<v Speaker 1>The guards at the most notorious prison in North Vietnam

<v Speaker 1>had a nickname for one particular American. They didn't call

<v Speaker 1>him by his rank because he barely had one. They

<v Speaker 1>called him the incredibly Stupid One. They were certain he

<v Speaker 1>was the dumbest prisoner they had ever laid eyes on,

<v Speaker 1>A poor, illiterate farm boy who couldn't read, couldn't write,

<v Speaker 1>couldn't even be trusted to sign a simple confession. They

<v Speaker 1>just let him wander around the prison yard because they

<v Speaker 1>knew somebody that dumb had to be harmless. They were wrong.

<v Speaker 1>The incredibly Stupid One may have been the most dangerous

<v Speaker 1>American in that prison, and by the time they figured

<v Speaker 1>that out, it was too late. I'm Jerry Broadway from

<v Speaker 1>Hey Dad Productions. This is Anonymous America. Doug Hegdell was

<v Speaker 1>a twenty year old kid from Clark, South Dakota, small

<v Speaker 1>farming town about as far from the ocean as you

<v Speaker 1>can get in America. He had never even seen the

<v Speaker 1>seat when he joined the Navy in nineteen sixty six.

<v Speaker 1>He joined the Navy because he wanted to see the

<v Speaker 1>world and maybe get to Australia. The Navy stationed him

<v Speaker 1>on a guided missile cruiser called the USS Canberra, off

<v Speaker 1>the coast of Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin. Doug

<v Speaker 1>was a seaman apprentice, one of the lowest ranks in

<v Speaker 1>the entire Navy. No officers commission, no secret clearances, no

<v Speaker 1>strategic value to anyone. He was just a young enlisted

<v Speaker 1>sailor doing his job. And that low rank, that nobody status,

<v Speaker 1>was about to become the most valuable weapon in a

<v Speaker 1>war Doug never expected to fight. On the sixth of

<v Speaker 1>April nineteen sixty seven, the Canberra was firing her big

<v Speaker 1>guns at targets on shore, and Doug went up on

<v Speaker 1>deck to watch. And then, and to this day, no

<v Speaker 1>one is entirely sure how, the blast from one of

<v Speaker 1>the ship's five inch gun mounts blew Doug clean off

<v Speaker 1>the deck and into the black water of the South

<v Speaker 1>China Sea, and nobody saw it happen. The Canberra steamed on,

<v Speaker 1>and when the crew took mustard the next morning and

<v Speaker 1>hegdel wasn't there. They searched the vessel not once but twice,

<v Speaker 1>and then listed him as lost at sea, presumed drowned.

<v Speaker 1>As far as the United States Navy was concerned, Seeman

<v Speaker 1>apprentice Douglas Hegdel was dead, but he wasn't. Doug treaded

<v Speaker 1>water in the open ocean for something like twelve hours

<v Speaker 1>until a North Vietnamese fishing boat found him and pulled

<v Speaker 1>him aboard, And just like that, that farm kid from

<v Speaker 1>South Dakota became a prisoner of war. He was handed

<v Speaker 1>over to the Vietnam army, who beat him with their

<v Speaker 1>rifles and hauled him off to a prison the Americans

<v Speaker 1>had nicknamed the Hanaway Hilton. Now, his captors took one

<v Speaker 1>look at this young sailor and assumed he must be

<v Speaker 1>a commando, a spy, an agent dropped in on some

<v Speaker 1>sort of secret mission. Why else would an American turn

<v Speaker 1>up alone in the ocean, And so they started to

<v Speaker 1>interrogate him. And this is where Doug Hegdel did something brilliant.

<v Speaker 1>He decided that the most powerful thing he could possibly

<v Speaker 1>be was underestimated. So he played dumb, spectacularly convincingly dumb.

