The odyssey of Maine’s first Vietnam POW

By Paul Mills

“They stripped me of everything I had.” Thus began Charlie Crafts’ 26-month odyssey as a prisoner of war in the jungles of Vietnam.

Crafts, who now lives in Livermore, agreed to an almost unprecedented interview of his experiences in the war, as Maine’s first Vietnam POW. His story, which follows, is now just beginning to come to light.

In the spring of l964 Crafts has been on the laboratory staff at International Paper since his graduation four years earlier from Jay High.  A draft notice from legendary draft board monarch Sgt. Eddie Berry arrived. After basic training Crafts was sent to communications school. Graduating near the top of his class made him eligible for the military’s most challenging assignment, the war in Southeast Asia.

After being in Vietnam only a month, Crafts experienced the event that utterly changed his life. On Dec. 29, 1964, he and Sgt. Harold Bennett had just been dispatched as advisors to some 360 Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) rangers trying to defend the Catholic village of Binh Gia, about 70-miles south of Saigon. American intelligence at this early point in the war was so limited it had no inkling that 5,000 Viet Cong, “VC,” were close at hand, some of them disguised as ARVN soldiers.

The overwhelmingly outnumbered ARVN and American advisors sustained enemy machine gun and rifle fire so strong that half were soon either killed or captured. Entire stands of banana trees were cut down behind them.

“Why we weren’t hit is a miracle,” Crafts recalled. Sgt. Bennett and Crafts refused overtures to be rescued by American helicopter pilots. They resisted the VC in all ways possible but finally when an assault force of 20 to 30 Viet Cong “swept over our position” we were “bound and tied,” Crafts recalls.

Nevertheless, despite being restrained for nearly half his imprisonment in solitary confinement, Crafts developed close bonds for and witnessed dramatic experiences with the 10 other Americans in his camp. Within five months, Crafts’ battlefield colleague, Sgt. Bennett was executed, the first execution of an American POW in the war. Another fellow prisoner, Sgt. Kenneth Roraback soon met the same fate. Two others died of disease, including Capt. John Schumann, who while suffering from pneumonia and kidney failure died in Crafts’ own arms in 1966.

Bestowed with a more exhilarating fate was Sgt. “Ike” Camacho, who in July 1965 became the first American POW to successfully escape from a prison camp during the war.

Camacho’s escape was facilitated by assistance from Crafts and other fellow prisoners. Each turned over their sole allotment from the only Red Cross shipment ever to make its way into the camp – chocolates. With them Camacho would have a better chance to sustain a four-day flight from captivity through treacherous jungles and rivers. After the Camacho escape, the VC put an embargo on any further outside provisions to the prisoners. The taste of chocolates would have to await the taste of freedom.

Crafts stands out not only as the first of four Maine POWs, but also as the only one from Maine held in the jungles. Others spent their captivity at an old French prison built in l898, named Hao Lo, or “fire oven” in Vietnamese. It was popularly known as the “Hanoi Hilton.” Though Crafts is quick to acknowledge that conditions at Hao Lo were at times brutal, being in a large urban city such as Hanoi meant that prisoners there had access to better amenities than could have been possible in the remote wilderness where Crafts was held.

One of the most frightening perils at the makeshift jungle prisons was B52 bombings from American air strikes. The U.S. pilots, who obviously had no idea as to the location of the Americans below, dropped their bombs in clusters of 1,000 to 2,000 pounds, “60… 70 to a time, it was just horrific! From the time you heard the scream of the bomb you had seven seconds to get into your bomb shelter,” recalled Crafts.

At the Hanoi Hilton, however, Americans – because the prison’s location was so well identified – experienced little risk of being targeted by U.S. bombers. The morale of prisoners there, according to Crafts, was buoyed by such bombings because it demonstrated proactive involvement by American forces.

Because of the hazards not only of B52s, but also risk of detection by ARVN or U.S. ground forces, prison camps such as those in which Crafts’ group was held were often on the move. Crafts estimates he was required to march some 800 miles through jungles so dense that at high noon in some places he could not even detect the sun. At no time did Crafts see a single village or town.

Information was confined to radio propaganda about the War, once or twice a week broadcast by English speaking Hanoi based newscasters. There was no occasion to celebrate the Gemini space flights of 1965 or the Batman TV sensation of l966, nor to debate whether the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine or the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations was their favorite hit record. Banished also from their lives was all communication from family and loved ones at home. Crafts’ parents had no word he was even alive until Sgt. Camacho phoned them on his own return in the summer of l965. The VC did, however, allow some personal fellowship among the prisoners.

A popular pursuit was swapping stories of their respective home communities. Thus, the Capt. Schumann who died while in captivity with Crafts learned as much about Jay, Maine as Crafts would learn about Schumann’s Cokato, Minnesota.

Another source of conventional entertainment offered by the VC was a deck of cards it issued to the prisoners. It’s one which in tattered, worn form is still with Crafts today. “I taught three other prisoners how to play cribbage. We made a cribbage board – very crude – but it was a cribbage board and we played endless games of solitaire and cribbage.”

Besides allowing card games, the VC on rare occasions would also help arrange other forms of benign pursuits. One guard “knew I liked animals so he would bring me pets. I had a pet deer that died. I had a pet cat and the last pet I had was a chicken and they wanted me to bring the chicken home but I couldn’t quite fathom me getting off the plane with a chicken underneath my arm.”

But it took more than just conversation, cribbage and a pet chicken to sustain Crafts and the few of his fellow prisoners who managed to survive. After all, as with most VC prisoners, Crafts was subjected to attempts to force him to cough up an infinity of anti-American fictions. When Crafts refused, the VC would tie him up and push him into a hole and leave there with nothing to eat for some two days at a time.

