Clarkston MIA's flying partner beats odds; Roderick L. Mayer is still missing, his partner came home

Lewiston Morning Tribune - Sandra Lee Monday, May 29, 2000

They learned to communicate with the tap of a nail on a concrete wall, the swish of a broom, toilet paper flashed beneath a locked door.

They coughed and cleared their throats and made crude noises that wouldn't attract attention, and possible torture, from their guards.

But to the men who were prisoners during the Vietnam War, it meant they could talk, find out who was down the hallway, who was known to be dead or alive.

David R. Wheat did it for seven years and four months. Some were there longer than he.

Wheat was the RIO -- radio intercept officer -- with U.S. Navy Comdr. Roderick L. Mayer in an F4 Phantom jet shot down over North Vietnam Oct. 17, 1965.

Mayer, son of Elizabeth Mayer of Clarkston and the late Joseph Mayer, still is missing. A gravesite tentatively identified this spring in a farmer's field in Lang Son Township may hold the solution to the disappearance of the 26-year-old pilot, who graduated in 1957 from Lewiston High School and in 1961 from the University of Idaho.

Excavation has been recommended by an investigative team of Americans and Vietnamese. If it happens, it will likely will be between November and March when no crops are growing there.

Mayer and Wheat were about the same age when they shipped out May 10, 1965, on the USS Independence. Sometime during that cruise to the Philippines, they became a team that lasted for about 80 missions, Wheat said last week in a telephone interview from his home in Duluth, Minn.

The Phantom was versatile. They flew escort on photo reconnaissance, did road reconnaissance, and flak suppression flights to try to take some of the pressure off the bigger bombers, not just from Vietnamese fire, but also from Chinese MIGs.

Mayer was "very intelligent, quiet, a nice guy to be around. I felt really privileged to fly with him," Wheat said.

The Navy version of the Phantom wasn't originally designed to drop bombs, but when the commander of their squadron decided it was a good idea, he picked Mayer to do the mathematics of dive angles and bomb release points.

Each dive angle requires a different release point and air speed, Wheat said.

On that 80th-something mission, they were supposed to keep their little part of the world safe and sanitized as one bunch of bombers rolled out and a second wave came in. They were flying "close to the deck," Wheat said, trying to stay under enemy radar that directed SAM missiles. "That put us in range of even a rifle."

All it takes is one bullet to penetrate the thin aluminum skin of the aircraft, hit the tube that carries hydraulic fluid for the flight controls and it's all over. That's what Wheat thinks happened.

They were flying over an aircraft that had been shot down earlier that day, looking for parachutes and listening for any kind of radio signal from the crew.

"As we were going by, Rod said, 'We've been hit'." The jet went about 10 degrees right wing down, then did a full rollover. "That's not a maneuver we would have done in that situation."

From then on, Mayer was too busy to talk, and Wheat, in the backseat of the Navy aircraft, had no access to any controls or gauges.

"All of this happens in tenths of a second," Wheat said. His canopy opened and he ejected. He tumbled. His chute flared, and he thinks he had one swing before it caught in the top of a little tree and he hit the ground, feet first, breaking his knee.

"Rod may not have got that one swing," he said.

He popped the quick release on his chute, intending to pull it down and hide it. Instead, the tree pulled it out of his reach, a sign to anyone in the vicinity that he was there.

He yelled for Mayer once, maybe twice, and got no response. He crawled up the hillside, parting the grass ahead, trying to close it behind him. Airplanes flew overhead and he tried to signal them with the backside of a stainless steel compass. "I wanted someone to know someone was alive on the ground."

A helicopter had been pre-positioned on a destroyer offshore. It would be able to come in, make one or two passes for a possible pick up, then would have to leave again.

"By the time it got there, militia was all around me. ... If they had come to hover over me, they would have been shot down and four more crewmen would have been killed or prisoners."

He watched Vietnamese walk within six or eight feet of his hiding spot. Finally, he saw someone following his path upwards. "He looked around the tree where I was, and jumped back, yelling gibberish."

Wheat remembers concentrating on keeping his hands in plain sight so no one would have a reason to shoot him.

"In essence the guys were relatively nice about it." They helped him up the hill to a trail, one on each side to support him, and finally, when it was apparent he couldn't put weight on his leg, brought a makeshift stretcher.

