My uncle, Lt Col Ben M Pollard, died in Nov 2016. After he came home from Vietnam, he toured American air force bases to tell his story. We were invited to his presentation. This is a portion of what he said.
His jet plane was shot down over enemy territory. He was severely injured and could not move and evade capture. When he was put in the cell, a little food was delivered. He was unable to move to reach it. The prisoners communicated via Morris Code by tapping on the wall. He conveyed to the person on the other side of the wall that he was unable to reach the food. Eventually, the other prisoner convinced the guard to let him in Ben’s cell to feed him.
Nothing was done for his injured legs. Therefore, he spent hours rubbing them. They eventually healed.
He was a POW for over 5.5 years. They were initially put in solitary for more than half that time. Eventually, they were put in a big dorm type room. Since Ben had been a Thermodynamics professor at the Air Force Academy before going to Vietnam, he taught a course in it to some of the POWs. It was a sacrifice for all the POW’s for some of the prisoners to take courses, because they had to give up some of their toilet paper rations.
There was one guy that differed with Ben on a primary formula of thermodynamics. He was adamant. Ben said, “Since I’m teaching the course, we’ll go with my formula. When I returned home, one of the first things I did was to double check the formula. I remembered it correctly.”
Then someone asked, “Did you have any pets?”
He answered, “Yes. For a little while we had a lizard as a pet. We killed flies to feed him, but we had to quit and not keep him anymore. Because when we killed the flies, we reduced the amount of fluid in them. The lizard was beginning to get dehydrated.”
He also said that many prisoners died that were in better shape than he was. It turned out that “those guys did not have a belief in any religion. They needed something bigger to believe than themselves, to survive what they were going through.”
He and John McCain were in the Hanoi Hilton together. He spoke for over an hour, but these are the highlights of what I remember.