Free Surviving Hell by Leo Thorsness Page A

of pain and accepted the offer.
    When the dentist arrived a few days later, three of us were taken to a familiar small building—the one used for interrogations. Inside was the dentist sitting at an old-fashioned dental drill. The
business end had a bit at the end of the handle. Between that and the pulley were the two lines that rotated the bit. From the pulley downward were lines that were attached to the foot pedal. My first memory of going to the dentist dates back to 1937 when I was five. Even then, the dentist in Westbrook, Minnesota, did not turn the drill with a foot pedal.
    I was directed to sit in the chair. My cavities were obvious to the dentist as he looked in my mouth. He stuck the drill in my mouth. The bit turned slowly—more like grinding than drilling. This went on for a couple of minutes; no anesthetics of course. In his most professional way, he held the bit up toward the light. Sure enough, there was some cavity debris on it. Wanting to keep things sanitary, he wiped the bit—several times—on his pant leg. Then back to drilling. He smoothed out two cavities and said, “Finished.”
    I asked, “Any fillings?”
    Rather indignantly he again said, “Finished.”
    Others had even better dental experiences. Swede Larson, who was shot down six days after I was, told this story:
    Two months after I arrived (July ’67), I got my first rice. I was not aware of the stones the guards put in the rice at that time. I crunched down big time and badly fractured a molar. The big piece did not come out until it rotted badly in ’69. In the fall of 1970, while living with Robby, the tooth really bothered me. The V [Vietnamese] cuffed and blindfolded me late one night, and took me to a hospital. A squat woman dentist in uniform sat me in a dentist chair and badly crushed my tooth with pliers while trying to extract it. She then grabbed an awl and tried for a long time to pry out the many pieces, while resting the shaft of the awl on top of my lip. Needless to say, she cut through my lip in several places while prying. Somewhere during the procedure, I passed out. My PJs were soaking wet and I was shaking like a leaf in late fall. As you would imagine, I did not get any anesthetic at any time. She never said a word to me the entire time. When I staggered out of the chair, she said to me in excellent English, “Your pain threshold is very low!”

CHAPTER 9
    WALKING HOME
    I n my nearly six years in prison, not a day went by when I didn’t think about and hope for freedom. I daydreamed about it, and I night-dreamed about it. I dreamed about it in the indistinct moments that separate sleep and waking. I dreamed about the physical sensation of freedom: how it felt on the body. I dreamed about how freedom might happen: by a daring rescue, by the military defeat of North Vietnam, by a POW exchange. These dreams sustained me for a time, but then, gradually, they stopped satisfying. I needed to do something. So one day I came up with a plan to walk to freedom.
    It was 1968 and I had been moved to a cell with two other POWs: Chuck Tyler and Don “Digger” O’Dell. Chuck was a fountain of sanguine sayings. He was from Globe, Arizona, and told great stories in his “Tennessee Ernie Ford” style. He kept Digger and me laughing. Digger was quieter than Chuck, but a strong POW. He was from Michigan and had been an avid hunter and fisherman. We shared a lot of fun hunting and fishing stories, though Digger’s were better than mine.
    Our cell was about 11 by 11 feet. We talked in a very low voice because if the guards heard any sound it meant a beating. There was no window, no communication with other POWs except by our tap code. So we only had each other. Depending on how we felt at any given moment, we did various exercises—sit-ups, push-ups. The North Vietnamese, for whatever reason, told us we could not exercise. We did it anyway, knowing that the