"We were lucky when we got shot down in this area," Wheat said. It hadn't been bombed or taken heavy fire, and the militia members probably hadn't lost loved ones. There wasn't the terror or the madness others experienced.

The Vietnamese carried him through the hills, through two villages where people lined up to see the American pilot. Some spit on him. "As spit goes through the air it vaporizes, cools. I was hot and sweaty. It almost felt good."

They came to a place with Jeeps. Wheat was put in a room and a man came in with a little book containing photographs of aircraft. He turned the pages and pointed, trying to get Wheat to indicate what he had been flying. "We were trained to give name, rank and date of birth."

The man finally went away and Wheat was put in the back of a Jeep with a guard on each side and another Jeep out in front that had a prisoner from the first F4 Phantom shot down that day.

They arrived at the Hanoi Hilton, the infamous prison synonymous with the war, the next morning.

In some ways, being one of the first prisoners of the war made it easier, Wheat said. The Vietnamese weren't trying as frequently to force answers to their questions. The rooms weren't as crowded.

When he was left alone, he lay down on a concrete bunk and slept until the mice started running over him. Then the single light bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling kept him awake.

He was given a mosquito net, prison clothing like pajamas, crude shorts. He found he could climb up and look out an open transom over the door and see the shower room across the hall. When eventually he was taken there, someone had scratched in the plaster, "Smile. You're on Candid Camera."

"You know then and there there'd been some Yanks there. That's not something a bloke would write. It gives you a little boost."

Sometime during the two weeks he was there, he saw James Stockdale, who eventually would be Ross Perot's running mate for the presidency, being taken to the shower.

More important, he learned what the boxes scratched on the wall meant.

They were like a tic-tac-toe game except with five squares on a side. Each square contained a letter, minus "k", which sounds like "c."

Tap two times, hesitate slightly, and tap three more times. Second row down, third letter in. H. Tap once, hesitate, tap five. E.

"We had all day to do it. I had seven years to do it."

The prisoners exchanged names, compiled mental lists, memorized up to 300 names in alphabetical order. No one wanted to throw away a name, get released one day and forget someone.

He was tapping on the wall one day with a guy named Harry Jenkins who came off another Navy ship. Jenkins said he'd heard about them being shot down, and one guy seen laying on the ground still in his chute and another up the hill from some water buffalo. "That was me."

A man lying on the ground, not trying to get away from his chute or out of sight, Wheat said, means "you're injured, very seriously injured."

Mayer may have been injured during ejection from the aircraft, from a shell fired into the cockpit, or because his chute didn't have time to deploy before he hit the ground.

The first three or four years, Wheat said, he listened for Rod Mayer's name. "I suppose you kept hoping his name might pop up somehow, some way. You'd keep asking around. I'd pretty well made up my mind from what I'd heard and observed that he'd probably died out there."

His mother and Mayer's mother kept in touch while their sons were missing. And Wheat continues that contact. "I hope before she passes on she can have an answer," he said.

The search team this spring was told by an elderly woman that sometime before 1969 an injured American pilot was brought into the prison infirmary where she worked. He died three days later and was buried in the prison cemetery that now is a farmer's field.

It looks promising, Wheat said after reading the team's report. Farming there isn't like it is here, and beneath the shallow cultivation, a grave could still be undisturbed.

Mayer probably was given the best medical treatment the area was capable of, but it would be rural first aid, not doctors and hospitals, he said.

He harbors little in the way of ill feelings toward most of those he encountered as a prisoner. Most of the guards were just doing their duty and not harassing the POWs much, "but a few looked forward to making life hard for you."

They weren't allowed writing materials, and cells were inspected once a week. If they had anything other than the simple items allowed by the guard, they would be tortured.

Wheat's hands were cuffed behind his back, once for four days, once for 10 days. One time he was caught talking. The other he didn't bow to a guard.

He was kept at the Hanoi Hilton, at a place they called the Zoo and another called the Briar Patch. They were moved a lot, always at night, blindfolded, the trucks covered in tarps. Always they were kept isolated as much as possible from each other.

The men "talked" as they rode, using the same "tap" code to nudge the foot of the man next to them.

Sometimes the "conversations" were just, "Hi. I'm so and so"

Sometimes a prisoner would be allowed to write home. Each time, that man would try to get at least one more name out.

