The Remarkable Story Of An Unlikely War Hero

The Remarkable Story Of An Unlikely War Hero

By Marc Leepson

Here is an excerpt from Marc Leepson’s new book,TheUnlikelyWarHero:

A Vietnam War POW’s Story of Courage and Resilience in the Hanoi Hilton, the story of Navy Seaman Apprentice Doug Hegdahl, the youngest and lowest-ranking American captured in North Vietnam during the Vietnam War—and his incredible POW story.

At great personal risk, the 21-year-old memorized the names of 254 fellow prisoners and, after coming home in August 1969, shocked his debriefers by rattling off the names of the men, their ranks, and services. Hanoi had admitted holding only a few dozen, although the U.S. had reliable intelligence on scores of others. With Hegdahl’s names, 63 missing servicemen were reclassified from Missing in Action to Prisoners of War.

A little-known fact about the Vietnam War: 271 U.S. Navy sailors were lost at sea in the waters off the coast of Vietnam from 1965-73. A good portion were thrown overboard during fires and explosions. Scores of others went over the side by accident, by malfeasance, or by their own desire to end it all.

Only one American sailor during the long war in Vietnam, however, went into the drink and wound up in a Prisoner of War camp in Hanoi: Seaman Apprentice Douglas Brent Hegdahl.

The incredible Vietnam War story of Doug Hegdahl, the youngest and lowest-ranking American POW captured in North Vietnam, began at around 4:30 a.m. on April 6, 1967. That’s when Hegdahl, 20, lay wide awake in his bunk below decks on the U.S.S. Canberra, a guided missile cruiser patrolling the coast of North Vietnam.

He was working a blue-collar job on the Canberra , a World War II-vintage guided missile cruiser patrolling the Gulf of Tonkin. As an ammunition handler, he was a tiny cog in the ship’s Deck Division, the guys who did the grunt work, including swabbing the decks, painting everything that didn’t move, scrubbing toilets in the heads, and humping ammo.

Zero dark thirty that morning. Doug Hegdahl struggled to get some sleep on his triple bunk mattress as the Canberra’s guns bombarded enemy positions more than a dozen miles away. He’d heard those guns blasting away at night when he’d humped the shells and powder kegs below decks. But he’d never seen them in action. And guys who had seen night firing told him it was an amazing sight.

So, Hegdahl decided to take a look for himself. He slowly rolled his six-foot, 225-pound body out of his cramped bunk, and made his way to the gun line to take in his first night bombardment. He walked closer and closer to the booming guns along the narrow, teak wood deck. There was not a sailor in sight. The guns began roaring as he headed toward one of the massive eight-inch gun mounts.

“And the next thing I remember I was in the water,” Hegdahl later said, “and I can’t tell you how I fell from my ship. All I know is, I walked up on the deck, it was dark and they were firing, and the next thing I recall I was in the water.”

Said water being the Gulf of Tonkin. Just the clothes on his back—no life preserver, no ID, no glasses. He screamed for help as loudly as he could. But it was pitch dark, the guns were roaring, and not a soul was on deck. After about four hours in the water, exhaustion set in. He knew he couldn’t stay afloat much longer.

Then Doug Hegdahl heard faint voices and an object closing in on him. He looked up and saw Vietnamese men on a primitive fishing boat. “It looked like a Viking ship coming through the swells,” Hegdahl later said. He managed to raise his arms. They saw him, hauled him in, brought him to the shore—and turned him over to the North Vietnamese Army.

“I didn’t think of myself as being captured,” Doug Hegdahl later said. “I thought of myself being rescued.” It was “probably the most embarrassing capture in the entire Vietnam War.”

Two days after being pulled out of the sea, Doug Hegdahl found himself in the infamous Hỏa L ò (“WHA-low”) POW camp, the one U.S. prisoners sarcastically referred to as the Hanoi Hilton. The youngest American prisoner captured in North Vietnam, and the lowest-ranking imprisoned American there, he would be held for more than two years.

But after Doug Hegdahl come home in 1969, the young South Dakotan wrote his way into the Vietnam War history books.

About Marc Leepson

Journalist, historian, and long-time Middleburg resident Marc Leepson has written eleven books. His latest, The Unlikely War Hero, the story of the youngest and lowest-ranking American captured in North Vietnam and held in the Hanoi Hilton during the Vietnam War, came out on December 17 (see excerpt) with a bang, selling out the first printing and becoming the No. 1 bestselling Vietnam War History book on Amazon.

A former staff writer for Congressional Quarterly in Washington, Marc has written eleven books, including Saving Monticello, Lafayette: Idealist General, What So Proudly We Hailed: Francis Scott Key, a Life, and Flag: An American Biography, and edited the Webster’s New World Dictionary of the Vietnam War. He also has written for many magazines and newspapers, including the Washington Post, New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal; and has contributed to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Encyclopedia Americana, and the Dictionary of Virginia Biography.

He is Senior Writer, Arts Editor and columnist for The VVA Veteran, the magazine published by Vietnam Veterans of America. From 2008-15 he taught U.S. history at Laurel Ridge Community College in Warrenton.

Marc graduated from George Washington University in 1967. He was then drafted into the Army and served for two years, including a year in the Vietnam War. After his honorable discharge, he went on to earn a Master’s Degree in history from GW in 1971.

He says that the biggest thing that’s happened to him and his wife Janna this century was the birth of his identical twin granddaughters, Daisy Simms and Nollie Alford, on May 14, 2024.