Doug Hegdahl was a sailor aboard the USS Canberra off the coast of Vietnam in 1967 when the concussion from the ships large guns knocked the young sailor overboard. His fellow sailors didn’t notice that the 22 year old was missing until later. Meanwhile, Hegdahl managed to swim and float for a bit until some Vietnamese fishermen picked him up out of the sea.
Unfortunately for him, these fishermen were not sympathetic to the South Vietnamese, and they turned him over to some North Vietnamese soldiers. Thus, the sailor from a small town in South Dakota found himself in the notorious Hanoi Hilton, the POW camp. At his initial interrogation, his captors soon found that the young man, who looked much younger than he was, came across as something of a simpleton. He had a blank stare about him, and he was always humming a simple tune under his breath. Even when the North Vietnamese soldiers beat him up, he didn’t change his look or habits. Finally, they simply left the simpleton alone, figuring that he was useless to them for information or as a propaganda tool. Apparently, he couldn’t even read or write. They called him “The Incredibly Stupid One.”
As a result, and, rather unusually, Seaman Doug Hegdahl became somewhat of the camp “mascot” for both the captors and the fellow prisoners alike. For the Vietnamese, he was a cypher. For the other American prisoners, he was like a little brother they wanted to both protect and care for. One prison guard asked another American was the tune was that Hegdahl was that he was always humming. “Oh, that?” the POW answered, “it’s a children’s song called ‘Old MacDonald.'” He was seen as such a simpleton, such an idiot by the guards that he was allowed to wander the compound freely. They knew he wouldn’t try to escape or do anything, and, besides, he wasn’t hurting anybody. He would visit everyone around the camp and make everyone laugh, Americans and Vietnamese alike.
Now, during the war, the US and the communists often traded prisoners. Usually for the US, they wanted the officers to be swapped for North Vietnamese captives. After Hegdahl had been held for two years, he and two American officers were exchanged for prisoners held by the US. It was decided that such an innocent, such a simpleton, should not have to stay in the POW camp. It was even commented on that it was a surprise that someone so simple would have been accepted by the US Navy in the first place.
When he finally reached the US after his release, Doug Hegdahl promptly reported to his superiors. And, after they had debriefed him, he was reassigned. They immediately fly him to Europe to become one of the US representatives at the Paris Peace Talks so that he could talk to the negotiators there and confront the North Vietnamese delegation. You see, this sailor, all the time he was humming the tune to Old MacDonald, he was using the song as a way of memorizing names, places, and information. He walked out of the Hanoi Hilton having an encyclopedic recall of every one of the almost 300 US POWs who were in that facility–names, condition, messages to loved ones, etc.–and details of how each prisoner was treated.
No, Doug Hegdahl was no simpleton–far from it.
Instead, he was the consummate actor.
The Rest of the Story 