Free Surviving Hell by Leo Thorsness

four.” He went on about my bad shoulders and knees. Then a question: “Do you have good insurance?”
    â€œYes I do,” I responded.
    He smiled: “If you stay in Seattle, I’ll make a million dollars off you.”
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    Military aviators have good dental care, and we all went to prison with good teeth. We came home with bad ones.
    Many of our dental problems were caused by the debris in the rice we were fed. No matter how painstakingly I inspected my rice, it was impossible to find all the grit and pebbles. Some POWs claimed the North Vietnamese added the little stones to the rice. We never knew for sure. But the problem was significant. When you hit a pebble chewing rice, a filling was often knocked loose, or a tooth chipped. You found a new part of your mouth to chew the rice; eventually a pebble discovered that part too. I learned to gum my rice to avoid the impact.
    Like most of the others, I developed cavities—mainly from fillings that came loose after biting a pebble in the rice. If the cavity was open to the nerve, touching it or breathing air over it often caused a “flash” pain. We had no material to craft temporary fillings. But after we were put into the large cells, we occasionally got bread instead of rice. It was filled with weevils, but not with pebbles. One of the first times we had bread, a piece stuck in one of my cavities. I started to try to pry it out, but then realized that the tooth nerve was less sensitive with the bread in. Several of us began using “bread fillings.”
    We had many discussions about our teeth. During ejection, capture, or torture, a lot of POWs had teeth knocked out or broken. In prison we were given a toothbrush and occasionally a small tube of toothpaste. The brush soon lost its bristles and the toothpaste, even used sparingly, did not last long. Without care, as time went
on, teeth with cavities or which had become loosened became worse. We wanted to keep our teeth no matter how bad they got, thinking that they could be saved when we got home. Some teeth, however, became so bad and painful that even we knew they were beyond salvation. None of us knew dentistry, and we could not get the Vietnamese to give us a pliers or some other tool to pull them. Most of us, however, knew that an abscessed tooth is an infection at the tooth’s root, or in the gum next to the infected tooth. If the abscess was in the gum, the swelling from the pus was obvious.
    The last couple of years, when we had been moved into the big cells, we were allowed to take a bath every other day, going to a concrete tank near the cell door and using a rubber bucket to pour water over ourselves. The water drained into a shallow gutter that ran by the tank, under the prison wall and into the Hanoi system. One day a POW spotted a tiny box just under the water in the gutter. When the guard was not looking, he snatched it up and managed to get it into the cell. It was a phenomenal find. Inside, neatly packed in grease, were more than 50 razor blades—the old-fashioned ones used in a safety razor. The toilet in these large cells was a “squat hole.” We devised a way to secure and hide the razor-blade box just out of sight of the hole underneath the cement squat slab.
    We had an instant and important use for the razor blades: to cut a slit in our gums so the pus could drain. It was a foul-tasting mess, but pure relief when the pressure was released.
    I had a unique and somewhat humorous dental experience a couple of months before we were released in early 1973. The nightly “Christmas Bombings” of Hanoi in 1972 by our B-52s had convinced the North Vietnamese to begin serious negotiations to end the war. They started trying to burnish their image as captors, both with the outside world and even with us. They announced one day that a dentist was coming to the camp. We were all a bit skeptical, but I had several bad cavities causing varying degrees