[00:00:00] (HOST) Lee Ellis flew the F-4 Phantom in Vietnam in 1967 while flying his 53rd mission Lee was shot down and captured. He spent more than five years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi and surrounding camps, and after his repatriation in 1973, he continued his career in the Air Force, eventually retiring as a colonel. He then built a practice as a leadership consultant and coach and wrote a couple of books on the subject based on lessons he learned as a POW. Lee’s new book is something else entirely. It’s also based on lessons learned from the POW experience. But it isn’t about leadership. It’s about love. Stick around. From the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, Founders of The Wall. This is Echoes of the Vietnam War. I’m your host, Michael Croan bringing you stories of service, sacrifice, and healing from people who still feel the impact of that conflict, more than 50 years later. Episode 68 Heart, right after this message. A few years ago, Lee Ellis noticed that he and the other POWs who made it home from Vietnam were doing better statistically than the general population when it came to making marriages last. Something about their experience in captivity, it seemed to Lee, had made them especially well prepared, temperamentally or practically, or both, to make loving relationships last. He looked into it and last year published his findings in a book called Captured by Love: Inspiring True Romance Stories from Vietnam POWs. Lee joined me via zoom from his home in North Georgia. Tell me again where you are in the world? You’re somewhere north of Atlanta.

[00:02:46] (LEE ELLIS) Yes. I’m about 50 miles north of Atlanta, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, about 25 miles as the crow flies from the end of the Appalachian Trail kind of hilly up here. And if I walk down to the creek, it’s pretty steep.

[00:03:01] (HOST) Nice. And is that where you grew up? You grew up in that part of Georgia?

[00:03:05] (LEE ELLIS) Not too far away. It’s a little bit closer to Athens, Georgia, where the University of Georgia is. I grew up on a farm there.

[00:03:13] (HOST) So I guess you’re a Georgia Bulldogs fan.

[00:03:15] (LEE ELLIS) Oh, yeah. I went to the University of Georgia and I started out in pre-med and I wasn’t a good student. I was probably the worst student that ever graduated in four years. But you had to be back there in those days, the state universities, you had to be in ROTC for two years. And I was in Air Force ROTC, and I by the time I graduated, they had a flight indoctrination program. By the time I graduated and got my degree I would say I had a private pilot’s license because the Air Force had some screening, training there, and so I was a pilot when I graduated. I said I was the worst student that graduated, probably at lowest grade GPA, but in Air Force ROTC, I was a distinguished graduate and number two in my class.

[00:04:04] (HOST) So what year was this that you finished up at Georgia?

[00:04:07] (LEE ELLIS) 1965 and in July, I got commissioned and headed to Valdosta, Georgia, which is about four hours south of Athens, 4.5 hours south. Valdosta is right just near the Florida line. It’s in flatland country down there, swampy country. Great place to fly back then and so, 53 weeks later, I got my wings. My class graduated and half of our class, because this was August 1966, the Vietnam War was building up, half of our class got an assignment that said F-4 Phantom Pipeline Southeast Asia, which meant as quick as we could get through the replacement training unit, the RTU, which was combat qualified in the F-4. We would be going to the war and no stateside basing for us once we got through our combat training, and there were about three bases that trained F-4 pilots for the combat and to be qualified. And I went to the one in Southern California near Apple Valley, about 40 miles east of Edwards Air Force Base, which is where the Edwards test is there in the high desert of California. And we even did some combat training, and we run into some Navy pilots and we get in a dogfight with them. So it was fun, but we knew that when we finished our training, we were headed to war. And that’s what happened. And we stopped in the Philippines to go through a week of jungle survival. And from there we went to Vietnam. And I’ll tell you, got there in July at the end of the first week of July to Vietnam. Of course, when we got to the Philippines, it was, yeah, 67. Okay. We got Philippines. It was hot and muggy, but when we got to Vietnam, it was just hot and muggy. And, it would be 100 degrees at 10:00 at night, you know, and muggy. So it was like any anybody who from this country, who goes to a country like that and steps out, it’s like, whoa, when you step off the airplane, it just hits you. It’s amazing. Now you get you kind of get used to it after a while, but it was hot.

[00:06:21] (HOST) What else made an impression on you?

[00:06:22] (LEE ELLIS) I was going I was going to Danang. I got there in the afternoon. They told me I would be sleeping in a, uh, we, they had some the pilots, we had air conditioned rooms. We were the only ones on base that had air conditioned rooms to sleep in because we were flying 24 hours a day. We had eight-hour shifts. And so you’d fly one week, you’d fly early evening, one week late evening and early morning. And the other one you’d go from like, 10:00 until 4:00 or 5:00 in the afternoon. So you’d fly daytime mainly. So we had air conditioned, but I went into a trailer. They had some four level, place buildings there to sleep in rooms, small rooms, but I temporarily they put me and another guy in, in a little trailer, and we were on one end. There are two guys on the other end of that trailer. So anyway, but no, that first night, we were in a big open barracks without air conditioner. That’s what the first couple of nights we didn’t get in a room yet. And at 12:25 that evening, the rockets started coming in, and every 2 or 3 months, the North Vietnamese people would sneak in and get close within 3 or 4 miles of the base and launch some rockets onto the base. And it blew up several airplanes that night. It killed 2 or 3 people. And when I heard that rocket go off, it. I’d just gone to bed about 12:00, because we’d been down to the bar and had a couple of drinks and learned what was happening there. When that rocket went off, my buddy and I, who was in, I was up top and he was in the bottom of that bunk bed. We climbed down and got under the beds there on the floor to protect ourselves. And I thought, man, if it’s going to be like this every day, this is going to be hell, you know? But it was. They would rocket us about every 2 or 3 months.

