Former Guardsman shares his Vietnam P.O.W. story

Compiled by Sgt. 1st Class Aaron R. Pollick

HIARNG Historian Section

Serving your country sometimes comes with a big price tag. For one member of the activated Hawaii Army National Guard, the price would be serving a nearly four-year tour of duty in the “Hanoi Hilton.”

Little did the Hawaii-born Thomas T. Horio know what the future would bring. The McKinley High School graduate enlisted in the Hawaii Guard in 1967. The Nuuanu raised soldier went on to attend Universities of New Mexico and Hawaii.

Carries on Guard legacy

Like his father, he joined the Hawaii Guard to serve his country. His father was a member of the Guard’s 299th Infantry Regiment of Maui and later, like most of the JapaneseAmericans, a member of the famed 100th Infantry Battalion during World War II. Horio, a member of the 227th Engineer Company, was activated along with 3,600 other 29th Infantry Brigade soldiers, May 13, 1968.

Imprisonment recalled

Shortly after arriving in Southeast Asia, Horio’s firebase guard post was overrun by the Viet Cong, and he was captured.

Instead of torturing us, the North Vietnamese forced us to read communist literature. We read it; it was the history about Cambodia when the French occupied FrenchIndochina and about Ho Chi Minh. For some reason, they left us alone after that.

At night, they would clamp our ankles in socks to prevent us from escaping. We were not allowed to exercise because the North Vietnamese wanted to keep us docile so we wouldn’t try to escape. But we maintained our sanity and kept the faith by exercising when the guards couldn’t see us. The only other thing we could do was pace and talk to each other. Our optimistic conversations always included discussions about what we were going to do when we got home.

We never lost faith. Our hopes for release hung on the success of the Paris peace talks that began on Jan. 18, 1969. The talks were still under way when Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam’s president for more than 30 years, died on Sept. 2, 1969.

Not long after Ho Chi Minh died, and after about five months in POW camps in Cambodia and Laos, we started on a month-and-a-half 350-mile trip to Hanoi,

One prisoner died, or was killed, enroute because he was too sick and frail to endure the journey.

The guy weighed about 200 pounds when he was captured; he got so skinny, you could pick him up with one arm. On the way to Hanoi, a guard escorted him down a trail, and we never saw him again. We think they killed him.

I fell ill during the journey, too, but luck was with me again. I contracted malaria and spent about a month in a North Vietnamese field hospital.

They made us carry all the food, and one day, I just passed out. All I remember was falling. The enemy soldiers showed compassion for me the rest of the way to Hanoi. I got to ride part of the way, and I arrived on Christmas eve 1969.

I joined the others in Hanoi at what American POWs dubbed “The Plantation”, about two miles from the infamous Hanoi Hilton. The Plantation was my home until I was moved to the Hanoi Hilton about seven months before being released in March 1973 during Operation HOMECOMING.

They stuck me in a room with six other enlisted guys. I had no idea of how many Americans were incarcerated in the camp. All I knew was the enlisted and officer prisoners were separated, and the officers were mostly pilots.

Camp food wasn’t very nourishing, bland, meatless, watery soup and a piece of bread twice a day. Summer brought a flavor change-pumpkin soup in the morning and pumpkin soup at night. There wasn’t any lunch. We prisoners got another flavor change at the end of summer – pumpkin soup with maggots.

On Christmas and the Vietnam Tet holidays, the communist captors were magnanimous. They treated us American captives to a half bottle of Vietnamese beer, candy and fruit. I traded my candy and fruit and got everybody’s beer, except for one guy, it was great!

Christmas 1972 was a hairraising, scary time for us. American bombs started falling and exploding around Hanoi. The North Vietnamese told us to dig foxholes through three-quarter-inch concrete floors in our cells.

We spent about a week-and-a-half trying to cut through the concrete with entrenching tools; they didn’t give us any picks or sledge hammers.

We went down about seven feet. We could hear the missiles all around us. Once we saw a B-52 U.S. bomber go down in flames. We were right in the city where the bombs were exploding, but none of them hit the POW camp area. I think they knew where we were.

