Behind the Wall: Bill Talley, An American Hero
By Mary Lynn Heath
Pilot William “Bill” Talley knew his plane was going down. He just wanted to get as far away from the North Vietnamese village below while he still could. And he wanted to get on the other side of the rocky
hills before he collided with them.
The scarlet sky was thick with exploding Surface to Air Missiles (SAMs) and antiaircraft fire. This was typical for missions around the Hanoi area of North Vietnam, but it still made Bill’s blood pressure rise and his heart rate speed. His 561st squadron, the Wild Weasels, would seek out the mobile SAM sites and destroy them. Major Bill Talley was flying a special-equipped, two-place F-105 jet fighter bomber. His Electronic Warfare Officer, affectionately called his Bear, navigated from the back. Their mission was to support a strike force of approximately 24 fighter bombers with targets throughout Hanoi.
Shortly after Bill flew into the Hanoi area, his F-105 jolted, the engine quit, and the instrument panel warning lights came on. The engine oil pressure dropped to zero.
“I didn’t think I was going to die,” Bill recalls. “I wasn’t even sure that I’d been hit. Two weeks before while flying a mission in North Vietnam at night, I experienced a similar engine failure. About 30 seconds before I was going to eject, the engine began running again at a low power setting.” That time Bill was able to make an emergency landing and later learned the engine bearing had failed causing oil to drain. “This felt a lot like that,” he says.
This time the engine did not recover, and he and his Bear were forced to eject. Though he never saw it, Bill assumed a MiG had hit his F-105 with a heat seeking missile.
In their parachutes the two descended to different sides of the hills. The plane exploded. Upon landing Bill smashed into a boulder deeply cutting his left knee. A tree claimed his parachute; it was not retrievable.
The two baby bottles of water he carried in his flight suit were destroyed and his knee was bloody, bruised and cracked. Stunned, but remembering his survival school training, Bill climbed the mountain in front of him with his leg throbbing. “You always want to be above the enemy, not in a valley,” Bill explains.
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A nearby jet fighter radioed him. After Bill gave a short count the pilot said, “We have a good fix on you.” Relieved, Bill thought there might be a rescue effort even though he was dangerously close to Hanoi. It was about 2:00 PM and there was plenty of daylight left for a rescue attempt. Bill found a large rock and squeezed under it for cover and to wait for the helicopter.
In the distance, the North Vietnamese made yodeling noises. By dark, Bill could hear their footsteps nearby. Thirsty, achy and tired, around midnight Bill fell asleep.
At daylight the next morning, Bill crawled out from under the rock and established radio contact with a jet plane. Then he crawled back to waited for his rescue. About two hours later he heard the dirt crunch under the Vietnamese sandals walking nearby. He decided to lay as still as possible. Maybe they’d just move on, he thought. The footsteps were very close now, and then he heard rifle shots. Bill grabbed his pistol. I’ll just go out John Wayne style, he said to himself. He realized that was not a good idea, because he had to really wiggle to get out from under the rock. Dismayed Bill raised his arms to surrender. He heard the sounds of the rescue planes flying directly overhead. Another almost, his rescue was too late. He couldn’t believe he was going to be captured…
“The first thing the Vietnamese did was to knock me on my back and tug at my flying 
suit and boots. Then they put a machete to my neck.” Bill did not think his captors knew what a zipper was, but they finally discovered how to remove his clothing and boots. Bill was left in his underwear. They tied his arms above the elbow behind his back with ropes and left excess for a lead. At six feet and two inches tall, attached to a Vietnamese with a rope, Bill says he felt like a big trained bear.
They all started hiking. “Bill the bear” was paraded through villages where crowds gathered to see the blue-eyed, giant American. The crowds spit on him kicked him, beat him with sticks, and yelled jeers that he didn’t understand.
Initially, Bill felt the pride of the U.S. was at stake, and he was not going to let these people outwalk him. After three days and only two capfuls of tea, three pieces of hail ice and one rice ball, he had had it. Weak and thirsty, Bill stumbled frequently. Alas, his knee wasn’t going to allow him to take another step. He fell on his face in the dirt. The Vietnamese put him on an oxen cart. They rolled about 30 minutes to a military truck where he was turned over to soldiers with AK automatic rifles.
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The truck drove through a large city and stopped by a vendor on the sidewalk for popsicles—Bill was not included. After dark, he could see the Big Dipper and the North Star. They were driving south. Bill thought perhaps the war had ended and they were headed to the DMZ for a POW exchange, which happened at the end of the Korean War. Positive thinking was Bill’s best defense, even when he was wrong…
The truck stopped at a camp, refueled and a woman wearing a white smock looked at Bill's knee. He was blindfolded and told the truck would deliver him to a hospital. They began driving north. Bill had no idea where he was because he was only about 30 miles west of Hanoi when he ejected and they had been driving for hours.
