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Colonel Risner named Oct. 15, 1969 as the beginning of improvement in the prisoners' treatment. The credit for the change seems to belong to all the people who tried at about that time to focus world attention on the plight of the P.O.W.s—President Nixon, the wives of the P.O.W.s, Congress and the media. Embarrassed by world pressure, the politburo in Hanoi may have passed the word to go easier. At any rate, prisoners were allowed for the first time to exercise outdoors for 30 minutes, but behind bamboo screens so that they could not see each other; they got a third daily meal of bread and water, and a third blanket. They began to pass their days in boredom rather than fear. Milligan began to raise a family of spiders in his cell, and watched geckos "mate with each other and grow old."
By the winter of 1970 most of the prisoners had been taken out of solitary or small-group cells into large open cell blocks that held about 45 men. It was after they were put together that they were able to organize—and even coordinate a resistance of sorts.
They called themselves the "Fourth Combined P.O.W. Wing." Each camp had its own American commandant, as it were. The prisoners adopted Air Force organizational tables—wings, squadrons, operations. A tap code and a hand code were the most effective methods of communicating, but everything helped—the modulations of a cough, the syncopated swipe of a broom.
Flag. By late 1971 the organization had solidified enough to stage its own psychological warfare. On Dec. 7 they staged a church service in the "Hanoi Hilton." Their North Vietnamese captors called it "the riot." On that day the Fourth Combined P.O.W. Wing ordered a mass prayer service in defiance of camp regulations prohibiting meetings of more than 20 men. Ordered to stop, they prayed even louder. When the wing leaders were taken outside the cell block, those inside broke into The Star-Spangled Banner.
Such exercises in symbolism proved immensely valuable in sustaining morale. Air Force Lieut. Colonel John Dramesi, who escaped with Atterberry in 1969 but was recaptured, began in the fall of 1971 to laboriously stitch together an American flag. He used the threads from a yellow blanket for the gold embroidery, pieces of red nylon underwear and red thread from a handkerchief, white threads from a towel and patches of blue from a North Vietnamese jacket. The flag often flew at night in the Hanoi Hilton cell block that he shared with 40 other men, and it was dutifully saluted. "I thought that a flag could be a symbol to which we could attach ourselves, so that we could retain our honor and respect," says Dramesi.
In much the same manner as the prisoners sustained themselves on such bits of symbolism, the U.S. has now turned toward the P.O.W.s as uplifting symbols—victors, in the sense of having survived, in a war that was never won, patriots in a land that had grown weary of flag waving. For the moment, their return has provided the only solace at the end of what President Nixon last week described as "the longest and most difficult war in our history."