I spent the last couple of hours talking to a carrier pilot who went to Viet Nam two or more times on the USS Ranger (CV-61) when he stopped by the office this afternoon.

He gave a pretty interesting description of formation flying as well as other matters. When the USS Pueblo was taken, they had just left Japan and were headed back to Yankee Station. In the middle of the night, it came out that they were headed north, not south and headed toward North Korea. The weather was really bad so they had to jettison their ordinance going back to land on the carriers.

They were relieved after a few days (maybe by the Ticonderoga who had been at Yankee Station before going to North Korea for a couple of weeks and then heading back to Yankee Station).

One of the more interesting stories he told about was an incident that occurred on another ship while he was there. It involved a sailor named Doug Hegdahl.

The pilot I was talking to said that he met him when Hegdahl was giving a talk at an officer's club and was quite impressed with him.

Doug Hegdahl was a farmkid who ended up in the Navy and sent to Viet Nam. One night, he climbed up to get a better look at some shooting and ended up going in the water. The pilot said he thought that it was from the ship making an unexpected turn but Wikipedia says it was from the blast of a 5 inch gun. In any event, he wasn't supposed to be out there and nobody knew he was missing until the next morning.

Hegdahl was rescued by a North Korean fishing boat who took him to land and turned him over to the Viet Cong. They thought he was some kind of spy but he convinced them that he was too dumb to be a spy and didn't even know how to read and write. He was imprisoned at the infamous Hanoi Hilton where he was given a much better run of the place than the other inmates because he was considered to be so stupid. The North Vietnamese even tried to teach him to read but gave up.

Hegdahl met all the other inmates and created a little song to the tune of Old MacDonald had a Farm containing the names and capture details of the other inmates. The pilot said that you actually had to record his song and slow it down to understand the words. He was released early and had a treasure trove of information about who was at the Hanoi Hilton, how they were captured, and how they were being treated.

Here's a link to the Wikipedia article on Hegdahl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Hegdahl

It's a really interesting story.

Went through Navy SERE school in January 1992 and Hegdahl was on the staff. He played the camp psychologist. After we finished the training, he sat with us for a Q&A session. He still could rattle off all of the POW names from Vietnam.