[00:08:18] (HOST) How soon did you start flying missions?

[00:08:21] (LEE ELLIS) A couple of days later.

[00:08:23] (HOST) A couple of days later. Wow.

[00:08:24] (LEE ELLIS) We had to go through some ground training and learn how the operation was going, what the procedures were, and all that, and then flew our first flight, and we would fly with someone who’s therefore has two seats in it, you know, two pilots. The Air Force had two pilots in theirs, and the Navy and Marine Corps had a pilot in the front seat and a radar intercept officer in the back seat, and the Air Force decided they could train more pilots, which it thought it would need for the war if they put pilots in the back seat. So those of us who had just graduated from undergraduate pilot training who had just got our wings and become pilots. We were in the back seat. So for about a year, we’re going to be in the back seat for about a year, and then they would upgrade us to the front. I would fly a lot of the times on those missions. I would fly probably 40% of the flight and the front seat would be looking out, and sometimes they would even carry binoculars and look down at the ground looking for targets in the ground, that sort of thing and, navigation and whatever. And I would fly a good bit and I made landings and sometimes did take off.

[00:09:32] (HOST) But how long did you how long did you continue doing that? Flying in the, in the back seat as a co-pilot.

[00:09:39] (LEE ELLIS) I got shot down and captured.

[00:09:41] (HOST) And how long was that?

[00:09:43] (LEE ELLIS) From July until November the 7th. August, September. October. November. For months, I have flown 53 missions over almost all my 53rd one when I was shot down and captured. And halfway through.

[00:09:59] (HOST) What do you remember about that mission? Do you remember where you where you were? What?

[00:10:03] (LEE ELLIS) Oh, I remember everything. You know, when you’re when you’re a P.O.W., you remember everything that’s ever happened? Yeah, that day, I was on with two ship, and we had bombs and rockets. Wingman had some rockets, but we were going up north to fly with over we’re patrolling the southern part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail as it came into toward the DMZ and then it turned west. It didn’t cross the DMZ because they couldn’t it would go over into Laos and then go south again and come in from the side angle of South Vietnam, where we didn’t have a DMZ. It was so long, hundreds of miles long, we didn’t have enough people to block them from coming in. So we would go up in the Route Package One, which was the southern part of North Vietnam, and patrol the Ho Chi Minh Trail and other trails that might be there, and look for trucks and bomb them or bomb out bridges. If they built a bridge, we’d bomb it out, and a few weeks later they might build it again. We’d bomb it out again. We’d also go after the antiaircraft artillery that was protecting those bridges. And they put in fords there or not fords but, a boat that would carry the trucks across, ferries. Yeah, they put in ferries there, and they would hide them in the daytime and bring them out at dark and use the ferries to take the trucks going south across the ferry. And so we were always looking for those kinds of things to bomb.

[00:11:38] (HOST) Mhm.

[00:11:39] (LEE ELLIS) So that day we were working with a forward air control or [unknown word] would find F-100s and they would go up and patrol the roads down at 400ft. They would go up and down the roads looking for trucks, and trucks would park in the trees sometimes too, and they would look for those, find them going into the trees and bring us into bomb. And so that day the FAC said, hey guys, I want you to bomb the anti-aircraft artillery that’s protecting the ferry boats here. They’re protecting where they cross. They’re not here right now, but they protect them and want you to bomb them and blow them up. So we were attacking those, and on there, we came down, dropped the bombs, and about 2 to 3 seconds later, our plane blew up and it was tumbling end over end. It would just normally an airplane gets hit, you know, it gets a 37, 57 millimeter hole in the wing or in the fuel tank, and your fuel starts to go out. It hits the engine. The engine kind of goes out, but you keep flying for 30 seconds to maybe time 30 minutes, you know, to fly back home and land and get back home. But this time our airplane just blew up into several big pieces. Fortunately, the cockpit stayed intact and we tumbled and I was in negative G’s. All of a sudden, and only about 5000ft. And I knew if I punched out with negative G’s, my head would hit that canopy top and might really, blow, break my neck. And so I held off for a second and all of a sudden it flipped and G’s went positive and I pulled that handle, ejected. It blew the canopy off. It blew me 50ft in the air, automatically blew me 50ft in the air, and then automatically the seat separator pushed me out of the seat. And when the seat separator pushes you out of the seat, it pulls the ripcord on your parachute so that it automatically opens your parachute. So I pulled the handle and 2.6 seconds later I’m looking up, checking my parachute over enemy territory. And all this shooting on the ground, shooting at our wingman, shooting at the missing Fac, maybe shooting at us. I can see the bullets going by, the tracers going by, and I can hear all this stuff, but I was well trained and all I’m thinking about is, how can I slip my parachute to that river right over there? Because we’re only a mile and a half from the ocean, and if I slip my parachute to that river, I can land in the river and maybe get out there and the Navy will pick me up. But those parachutes back then didn’t slip much, so I did my parachute landing fall. I hit all five points and did a perfect landing fall. And then I jumped in an old crater bomb crater there and disconnected my parachute, pulled out my radio emergency radio, and I said, you know, this is Buckshot Two. Bravo. I’m on the ground. I’m 200 meters north of the river, start shooting at 300. Strafe them. I’m headed south. Two years, seven years later, I was at a reunion. Two years after I came home, and the guy, my wingman, my flight leader, actually came over and said, hey, I heard your call. I’m sorry I couldn’t. I’m afraid I couldn’t shoot that good. I didn’t want to hit you. I said, you’re very wise. They captured me within 90seconds, so you couldn’t you couldn’t have got it done.

