Neil Black was blindfolded, his hands bound behind him, and was forced to his knees. In an out-of-body experience, he could see himself while a man yielded a machete over his head and villagers cursed him.
“Now I’ve seen enough movies before that and I know what they do in that kind of a situation,” Black thought. “I didn’t think I was going to get back up on my feet. I thought I was a dead man.”
That wasn’t the end of his life, but rather one of the worst ordeals during his 2,703 days of captivity — the longest held enlisted prisoner of war during Vietnam.
Instead of being beheaded, he was pulled to his feet and dragged past villagers who threw punches at him along the gauntlet. It was for propaganda purposes — as were other torture episodes — says Black, an 80-year-old Carlsbad resident,
As the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon was commemorated this week, Black reflected on being a survivor of 7½ years of captivity in the “Hanoi Hilton” complex of North Vietnamese prison camps.
He told how he enlisted, how he kept his sanity through his faith and companionship, was promoted to the rank of major and the pride in his marriage, children and grandchildren. He now resides comfortably in a gated community.
Neil Black as an Air Force pararescueman before his 1965 capture. (Photo courtesy of Neil Black)How did he psychologically endure the ordeal starting Sept. 20, 1965?
“I have to say it was terrifying,” said the retired Air Force officer. “It caused my brain to start looking upward to the heavens and knowing that, you know, I may not have been the best believer in God, but now I’m working on it and getting better.”
Black, who is Jewish, carved a Star of David into his cell wall and prayed daily.
“That’s part of the reason how I stayed out of PTSD and all that,” he told Times of San Diego last week. “Yeah, and I communicated” — his confinement not always being solitary.
When in solitary, he tried to keep his mind occupied.
Even something as simple as listening to the footsteps of fellow captives and wondering where they were going.
“I always found things to do,” he said. “I tried to keep busy, you know — I thought about the past, all the things that I had done good and bad. I considered … what my parents were going through. And I figure they were having a harder time than me.”
And he managed to socialize with men in adjacent cells.
“I had my moments, but mostly tried to keep busy. I was an ant studier. I got a Ph.D in ants,” the Southern Californian said. “Yeah, it was mind-blowing watching these ants.”
He studied the arthropods’ “mind-blowing” patterns. He killed the lead ant to see their response. “The others will scatter a little bit, and then they’ll come back and somehow, they’ll promote another ant in the doing the lead.”
Hanoi Hannah brought him to tears
He was brought to tears on occasion — but not from pain.
Vietnamese propagandist Hanoi Hannah’s broadcasts were piped into their cells. She daily announced American casualties.
One day in 1966, while listing GI deaths, she mentioned William Pitsenbarger, a renowned Air Force man killed by friendly fire. Black’s fellow pararescueman who would posthumously receive a long-delayed Medal of Honor. (The war hero’s story is told in the movie “The Last Full Measure.”)
Black fell to his knees at the report.
“I cried as one of the few times I ever cried, and I picked myself up and I said ‘Pitts, this is for you’ and the idea that I’m going to make it out of here, So that helped a lot, and I was in solitary confinement for quite a while at that point.”
He said he never lost hope.
Illness in captivity was “a bit scary.”
Retired Air Force Maj. Neil Black. (Photo courtesy Neil Black)Black received paramedic training early in his service. So he understood disease, but not how to treat it without medication.
“I had a fever that would come across me at least four or five times a year,” he said, adding that he never saw a nurse or doctor. He finally received medicine from a medic toward the end of the war.
One time he just lay on the floor until his condition improved.
“We had a couple people that actually died while they were there,” Black said.
In the beginning, for exercise, the 20-year-old did push-ups and walked in circles in his 5-by-8-foot cell. Having been a high school wrestler, he was in good condition when he entered the military.
Once weighing 175, he shed pounds down to 110 on his bleak diet of bug-infested bread and “sewer greens.”
He admits to having a rebellious, troubled youth with run-ins with the law.
Black called his report cards “very colorful. It wasn’t anything that anybody any college would accept, I don’t care how much money went their way.”
It wasn’t for a lack of intelligence, he said. Rather, he didn’t care.
