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Left to right: Capt.Gus and Sandy Gruters and Pastor Daniel McQuality

Vietnam POW shares his remarkable story

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[November 13, 2015]  On Sunday, Capt. Gus Gruters, a Vietnam veteran and former prisoner of war, shared his remarkable story with the congregation at Grace Lutheran Church in Lincoln. The event was the second and final in the series “For God and Country” hosted by the church to honor all veterans.

The day began with words of welcome from Pastor Daniel McQuality and the singing of the National Anthem by ten-year-old Peyton Bennett and her mother Lesleigh.



In his comments, McQuality said that it was important to recognize and remember all our veterans. He emphasized that all veterans, regardless of when or where they have served, are the reason that we as American live in freedom. He noted that what they have done for us “came at no small price.”

When Gruters took the podium, his story was morbidly beautiful. He talked about the terrible torture he endured, the way he was treated as a prisoner of war, the loss of fellow soldiers he knew and loved, and the love of God that saw him through each moment of the five years he lived in the Hanoi Hilton in North Vietnam. Gruters spoke emphatically saying that it was God’s presence in each scenario that brought him through five years of suffering.

Shot down and rescued

As a pilot in Vietnam, Gruters was shot from the sky twice in his career. The first time, he was rescued within one hour of the crash by what he deemed to be “The bravest men in the world.”

He explained that he was flying a small Cessna airplane at low altitudes searching for Vietnamese convoys loaded with supplies to be delivered to the front lines. The convoy personnel parked their trucks in hiding and slept during the day, then moved out and traveled during the night. The bombers couldn’t see them from their altitude during the day, so the Cessna’s were used to spot the convoys and mark the coordinates with smoke bombs.

Gruters said it was a highly successful operation, and that the American forces destroyed many a convoy using this method. But the Cessna pilots were vulnerable to attack and were easily shot down. This happened to Gruters, and he found himself in a body of water. He survived the crash but was at high risk of being caught and killed.

However, there was a special unit of helicopters and men, whose job was to rescue soldiers such as Gruters. Gruters said these men were also very vulnerable because they flew low to the ground, and at slower speeds than the bombers. When they found their soldier, they would hover over his location and work to bring him up into the chopper and away to safety. Gruters said the mission was so treacherous that two choppers were always deployed with the knowledge that at least one of them would be shot down during the rescue effort.

Shot down and captured

The second time Gruters was shot down, he was captured by the enemy and became a prisoner of war. Even though it was a treacherous experience, Gruters called himself fortunate in that he was captured by enemy soldiers. He explained that in North Vietnam, the Americans were as hated by the civilians as they were the soldiers. Many was the pilot who was met on the ground by dozens of civilian field workers armed with their farm tools that soon became weapons to beat the American soldier to death. Gruters felt fortunate that the Vietnamese soldiers got to him first and protected him from that certain death.

The Vietnamese needed their prisoners of war. They had two motives for taking American soldiers captive. First, they wanted information about their enemy and in their words “punished” the POW’s constantly, hoping to gain intelligence information. Equally important, they wanted the break the soldiers into submission. The goal was to have the soldiers announce publicly that as POW’s they were being treated well, and that it was their personal belief that being in Vietnam was wrong, and that the Americans should leave.
 


Taking the “punishment”

The Vietnamese referred to their torture tactics as punishment for not submitting to their demands. Gruters described the torture from firsthand knowledge, telling how the arms were pulled behind the back until the elbows and shoulder blades touched, and then tied in that position. The legs would be drawn up against the soldier’s body until his face was between his knees, and he would be tied and left in this position, a very painful position, for long periods of time. From time to time, a rope would be added, and the soldier would be suspended in mid-air from a hook in the ceiling of the holding area. His captors would then beat the soldier as he twirled in the air like a ceiling fan.

Gruters said these punishments were so severe, that it took all the soldiers willpower not to give in to the demands of his captors. For Gruters, he said that willpower came from God, and he knew beyond a doubt that God’s hand was in everything.

Overcoming hatred

But, even with God nearby, Gruters didn’t always have peace. He talked about becoming so consumed with hatred for his enemy that he spent every moment with murderous thoughts. He also went through a period when he considered suicide. He came out on the other side of these terrible thoughts through prayer and remembering his Catholic teaching as a child.

Overcoming the hatred was the hardest part. Gruters said on the day he realized that the voice in his head and heart was no longer the voice of Christ, but the voice of someone else, he knew that somehow he had to overcome this horrible hatred he felt, if he was going to survive. He remembered the admonitions of Christ even up to the day of crucifixion when he told his followers to “forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Gruters began to pray that God would help him to forgive. It took months. He said three months of praying had yielded no results. He was still harboring the hatred though he didn’t want to. But after six months of continual prayer, he was finally able to let it go and say in his heart that he forgave the Vietnamese for what they had done to him.

