The Unlikely War Hero: A Vietnam War POW’s Story of Courage and Resilience in the Hanoi Hilton

On April 6, 1967, twenty-year-old US Navy Seaman Apprentice Doug Hegdahl fell off his ship, a guided-missile cruiser, in the Gulf of Tonkin. Close to exhaustion after nearly four hours in the water, he was picked up by a small fishing boat and soon found himself in Hỏa Lò Prison, the notorious North Vietnamese POW camp the prisoners called the Hanoi Hilton. Under intense interrogation, Hegdahl pretended to be a country bumpkin who could barely read or write.

But Doug Hegdahl was far from stupid. Possessing a razor-sharp memory, he memorized the names of 254 fellow prisoners during the next two years. After coming home in August 1969, Hegdahl shocked his debriefers by rattling off the names of the men. Hanoi had admitted holding only a few dozen, although the US military had reliable intel on scores of others. With Hegdahl’s names, sixty-three missing servicemen were reclassified to Prisoners of War.

But that’s not all. In addition to divulging the names, Doug Hegdahl told the Pentagon about the systematic torturing of the American POWs in Hanoi and reported many other hitherto unknown details about life inside the Hanoi POW camps. The new information became an important factor in North Vietnam’s fall 1969 decision to make life immeasurably easier for the 500-plus POWs held in Hanoi and assuaged the doubts and fears of dozens of POW families.

In this vividly written book based on archival research, personal interviews, and his experiences in the Vietnam War, Marc Leepson, for the first time, tells the incredible tale of the youngest and lowest-ranking American POW captured in North Vietnam.