One might write, "Is my Rambler still parked in the wheat field?" Wheat owned a Rambler, and they knew Uncle Sam would have someone reading those letters home looking for just such identifying signals. Then they could tell a family there was reason to believe their son, or daughter, was alive.

"My parents didn't find out officially until four and a half or five years later when most prisoners were allowed to write a letter home."

He was allowed to write six lines. Until that time, his folks had days when they were positive he was alive, and days when the doubts set in.

It was that way for the captives. You would think to yourself, surely by Christmas we will go home. Christmas would come, and you would think, by Easter, certainly. Then it would be, maybe by the Fourth of July.

"You cycle through the whole year like that. They were rough years."

"If we went in and they told us seven years and four months, the crap we went through, I don't know what you would do. I think a guy would naturally consider suicide, or say I'm going to get through it hell or high water."

One of the ways of keeping morale up, Wheat said, was to look at the guards and say, "Some day we're going home and you poor so and sos are going to stay here, but we're going home to the United States of America, with all our toys and TVs."

The camaraderie carried them through, he said, the shared hell of what was happening to them, being away from families, no freedom to go outside and do something.

"I can look back and say I'm lucky I went through that and met some of the neatest guys in the world."

While still prisoners they put together an informal organization they called NAMPOW. "A few guys we didn't invite. Not very many but there was a couple we had some heartburn for."

Christmas 1972 they were being held up near the Chinese border, a fact they know only because one of the guys was able to sneak a peak out of the back of a truck during the previous move and saw a road marker with the kilometers to the nearest named town.

There were nine buildings in the camp. "They let us out of our buildings. We could go talk to guys in the other building. It was just unbelievable."

Wheat had been a prisoner more than seven years.

The commander said President Nixon was bombing Hanoi. "You wanted to let out a big yell." Instead they just listened. "But you just knew it in your mind, this is what it was going to take to end this damned war."

A week or two later, the trucks arrived. They rolled up their bed mats and put on the long pants and shirts required during moves, and they waited all night. No one came for them.

At daylight, a guard came to let them dump their waste buckets. He smiled and shook his head, no.

Later that day, though, they were loaded into the trucks. It was still light out. They weren't blindfolded.

They were taken back to Hanoi and put into big rooms, 40 or 50 in a group.

"We were all in order of shootdown. You could count them. ... "

Someone tapped on the wall from the next room, saying the same thing. They were next in line after Wheat's group.

They were given a watered-down version of the Paris peace agreement that specified all POWs would get a copy. It didn't say anything about releasing prisoners. "It's just so vivid in my mind that it did not say."

A couple weeks later, the senior man in their group was told some would be released. Feb. 12, 1973, they were put in buses that didn't have the windows painted out and driven in daylight to the airport.

They were given food, a crude submarine sandwich of bread and a little pork fat. He wasn't hungry.

An American C-131 touched down and took off.

Nothing can describe the sinking feeling of seeing it go airborne again, Wheat said.

They heard later the pilot thought he didn't have clearance from U.S. authorities to land. A call was patched half a world away, and the word came back -- get that plane on the ground, now.

They were let off the bus, one man at a time, announced their names and saluted the Air Force colonel there to greet them. Two at a time, their photographs were taken by a Vietnamese cameraman. Some had to be carried up the ramps. Some walked with help.

"We were pretty happy at that point," said Wheat, who was on the second plane right behind the injured and ill. But they were still in Hanoi, still on the ground.

The ramp was closed. The planes lumbered down the runway, accelerating, accelerating ...

"At one point, the nose comes up and the thing lifts up. That was the moment in time that said the heck with this place, we're never coming back. Bad guys, we're going home."

Everyone let out a yell. Men laughed. They cried. They were going home.

He landed and called his parents. Some men with wives found out they had gone on without them. They ate eggs and meat and Jell-O. They went home.

Wheat put in for flight training and finished out a 21-year career in the Navy. Now he teaches home building to a vocational education class at a Minnesota high school and drives a charter bus on his days off.

He doesn't believe the United States left anyone alive in Vietnam.

The Vietnamese had one thing to offer to end the bombing and the war -- the POWs, Wheat said. If they had someone there they could trade for reconstruction after eight years of bombing, they would have done that years ago, he believes.

"And if I was ever proven wrong, someone did come home, I'd be a happy individual for that person."