Locked Up With God - My Best Thirteen Speeches, With Forward By Bud Day

1

MY GENERAL TALK

Introduction

Captain Guy Gruters served as a fighter pilot and Forward Air Controller during the Vietnam War and flew more than 400 combat missions. In December 1967 he was shot down and spent the next five years and three months as a prisoner of war in communist prison of war (POW) camps, including the notorious Hanoi Hilton.

TYPICAL CELL IN THE HANOI HILTON. USED WITH PERMISSION FROM Prisoner of War, BY CAPTAIN JOHN M. (MIKE) MCGRATH, USN (RET), NAVAL INSTITUTE PRESS

NORTH AMERICAN F-100 SUPER SABRE FIGHTER AIRCRAFT FLOWN BY MISTYS

Captain Gruters was awarded more than 30 combat medals, including two Silver Stars, two Distinguished Flying Crosses, two Bronze Stars for valor, two Purple Hearts, and over twenty Air Medals. Captain Gruters has spoken around the country and overseas sharing his unique message, a joyful, positive one, full of faith and hope. He and his wife, Sandy, have been married over forty years and have seven children.

Here now is Captain Guy Gruters.

PRAY FOR PEACE

I would like to thank everyone for coming. I'm here to bear witness to God's presence in a communist POW camp and the love that is found in war. Speaking for all veterans, I ask you to please remember everyone who has served, especially those who have lost their lives or their health. I ask you to please pray for peace in the world. Nobody wants peace more than veterans.

CONDITIONS IN PRISON CAMP

I was shot down by the North Vietnamese during an airstrike. I was captured after ejecting from my F-100.

All of us who were captured were imprisoned for the remainder of the war. We suffered terribly. We were beaten. We were put in stocks and manacles in solitary confinement. We were tortured, some of us for months, some of the senior officers for four years or more. We were denied medical attention and starved. We were not allowed to correspond with our families for the first few years that we were up there. We were hot in summer and cold in winter. I have never been hot or cold like that before or since. We spent hours daily just trying to communicate, which was strictly forbidden. There was a rule of silence. We were tortured badly when they caught us communicating.

We never knew if we would ever get out. That was the toughest thing to take mentally because it looked like we would spend our whole lives up there. There was no pressure whatsoever on North Vietnam, especially after the U.S. stopped the bombing of the North in 1968. The U.S. didn't go after the source of the trouble, which was North Vietnam. It was allowed to raid South Vietnam at will from its secure bases in North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, which we could not eliminate due to the US State Department's "Rules of Engagement." These facts are well-documented in books and stories, but they're not the real story.

MORE THAN SURVIVAL

The real story is that we didn't just survive up there. Surviving at all costs is when people are willing to do anything just to get through. "I'm going to live, I don't care if I have to betray my country. I will give them what they want. I don't care. I'm going to get out of here. I'm going to be helpful to them, and do what they say." Instead, we fought them every step of the way as a well-disciplined military unit. We established contact through the walls, using what was called the tap code. We would tap out one letter at a time through the walls. We kept the American Fighting Man's Code of Conduct, which directed that the senior ranking officer be in charge of every cell, of every cell-block, of every prison camp. We remained a fighting team. We continued the fight in hopeless conditions so we could return with honor.

AS EVERYONE WHO IS NOT LIMBER AND IN GOOD CONDITION KNOWS, IT CAN BE QUITE PAINFUL JUST TRYING TO TOUCH THE TOES. FORCING A MAN TO BEND, AS SHOWN HERE, CAN CAUSE EXTREME PAIN IN HIS BACK, AS WELL AS A FEELING THAT THE LIGAMENTS IN THE BACK OF HIS LEGS ARE BEING RIPPED RIGHT OUT OF HIS BODY. STRESS POSITIONS SUCH AS THESE WERE FAVORITE TORTURE METHODS OF THE NORTH VIETNAMESE BECAUSE OF THE EXCRUCIATING PAIN THAT CAN BE EXACTED. AND JUST AS IMPORTANT, NO TELLTALE SCARS WILL REMAIN (UNLESS THE TORTURERS MADE MISTAKES - AS THEY OFTEN DID). USED WITH PERMISSION FROM Prisoner of War, BY MIKE MCGRATH, NAVAL INSTITUTE PRESS