<v Speaker 1>He acted like a simple, illiterate country boy who could

<v Speaker 1>barely understand what was happening. He asked innocent, ignorant questions,

<v Speaker 1>and when they demanded that he write out a confession,

<v Speaker 1>he told them very sincerely that he couldn't he couldn't read,

<v Speaker 1>he couldn't write, he had never learned how Now you

<v Speaker 1>have to remember many of his captors had grown up

<v Speaker 1>in a poor, rural country, and they knew plenty of

<v Speaker 1>farmers who couldn't read a word, so they believed him.

<v Speaker 1>They actually assigned someone to teach the poor literate American

<v Speaker 1>his letters, and Doug made sure that project failed. Week

<v Speaker 1>after week. He was hopeless, he was unteachable. Finally, his

<v Speaker 1>frustrated teacher just gave up and declared him a lost cause.

<v Speaker 1>And the guards really convinced gave him that nickname, the

<v Speaker 1>incredibly stupid One. And here's the thing that they had

<v Speaker 1>no way of knowing. Doung Hegdell was anything but stupid.

<v Speaker 1>Doug Hegdell had a remarkable memory, and now that everyone

<v Speaker 1>had decided he was a complete idiot, they stopped watching him.

<v Speaker 1>They gave him the run of the place. They let

<v Speaker 1>him sweep the prison yard and wander around between the

<v Speaker 1>cell blocks because he was the only American they figured

<v Speaker 1>was just too stupid to cause any trouble. Doug caused

<v Speaker 1>an enormous amount of trouble for starters. He became a saboteur.

<v Speaker 1>As he swept the yard, he would wait for a

<v Speaker 1>guard to nod off, and then he would drop a

<v Speaker 1>small amount of dirt into the fuel tanks of the

<v Speaker 1>North Vietnamese trucks parked in the compound, just a little

<v Speaker 1>at a time so no one would notice. Five of

<v Speaker 1>those trucks eventually broke down so badly they had to

<v Speaker 1>be towed out of the prison. A senior officer and

<v Speaker 1>fellow prisoner, Navy pilot Dick Stratton, later marveled at it.

<v Speaker 1>Here was a high school kid who fell off a ship,

<v Speaker 1>and he had five in many trucks to his credit,

<v Speaker 1>while Stratton, a decorated pilot with thousands of flight hours

<v Speaker 1>and dozens of combat missions, had destroyed exactly zero. Who,

<v Speaker 1>Stratton asked, was the better sailor. The North Vietnamese also

<v Speaker 1>tried to use their harmless idiot for propaganda. They would

<v Speaker 1>have him read statements criticizing the United States, but Doug

<v Speaker 1>would deliver them so badly, so flat, so mangled, so

<v Speaker 1>riddled with mistakes, that the recordings were just useless. He

<v Speaker 1>said later that ruining their propaganda became a personal war

<v Speaker 1>for him. He was fighting them with incompetence on purpose,

<v Speaker 1>and he was winning. But all of that was just

<v Speaker 1>the warm up, because Doug Heggel was about to do

<v Speaker 1>the single most important thing any prisoner in that camp

<v Speaker 1>would ever do. The men in the Hanoi Hilton had

<v Speaker 1>a desperate problem back home. The North Vietnamese refused to

<v Speaker 1>release accurate list of who they were holding, so hundreds

<v Speaker 1>of American servicemen were simply listed as missing in action,

<v Speaker 1>and their families had no idea whether they were alive

<v Speaker 1>or did ed Sitting in a jail celle in Hanoi

<v Speaker 1>or lying at the bottom of a jungle somewhere. The

<v Speaker 1>prisoners needed the world to know their names. They needed

<v Speaker 1>proof of life. So one of Doug's salemates, an Air

<v Speaker 1>Force officer named Joe Kreka, took on a project with

<v Speaker 1>the one man the guards never watched. He began feeding

<v Speaker 1>Doug the names of fellow prisoners, and to lock them

<v Speaker 1>into his memory, they set the list to a tune,

<v Speaker 1>a simple silly children's song. Old McDonald had a farm,

<v Speaker 1>name after name after name sung quietly to that nursery rhyme.

