Beyond Endurance — The Incredible POW Story of Lance Sijan
If I am captured I will continue to resist by all means available. I will make every effort to escape and aid others to escape. I will accept neither parole nor special favors from the enemy.
— Article 3 of the Code of Conduct for Members of the Armed Forces of the United States
Since its inception in 1862, the Medal of Honor, our nation’s highest and most prestigious military citation, has been awarded to 3,555 recipients (out of an estimated 40 million who have served in the armed services), each one of them honoring someone who served their country and distinguished themselves “by gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty.”
Above and beyond the call of duty. Few words would better summarize the short life and long legacy of Captain Lance P. Sijan. He was born in Milwaukee in 1942 to working-class parents. His Serbian father was a tough, South Side tavern owner, who showed his own sense of pride when he carved the word “Tradition” into the ornamental woodwork above his bar. Young Lance was a good enough student in high school, but he had to work hard for everything. Family members would later recall how he always had an intense drive to do whatever it took to set out and achieve a worthy goal like earning an appointment to the Air Force Academy in Colorado. (Along with meeting the academic and flight training demands, he played for two years on the Academy’s varsity football team.)
He graduated as a fighter pilot in 1965, just as US military involvement in Vietnam was hitting its peak. He was immediately assigned to the 480th Tactical Fighter Squadron stationed at Da Nang Air Base in South Vietnam.
On the night of November 9, 1967, Sijan was twenty-five years old and already flying his 52nd combat mission in an F-4C Phantom, a twin-engine fighter-bomber and mainstay of US air operations in Vietnam. Flying alongside his Squadron Commander, Lieutenant Colonel John Armstrong, they were on a bombing run near the border between Laos and North Vietnam, call sign AWOL One. Upon reaching the assigned coordinates, they flew in low on target and released their 750-pound bombs, only to have a malfunctioning fuse set off one of the bombs right underneath the wing, instantly disabling the engines and sending the aircraft into a hopeless dive.
Sijan and Armstrong kept their composure enough to eject quickly and employ their parachutes. (Armstrong’s body was never recovered and he was later declared Killed In Action.) But even with a parachute the descent in the dark was frighteningly swift.
After crashing through a triple-canopy of tree branches and thorny vines, Sijan hit the ground hard enough to fracture his skull, leave bloody gashes to his right hand and forearm, dislocate three fingers, and break his left leg in two.
For twenty-four hours he lay there battered and unconscious in the jungle underbrush. Trees two hundred feet tall blocked out much of the natural light, making daytime seem like dusk. When he came to, he was dehydrated and wracked with pain, wounds seemingly all over his body. He managed to grip a transmitter with his good hand and send out an electronic SOS signal, making intermittent contact with a Search and Rescue team flying somewhere up above.
But the jungle canopy all around was too thick, and persistent small arms fire from approaching enemy troops made it too dangerous for rescuers to drop down and save the downed pilot. After several hours of futile searching, the rescue team had to break off and return to base. They returned the next day but by then Sijan’s battery-operated transmitter was dead. They couldn’t locate him or make contact with him. They had no choice but to assume he was captured. Or dead.
When the Search and Rescue chopper flew away a second time, Sijan’s heart sank. He knew they wouldn’t be coming back. But crippled or not, he was still a United States soldier. Surrender, to his moral code, was not an option. Dropped by fate, or the worst of luck, into a dark, almost primitive world, deep in enemy territory, Lance Sijan would have to go it alone.
Recalling the tenets of the Code of Conduct, he knew it was a matter of military duty to evade capture and continue to take the fight to the enemy in whatever way possible. Taking stock of his dire situation, he waited until first light, then made a crude splint for his leg, and with the help of a compass, started pulling himself through the underbrush, toward rescue from his fellow countrymen in South Vietnam.
It was all he could do to crawl for a hundred yards or more in a day before blacking out from exhaustion. Yet for an incredible forty-six days, he forced himself with sheer will to keep going, over rocky ground and through the underbrush, his gray-green flight suit becoming more tattered and blood-stained with each passing day. Moreover, the relentless pain, hunger, and thirst was eating away much of his physical strength.
He kept going through the steamy days and chilly nights, licking the dew off of plants and eating bugs to stay alive, all the time fighting off flies and picking off leeches. His broken leg and bloodied skin made every movement an excruciating test of endurance. And of course, there was always the danger of being discovered by a bitter enemy who showed little mercy toward US pilots, or as they called them, “air pirates.”