His father sent him to a New Jersey prep school, and after taking a longer-than-allowed Christmas break, he found himself kicked out.
Responding to Uncle Sam poster
Not waiting for his father to pick him up, he ran down the street and went past a post office. “Uncle Sam wants you,” the military poster read.
“Somebody actually wants me,” he thought.
Penniless and hungry, he went downstairs to the recruitment offices. The Air Force office was the only one open, and he offered to join then and there.
Why so quickly? The recruiter asked. Black said he explained his situation — and was hungry. Following a meal, he signed up at 20.
Doing well on his entrance exams, Black said the recruiter suggested he was officer material.
Instead, he was chosen to be a pararescueman and was sent to Guam for further training.
There he said his out-of-line behavior continued when he lied about losing his ID and then claimed he was a year older (so he could drink in town) when the ID was replaced.
He was caught and spent two weeks in a Marine brig.
In Vietnam he served as a rescueman, going on missions to retrieve downed servicemen, but that task proved difficult.
Captured in North Vietnam
Then his team was sent to rescue a pilot who was shot down. “So we took off and got over the site where the downed pilot was. We found him, which was the first time. We had never found a guy before, and I got pretty excited.”
North Vietnamese troops were in the same area and began shooting at his helicopter.
After firing back with his M16 rifle, the enemy blew up the engine and his HH-43B Huskie chopper plunged to the ground.
Black tripped and fell after getting out of the copter. The rifle, now covered in mud, was useless. He handed the craft’s radio to his pilot, who also slipped in the muck. The antenna snapped off.
With about two dozen enemy soldiers descending on them, the Americans ran out of options, he said.
“I had a pistol but had five shots in it,” said the retired officer. “I’m looking at 25 guys, pointing their weapon at me. “This isn’t going to work,” he thought. “I mean, I can shoot until I die, but I’d rather come back and fight another day.”
He survived many more days, spending the rest of his time in Vietnam — through February 1973 — being moved around sections of the prison camp and to Cu-Loc prison — “The Zoo.” Solitary confinement and abuse punctuated his captivity.
“They call it punishment. It was torture,” Black said.
Early in his captivity, he made a decision. “I had a choice [to] either live or die, right? And if I had that choice, I’m going to live, but I’m going to live correctly as a prisoner.”
That meant following the military Code of Conduct and stay-put orders.
One day, he was pulled into an interrogation room and asked if he wanted to go home.
“I’m not going home before the wounded and those that were captured before me,” he told his captors. He was punished for embarrassing the enemy officer.
But such brave behavior prompted U.S. officers in the prison with him to promote him to second lieutenant.
Failing on six escape tries
Black came up with escape plans during his confinement. “I had six attempts over the years to try to get out, he admitted. “And for good reason, I failed on every one of them, because I probably would have died, gotten killed.”
But he and his cellmate were part of one successful escape of two other prisoners. They had gotten word that two prisoners planned to escape that night. The missive came via a message attached to a rock thrown into his area.
The other prisoners asked that they knock out the light near their cell to aid the escape. His cellmate threw his sandal at and broke it.
The pair did get over the prison wall and walked downtown but were captured. One of them, a 6-foot-2 man (who stood out in a population of shorter stature people) was water tortured and died during interrogation.
The other suffered a “pretty damn good beating,” but lived to be released at the end of the war, he said.
For their part in the escape scheme, Black and his cellmate were stripped naked and beaten with rubber hoses.
Being a social person, Black said he did much better in captivity when he could communicate with other prisoners – first through tapping on an adjoining wall.
Prisoners devised a tap code to spell out the alphabet to communicate. Today, more than a half a century since his release, Black is still well-versed in the tapping code and hand signs, which they called “hand jive.”
But when American soldiers were placed in cells with about a dozen other prisoners, they could help each other.
“We hit everybody up for whatever information we could get out of them,” he said.
One cellmate — an MIT graduate who had been on track to become an astronaut — became a math tutor for Black. Algebra, a course he flunked in high school, was a puzzle for him and his cellmate helped him understand it while writing equations on the floor with concrete. He passed the tests his tutor devised.