Just four days ago during Easter week 1972, Bill was stationed at McConnel Air Force Base in Wichita, Kansas. He had been to Korat AFB in Thailand twice, and flown 169 combat missions in the F-105 over North Vietnam and Laos. He had been selected for promotion to Lieutenant Colonel and verbally told of this new assignment near Hanoi, which he intended to be his last assignment in the Air Force. Then he planned to retire with 22 years of active duty. But now, after 182 total flight missions, Bill Talley was a Prisoner of War.
When he arrived at the prison, they gave Bill some water. He gulped it quickly and vomited. When he regurgitated, he made sure the liquid went back in the bucket. Not knowing when he would get water again, he drank the clear warm substance.
The interrogation room was small dark and dank. Instead of information, the cigarette-breath interrogator wanted Bill to write letters and make statements against the war. Mostly he wanted Bill to attend press conferences for propaganda purposes. The sessions became a daily routine. Bill was told that his oozing, black and red knee would not be treated unless he cooperated. They said his leg would most likely be amputated. After two weeks Bill was so spent that he really did not care. Then he was moved to the Heartbreak, also known as solitary confinement
Bill had been in the new cell a couple of weeks when he heard a hushed voice calling from another room. The voice told Bill to look out the grate above the door. When he did, he saw another POW who told Bill he was in the Hanoi Hilton and gave him additional information to supplement the Code of Conduct that was developed after the Korean War. According to the Code, the POWs were not to accept early releases, make anti-war statements or participate in press conferences. These were the tools the North Vietnamese used to persuade the United States Government and public that the POWs were being treated well.
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The NVA wanted the prisoners to plead to U.S. legislators to stop the war, and to tell the American citizens that the North Vietnamese were fighting a war of independence, just as the Americans had done against the British.
After two months alone in his cell of six and a half feet by six and a half feet, Bill was told he would be taken to a press conference that night. Bill said he would not cooperate. Then he was placed in leg irons. The room was a bit larger, still concrete and Bill was still in solitary. On the wall scratched with a red tile read: Conrad Troutman 1968. My, thought Bill, that was four yeas ago! As low as he had ever been, Bill wondered how long he would be in this awful place.
While in alone in his cell Bill had a ritual to keep track of time. He would move a rock around seven different places in his cell to determine the days of the week. He stayed mentally strong by working his mind. He played a game called matches that he learned at Oklahoma A&M. The object of the game was not to pick up the last of the six matches arranged in three rows. “I didn’t have matches but I had some twigs. I got pretty good, and may have been able to beat my fraternity brother by the time I got out.”
In his mind he would design his own house from the ground up, thinking of the rooms, what it would look like and what to put in it. He focused on his wife, Louan, and teenaged children, Mike and Susan. Each day Bill called on his faith in Christ to get him through. “They say there are no atheists in POW camp. They may have been atheists going in but not coming out,” Bill says.
Eventually, a Vietnamese doctor began giving him two shots in the arm daily and a powder on his knee. His black flesh started to fade.
When Bill was released from his solitary cell into the regular prison regime he was appointed “Chaplain” by the senior ranking officer in his room of about 12 POWs. Their group held worship services on Sunday mornings. Bill wrote the worship books on small scratchy “toilet paper” squares. The prisoners shared one pencil made of stolen mechanical pencil lead and bamboo, tied with threads from a blanket. “The guards would find the worship books and throw them away,” Bill says. “Then I would have to start all over.”
Bill’s wife, Louan, believed he was MIA. For two months that is all the information she was given. Louan was relieved when notified that her husband was still alive, but in angst knowing he was in a North Vietnamese prison, and probably going through torture and abuse.
Per the Geneva Convention, POWs were allowed to receive mail on a six line page once a month. Louan wrote once a month and Bill's parents did as well. All of the letters that his parents sent were returned to them and marked, DECEASED. Only one of Louan's letters was given to Bill.
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“They let me read one letter from my wife just before Christmas Day,” Bill recalls. “I got to read it and then they took it away.” Only then did Bill know where his wife and children were living. They moved to Louan's hometown in Kansas—something she said she would never do. “That was the last place I would have looked for her,” Bill says.
The week before Christmas Bill and a cellmate collected some of the khaki green socks that had recently been issued for the cold weather and began making a wreath. The month before, Bill’s 40th birthday passed. Time kept passing but inside the Hanoi Hilton it was strangely standing still. With concrete walls for a view, and cabbage soup twice daily, they had to recognize days to remember the outside, to give each other hope. One week before Christmas, a break in the mundane came while Bill was working on the wreath.