Crafts’ own life was thus hanging by a thread. On multiple occasions he contracted malaria, once so seriously he was in a coma for three days. Even when he wasn’t ill, the rice and fish diet was so meager the six foot frame of the one-time Jay High School football linebacker/offensive end dropped from over l80 to just above l30 pounds.

The VC thus, “Wanted you just strong enough to survive but not strong enough to escape,” Crafts recalled for this columnist recently.

Crafts credits his ability to survive such torture to the inspirational leadership of Capt. Donald Cook, the first Marine POW of the War, who became a POW just two days after Crafts’ own capture also near Binh Gia. Cook, who became the only Marine to earn the Medal of Honor for acts of heroism while in captivity, was in Crafts’ words, “Our inspiration. He taught us, ‘Think of your family, think of us as a group. I don’t care how bad you hate rice, how bad you hate fish heads, you eat.’”

As Crafts also recalled, “It is unbelievable how strong your ties are to your family if you think about them a lot and the desire to get back home and see your loved ones. That will carry you through almost anything.”

Despite the grim severity of imprisonment, the VC was still capable of humanitarian behavior. Thus, during the same year that two of Crafts’ prison mates were executed, two others were released.

Much later, in Crafts’ own third year of imprisonment, the VC offered to release both himself and an Afro American sergeant from Tennessee, Sammie Womack.

Captain Cook urged Crafts to accept the VC offer, pleading with Crafts that his condition was so fragile that his release would be his only chance of survival. Cook himself was denied any opportunity for his own freedom and the man Crafts today extols as the prisoners’ “guiding star,” died from malaria while in VC custody at the end of 1967.

February 23, 1967, Crafts – without his pet chicken under his arm – and Womack were released. Both were soon flown back to the States. After some days of de-briefing and hospitalization, Crafts returned to his parents’ home in North Jay. Heading up his personal agenda was a visit to meet the nephew born to his older sister Patty Ridley, just two days after his release.

The Jay community in which he had always lived also provided a hospitable homecoming. A Mustang and dedication of the high school yearbook were among the tokens or appreciation. The yearbook presentation was made by a high school senior, also from North Jay, Juanita Allen, and they dated for the next year before going their separate ways.

Crafts’ return was soon marred by a relapse of malaria, however. This caused Crafts’ father, Brad, to deny an interview with Crafts to a visiting Bangor based reporter. Feeling rebuffed at a perceived snub, the reporter penned an unfavorable article. This experience, coupled with the irrepressible behavior of a reporter who unceremoniously plunged a microphone between Crafts and his mother before they could even exchange a single gesture of affection when Crafts first stepped off his homecoming plane, left a bitter taste with Crafts. It’s among the reasons why he for so many years until a recent interview with this columnist, kept the media at an arm’s length.

By June 1967, Crafts was honorably discharged. He picked up his life where it left off before Sgt. Berry’s draft notice three long years before. He returned to his old job at the IP mill’s laboratory. He also resumed service as a volunteer firefighter with the North Jay Department. In a few years, a marriage and birth of a son, Jason, followed. By 1975, Crafts transferred to the IP’s Androscoggin mill, where he remained as an operator at the pulp mill until the 1987 strike.

By 1994, after a marriage of some 25-years, a divorce, and a hiatus of some 27 years after first meeting and dating the high school senior who in 1967 had presented the dedicatory yearbook to Crafts, they are married. Juanita Crafts became not only his wife but also an accomplished co-archivist for his momentous achievements.

In 1997, a landmark for Crafts’ life back in Maine was attending the christening in Bath of a guided missile destroyer named for Captain Cook. In the same year, Cokato, the Minnesota city 50-miles west of Minneapolis Crafts had heard so much about from John Schumann, the captain who died in his arms in 1966, offers an invitation to the Crafts. At a community observance in honor of the fallen prisoner, Crafts was given the keys to the city for the support Crafts had given Schumann while its favorite son was held in captivity.

Another belated but far more significant accolade came in November 2009. This was when Crafts was awarded the Silver Star, in recognition of his gallantry at the Battle of Binh Gia.

Earlier this year, Crafts and Juanita were Memorial Day marshals in Jay-Livermore Falls, as part of the parade’s theme commemorating the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of American involvement in Vietnam. In September, the Livermore Falls American Legion presented Crafts with a life membership.

Crafts, now 69, and Juanita, devote some of their retirement time today to their blended family of three sons and several grandchildren. Renewed attention to his fellow POWs including Sgt. Womack, now blind from the effects of diabetes contracted while in captivity, are also a focus of their mutual interest.

Crafts is today a good-natured but articulate and inspiring figure. When on an evening in late October he was seated across the table from this columnist for over three hours at Crafts’ modest but efficiently-maintained modern home in a quiet, wooded neighborhood in Livermore, Crafts summoned from the well spring of his alert memory vivid recollections of his historic experiences. He nevertheless acknowledged the symptoms that beset many Vietnam POWs: diabetes, lack of feeling in part of his legs, back problems, and post traumatic stress disorder or PTSD.

Among the symptoms of PTSD for Crafts are nightmares. He has, despite the nightmares, experienced some elements of the American dream, even though their rewards have been purchased at a steep price.

But the most enduring message from Crafts is neither physical nor emotional.

“It is how people take freedom for granted. They just assume it is part of life and it is not. Freedom is earned. I did learn that and it is to enjoy the freedom and the everyday life that we can lead and not be restricted. It is amazing. I just cannot stress how important freedom is to people.”

Few in Maine have overcome such formidable hardships in order to deliver a testimonial in such authentic terms. It is a privilege to have Charlie Crafts still among us today to impart it to us.

Paul H. Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of Maine’s political scene. He can be reached by e-mail: pmills@myfairpoint.net