Christmas at Hanoi Hilton : Unforgettable Memories of Long-Ago Holidays Away From Home and Country

Dave Rehmann was only 24 on his first Christmas at the “Hanoi Hilton” when guards took him from solitary confinement to a room with a Christmas tree and a Nativity display. “I kind of stood there. . . . I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. So (the guard) motioned me over to this Nativity scene and made me kneel down. He kind of pushed me down, like I was supposed to pray or something.

“I knelt there for a while and I thought, well, I wonder if this is long enough. Then I got up and I stood there and they seemed to be satisfied and they took me back to my room. “And I said, well, OK, so much for Christmas.”

The year was 1966. Rehmann would spend six more Christmases as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam before he finally boarded the plane to freedom and his family in Garden Grove. Coming home with him were men like David Hoffman of Huntington Beach and Dave Luna, who grew up in the city of Orange.

All three were pilots and all spent Christmas of 1972 at the “Hanoi Hilton,” the North Vietnamese prison formally known as Hoa Lo. Months later, as the United States withdrew its ground forces from Vietnam, they and more than 600 POWs who survived the camps returned home.

As they got ready for this year’s holiday, the three remembered what it was like to be a prisoner, half a world away from America, deprived of family and freedom. And they remembered how those were exactly the kind of thoughts they banished when they were behind bars.

“You were hardened to the fact that you were not going to be with your family,” said Luna, whose parents still live in Orange and who graduated from Orange High School.

“On the human side, you can’t help think about” Christmas at home. “But we couldn’t afford to think about it too much because there wasn’t anything we could do. . . . It was obvious . . . this was not to be a Christmas like Christmases past.”

Nor do the men talk nowadays about those ghosts of Christmas past. They will discuss it if they are asked, but with varying degrees of detail and in calm, just-the-facts-ma’am tones.

Even on his first Christmas free in seven years--December of 1973 back home in Orange--Luna says he didn’t spend a lot of time thinking how different that holiday was from the one the year before.

“I at least tried to block it all out from my mind,” he says. “If you’re standing there listening to Christmas carols, you don’t want to think how bad it was; you want to think how nice it is. “

Rehmann, an unsuccessful Republican candidate for Congress from Orange County the year after he returned from the war, said he generally thinks of his POW experiences only when asked.

“I’m not real emotional about getting the blues on holidays or anything like that,” he says with a smile. Christmas in Hanoi was by and large just another day. But what of subsequent Christmases? Last year, for instance?

He searches his memory, and finally retrieves what he thinks it was like last year. “I think I went over to my mom’s for dinner,” he says.

Rehmann, now a San Diego businessman, does have his attachments, though. He still has the 1973 Corvette given him by the people in Lancaster, where he grew up. The car’s license plate reads, POW FREE.

And he does remember a Christmas in captivity besides his first one as a POW, even if he’s hazy on the year, “probably in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s.”

On that memorable Christmas, “they brought us in and they sat us down and they had some peanuts in a dish. There might have been even some mints, I can’t really recall. But they had one thing that was interesting, and that was like an orange liqueur. . . . And they sat down and they wished us a happy holiday or whatever it was, Merry Christmas, and they gave us this little drink. . . . “

Dave Luna was shot down in March of 1967 and spent month after month after month telling the North Vietnamese that he was an unmarried orphan. Actually, he had a wife and two children in Utah and parents in Orange. Still, he figured it would be easier on himself and his family if his jailers didn’t know whom he had left behind--just one less set of psychological buttons for his captors to push.

But after two Christmases that were just another day in prison, 1969 was different.

Prison conditions had improved that year, Luna said, a phenomenon he thinks was probably due to halts in the U.S. bombing. Yet prisoners kept trying to escape, and Luna was back in isolation as November of 1969 rolled around because he had been part of an unsuccessful escape try.

Just before Christmas, Luna was taken to a room to be questioned by an army major.

“He said, ‘Luna, I have a message for you for Christmas, from your father.’ I told him, ‘No, you’re mistaken. My father’s dead and I’m an orphan.’ He throws me a letter from my dad. I look at it, I throw it at him and I say, ‘It’s not mine.’ ”

Luna had been a POW nearly three years.

“That was the first time I had any contact with anyone from back home.”

Now newly retired from the Air Force after reaching the rank of colonel and living just outside Washington, Luna said that later Christmases as a POW were memorable largely because there was no harassment.

He remembers occasional Christmas carols over the camp loudspeakers, some of them sung by fellow POWs and some of them recordings by Perry Como.