“It sounded like thunder in the distance that did not stop, and got closer and closer. Bombing we assumed. But I’d never heard anything like this. The explosions continued with only 30 minutes to an hour rests between them until Christmas Day. Then silence. Then on December 26th the bombing continued for another five days.”
The twelve days of thunder were from B-52 planes, which could carry as many as 100 bombs each. The initiative was all part of President Nixon’s plan to get the North Vietnamese to the treaty table, and end the war.
On January 28th the POWs were told to line up in formation at attention. “This was strange because the prison guards never wanted us to organize in any way,” Bill tells. "We formed up outside our rooms in a courtyard where they read the Peace Treaty to us.” Bill says that in the treaty it stated that all POWs would be released within 60 days. “The Vietnamese were always playing head games with us. But something about this time felt different. We maintained a military formation until after the guards left the courtyard then we all began to cheer,” Bill says.
After that, the prisoners were allowed to meet and congregate. Familiar faces began to turn up. Bill’s 200 pound normal weight had been reduced by 40 pounds. Others were much more emaciated. Bill conversed with a pilot named John McCain, who had been a prisoner for nearly six years. He had the utmost respect for John whose plane went down in a lake in Hanoi. John had two broken arms and a broken leg and nearly drowned because his parachute had landed on top of him in the water. When captured, John was also bayoneted by one of the NVA soldiers.
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The atmosphere was now celebratory, even in the face of the gruff guards. During that time a guard told Bill not to walk in a certain area. Bill got in the guard’s face and shouted, “You will not tell me where I can and cannot walk!”
In those last 60 days prisoners were shuffled from the various Hanoi prison camps. Bill found himself in a shabby, dirty, hut-style camp called the Zoo. This was the prison where two of his pilot friends, John Drameci and Ed Atterberry, had escaped one night in 1969, but were recaptured the next morning. Both Ed and John were subject to even more severe torture, as was the entire camp. The NVA were punishing Bill’s pilot friends and torturing the other prisoners to learn if there were more escape attempts planned.
“During one of these brutal torture sessions, Ed died,” Bill softly says. Ed is one of seven pilots Bill will always remember who didn’t come home from Vietnam.
The prisoners were to be released in the order in which they were captured. Bill’s group was next to the last. They were bused to the airport in downtown Hanoi. They formed in a line to report to a table where a representative of each branch of the military greeted them. Finally it was Bill’s turn; a kind Air Force Colonel matched the information in his file with Bill in the flesh. He was then escorted to a U.S. Air Force C-141.
“I drank so much chocolate milk on the plane I nearly made myself sick,” Bill says. The plane flew to Clark Air Base in the Philippines. There a large crowd had gathered welcoming all the POWs.
“An old Air Force buddy who I knew in France from ‘59 to ‘62 had made a sign for me that read: Welcome Home Bill! My buddies thought that was something.” At a nearby hospital doctors checked out each former prisoner and each visited the dentist to have teeth replaced and repaired. Bill was told he would need knee and foot surgery, but it could wait. They stayed in Clark for three days before starting back to the States. An escort officer was assigned to each POW to meet them every morning and take them to their medical appointments. One night the men were taken to the Base Exchange to shop for gifts to take home. The POWs were given a pay allowance, but the escort handled the money.
After the Philippines the freed POWs were flown to Hawaii. There Bill was reintroduced to another Air Force friend, who greeted him with macadamia nuts and chocolates. After refueling, the plane flew to an Air Force Base in San Antonio. The POWs were put on smaller planes to take them to the closest Air Force Base hospital near their families’ hometowns. Finally, Bill was headed to Wichita Falls, Texas to be reunited with his wife and children!
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“There was lots of fanfare,” Bill recalls. “Some members of my old squadron had flown in, and as I was walking out of the plane they jumped the rope to greet me. Then I saw Louan, my teenaged children and my parents. My son, Mike, was 16 and driving! That was something I wanted to teach him…”
Though he had missed a year of his life, Bill was ecstatic to hug his family—to be alive, to be an American and to be free! Today he walks with a slight limp and his arthritic knee especially bothers him when he and
his wife, of 54 years, go shopping! The couple lives in their far Northwest Oklahoma City retirement duplex. They are thrilled a replica of the Vietnam Memorial -- The Dignity Memorial®Vietnam Wall – is visiting Piedmont to honor those who gave their lives for freedom. Bill’s friend Edwin Lee Atterberry and six other very brave pilot comrades are listed on that wall, and on Bill’s heart, forever!