[00:15:08] (HOST) They captured you within 90 seconds.

[00:15:10] (LEE ELLIS) Yes. The militia was there and they just surrounded me. You know, these militia guys were trained. They farmed, but they were militia. And their primary job was to shoot at us or capture any pilots that came down. And they surrounded me. At first it was only three. I pulled out my 38 Smith and Wesson. I had two rounds of tracer and three rounds of ball, and I thought they had trained us in survival training. These guys are the least trained about handling captives, so I thought maybe I can scare them off. I pulled out and shot fired around a tracer over a couple of em’s head and I yelled, get out! I didn’t try to shoot him. I just fired a round a tracer over their head. They didn’t flinch. They raised their AK 47, and one of them pulled out a little card out of his pocket. It was a little folded card, and he looked down at it and he yelled. It had on one side, it had a drawing that showed a pilot with his helmet on, with his hands up. And on the other side it had phonetic and it said, he says, “hands up, hands up, surrender, no die, surrender no die.” And I thought, that’s probably good advice. I better do that, because by this time there’s about six of them with AK 47 there. So I put my hands up and they come in and captured me and took away all my stuff, my flight suit, my G suit, my G suit, my flight suit, my boots, everything stripped me down to my jockey shorts and searched me, you know? And then they gave me my flight suit back and I was very calm.

[00:16:57] (HOST) And you’re not injured at all?

[00:16:59] (LEE ELLIS) No. Well, I had a cut on my lip. I had a cut on the back of my head. I had 18 G’s going up to going up to the ejection seat. My head, the next two days, my head, I couldn’t raise my head much more than about that. But at that time, I felt no injury whatsoever.

[00:17:19] (HOST) Okay. Okay.

[00:17:20] (LEE ELLIS) But until that point, until I surrendered and they captured me, I was perfectly thinking about avoiding them and not being captured. Once they captured me, It was like, whoosh! Now it’s like, I don’t know what’s going to happen.

[00:17:41] (HOST) Mhm.

[00:17:41] (LEE ELLIS) You know, and I’m a person of strong faith. And when they didn’t kill me right away and they tied my hands and put a blindfold on me and put a rope around my neck and started leading me around like a dog. I could see underneath that blindfold, I could see down where my feet were and where I was walking. But I couldn’t really, because they were pulling me along and they took me on to a village over there. And, , it just, most of the time I was blindfolded and kind of being dragged around, and, it took me three days, four days, five days, six days, seven, about seven days to get to the holding point, which was en route to Hanoi. I was way south of Hanoi. Okay. And they had a kind of a holding pen up there near (unknown) and where they would bring in POWs, and it was a kind of like an old barn with little stalls in it. And they would put us in there and we’d be tied up and blindfolded. And I waited there for only two days. And then they had three other guys there. When I came in two days later, we headed for Hanoi. But during that time period, an amazing thing happened with my capture. And this didn’t happen to almost anybody I know. But the guy who was in charge of taking me north, who was a militia guy from this little village where I was, he was a good man, a person of great character and integrity. Now he worked for the communists because he didn’t have a choice. He had to take me and captive and take me north, so to go to Hanoi. But this guy protected me from all the villagers that would get all fired up by the Communist Party head in the village. He would get walking bullhorn. A bullhorn out, and he would yell and get them all fired up. All fired up about we gotta win this war. You know, keep shooting them down, capture them. Blah blah blah blah blah blah. And how wonderful we are and how hateful they are. And I can see all that. But the people would get so fired up, they would come in there and try to smash my head and do everything like that. This guy had his troops protect me and he would push them back. They would get their rifles, AK 47 and just push them back and throw me in a truck in the back of a truck and they’d drive off. And it was amazing. And the amazing thing is that a guy who lives nearby where I was captured, he was five years old when I was captured. He’s now a friend of the Misty FACs, and they introduced me to him because they knew I was shot down there where he lived. And I’ve done video, Facebook video calls with him, and he went back and interviewed the widow of the guy that was in charge of me, and he said, this guy had a great reputation. He became, you know, the kind of the militia guy of the area. And he had a great reputation for being a person of great character. And he died in 2015.

[00:20:49] (HOST) Mhm.

[00:20:50] (LEE ELLIS) So I says, well, I remember him, she was speaking Vietnamese but he was translating for me. He says yes, I remember him being there and she said it was he, he smiled some and he had eyebrows that went all the way across. And she remembered me.

[00:21:08] (HOST) That’s funny. So how long was the trip from the point of capture to Hanoi?

[00:21:14] (LEE ELLIS) It took from the day I was captured the 7th of November. I got to Hanoi on the 22nd of November.

[00:21:20] (HOST) And the whole time you’re moving?

[00:21:22] (LEE ELLIS) Actually, I spent because a typhoon came in and the roads were washed out and you didn’t want to travel because we only traveled at night. Because the bomb, you get bombed out if you traveled in the daytime. And by the way, I got bombed several times by American F-1, F-105s and F-4s, but there were always foxholes and bomb shelters we jump into, and they pushed me down in a foxhole. I’d watch these guys come in and drop bombs and get out of my foxhole. And there was these big old red hot pieces of shrapnel type stuff. There it was. It was a wild trip, but they took care of me and moved me up there. But then when that typhoon came in, he took me to his underground shelter. And I stayed three nights with his wife and daughter, two year old daughter, and his father in this underground shelter. And he had the guards outside.

