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 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.
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“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.
[By Mark DePue
Director of Oral History
Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum]
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 website,
www.oralhistory.illinois.gov. |
