Free Operation Thunderhead by Kevin Dockery Page A

at the prisoner’s inability to eat with the simple utensils they used every day.
    When dusk came, the procedures that had been followed for the last few nights were changed. After Dramesi was given a red T-shirt and pants, his hands were once more tied behind his back. He would be carried once again, but this time not by stretcher bearers. Just outside of the village, Dramesi was unceremoniously dumped into the back of a small truck, where two guards joined him.
    To help break up the outline of the vehicle, plants were strapped to all sides of the exterior. The rolling bush joined a small convoy of other vehicles moving quickly along a fairly narrow jungle pathway. The drivers must have known their route well enough; they drove through the night without lights. Though Dramesi was concerned at the speed they moved in the darkness, his guards didn’t seem to care at all. In the preferred posture of soldiers all over the world, the guards slept as the truck convoy continued on.
    With the guards asleep, Dramesi managed to untie his hands without making any real noise. In spite of being able to make a hole in the camouflage plants surrounding his truck, Dramesi did not try to escape. He thought the truck was moving east, the direction he wanted to travel when he did escape. Moving in the vehicle was taking him where he wanted to go—or at least in the right direction.
    Arriving at another village just before dawn, Dramesi could see one of the reasons the United States was going to have problems moving the air war forward. It took some time to get the truck placed where the guards wanted it because the village was crowded with other vehicles. The vehicles were all trying to stay as close to the huts as possible while remaining under the cover of the jungle canopy. The village was off-limits to U.S. air strikes, the civilians acting as a greater defense than the heaviest antiaircraft guns. Taking further advantage of the situation, the North Vietnamese had ammunition stored everywhere: huts, trucks, even paths were stacked with ammunition crates and containers.
    Carried once more by his captors, Dramesi was taken to a small house in the middle of the village ammo dump and truck park. Creature comforts were more than limited; a foot-wide plank was his bed, and nothing else was offered to him until the next day.
    While consuming a small bowl of rice the next morning, Dramesi took the opportunity to survey his present environment. The house was sparsely furnished with a few pieces of furniture: a bed without a mattress, tables, some chairs. The walls were made of bamboo tied together with rope, which was also made from bamboo. There was a spot in one corner of the room, between the wall and the roof, where there was a hole large enough for Dramesi to crawl through. A small table underneath would make reaching it possible. What was outside the wall was unknown but Dramesi needed to know the layout of the village in order to plan some kind of escape attempt.
    As things turned out, getting outside of the building wasn’t a problem. Through one door was a roofed-over but otherwise open kitchen area. Nothing was around that looked like a latrine or bathroom, so he pantomimed his needs to the guards in rough sign language. A guard simply pointed to the open doorway leading outside.
    Keeping up the pretense of not being able to walk very well at all forced Dramesi to crawl out the doorway on his hands and knees. Crawling to where he could attend to nature’s call, Dramesi looked about but saw nothing notable. The villagers noticed him, though, especially when he was crawling back to the bamboo hut. Some old women who were carrying babies approached him; one of them thought it was funny to place her child on the back of the American “horse.” The baby didn’t think much of the situation and started to cry. All during the day, villagers came up to the bamboo walls of the hut to stare and poke at the American