[00:22:20] (HOST) Yeah.

[00:22:21] (LEE ELLIS) It was like an underground cave with a roof over it. And we slept in there.

[00:22:26] (HOST) That’s amazing. That’s real. It’s bordering on hospitality, almost.

[00:22:30] (LEE ELLIS) They were. They treated me like I was a guest. Now I was tied up. Yeah. And you know, to go to the bathroom, you had to go outside behind the behind the tree out there, but the guard would take me outside, but otherwise they would sit around and try to talk to me. And they told me someday I would go home.

[00:22:51] (HOST) Do you know where they’re taking you? Yeah.

[00:22:53] (LEE ELLIS) Oh, yeah. Well, we figured they’re going to take us to Hanoi. We stopped there at Bien which was kind of the halfway house where they had the part time prison to carry people from, and from there we went straight to Hanoi. Now we got from there the last day or two of travel up to Hanoi. We just it was easy driving because they traveled in the daytime and we were bombing the roads up there, much less, not much at all, so we could speed along and race into Hanoi. And they got to the Hanoi Hilton. And there it all started being locked up for years. I was put in a wash house, which is a small, probably seven feet by seven feet brick wash house. They had about six back-to-back, three back-to-back with three more in the center courtyard of the part of the Hanoi Hilton, which we call Little Vegas at that time. That was a part where the Americans were kept. And, in there I was handcuffed and leg irons and blindfolded. I got there about 11 or 12:00, and that was where I was until about 5:00. They came in and they had a pair of black pajamas and a pair of shorts and a black t-shirt, a striped shorts and striped shorts, striped t-shirt and a pair of rubber tire sandals. They were chopped up out of rubber and made into tire sandals like sandals. And the guy said, you know, pointed over to the water and had a pipe there and had a plug in it. You pull out the plug and the water would run out, and he gave me a little towel about that big and said, you know, bathe up. But I hadn’t bathed in two weeks. So I bathed up and it was November. So believe it or not, it was probably, you know, it was getting dark there about 630 or 7 maybe. But, it was probably in the low 60s, I’m guessing, and it felt pretty chilly. You know, when you’re pouring cold water on you in the low 60s. So I was a little bit cold, but I was glad to get in the shower and put on my pajamas. And, then they came back in and put me in handcuffs and took me and put me in blindfolded anymore. Took me to a interrogation cell room. Not a cell, but a room, small room. And in that cell, a room, there were two guys, three guys already sitting on little stools, and they were in handcuffs. And behind that table there was a table. There was one guy sitting like this. And a very nice dress uniform and two guys without a jacket, you know. Dress jacket on beside them, but just in a shirt and pants and they were the English speaking guys who were the kind of the people who were the door openers and take you out and in and out, shut the shuttle. People who would take you out to get your food twice a day. They were sitting on either side. And this guy, after I sat down, he looked around at the four of us. There’s three plus me one of them is the guy I was flying with when I was shot down.

[00:26:13] (HOST) Oh he’s there.

[00:26:14] (LEE ELLIS) Yeah. Now we rode the truck from Vietnam up to Hanoi, so I’d seen him okay. Bouncing along for three days, but we’re sitting there, and this English speaker he put his hands like this he leaned over and he said, “And now the fat is in the fire”. Oh, I almost broke out laughing. If I hadn’t been knowing I was in the Hanoi POW camp, I would have laughed in his face because it was so funny. And now the fat is in the fire. Well, this guy was always memorizing English idioms. And he would throw them out every time he could the fat’s in the fire. And I thought, well, you know, that was an old saying down south. That means something’s happening. You’re burning. Something’s going to happen. You know, you’re not, it’s not a good thing when the fat’s in the fire, buddy. So, anyway, we sat there and listened, and he told us you must obey all the camp regulations. All the camp regulations were posted. You can’t talk to any. You can’t talk loudly. You got to whisper in your room. You can’t talk loudly. You can’t talk to any other cell. You can’t make noises. You can’t ever escape. You’ll be, you know, whatever all this kind of stuff followed the camp rules. And they were posted on the back of the cell door. So we went to a cell. After a few minutes that was six and a half by seven feet. Now that’s about the size of a bathroom and a gas station in a small place out in the country, you know. But there were four of us in there for the next eight months, 24 hours a day. Except when you’re being interrogated or when we went out to. We go to the wash house mostly most days of the week, five days a week, and have about ten minutes to wash off and wash our clothes off and that sort of thing. And we got fed twice a day, about nine in the morning, about four in the afternoon, we were fed six months of thin, watery pumpkin soup with a piece of pig fat in it. Six three months of chopped up cabbage soup and three months of what we call sewer green soup. Sewer greens were like chopped up lily pads and chopped up lily pads, and they’d always have some pig fat in them. Or maybe some monkey or something ground up a little bit in there, you know, you didn’t know what was in there, but, there was almost no protein. But we were all we each want each meal, we would get a small bag out of bread. Now, bread is about that bread was about 10% protein. That’s where we got our protein. We all lost weight, but we survived. And then occasionally they would give you a side dish generally they’d give you a little side dish of stewed pumpkins, stewed cabbage, or stewed sour greens. And it might occasionally have one little scoop of pork or sausage or something like that on it. One little piece of meat about that size, but not most of the time. We didn’t get that, but occasionally. But the amazing thing was that after settling our bodies kind of settled into that we did pretty well.

[00:29:45] (HOST) And so it went for, what, five years?

[00:29:48] (LEE ELLIS) Yeah.

