11/13/2023 0 Comments Never caged![]() On his eventual return to the US, Army doctors found two types of the disease in his body. (Smith did not know it at the time, but he did in fact catch malaria. Or just take your mosquito net away,” Smith said, pausing for a split second, the word “malaria” silently hanging, before adding, “Then you die.” “All they had to do is punch a couple holes in your mosquito net, and not give you a needle and thread to sew it up. Smith said that in the jungle, the North Vietnamese fighters could leave the fear, the intimidation, the torture, up to nature. Mark Smith has identification attached to his shirt, after his release by the Viet Cong to the American military at Loc Ninh, Vietnam, on February 12, 1973. I was worried about snakes coming,” Smith recalled.Ĭapt. His cage was a “hell hole” in the ground, about the size of the tiger cages above, but with four earthen walls. Yet it was Smith – the commander of the US and South Vietnamese troops at Loc Ninh – who was destined to endure an even worse punishment. Unless I either went to the bathroom, or to bathe, which was about every seven to 10 days,” Wallingford said. “They put me in one cage by myself and put a 10-foot chain around one of my ankles (and) locked the other into the cage itself. And they were roughly five (foot high) by six (foot wide) in size,” each with a small wooden door, Wallingford recalled. “There were five tiger cages in a circle. National ArchivesĪfter three days of marching, they arrived at a camp deep in the Cambodian jungle. Ken Wallingford is seen in a group of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army personnel after his released at Loc Ninh, Vietnam, on February 12, 1973. The trail extended beyond Vietnam into neighboring Laos and Cambodia, non-parties to the conflict, where the North thought its military movements would be less vulnerable to US air attacks. As the North Vietnamese wanted to keep their prisoners in a more secure area, they marched the pair off – with five other American prisoners – along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, an elaborate network of paths and roads the North Vietnamese forces used to infiltrate weapons and troops into the South throughout the war. The base where the pair had been captured – Loc Ninh – was in South Vietnam. Smith had been fighting in Vietnam since 1966, and “didn’t like the communists at all…”īut he was now at their mercy, and about to join Wallingford in chains in the jungle. And that was why I couldn’t move,” Smith said. And I finally realized there were three Vietnamese standing on my back. “Well, then I started shaking my shoulder. ![]() ![]() “When I came to, I thought I was crippled. The blast left him unconscious, but alive. “The RPG that was headed to my chest hit the tree behind me (instead),” he said. The small-arms fire that hit him in the left shin knocked him off his feet – and out of the firing line of the rocket-propelled grenade heading his way. Mark Smith was engaged in a firefight and about to be shot by the bullet that would save his life. ![]() His new home was a Viet Cong “tiger cage.”Įlsewhere on the base, Capt. Instead, he would spend the next 10 months shackled in a bamboo enclosure measuring 5 feet by 6 feet, too small for the 5-foot-11 American even to stand in. A day that Wallingford recalled as clearly as if it were yesterday, as he recounted it to CNN at a recent reunion for surviving Vietnam War POWs in California.Īt the time of his capture, Wallingford had been tantalizingly close to freedom and home, with just six more days to go before his expected discharge. “The enemy descended upon us, took our weapons and anything visible, my wallet, the money,” Wallingford said. Instead he scrambled out of a porthole and found himself face-to-face with the North Vietnamese. “We started smelling gasoline on top of the bunker that we were in and knew a Molotov cocktail was coming next,” he recalled. His life flashed before his eyes, frame by frame, like an old 8mm film. He’d spent the previous night hiding in a bunker with another soldier at a base that had been overrun by the North Vietnamese forces and was already nursing 17 shrapnel wounds when he realized his position had been spotted. Ken Wallingford had only days left to serve in the US Army when he found himself trapped – and seconds away from being burned alive.
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