Defiant: The POWs Who Endured Vietnam's Most Infamous Prison, the Women Who Fought for Them, and the One Who Never Returned

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He could not forget the beetle, how it stopped moving, how it rolled onto its back, dead, its stiff legs pointed to the plaster ceiling, where a single burning bulb and a meat hook hung. By now, he knew the hook wasn’t intended for meat. Instead, it gave leverage to the ropes that forced him to talk, to sign confessions, to compromise the Code.

Some of the ants crawling across his own beaten and prostrate body soon began marching down to the floor and toward the dead beetle. He watched them—just inches from his face—as they bored holes through its shell, devouring it. Soon a column of the tiny scavengers formed and carried the carcass away to an unknown grave in this godforsaken prison.

After two years of interrogations, torture, and isolation, he felt just like the beetle. He lived in the same filth as the insects and vermin that inhabited the floor of Room Nineteen. He could still barely stand. The guard—Pigeye, the prisoners called him—had broken his knee again, rendering his left leg useless and leaving it twisted inward at a grotesque angle. Three weeks ago, they’d hauled him off the tile floor that he’d shared with the beetle and shoved him into a different cell. Now he spent the entire day wearing a tight blindfold across his eyes, hunched on the floor in his own waste. Mosquitoes and ants preyed freely upon him; he could fend off neither since tight iron cuffs bound his wrists behind his back. A guard removed the cuffs and blindfold once each day so he could eat the watery vegetable soup that barely sustained him. Sometimes the guards refastened the cuffs so tightly that the pain kept him from sleep, the one refuge from the horror of his imprisonment in North Vietnam.

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