[00:29:52] (HOST) We’ll take a short break and then come back with the rest of my conversation with Lee Ellis. Stick around.

[00:32:02] (HOST) And now back to my conversation with Lee Ellis.

[00:32:04] (LEE ELLIS) Now after 1969, they because of what the wives back home did and we haven’t talked about that. But after 68 now, first POWs got there out of Alvarez. August 64th. And then the first ones came in. The second ones came in early January. February, March 65th. And a good many in the fall of 60, summer and fall of 65 and then 66 a good many more. And then by the summer of 67, the fall of 67, when I was captured, a lot of guys were shot down and captured because they had a lot of anti-aircraft artillery and surface to air missiles. They were shooting down a lot of us, so our odds of getting shot down were pretty high up there by 66 and 67.

[00:32:52] (HOST) So how many how many guys do you think are in there when you get there?

[00:32:56] (LEE ELLIS) There were by the time I got there, there were over, probably 240. So we had the bombing stopped in the summer of 68. I got there in November 67th. The bombing stopped up there in the summer, late summer of 68, and so we didn’t have any more for three and a half years to POWs in our system up there. And so we had about 360 guys that were POWs for 5 to 8 years. Then we didn’t have any again for three and a half years. And so there about 140 or 50 that were there from 12 to 14 months to two months, three months.

[00:33:44] (HOST) So you said once you got used to the new routine and the new diet, you know, you guys for the most part did okay physically. I assume you mean physically. What about otherwise?

[00:33:56] (LEE ELLIS) Well, we would have things physically, just about physically. There was a time when things would go through the camp, you know and everybody would get sick with the flu and for a week or so and you’d recover. And then one time everybody got the chickenpox or something and recovered. And the thing where you can’t see, I’ve forgotten as a kid, we all had that, that, but about half of my group had that when I didn’t have it. But, you just kind of work through it and survive. And the good thing was, if you were in a cell with 1 or 2 people, that was a whole lot better than being by yourself. And then later, after what the wives did back home in 69’ especially, they stopped the torture. And then we got a lot healthier emotionally, mentally healthier. We can talk about that. And after the Santee raid in November of 70’, we were moved back to Hanoi. Many of us were in other camps. We all went back to Hanoi to camps where the Vietnamese had been, and they moved them out, and they put us in big cells with probably 1800- 2000ft², with 40 to 60 guys. I was in a cell with about 53 guys for a year and a half.

[00:35:19] (HOST) One of one of the things that really struck me about your book, and, you know, I love these historical highlights that that show up in between in between chapters. I didn’t realize that, it just hadn’t occurred to me how spending that last year and a half in a group of 30 or 40 must have been therapeutic in a way that I mean, in terms of easing your transition back into the world later.

[00:35:48] (LEE ELLIS) It was incredibly healthy. We got so much healthier. That’s one of the reasons I was able to write this book, Captured by Love: Inspiring True Romance Stories from Vietnam POWs. Because the POWs came home very, very emotionally healthy. And we would have been a mess if we’d come home in 1969, when the torture was still going on. The summer of 69, people were tortured going on in every camp up there. They were actually torturing guys to sign a statement saying they had received good treatment because the wives back home and the Geneva Accords, which they had signed, Geneva Conventions, they had signed the North Vietnamese communists had signed, said that they would treat captured prisoners lenient and humanely. Well, they had torturing guys to sign statements. One page statements said that received lenient humane treatment. And of course we refused. And they tortured God to do that. Well, that’s what was happening, but because of what the wives did and Ho Chi Minh died, they stopped the torture. They were getting international pressure by now about their treatment of us. And they stopped the torture. And then the unknown raid of the fall of 70’. They put us. They got scared that they were going to raid other camps. And so they put us back to Hanoi in those big cells. And there, you know, you have to be authentic you can’t pretend when you’re in a room of 40 or 50 guys, everybody’s going to see who you are. And that we were all accepted. And so we became very united, very caring for each other. It was a fantastic community. We had classes, we got organized, our senior leader brought in a guy who had been a teacher at a community college and said, Tom Storey, you’re in charge of putting together an education program for this cell. Tom put together, he took a survey. He took a piece of brick, chalk, brick tile and was like chalk, you know, orange brick tile off the roof that had fallen off and took a piece of that and went back on the in the concrete slab floor around the outside and wrote a list of things. That evening we had a two minutes of silence every day, about 6 p.m. and announcements and he announced, guys, I have made a list of things that we can study in here, go by and just put a mark on. We’ll do a survey. He did the survey and then we started Monday, Wednesday, Friday classes Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday classes three hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon. And because I had had four quarters of French in Georgia and it was the worst French student had ever been there, I taught beginning French, but I took intermediate French from a guy who was pretty good at it. But I studied beginning German, beginning Spanish. My goal was to get fluent in Spanish and French and have a two thirds 2000 word vocabulary in German before I went home. Unfortunately, I was there long enough to do that. Yeah. And so.

[00:39:00] (HOST) We have a name for this school.