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Freedom came to an end for Lance Sijan on Christmas Day of 1967 when a North Vietnamese patrol found his thin and battered body lying in the middle of a dirt path. With guns drawn they approached warily. He was unconscious. They picked him up and took him to a nearby army post where he was watched over by one guard. One night, after he had gained back a little strength, he lured a guard inside his hut, knocked him out cold, and staggered back into the jungle.
The escape didn’t last long. Within hours he was recaptured, and this time sent to a larger bamboo prison outside the city of Vinh. Here the interrogation and torture began. As they showed throughout the war, the North Vietnamese would stop at nothing to coerce from its prisoners war crimes confessions they could use as anti-US propaganda. (Over the course of what turned out to be years-long captivity, almost all of the American POWs eventually succumbed to torture and made forced confessions.)
Already malnourished and in searing pain from his wounds, Sijan held fast to the duty and honor defined within the Soldier’s Code of Conduct. He would give them nothing but name, rank, and service number, even as guards twisted and beat on his swollen, broken leg.
Fellow prisoners Guy Gruters and Bob Craner heard the sickening thuds of bamboo clubs and Sijan’s screams, but they also heard his repeated shouts of defiance: “Sijan! My name is Lance Peter Sijan! I’m not going to tell you anything. I can’t talk to you…it’s against the code.” 1
At one point he screamed at one of his torturers, “I’ll get you, you fucker! I’ll kick your ass!”2
As Gruters and Craner would later testify, the continuous defiance showed by Lance Sijan, despite his broken body, was the bravest thing they ever saw. Days of torture and a complete lack of badly needed medical care began to take their inevitable toll. Gruters and Craner did what little they could to nurse the wounded airman back to some semblance of health, but it appeared more and more to be a losing battle.
Next stop for Sijan, Gruters, and Craner was Hanoi and its aptly named Hoa Lo prison (In Vietnamese Hoa Lo means “fiery furnace.” American prisoners called it the Hanoi Hilton.) Following a three-day trip in the cold rains of monsoon season, Sijan arrived at Hoa Lo starved and bloodied, having suffered through such barbaric treatment.
He was put in a dank concrete cell where, at night during the rainy season, the temperature inside dropped precipitously. He couldn’t stop shivering. He could barely eat anything, and was slipping in and out of consciousness. Back in Da Nang his fellow pilots in their air-controlled barracks would have struggled to recognize the man anymore. Not so, however, if they would have seen his fighting spirit in the face of the enemy. According to the testimony of other POWs, in his final days Sijan was drawing on what little strength he had left, literally growling at his captors, refusing to bow to them, thinking of escape and of home; a warrior fighting to the end.
Lance Sijan died in Hoa Lo on or about January 22, 1968. (At the conclusion of the war, North Vietnam acknowledged that he was one of 55 American servicemen and 7 civilians who died in captivity.) The stated cause of death was pneumonia. The man may have died physically broken and alone, but from that day on, his story and inspiration have lived on.
In 1974, his remains were positively identified and repatriated back to the United States where he was buried with full military honors in Arlington Park Cemetery in Milwaukee.
He was posthumously promoted to the rank of Captain, and in 1976 was awarded the Medal of Honor at a White House ceremony, thus becoming the first and only Air Force Academy graduate to be so highly honored.
One year later, the Air Force Academy named one of its dormitories Sijan Hall. Today cadets entering that building can look up and see a life-sized oil portrait of a dignified, dark-haired officer in dress uniform. They see for themselves what it means to sacrifice all in the service of one’s country.
“A long time ago, I lived for a time in the company of heroes, men who endured great hardships but who refused to lose faith in their God, their country, and their comrades. I am a witness to a thousand acts of compassion, sacrifice, and endurance. But of all the men whose dignity humbles me, one name is revered among all others- Lance Sijan.”
-— Former POW and U.S. Senator John McCain, in a keynote address at the opening of the National Prisoner of War Museum, 1998
1 Malcolm McConnell, Into the Mouth of the Cat — The Story of Lance Sijan, Hero of Vietnam (W.W. Norton & Company, 1985), p. 175.
2 Ibid., p. 176
