-ranking U.S. officers in the POW camps, Denton helped develop a strategy of organized resistance for other prisoners to follow. He told the other captured American soldiers—most of whom were downed airmen like himself—to keep important information from the guards. "I tried to put out involved orders saying that you should die before giving the enemy classified information," he recalled in the New York Times. He also encouraged his fellow POWs, urging them to keep their spirits up and support one another. The prisoners passed these instructions on from cell block to cell block through use of a complicated communication code that used taps, coughs, sneezes, and other sounds as a substitute for spoken words.

As Denton's imprisonment continued, he was targeted for especially rough treatment by the North Vietnamese. They recognized that he was a strong-willed officer who exerted a great deal of influence over the other American POWs. But despite their best efforts to break his spirit with torture, starvation, and long months of solitary confinement, Denton never gave up hope that he might someday return to his family in the United States.

Many American POWs expressed admiration for Denton's patriotism and leadership in the North Vietnamese prison camps. This grit was on full display in 1966, when Denton took a particularly daring action that became the war's most famous example of American POW defiance and spirit. At that time, North Vietnamese prison officials forced Denton to take part in an interview with reporters from several other Communist countries. As the interview got underway, Denton never stated that he had been tortured. He knew that North Vietnam would destroy the film footage and inflict new punishment on him if he accused them of torturing him or the other captured airmen. But unbeknownst to his captors, Denton blinked his eyes during the interview to spell the word "torture" in Morse code. Footage of this interview, which was eventually seen by a national television audience in the United States, confirmed U.S. suspicions that American POWs were being tortured in North Vietnam. From that point on, treatment of American POWs became an important issue in press coverage of the war.

Conditions for Denton and many other American POWs finally improved in 1969, when North Vietnamese leaders recognized that their treatment of the captured pilots was hurting their efforts to garner international support for their cause. From that point on, torture became much less commonplace, and food, shelter, and medical care all improved. Still, Denton and the others remained imprisoned in generally poor conditions, thousands of miles away from their loved ones.

Denton returns home

In January 1973 the United States and North Vietnam agreed on a treaty that ended American involvement in the Vietnam War. This treaty included provisions calling for the release of all American POWs, and in February 1973 the captured U.S. soldiers finally began returning home. Denton was among the first POWs to be released, since U.S. military protocol stated that soldiers who had been imprisoned the longest should be released first.

Denton was relieved to leave his nightmarish POW experience behind him and be reunited with his family. But he repeatedly expressed pride about fulfilling his patriotic duty to his country, and he declared that America needed to continue its fight against communism.

In 1974 Denton received an appointment to serve as the commandant of the Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia. Two years later, he published an account of his experiences in North Vietnam POW camps called When Hell Was in Session. This powerful book attracted a great deal of critical attention, and it remains one of the best-known memoirs of the Vietnam War.

Denton stayed in Norfolk until 1977, when he joined the administration of Spring Hill College in his hometown of Mobile. In 1980 he won election to the United States Senate as a Republican. His victory made him the first Republican to represent Alabama in the U.S. Senate in the twentieth century. Around this same time, Denton founded the Coalition for Decency (now known as the National Forum Foundation), an organization that promotes conservative solutions to social problems facing the United States and other nations.

Denton served one term in Washington, D.C., where he became known for his conservative voting record on social issues and his deep distrust of Communist governments and organizations. In 1986 he ran for reelection but was defeated. A year later, he was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to serve as chairman of the President's Commission on Merchant Marine and Defense. He served in that role for two years before retiring from public life and returning home to Alabama. Since then, he has worked as a businessman and has founded a humanitarian aid program known as Joint Relief International Denton Operations. In 1997 this organization provided 2.8 million pounds of donated food and supplies to thirty-five countries around the world, including Vietnam.

Sources

Denton, Jeremiah A., Jr., with Edwin H. Broadt. When Hell Was in Session. Clover, South Carolina: Commission Press, 1976.

Howes, Craig. Voices of the Vietnam POWs: Witnesses to Their Fight. Oxford University Press, paperback, 1998.

Hubbell, John, with Andrew Jones and Kenneth Y. Tomlinson. P.O.W.: ADefinitive History of the American Prisoner-of-War Experience in Vietnam, 1964–1973. New York: Reader's Digest Press, 1976.

"POW to U.S. Senator." U.S. News and World Report, November 24, 1980.

An American POW Recalls Torture in the Camps

In Jeremiah Denton's memoir When Hell Was in Session, he recalled many episodes of torture that he endured at the hands of North Vietnamese prison guards. Following is an excerpt from the book that details the sort of horrendous treatment he often experienced in the years following his capture:

[Two guards] began roping one arm from shoulder to elbow. With each loop, one guard would put his foot on my arm and pull, another guard joining him in the effort to draw the rope as tightly as their combined strengths would permit . . . . The first pains were from the terrible pinching of flesh. After about ten minutes, an agonizing pain began to flow through the arms and shoulders as my heart struggled to pump blood through the strangled veins .... [One of the guards then laid a nine-foot-long iron bar] across my shins. He stood on it, and he and the other guards took turns jumping up and down and rolling it across my legs. Then they lifted my arms behind my back by the cuffs, raising the top part of my body off the floor and dragging me around and around. This went on for hours . . . . I began crying hysterically . . . . My only thought was the desire to be free of pain . . . . [Later, a guard nicknamed Smiley] pulled me to my feet and hit me several times . . . . He indicated that I must rise whenever he entered. Bound as I was, that was no easy matter. The next time Smiley entered, I began pushing myself against the wall until I was on my feet. He beat me anyway, slapping me hard across the face and hitting me in the stomach . . . . On the seventh day, I decided to give them something [personal information about himself]. I cried for help. Dried blood streaked my chest. Feces clung to the bottom of my pajamas, which were completely stained with urine.