[00:39:03] (LEE ELLIS) No, we didn’t really have a name in our cell for that school, but we would go to class for eight weeks and everybody didn’t go, but most people did. They get in something. We had architecture. We had an architect in there, you know, with 40 guys, most of them had college degrees. Some of them had master’s degree. Okay. With that many people, you got a lot of people that are pretty knowledgeable in one area and so we have plenty of teachers. We had people that taught art. We had people that taught music. We had a great choir. And on Sundays we’d have church, and these old fighter pilots would get up and give a nice little sermon. And it was amazing what we did there, you know, and working out. We had guys that could, I was walking on my hands and I could walk across the back of the cell, which was maybe 30 or 40ft on my hands. But we had one guy who was a gymnast. He could walk all the way down and all the way back. The long length of it. A couple of times on his hands without getting down. So we were all doing these physical where we were getting more food now. In 1970, a little bit more food. So we were working out every day and doing push-ups and chin-ups. At another camp we had outside place where there was a beam across the top holding up the roof, and we could jump up and do chin-ups. And I started with three and a year and a half later, before we left, I could do 30 chin-ups and 15 pull-ups. So we had to get healthy and we did. Our PTSD rate is much lower than the combat veterans who fought for a year in the South, and we were there five, six, seven, eight years. And we went through torture. And for the first couple of years, some guys were in for five years of torture almost. So not every day, but it happened, you know, in their camp and to them several times. So we were just getting healthy to come home. And that made all the difference in the world.

[00:41:16] (HOST) Are you guys getting are you guys getting…

[00:41:18] (LEE ELLIS) Day by day, we were working at getting healthier day by day.

[00:41:23] (HOST) Are you receiving mail or news from home at all? Is there any correspondence?

[00:41:27] (LEE ELLIS) A few guys, they let a few guys write home because they had a reason to do that. They could say that, but most of us didn’t until I’d been there two years. December of 1969. I got to write a six-line letter home, and my parents got it. A few months later. They would save it back and then mail it, and I got my first six-line letter or little note letter and the summer of 1970. I’d been there two and a half years, so I would get 2 or 3, 2 or 3 letters a year, and I would get the right 3 or 4 letters a year. So that’s what it was like. So the only thing we learned from each other was that we’re doing okay. Otherwise, there wasn’t any real message in there.

[00:42:18] (HOST) But now you’re single, some of the guys you’re imprisoned with are not single.

[00:42:27] (LEE ELLIS) Most of them were married.

[00:42:29] (HOST) They’re not getting news from home at all? They don’t have any idea what, you know, whether they’re much.

[00:42:35] (LEE ELLIS) Not much. Not much.

[00:42:36] (HOST) So they don’t know what. They don’t know what’s waiting for them when they get out?

[00:42:39] (LEE ELLIS) Well, a couple of them, I’d say about of the married guys, probably 40 to 45, 50% of them were divorced. When they came home, their wives said, I’m out of here. And some of them went to Mexico, but that was the national average, about the same as the national average when we came home in 1973.

[00:42:59] (HOST) I’m sorry, what was the Mexico reference that some of them went to?

[00:43:03] (LEE ELLIS) Some of the wives went to Mexico, divorced and remarried. Got a Mexican divorce so they could legally say they were divorced.

[00:43:11] (HOST) Wow.

[00:43:12] (LEE ELLIS) Yeah. So. But, you know, think about it. Some of these guys were gone 6 or 7 years, and maybe their marriages weren’t that great when they left. And some of the wives just got tired of being alone. They were raising kids.

[00:43:27] (HOST) Well, some of them might not have known even whether the man was alive or not.

[00:43:31] (LEE ELLIS) Some of them did not know for 3, 4 or 5 years that their husband was still alive, and some didn’t know for sure even until they came home. They kind of knew they were, because the peacekeeper, the peacemakers that went over there, the peace folks that went over some of the Hollywood stars and famous people that went over. They were told about some of the people that were alive and the husband, they actually saw some of the people. And the guy said, tell my wife I’m alive. And they actually did that when they came back home. So that’s when some of the wives, but they weren’t sure that that was true. And so they waited till they got a letter. And we have stories like that. We have Wes Shearman, his wife Faye did not know for sure from our government until four and a half years after he was shot down.

[00:44:27] (HOST) So what did they tell her? That he was missing? Did they tell her he was missing and presumed dead? Did they tell her?

[00:44:33] (LEE ELLIS) Missing in action?

[00:44:35] (HOST) That’s it. That’s all we know.

[00:44:36] (LEE ELLIS) They were missing in action. Unless they knew they were a POW, or they knew they were killed in action.

[00:44:43] (HOST) Mmhm.

[00:44:44] (LEE ELLIS) Otherwise they were missing in action. And so, I was MIA even though I’d made a radio call in the government told my parents that I was alive on the ground. I made a radio call. They told her exactly what I’d said and that they had no more information about me, but I was probably alive. But I don’t know exactly when they found out for sure that I was alive, but they did when two and a half years later when they got that letter. But I think they probably knew it from the government before then.

[00:45:20] (HOST) So by the time you were released and you return home, a lot of the stuff that you would have to go through mentally and emotionally in terms of transitioning, you’ve already done.

[00:45:30] (LEE ELLIS) Yeah, exactly. We’re just like, okay, what? Let’s go. Let’s look around and discover what’s happening here.

[00:45:37] (HOST) Well, one of the things I really like about the book is just the variety, the different kinds of stories. Right? Guys who were married when they were captured, who came home, and, you know, the marriage worked. Guys who were married when they were captured, they came home, and that marriage didn’t work, but the next one did. Guys like you who were single when they were captured, and they came. I mean, you guys, you know, I think the point of the book is that you came home kind of ready for healthy relationships, like mentally and emotionally. You guys were stable enough and healed enough and had enough perspective that you could make a relationship work, even if it wasn’t the one that you were in when you left. But what surprises me is how many different flavors of that you managed to capture.

