COURSE THAT TEACHES US TROOPS TO SURVIVE ‘WITH HONOR’
July 13, 2023Jenna Biter
SERE school
In 1965, the North Vietnamese Army captured four American pilots and detained them in a single cell at the Hoa Lo Prison in Hanoi. The Americans — Capt. Carlyle Harris, Lt. Phillip Butler, Lt. Robert Peel, and Lt. Cmdr. Robert Shumaker — knew they’d soon be split up, so they spent the next few days devising a tap code that would allow them to communicate with each other through walls.
The code, based on one Harris had learned from an Air Force instructor, was premised on an imagined five-by-five alphabet matrix, with the letter “A” in the top left corner and “Z” in the bottom right. The “speaker” would tap a letter’s row number, pause, then its column number. For example, “A” is one tap, pause, one tap; “B” is one tap, pause, two taps; and so on. The code omitted the letter “K” to keep the grid an even five-by-five square. Where a “K” was needed, “C” was used instead.
After Harris, Butler, Peel, and Shumaker were separated into different cells, they began teaching other POWs the tap code. Before long, most of the inmates had it memorized and were transmitting intel throughout the camp unbeknownst to their guards. As POWs were transferred out of Hanoi, the use of tap code spread, and because of it, so did useful information, so that in time a vast underground communications network was established, allowing inmates at different camps to not only coordinate resistance efforts, but also build a sense of camaraderie among them that strengthened their resolve to resist the demands of their captors.
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