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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. 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.
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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] |