[00:46:29] (LEE ELLIS) Yeah. And, you know, it just kind of worked out that way. But at our reunions, I’d written several books. I’d written two leadership books based on leadership lessons from the Hanoi Hilton. Because I’ve been I’ve had a leadership consulting company for 27 years. And so each one of those chapters has, here’s a story from the Hilton about the leadership lesson and how it applied from the POW camp, and then transition here’s how it’s being applied in today’s workplace and then some coaching at the back of the chapter. But I kept hearing all these stories at our reunions about the couples, and I’d heard about the wives and hadn’t met some of them until we had our reunions. And I got to know them, and I saw how outstanding their marriages were and how their families were so healthy and all. And I said, you know, Hollywood couldn’t write a script this crazy. Nobody would believe Hollywood writing a script this crazy. Somebody needs to write a book about this. And finally I said, I guess I better do it. So, a friend of mine who was a speaker and author also said, you know, you need to bring in a guy who’s a romance writer, Greg Gaudet. He’s written a book, 1001 Ways to Be Romantic. It’s a best seller, and you need to bring him in to help you with this book. And I said, that’s a great idea, so I did.

[00:47:52] (HOST) Yeah, that’s a little different than a romance writer. He bills himself on your cover as a, as a love expert, so he’s more of a more of a therapist, really.

[00:48:00] (LEE ELLIS) Right. Yeah. Yeah, it really is. And so we together we were able to interview these people and then he would kind of help me put that together. He would take it over and kind of draft it and I would get the history, the historical part right in it. And he would work on getting the romance right and work with these couples to get the love lessons. And so each story has love lessons. At the end of each chapter, there’s 2 or 3 love lessons. And then I summarize them all at the back. And I worked on the historical highlights. There’s a one page or two-page historical highlight between each chapter, and half of those are from what was happening in the P.O.W. camp, and half of them are what was happening back home with the wives and widows. Some of them were widows. They didn’t know they were going to be a widow.

[00:48:49] (HOST) Right.

[00:48:49] (LEE ELLIS) Two stories of ladies who were widows, who came home when their husbands didn’t come home. They actually met a fighter pilot. One was divorced. His wife said, I’m out of here. She married a widow. And another one was a guy who came home and his wife had passed away while he was a POW. She had a terminal illness and they were best friends. Her husband and him were best friends and his wife and her, this widow were best friends. And he went to see her and a couple of months later he proposed and a few months later they got married. And they were married until both of them passed away in their 80s, but they were married for over 40 years. So, you know, we had it was amazing how incredibly strong those people who were divorced when they came home by their wives, met somebody within a few months that was a perfect companion and had the same values and they’ve been married for 48, 49 or 50 years. The single guys, I dated a lot of girls for a year when I came home until I met the one. And that’s the title of my story. I knew that I’d met the one, and right away and she knew that I was the one. And so we just dated and it was pretty obvious. We told our families, hey, I think I met the one. This is the one. And so I went and met her family. She went and met my family. And we got married pretty quickly. And we’ll be married, we met 50 years ago this summer and we got married 50 years ago next December, so we just had our 49th anniversary.

[00:50:38] (HOST) How about that?

[00:50:39] (LEE ELLIS) Amazing.

[00:50:39] (HOST) Congratulations, man. So, as you said there, you know, you tell you tell the 20 or so of these stories, all different flavors of coming home from that POW experience and then making a relationship last for decades. Right. And then after each one, you know, you’ve teased out what you think are the lessons for us all to learn from that example, when you when you look at the kind of all those lessons all up in summary, are there any that surprised you?

[00:51:20] (LEE ELLIS) You know what surprised me is what made those lessons, those marriages work were the same things that are important in a lot of places. There’s just more important there, like respect, trust, commitment, companionship. Those things are so important, romance is really important and when you’re dating and you’re first married, but within two years that all settles out. You have to work at it and keep romancing going, you know, over the long years. But what sells out is your respect for each other, your value for each other, your commitment to each other and your companionship. And those things are important at work. Commitment, values, trust. Those things are important everywhere in relationships. And so that was what surprised me is, yes, romance gets you started and you need to keep it going. You need to work at it, keep it going, and be thoughtful about how to be romantic. But ultimately, to keep people in a marriage long term, they have to share this closeness that can only happen when you really respect this person and you have the same values and you enjoy their companionship, you know. And so those are the key things that make a good marriage. But I think that commitment thing is so important too. We were committed in the POW camp to our country. We suffered torture to keep up, to live by the six articles of the Code of Conduct, which says, basically, I’ll resist the enemy. I will not help them, propaganda, make propaganda and all that stuff. I’ll be faithful to my country. I’ll be faithful to my teammates. If you’re senior, you’ll take command. If you’re not, you’ll obey the orders of the commander over you. That’s what those six articles are. And our commitment was so strong that we would take torture almost to dying. They wouldn’t let you die to keep up with that. So return with honor was our goal. And honor is important everywhere, especially in marriages.

[00:53:43] (HOST) Is there a story, aside from your own in this book, that that sort of comes to the top of your mind more, more often than the others?

[00:53:56] (LEE ELLIS) You know, they’re all so unique, but I share let me share a couple of them that are very different right quick.

[00:54:03] (HOST) Okay.