<v Speaker 1>And Doug didn't just memorize names. He memorized ranks, capture dates,

<v Speaker 1>how each band had been shot down or taken, the

<v Speaker 1>names of their wives and children, the names of their dogs,

<v Speaker 1>even social security numbers. And by the time he was done,

<v Speaker 1>the incredibly stupid one had committed to memory the identities

<v Speaker 1>of two hundred and fifty six American POWs. And then

<v Speaker 1>came the test of his life. The North Vietnamese decid

<v Speaker 1>to release a handful of prisoners early as a propaganda gesture,

<v Speaker 1>look how humane we are, and they picked, among others,

<v Speaker 1>their favorite harmless idiot. But the American prisoners lived by

<v Speaker 1>an ironclad code. Nobody goes home early, You come home

<v Speaker 1>in the order you were captured, and no one accepts

<v Speaker 1>special release ahead of the others, because early release was

<v Speaker 1>exactly the kind of thing the enemy would use to

<v Speaker 1>divide them and break them. To take that deal was

<v Speaker 1>to be branded a collaborator, and Doug Hegdel did not

<v Speaker 1>want to go. He did not want to be seen

<v Speaker 1>as one of the men who cut a deal and

<v Speaker 1>left his brothers behind. So his senior officer, Dick Stratton,

<v Speaker 1>gave him a direct order, take the release, get out.

<v Speaker 1>Because inside that so called stupid sailor's head were two

<v Speaker 1>hundred and fifty six names that the outside world needed

<v Speaker 1>far more than the Hanoi Hilton needed one more body

<v Speaker 1>in a cell. Going home for Doug was not a reward,

<v Speaker 1>It was an assignment. On August fifth, nineteen sixty nine,

<v Speaker 1>Douglas Hegdel walked out of North Vietnam, and when he

<v Speaker 1>got home, he opened his mouth and out came the names,

<v Speaker 1>two hundred and fifty six of them, with the details

<v Speaker 1>to back up every single one. For dozens of American

<v Speaker 1>families who had been told only that their son or

<v Speaker 1>their husband was missing, it was the first hard proof

<v Speaker 1>in years that their man was still alive. And the

<v Speaker 1>Navy that had once listed Doug Hegdel as dead now

<v Speaker 1>had in Doug a witness who could account for hundreds

<v Speaker 1>of the living. And it didn't stop there. In nineteen seventy,

<v Speaker 1>businessman Ross Perot flew Hegdel to the Paris Peace Talks,

<v Speaker 1>where the incredibly stupid one stood up and told the

<v Speaker 1>world in specific detail about the torture and the mistreatment

<v Speaker 1>inside the Hanoi Hilton. His testimony put a spotlight on

<v Speaker 1>that camp, and the men he had left behind reported

<v Speaker 1>that afterward, conditions actually improved. Doug went on to spend

<v Speaker 1>years teaching other American service members how to survive captivity,

<v Speaker 1>passing on hard won lessons at the Navy Survival School,

<v Speaker 1>and nearly three decades after he came home, at a

<v Speaker 1>gathering of veterans, Doug stood up and did it one

<v Speaker 1>more time. He recited the names, all two hundred and

<v Speaker 1>fifty six of them, to that same old nursery tune,

<v Speaker 1>every name, every rank. He still remembered them all. Dick Stratton,

<v Speaker 1>the decorated pilot with all the medals and none of

<v Speaker 1>the trucks, called Doug Hegdel his personal hero. He was

<v Speaker 1>the perfect model of the resourceful, courageous American sailor. The

<v Speaker 1>guards thought he was the stupidest man in the prison.

<v Speaker 1>He may have been the smartest man in all of Vietnam.

<v Speaker 1>And he beat them with nothing more than a nursery

<v Speaker 1>rhyme and a steel trap memory that gave hundreds of

<v Speaker 1>families back their sons. That's Douglas Hegdel, and that's anonymous America.