DEL.ICIO.USCumming man, McCain shared POW experience
Ellis celebrating his old friend at GOP convention
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thursday, September 04, 2008
The flak-strewn skies over North Vietnam brought Lee Ellis and John McCain together. Politics, honor and memories of those long-ago days brought them together again this week.
The two were among the 800 Americans captured and held as prisoners during the Vietnam War. More than 100 died in captivity. Five years after arriving at Hoa Lo, the notorious North Vietnamese prison known as the Hanoi Hilton, Ellis and John McCain left Vietnam together, bound for home as peace was declared.
Bob Andres / bandres@ajc.com
Lee Ellis of Cumming, an Air Force pilot during the Vietnam War, was shot down a few days before John McCain and was dragged into the same Hanoi prison. Both men spent five years there.
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Now Ellis, a retired Air Force colonel from Cumming, is in Minnesota, celebrating his old friend’s ascension to the Republican presidential nomination.
It’s a moment that was unfathomable more than three decades ago.
“This has been a really, really special occasion,” Ellis said this week from the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn. “Anybody who is involved in something that plays out like this, you always do your best and try and be a good citizen and put country first. You never know which way the road will take you, but the goal is to serve well and trust that leads to the best of destinations.”
This week, Ellis has served as a McCain campaign surrogate, speaking to delegations from Alabama, Georgia, New Hampshire, North Carolina and South Carolina. At each stop, he related his own story and the courage, and humor, that McCain exuded.
At Tuesday night’s convention session, Ellis, seated directly behind McCain’s family, was recognized along with more that a dozen other former POWs who served with McCain.
“It was really a powerful evening in a lot of ways,” Ellis said.
When McCain finally accepts the GOP nomination on Thursday, Ellis will be there again, sitting behind his friend’s family, surrounded by fellow POWs.
Ellis, 64, is senior vice president at RightPath Resources in Suwanee, a leadership-development firm he helped found 10 years ago. The married father of four last saw McCain in February, when McCain was in Cobb County, campaigning just before the primary.
While McCain’s campaign would not comment for this story, McCain in 2007 praised Ellis and the 80 other former POWs now backing his candidacy.
“Our ordeal was incredibly long, arduous and painful, and those with whom I shared that experience made sacrifices unequaled in American history. They truly earned the description of hero and are symbols of what Americans are capable of doing. I am honored by their support.”
Ellis had already survived six months in a North Vietnamese prison before he learned that a Naval aviator with a famous father was there, too.
Ellis was a 23-year-old fighter pilot in 1967. He’d gone from plowing mules on the family farm in North Georgia to flying supersonic jets in about six years when he arrived in DaNang as part of a squadron of F-4 pilots.
Air Force pilots had to fly 100 missions into North Vietnam to earn their ticket home, and on his 54th, on Nov. 7, 1967, Ellis went down near the coast of the Gulf of Tonkin after a bombing raid along the MuGia Pass.
McCain was 31 on Oct. 26, 1967, on his 23rd mission, when his Navy jet was hit by an enemy missile over Hanoi.
The U.S. had no ground operations in North Vietnam, and by 1967 the American air campaign in the North was engaging riskier targets, said Clemson University professor Edwin Moise, author of the “Historical Dictionary of the Vietnam War,” and “Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War.”
“McCain was shot down right in Hanoi, which is both very sensitive in an international sense and very heavily defended,” Moise said.
As for Ellis, his raids were aimed at disrupting the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a key resupply line for the Viet Cong. The trail was defended by anti-aircraft weaponry, including surface-to-air missiles.
Two weeks after Ellis was captured he arrived at Hoa Lo.
He shared his cell with three other Americans, including his own co-pilot. The room was six-and-a-half feet by seven feet, with bunks of wooden boards. Each had leg stocks. They had no contact with other prisoners. The cell shared no adjoining walls with others.
From his top bunk, Ellis could reach the cell’s one window, which was barred and covered with a rattan mat. There was one view: straight down.