[00:54:03] (LEE ELLIS) One gal was married to this wonderful fighter pilot, Naval Academy graduate, and on his second tour in Vietnam, he went down and didn’t come home. She raised two kids. Strong faith, strong person. She got involved in the National League of POW/MIA family. She went to Paris to help confront the Paris the communists from North Vietnam at the Paris Peace Talks. She was so strong in all that. And her husband did not come home. He was declared KIA- killed in action. When we came home, he didn’t come home. And she was so discouraged. And so she was there, living in the town near the navy base. And so one Sunday, she gets a call from a guy who sounded kind of simple and quiet, and he said and she almost didn’t answer the phone, but she answered the phone and he said, are you Dora Bell? And she said, yeah, Eudora the first name. But she said, yes. He says, well, I’m, Jim Bell. I was a friend of your husband. We were both RA-5 vigilante pilots, and I was a POW for seven and a half years. I went down after he did. But I was your friend, and I knew him pretty well. And we’ve met before, and we’re having a party a little with my old friends over here at the officer’s club we’re having lunch. Would you come join us? And she said, yeah. And they started dating and just spending time together. But when he came home, his wife had divorced him and he was so sad. And when we came home, her husband didn’t come home. And they started connecting because they were both so sad about their loss in their loved one. And a few months later, they were married. And they were married for over 40 years. And it was just an incredible story. They were both of her husbands were Naval Academy graduates by the way, and they’d known each other. Another story was a guy who’s a single guy, and he thought about, strong Christian guy. He thought about the gal he was going to meet and marry. He was going to come home and date for a year and not marry anybody for a year, because he did. He needs some dating time because he was 24 or 25 when he got captured. He came home and there was a widow in Montgomery, Alabama, who was Jewish and married to a fine Jewish doctor, died. She had two kids. Her friend’s husband was a POW/MIA and then POW. And so she wore a bracelet. She helped sell bracelets and everything. So when her friend’s husband came home to Montgomery, she went over and was up on the tower on a high place, watching these single guys and married guys come off the airplane. When they first got home, and she saw her friend run out and hug her husband, and then this single guy got off and said, I’m so thankful to all of you all. I’m so glad to be home. Appreciate what you’ve done and now I’m ready to meet some nice girls. She heard him say that. Well, the next week her friend said, hey, there’s this guy who’s single here you ought to meet. He’s a friend of my husband’s. You ought to meet him. And so she arranged a date with him. Well, three weeks later, we all went to the nation, to the White House. President Nixon invited all the POWs to bring one guest and come to the White House for the largest banquet ever held at the White House. We went up there on May the 24th, 1973. He proposed to her in the Blue Room at 2:00 in the morning. They have one of the greatest marriages I’ve ever seen.

[00:58:13] (HOST) Still going?

[00:58:14] (LEE ELLIS) Still going. He’s 83, 84 and she’s 81 or 2. And they’ve just had a wonderful family. Close friends. He became a doctor. He went to medical school, became a flight surgeon for the Air Force after we came home, brilliant guy. He became requalified in pilots. Was a Top Gun in the A-10 airplane in his squadron. Also at the same time, he was a flight surgeon.

[00:58:49] (HOST) Yeah.

[00:58:50] (LEE ELLIS) Amazing guy. He was a head flight surgeon for Combat Air Command when he retired. So just amazing stories and they’ve had a wonderful family. He was Christian, she was Jewish and they’ve just had their faith overlaps and they’ve just made it work in a wonderful way.

[00:59:08] (HOST) So neither of them converted?

[00:59:11] (LEE ELLIS) No. But when I go to their house, we always have a blessing before we eat. So.

[00:59:15] (HOST) Yeah.

[00:59:16] (LEE ELLIS) Oh, it’s just they just have, you know, God is love and love conquers all.

[00:59:26] (HOST) Mhm.

[00:59:26] (HOST) So we’re going to publish this episode next week on Valentine’s Day.

[00:59:31] (LEE ELLIS) Oh, wonderful. Yeah.

[00:59:32] (HOST) Is there any is there anything, I mean, no pressure, but if there’s anything you’d like to say on, uh, just in terms of connecting this book with, you know, Valentine’s Day and just bearing in mind that, you know, most of our listeners are either Vietnam veterans or people who love Vietnam veterans.

[00:59:52] (LEE ELLIS) You know, Valentine’s Day, you see, the symbol of the heart, and the heart is about the heart of individual. The heart is where we feel loved. Okay. And when you love somebody, when you really love them, you can be independent and interdependent. You don’t try to change them. You accept them for who they are. And you want to do things for them, to help them feel valued and important. Giving love. I coach leaders to give love. I don’t talk about love. I talk about connection. Help them feel valued by affirming them acknowledge their existence, appreciate them. Those kind of things. When you do that for another person, they’re going to feel valuable, important. They’re going to feel loved. So just smiling and complimenting somebody can be very, very helpful. This Valentine’s Day, I want you to think about how you can make that other person feel special, not just a box of candy that’s shaped like a heart, but how can you connect with their heart to make them feel special? Quit judging them. Quit complaining on them about this or that and the other. Just let them be different. Hold them accountable for their values and doing the right thing. But otherwise just let them know you appreciate them and look for ways. Look for ways that you can make them feel valuable and important, and their heart will be connected with every time you do that 365 days a year. Happy Valentine’s.

[01:01:42] (HOST) You can learn more about Captured by Love by visiting powromance.com for more information about the military wives, he mentioned the ones who fought to make No Man Left Behind a promise that America could keep, check out episode 52 of this podcast. If you like the work we’re doing here, there are a couple of easy things you can do to help us out. The easiest is just to tell a friend or two who might like it as well. Only slightly more effort is to go to wherever you get your podcasts, Spotify or Apple Podcasts or whatever, and leave us a rating or a review. That little action orders the robots to help more people find us. We’ll be back in two weeks with more stories of service, sacrifice, and healing. See you then.

Full Interview with Lee Ellis

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