Luna remembers 1972 as “one of my better Christmases” because the POWs knew freedom was near.

Yet the U.S. “Christmas bombing” of Hanoi that year, an event burned into Hoffman’s memory, was not recalled by Luna at all. “Maybe I just blocked it out,” he said a few weeks ago, after putting up a 14-foot tree in his Maryland home.

“Christmas of ’72 was one to be remembered. We were told then that our main responsibility, as (the North Vietnamese) put it, was . . . to get healthy so we could go home to be with our loved ones.

“So they started giving us some darned good food: pieces of chicken, boiled soup.”

One year later, after his release, Luna was stationed in Texas but took leave to be with his parents in Orange for the holidays. Texas entrepreneur H. Ross Perot offered to help him get home, and then, after finding out that wasn’t necessary, said he would like to send a gift, Luna remembered.

“I got home, said, ‘Hi, see you when I get back,’ and went running around on all different errands. Everyone did what they could to keep me (at home)” or get him there. On Christmas Eve, he found out why.

Perot “sent a bunch of Christmas carolers over to my parents’ home, and they sang Christmas carols for over an hour. It was outstanding. . . . The carolers took up the front lawn. It was a surprise to end all surprises. And a very pleasant one.”

Like Rehmann, David Hoffman was a Navy flier. Like Rehmann, he was shot down while flying an F-4 fighter jet off the aircraft carrier Coral Sea. But when he was shot down just after Christmas in 1971, on his wedding anniversary (“I joke that I was shot down twice on the same date”), he was 30 years old, had been in the Navy 10 years and was on the fast track that would eventually take him to the rank of captain and one of the Navy’s top commands, skippering the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk.

He remembers Christmas of 1972 well, especially the bombs and the food.

The B-52 bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong occurred after peace talks between the North Vietnamese and Americans broke down in Paris. They were praised and condemned across the United States, mirroring the way the war divided the country. But to Hoffman, the bombs meant he would be going home soon.

“I can remember when the first heavy bombing raid started (just before Christmas),” Hoffman said. “The guards . . . were absolutely scared. There was just a universal feeling . . . that there was no question (among the American POWs) that the war was going to be over in a very short period of time because (the Vietnamese) all of a sudden realized that we had the capability to hit them where it hurt. Up to then it had just been nickel-and-dime stuff.”

Early in the first raid, an American F-111 fighter screamed over Hanoi from the west, “literally . . . at tree-top level,” Hoffman said. “It was so low it shook the building. And (the Vietnamese) didn’t know it was coming.” As a result, the air raid sirens had not wailed and the lights of the city had not been doused.

“For the next hour, all hell broke loose. I mean there were just bombs all over the place, missiles flying all over the sky. It was just an amazing, amazing sight.”

Hoffman’s other Christmas memory is the food.

On Christmas, “they would feed us a decent meal,” said Hoffman, who now lives in Huntington Beach. “And by that I mean, usually a piece of roast chicken or roast goose or something like that, a salad, and some candy and maybe a few extra cigarettes, that sort of thing.

“Christmas and Easter, and their holiday of Tet (the lunar new year). Those were the days that they fed us a decent meal.

“And they also brought a priest in on Christmas Eve to do a Mass. And you have to remember, I was shot down late enough (in the war) that I had seen some of the films of some of the propaganda stuff. And we were very leery of, ‘Are they at it again?’ But there was no hint of that.”

Hoffman wasn’t Catholic, but he went to the Mass anyway.

“It was a matter of that’s what Christmas was all about to me. You celebrated the birth of Christ and going to church was part of it.”

There is a certain symmetry about Hoffman’s holidays from the early 1970s. Christmas of 1971 saw him flying F-4 aircraft off the carrier Coral Sea. Christmas of 1972 found him in Hanoi as a POW. Christmas of 1973 found him home in San Diego.

Hoffman says his time behind bars had been especially hard on his son, who was almost 5 when Hoffman returned home.

“Kids are cruel. Kids in the neighborhood would say, ‘Your daddy’s in jail.’ They didn’t know. He used to come home in tears, I understand. ‘What did Daddy do? Why is Daddy being punished?’ It was hard for him.”

He remembers “just an awfully good feeling to be back for Christmas with the family. The whole family was there as I recall. I remember taking my son out and getting him a puppy, a little Irish setter puppy. . . .

“We got it (from) the Humane Society. It had been mistreated, but it was the prettiest dog we’d seen. It just had these big, brown, sad eyes, and it looked up at you. We took that puppy home, and I remember how much fun that Christmas was, because of the puppy and my son.”