Unlikely War Hero
In April 1967, twenty-year-old Doug Hegdahl was knocked overboard from a U.S. Navy cruiser in the Gulf of Tonkin. Initially believed to be a special ops commando, he was turned over to North Vietnamese who beat him and then turned him over to the prison known as the Hanoi Hilton, where Hegdahl maintained a ruse of being a country bumpkin who couldn’t read or write. The North Vietnamese called him “The Incredibly Stupid One,” and guards paid no attention to Hegdahl as he proceeded to memorize information about more than 250 prisoners, which he memorized to the tune of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” Offered release in the summer of 1969, Hegdahl balked—the POW code stipulated that prisoners should be released in the order of capture—but was ordered to accept so that he could provide his information to the American military.
In a vividly written book based on archival research, personal interviews, and the author’s own experiences in the Vietnam War, Marc Leepson tells the story of this most unique of American military heroes. Most of the prisoners in the Hanoi Hilton were pilots or navigators—such as John McCain and James Stockdale—and Hegdahl was the only non-officer, the lowest-ranking person in the prison. He was never properly recognized or decorated for his extraordinary efforts after the war, and his story has never been told, except briefly in books like John McCain’s Faith of My Fathers. Hegdahl’s is a story of survival, not only his own, but that of the hundreds of American POWs he helped ensure.
Marc Leepson graduated from George Washington University with a history degree in 1967, served in the U.S. Army for the following two years, including a tour in Vietnam, and earned a master’s in history from George Washington. He was a staff writer for Congressional Quarterly for ten years before becoming a fulltime freelancer. His work has appeared in magazines such as Smithsonian, Military History, Civil War Times, American History, Vietnam, and World War II, and in newspapers such as the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. He has been senior writer, arts editor, and columnist for The VVA Veteran (the magazine of Vietnam Veterans of America) and has written reviews for Publishers Weekly and Kirkus. He has been interviewed on The Today Show, the History Channel, MSNBC, Fox News, NPR, and other TV and radio shows. His previous books are Ballad of the Green Beret: The Life and Wars of Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler from the Vietnam War and Pop Stardom to Murder and Unsolved, Violent Death; What So Proudly We Hailed: Francis Scott Key, a Life; Lafayette: Lessons in Leadership from the Idealist General; Desperate Engagement: How a Little-Known Civil War Battle Saved Washington, DC, and Changed American History; Flag: An American Biography; Saving Monticello: The Levy Family’s Epic Quest to Rescue the House That Jefferson Built. He lives in Middleburg, Virginia.