Captured by Alvin Townley

Author:Alvin Townley [Townley, Alvin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2019-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

THE CHANGE JERRY FEARED came on the night of October 25, 1967. He heard the distinctive light, quick footsteps of guards as they rushed into the Stardust cellblock. Keys rattled, padlocked doors creaked open, and curt orders echoed along the corridor. Jerry’s closest friends, his fellow Stardust prisoners, began shuffling by his door; he tried to identify them by their walk. Then a guard arrived for him. He carried a blindfold and Jerry turned around in resignation. The guard tightened the cloth around Jerry’s head, then led him into the hallway.

Jerry felt his way forward through Stardust, then sensed the autumn breeze circulating through the alleyway between the cellblock and the prison’s outer wall. For a moment, he appreciated the refreshment of being outside. A hand pushed Jerry into a kneeling position. His shoulders rubbed against other POWs; soft nudges in code told him George Coker and Howie Rutledge were next to him. The POWs knelt together in the alleyway; they heard others arrive and join them. They listened not only to the sounds of movement but to the rare sound of an open sky at night.

Someone grabbed Jerry’s ear and wrenched him to his feet. He and some number of other POWs were led down the alley and into the corridor at Ha L’s entrance; he could hear voices echo off the arched ceiling. Arms and hands loaded him into a truck bed. He sat on piles of metal pipes, which pinched his legs with every bounce of the truck as it rumbled through the quiet night to God knew where.

In fact, the truck carried the POWs to a tiny prison on a small street behind the North Vietnamese Ministry of Defense, at 4 Ph Lý Nam . (Ph means “road” in Vietnamese. Ph means “soup.”) The French had built the small thirteen-cell gulag in the 1950s especially for dissidents, troublemakers, and political leaders who required more isolation than Ha L Prison could provide. The new prison on Lý Nam had removed enemies of the French regime from the world. There, they could no longer spread their political ideas or incite other prisoners. There, they effectively vanished.

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