Other than the bombings, the scariest time in my area was when a prisoner had frequent seizures. There wasn’t anything we could do. The doctor would come, but only gave him aspirin

A big morale boost came when the prisoners managed to steal enough metal wire and used it to fashion a crude communications system throughout the POW garrison. The garrisons were built by the French in rows like townhouses. The mortar in between the bricks were soft, so it wasn’t too hard to make holes through to the next room.

Every time we got information from Col. Guy (Air Force Col. Theodore W., the camp’s senior American prisoner and an F-4C pilot shot down in 1968), we’d relay it from room to room through the holes in the wall. We hid behind mosquito nets over our bunks when the guards came by at night.

The enlisted prisoners were given the task of emptying slop buckets for themselves and the officers. They learned to use the distasteful job to their benefit.

Col. Guyused toilet paper to put messages in the top of the lids, which gave us another way to communicate. I thought to myself, this can’t be true; this is like Hogan’s Heroes (the television comedy show about WWII POWs in Germany).

Meanwhile, the North Vietnamese were hell-bent on making the prisoners protest the war. They wanted us to write letters of protest to our congressmen and other dignitaries. They even offered to establish communications with our families if we protested the war. “We had to keep pretty tight to encourage each other not to fall for those kinds of things,” he said.

About five months before our release, the officer and enlisted prisoners were allowed to mingle and have recreation time together. Until then, we were only allowed to mingle with prisoners in our own rooms. One of the officers was a doctor who was shot down on a medical evacuation mission. He talked to the guys about their problems, but he didn’t have any medication.

The North Vietnamese anticipated the war would end and started feeding us more and gave us new clothes and shoes. They also let prisoners mingle and do recreation and exercise, but they guessed wrong. The peace pact wouldn’t be signed until Jan. 27, 1973. The four-year ordeal melted more than 40 pounds off of me. When I was captured, I weighed 190 pounds and had a 34-inch waist. It shrunk to less than 27 inches.

POW released

After our release, we spent three days being examined and debriefed at a hospital in the Philippines. I was then transferred to Tripler Army Medical Center.

When my escort officer in the Philippines asked me what was the one thing I wanted to eat, I said, ”beer and vanilla ice cream.”

”I chased the beer down with raw fish and clams,” with a chuckle. My escort officer attended my wedding when I married the former Phoebe Inabe of Maui, in 1974, and the first thing he did was give me a bowl of ice cream.

Returning to normalcy

Thomas wasted no time using his GI Bill benefits to finish his education. Discharged from the Army in April 1973, he returned to the University of Hawaii for summer school that June. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in medical technology in 1976 and worked at Tripler Army Medical Center from September 1977 to January 1980. He accepted a job with the Internal Revenue Service and went to the mainland five years later.

A branch chief in the IRS’ Delaware/Maryland collection division in Landover, Md., Thomas quipped, “Now I’m licensed to take blood and money.”

The couple has two sons. Brant, 19, is a freshman at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Va. Ross, 17, is a junior at Robinson Secondary School in Fairfax, Va.

Vietnam flashbacks

After attending a couple of POW reunions, Thomas decided to keep a low profile. “I try to forget some of the things that happened to me,” he said. “So I don’t go to many functions any more. The only one I keep in contact with is Nat Henry, the guy who had seizures in the camp. He lives in North Carolina. He was one of the five guys left after his unit was ambushed.”

Thomas’ luck is still holding. “I don’t have malaria relapses anymore. When I returned, they had developed a cure for the type of malaria I had.”

He said he also feels lucky because he doesn’t suffer flashbacks or any other severe, belated reactions to his captivity. “I attribute a lot of my mental survival to being a Buddhist,” he said. “Buddhism taught me to have peace of mind within myself. That, in combination with exercise, kept me going. I also have a personality where I don’t react emotionally to a lot of things. I’m more conservative.” If there was one word that helped, it would be ”faith, we never lost faith.”

Reference: Thomas T. Horio, American Forces Press Service by: Rudi Williams, Hawaii Army National Guard historical files, news articles and The Honolulu Advertiser.

– 1998 Winter Pūpūkahi pp. 5