You can’t breath because your chest is compressed during the process,” Captain Peter Schoeffel explains. He’s talking about being tortured by the communist North Vietnamese, who were trying to force captured American military personnel to talk. Schoeffel, a retired navy pilot living in Jacksonville, tells about his experience as a POW in Vietnam.
He described how he would be handcuffed and shackled. He says he couldn’t support his body after a time and wound up lying on the ground. “I’d be on my side sweating so hard I’d have a pool of sweat under my head and so I’d lean over and suck it up,” he says.
Suck it up to get some moisture in his mouth…
Schoeffel was a POW in the infamous “Hanoi Hilton” for 5 1/2 years. During his captivity he would see another POW, John McCain, the U.S. Senator who ran for president.
Schoeffel would write poems with ink, made from “brown bombers,” the name prisoners would sometimes give diarrhea medicine.
He used part of a cigarette package as paper. His words, written in tiny script, described his emotions in prison,