A Christian leader and the ‘Tap Code’

Gruters said it was also a gift from God that he was being held captive with fellow believers including a Christian leader Robbie Risner. The prisoners were not allowed to speak, even to their cellmates, but they had the ‘tap code’ and through that, they were led by Risner, who conducted daily prayer and devotions. On each Sunday Risner led the group and everyone remembered the Lord’s Prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the 23rd Psalm. Risner would tell the soldiers, “When God wants us out, he’ll get us out.” Gruters said that many of those young soldiers who did not know Christ when they came into the prison camp, were walking with him when they came out, and it was because of their leader.

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In addition, Risner, as the highest ranking soldier in the camp created a chain of command, and through that the soldiers once again felt the team comradery that they had known when free and fighting. It brought the group together and made them stronger as Risner would encourage them to be brave and silent during their punishments.

The tap code was a big portion of the mix that kept the soldiers rallied for their cause in treacherous conditions. It was a simple code, easy to learn, and very fast to execute. Cells contained two soldiers in most cases. One soldier would be “on the wall” with his ear to the wall to hear his neighbor and tap his messages or responses. Another soldier would lay on the floor at the cell door and watch for shadows that indicated the nearness of the guard.

The code eliminated the letter “k” from the alphabet and then divided the other 25 letters into five lines with five letters each. The letter then would be tapped in two parts; first the line number, a short pause, and then the letter number. As an example, the letter “c” would be tap, pause, tap, tap, tap.

The code connected the soldiers, and they found their strength in numbers, just as they had when they were part of their team fighting the enemy.

Finding the magic word

All prisoners of war were held for the purpose of propaganda. The Vietnamese wanted information about their enemies, but they also wanted American soldiers to do their bidding for them. After long terms of torture, the soldiers finally would be met with the day when they were taken out of their cells and forced to read over a loud speaker the Vietnamese propaganda papers to the rest of the camp.

Once that task was completed, they would then be placed in front of recording equipment and recite a message that was ultimately sent to the United States. The message was to say that the American people didn’t belong in Vietnam, that the Vietnamese people were doing the right thing for their country, and that the POW’s were being treated well.

The day finally came when Gruters was called on to read the papers and he refused. He recounted that it was several minutes of arguing with his captors telling him the papers were not propaganda and that they said only good things. But Gruters kept saying, no, he would not read.

Finally, someone said to tell them why he was refusing, to give them a reason. He said the words came out of his mouth, but they were not his words, they were gifts from God. He told his captors that to read the papers would disgrace his family.

He said ‘family’ was the magic word, as the soldiers of Vietnam had grown up revering their family and understood how terrible it would be to disgrace the family. Gruters was returned to his cell and never asked again to read, and he never had to deliver a propaganda speech.

Gruters had been three-and–a-half years a prisoner when that happened. He remained a prisoner for another year-and-a-half before he was released.

God was always there

Gruters told his audience that God was in the details all through the Vietnam War. It was a conflict that God had control of and wanted the Americans involved. He noted that God is all powerful and could have ended that war or any other in our history in a day, or not allowed to have it happen at all, but it was part of his bigger plan for humanity.

Gruters said that for him "my joy and my peace was knowing God was there, and He wanted me there."


Gruter signs copies of his book "Locked up with God."

Living as a POW’s wife

Before the program, Gruters wife Sandy spent some one-on-one time with LDN talking about her experience while her husband was missing in action. As a young wife and mother of two, she said that the waiting, wondering, and not knowing what had happened to her husband was excruciating. She said the worst part was the not knowing what had happened. She explained that throughout the country there were hundreds of young wives who were in the same situation. They knew their husbands had been shot down, but they had no clue what happened to them afterward.

 

She explained that they would get word that their husbands were MIA, their planes had been shot down, and no one saw a parachute prior to the crash. She said that didn’t mean they were dead, though it could have. The wives spent their days hanging in limbo waiting to hear something.

The frustrating part of it was that the Vietnamese knew who was being held prisoner and who was not, but they refused to release the information to the U.S. government.

During this war and while her husband was MIA, the people of the United States began their own search for answers. Sandy said she was among the many wives and families who flew to Paris in a plane hired by Ross Perot. When they arrived, they asked to meet with the Vietnamese government, but their request was denied.

She said they had two requests for the government; that they identify the POW’s and that they deliver humane treatment to the captives. She said that it was a request that even the thousands who were opposed to the war could not criticize.

It was Christmas Eve. On Christmas Day, the women and families held a special prayer service. She said that the gathering of the families drew the attention of the media and made the Vietnamese government uncomfortable, so they began to release names.

Sandy’s husband was a POW for five years, many of those years with her not knowing that he was alive. She said it was a glorious day when she learned that he was alive, and an even better day when she learned that he was being released. As a side note, she also shared that her brother-in-law, Gus’s brother, was among the B-52 pilots who ultimately gained her husband's freedom.

[Nila Smith]

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