But after days and days of pushing on the mat to loosen it, Ellis said he gained a view, at an angle, into another cell.
“So I got contact with a guy,” Ellis, now 64, said. “I was able to write notes on my hand and he’d write back when the guards weren’t around.”
By “write,” Ellis means he would spell words, letter by letter, by tracing them with his finger, using his palm as paper.
POWs moved in and out of the other cell, Ellis said, until one day Robbie Risner appeared. Risner was perhaps the most famous living Air Force pilot, a Korean War ace who was on the cover of Time magazine in 1965. Risner had been in Hoa Lo for two years and was the senior ranking POW when he and Ellis began swapping messages.
In May 1968 Risner asked, “Did you know about McCain?”
“That’s when I first heard about him,” Ellis said.
What he heard was that the son of the commander of the Navy’s Pacific fleet, a four-star admiral, had been shot down and was in bad shape in a nearby cell. The North Vietnamese discovered who McCain was, too. They offered him early release, but McCain refused to be used as a propaganda tool and endured more punishment.
Beatings and physical abuse were common in the prisons. The military estimates 95 percent of all POWs were tortured.
Ellis was part of the 95 percent.
It happened, he said, “a couple of times when they wanted something. One time they wanted a biography and some military information, which I didn’t give them. I eventually gave them something, because everybody gave them something.”
The strategy, Ellis said, was to deny the enemy as long as possible but when you gave in, give false information as much as possible.
The torture methods varied depending on “how big a hurry they were in.”
One method was called “the ropes.” A prisoner was tied into a pretzel with his arms behind his back, elbows together. The rope was yanked from behind, pulling the shoulders out of the socket. Sometimes the prisoner was left to hang.
Ellis was put into leg irons and handcuffs and had to hold his hands over his head while on his knees on a concrete floor.
“I did that for eight hours, and of course my body was quivering and I could not hang on anymore and just lay down,” Ellis said. “They’d come in and start kicking me and beating on me.”
He felt like a failure, like a wimp, he said. “You go as long as you can and fall over and they start beating you and you’d be back on your knees, and this goes on for a couple of days, and I said, ‘OK, I’ll do something,’ and filled out this biography and just made up lies.”
McCain, too, has written about his own time with the torturers and the fact that he divulged information he wished he had not.
By May 1972 the American bombing campaign in North Vietnam had intensified and the prisoners could hear big ones land near Hanoi and the prison walls would shake. By December, as the U.S. continued its Operation Linebacker bombing campaign, the guards began to hint that the war would soon be over. The bombing ended after Christmas 1972.
Ellis and many other prisoners, including McCain, were moved to another prison in Hanoi known to them as The Plantation. A few days later, the guards came and read the Paris Peace Accords. They were to go home within three months.
At that compound, Ellis and McCain became friends. Shot down just weeks apart, the two were grouped together for release.
“He had that great sense of humor,” Ellis said, “real dry sense of humor, but a serious part to him, just like he does now.”
He had a terrible limp, Ellis said, and as he walked his head would tilt 20 degrees with each step.
They became friends and on March 14, 1973, Ellis and McCain left Vietnam and their shared experience.
They’ve kept in touch over the years, seen each other at the regular reunions for POWs.
Ellis is on McCain’s national POW committee, but he said he supports McCain for reasons that go beyond their time in Vietnam.
McCain has the experience in government and leadership Ellis believes is necessary for the job. The Republican will also represent “conservative values,” Ellis said, “but will also be practical in working with all parties to actually move the country ahead in solving important issues.”
From foreign policy to fiscal policy and appointing of conservative judges, Ellis finds McCain superior to Democrat Barack Obama.
But close to the surface is the enormity of what they, and hundreds of other American POWs, went through.
When he came home in 1973, Ellis said, he dealt with the guilt, sometimes known as “survivor’s guilt.”
“After you come home and your buddies didn’t,” he said, “and people think ‘Oh you’re a POW and you went through a lot.’
“Well, we did. But we were the lucky ones. We came back. A lot of our friends didn’t.”
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