I think that we beat the communists even though we were under their power physically in prison camp. They beat and tortured us constantly without reprisal. But I think we did very well. I believe it was due to God's grace because of our Christianity and sincere prayer. Our leadership was God-fearing. The first communication each prisoner received told us about the church service each Sunday at mid-day in each individual cell. We would all say the Our Father, the 23rd Psalm, and the Pledge of Allegiance. Even though we were generally kept solo or with one other man in each cell, we knew that at twelve noon on Sunday we were saying our prayers in union with every other POW in North Vietnam. Of course, we also prayed extensively as individuals. I believe this and the prayers of our families and the American people gave us the grace to fight as well as we did.

MISTY FORWARD AIR CONTROLLERS

In South Vietnam, I served with the US Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade as a Forward Air Controller or FAC (See Chapter XIII for detail). I subsequently transferred to an Air Force unit called MISTY, called the Fast FACs, because we traveled at fighter speeds (400 to 550 miles per hour) instead of light plane speeds (80 to 100 miles per hour). MISTY was the call-sign for an all-volunteer, top-secret unit of 14 fighter pilots which flew over North Vietnam. We would fly low-level scouting missions in North Vietnam to find targets. Most of the strike fighter flights carrying bombs came in at 16,000 feet. But we would be from altitudes down on the treetops up to about two or three thousand feet looking for targets and so had excellent visibility. We found targets of opportunity such as hidden convoys which were impossible to see from higher altitudes. After we'd find a target, we would have first priority on all fighter strikes into North Vietnam, of which there were between fifty and one hundred each day. We would call the top brass in the control ship orbiting over Laos and they would divert the fighters to us for attacking the targets we found. We would dive and mark the targets with smoke rockets. The smoke rockets had exploding warheads with white phosphorous which would appear as puffs of white smoke on the ground.

O-1 WITH "WILLY PETE" (WHITE PHOSPHOROUS) MARKING ROCKETS ON WING THE SAME ROCKETS WERE USED BY THE MISTY FAST FAC F-100 AIRCRAFT

Then the strike fighters would come in and destroy the enemy positions clearly pointed out by the smoke rocket.

Each mission, we rendezvoused with and refueled twice from a KC-135 Tanker Aircraft airborne over Laos.

This refueling let our missions be four and a half to five and a half hours long, of which three to three and a half hours were under heavy fire from the ground. We had among the highest loss rates of any unit in North Vietnam. One of the proudest and most satisfying accomplishments of my life is that I was a member of the MISTYs. The stories of a number of those fighter pilots, including one of mine, are documented in the book, MISTYs, by Major General Don Shepperd, USAF (Ret). Please see my website, guygruters.net, for a link to this book and others on the MISTYs.

SPECIAL FORCES BEHIND THE LINES

Due to the excellent camouflage of many targets in North Vietnam by the enemy, two-man special forces teams were assigned the mission of finding them. We had approximately thirty such teams in the ground behind the lines. They were inserted, supplied, and extracted by air. They would scout through the jungle to find military targets for our strikes, looking for ammo dumps, supply dumps, tank parks, etc.

EXCELLENT TARGET

One day, at two o’clock in the morning, we received a call from one of these teams. They gave us the coordinates of a big ammo dump in North Vietnam. We were off before dawn to strike this target. Major Charlie Neel was the aircraft commander and I was in the back seat of a two-seat F-100F Fighter. As we came into North Vietnam, we were on the deck turning and twisting back and forth to evade the heavy cannon fire. There were 150,000 to 180,000 active anti-aircraft gun sites in North Vietnam, according to our intelligence services. We made our way to the coordinates that had been given to us, but the sun was just barely up and we couldn't see anything under the trees at first. We came back around through the mountains and made another approach from a different heading, and we...