Later, the cellmate taught him calculus, which he was pleased to get his head around.
“He gave me examples of what he was talking about, and I’d think about it, you know, under my mosquito net, in my head, get a mental picture, exactly how these things worked,” the veteran said. “and he would test me at the end of one session and I’d go through the calculus equations and they were right.”
Met John McCain afterward
Black never ran into John McCain, a 5 1/2-year prisoner at the Hanoi Hilton (Hoa Lo Prison), but was aware of the future Arizona senator’s presence. Later, Black worked in one of McCain’s presidential campaigns.
“I met him when we got home,” he said. “I became his Pennsylvania state campaign chairman when he ran against [George W.) Bush the first time and lost in the primary.”
His release in 1973 followed the signing of the Paris Peace Accords.
Black was ready to trade in his prison pajama-like clothing for a second-lieutenant’s uniform. Instead, he was handed a tech sergeant jacket. That didn’t sit well.
He had hoped to be made captain following his Vietnam service and took his case to higher-ups. His superiors had connections to the White House, and President Richard Nixon ended up giving him and two fellow enlisted men direct commissions. He was now a second lieutenant.
Rather than say goodbye to the military after captivity’s mental and physical abuse, Black decided to be a pilot (after first having “big plans to go to UCLA” with the extra money he gained as a POW).
He had heard stories from other servicemen about their flight adventures and wanted in on that.
“Oh yeah, I want to fly fighters,” Black said. “I’ve been around it enough, hearing these guys talk, you know, going through their motions with their hands … jumping out of airplanes was, you know, energetic. Flying an airplane upside down would be great. So that’s what I wanted to do.”
Black earned his wings and clocked in more than 2,000 hours.
He went on to receive a bachelor and master’s degree in political science and had a minor in Russian. He had contemplated assignments for the Center Intelligence Agency but decided to forgo that.
After working as a military trainer and an operations officer with the U.S. military liaison mission to the Soviet forces in East Germany, he joined Morris Black and Sons of Allentown, Pennsylvania — a building supply business started by his grandfather.
He has studied the Vietnam War, which ended 50 years ago Wednesday, looking at the “whys” about how it ended that way.
“I was disappointed that we lost,” he said. “I saw the reason why we got into it because the code back then was stopping the spread of communism” — the domino theory. ”And unfortunately, we didn’t understand the whole situation; we didn’t know much about the history of that area, and we didn’t think about the French and how they lost that war up north and for practically the same reason that we had to withdraw.”
But he also put “a lot of blame on the media.” Black thought it was “terrible” hearing that returning service members were spat on “up there in San Francisco area and whatnot.”
He retired in 1987 as a major with 24 years of service. His honors included the Air Force cross, the Defense Superior Service Medal, the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart.
In the meantime, his personal life blossomed. At 29, he met his future wife, Vicki, who has been at his side for 50 years. They brought a twin boy and girl into the world. Now he has grandchildren.
Impressed by Honor Flight to D.C.
Black returned Sunday from a San Diego Honor Flight trip to Washington, D.C., to visit military monuments. The spirit of the weekend and camaraderie of fellow soldiers impressed him along with the well-oiled organization.
During mail call on the flight over, he read a letter from his wife.
“She said, ‘You know, we’ve had a terrific 50 and it’s going to 51 years, hope to have 60 and 70 and said you’ve been, you know, the best husband, that could be there. You’ve been great for your kids and think about you every minute of every day.’”
Indeed, when asked what he proudest of in his life, he first mentioned his military achievements. But in the next breath, he said, “I also take a lot of pride in having a successful marriage, a successful family.”
His hardships and successes have “given me the sensation that whatever I do, whatever I get involved in, I can do it and do it well.”
How was he able to survive more than 2,700 hours as a prisoner of war?
“I think God gave me a chance,” he said. “You know, I think God has looked upon my past before that and I think that I’m not going to say God put me there. It’s a matter of circumstance, but I think that getting through it, God said, ‘OK, I’ll give you another chance.’ That’s what I think.”
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