Doug Hegdahl

And I just remember, you know, I look back on that.

I met Doug Hegdahl at SERE.

He was my interrogator.

Doug Hegdahl was a young seaman that was blown over the side of the ship that memorized all the, when he went to the Hanoi Hilton, memorized all the names of all of the prisoners at the Hanoi Hilton and brought those names back to the tune of Old MacDonald Had a Farm to get a full accounting of the prisoners of war.

So I got to meet him.

Uh, Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was killed in 2012 on 9/11 in Benghazi, Libya, was a classmate of mine at the National War College.

Fortunately for us, When they released nine guys in 1970 as a, in good faith, quote unquote, they released nine guys and all but one of them did not have orders to come home.

The only guy that had orders to come home was a kid named Doug Hegdahl, a sailor that fell off a boat and washed up on the shores of North Vietnam.

The reason Doug had orders to come home, he had memorized the names of everyone there and they let him, we let him go home because he had the names.

The other guys, we weren't allowed to go home Only way we were going to go home with honor is to go home in the order that we got there.

Thanks to the brave men and women at Forward Operating Base Weasel, Saddam was caught off guard when the real attack came, and his forces were quickly routed.

Douglas Brent Hegdahl III was only 20 years old when he was taken captive by the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War.

A Navy seaman, Hegdahl had been on a ship in the Gulf of Tonkin when he fell overboard and was picked up by a North Vietnamese fishing boat.

Hegdahl was immediately taken prisoner and spent the next two years in captivity.

During that time, he developed a deep understanding of the Vietnamese language and culture.

However, he was able to fool his captors into thinking he was stupid and harmless.

He was allowed to roam the POW camp freely and would secretly sabotage the Vietnamese by doing things like putting dirt in gas tanks to disable them.

He was eventually released as part of a prisoner exchange.