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March 28, 2022 - Doug Collins Podcast
01:06:42
5 years in the Hanoi Hilton: Lt Col Barry Bridger’s story of Hope
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By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
In this house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Folks, this is going to be a great discussion today.
I've met up with these folks at CPAC. A book's been written called The Spirit to Soar, and it's about the true story of a former orphan and POW Lieutenant Colonel Barry Bridger, U.S. Air Force, retired.
Colonel Bridger, I am also Lieutenant Colonel of the United States Air Force as well.
Finished, got 20 years in, so we'll see if I make it that way.
Then you got Jim Peterson.
Jim is with us and he is on that other blue, a little bit darker blue, the navy side, which actually I started in.
But I spent more of my time with the green guys down at Camp Pendleton when I was there as a chaplain.
But folks, guys, it's good to have you all with us.
This has been exciting.
I got to look over the book.
And let me just tell you, Jim, for writing it, but Barry, sir, for you and what you've been through, thank you both for service.
And I'm looking forward to some discussion here.
So am I. Let it rip.
Let it rip.
We are too.
I love it.
Well, let's start off, Jim, I'm going to start off with you on the writing of the book.
You write in the book about why you started it, but you chose it to be a biography, but also a life lesson.
Explain that a little bit.
Well, you know, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called The Outliers, and he talks about people who do extraordinary things.
So, started out, I've observed Barry.
I've known Barry over 30 years now.
And I've observed him and the things that he does.
I knew his story, but I didn't know it all that well.
And once I learned his story, I told him, one day I'm going to write your biography.
In that process, I opened up the book The discussion of his biography saying that Barry's been an inspiration in my life.
I've learned so much.
And so our publicist said, this is a life lesson book.
So we put in 17 life lessons that I've learned from Barry's life.
And he's had a tremendous impact on my life.
So I thought, And as we're finding as people read the book, that's really what has been very beneficial to them to sort of reflect on their lives as we go forward.
Well, it's been interesting to me.
Colonel Barry, this is something that really, I mean, starts off with your story.
I do have a question for you.
For those, and it'll come after this, but you, of course, as we've said before, a Vietnam fighter pilot, also POW, Hanoi Hilton.
I have a question, and you mentioned in here about John McCain, I saw later in the book.
Did you also know Sam Johnson?
I did indeed.
Now, I didn't know him up there, but I knew him when I came home.
I just, I take that back.
I lived with him in the same dang home room.
Yeah, I remember playing chess with him.
Yes.
I know he's a good man.
Sam, you talk about people who make a difference in your life.
Sam and Jim, I like the way you put that.
Sam was that for me when I was in Congress.
And the one thing I remember, and Barry, from what I've read in the book so far, and what we're going to get in this, is I watched Sam come to the floor in Congress, especially as he got older, and you could see the marks of what y'all went through.
Okay, you can see it in his hands.
You can see the bend in his hands.
You can see it.
But the one thing that he always walked on the floor of that house, no matter where he was, no matter how he felt, he always had a pleasant spirit about him.
And I see that in this book.
I see this in the writing.
Just in general, There's a conception about the POW and the treatments you had.
What made it that you could come out of that in a way, besides these life lessons, if you just sort of look at it, you, Sam Johnson, John McCain, there's many others of you that have survived and thrived.
What do you think made the difference?
What we value about life.
About living.
About being.
That's what made the difference.
I talk a lot about values because in the prison camps of North Vietnam, Sam and I were witnesses to the powerful and the pervasive impact that traditional American values had on my fellow POWs not only to engage but to survive.
The pressure cooker environment of the Hanoi Hilton.
I could not believe the quality of individuals that I was bumping into, tapping on walls, never seeing their face the whole time I was there, and realizing what incredible human beings I was blessed to go through this night of terror with.
It is amazing.
Sam, actually, I had a night, I got to spend a night with him and others and him just talking about some of his experience.
And he talked about developing that tap system.
And he talked about it in terms of, and this is something, Barry, I want for you to communicate to the, maybe to the younger podcast listener who's listening to this and they have only a memory of Vietnam.
It's something way in the past, unlike for others of us.
But Sam made a statement to me one time and he said that the tapping system That he and others came up with was so important because it connected each of you to each other in a way.
Explain that.
For those of us who pick up a phone or make calls, why is it that those tapping was so important?
Tapping and communicating was absolutely critical in order for us to survive as a group.
You couldn't survive by yourself.
You needed help.
And we had plenty of it because we had shared values.
I was a beneficiary Of that communication system.
And we worked very hard to amplify.
And we did eventually amplify.
Tom McNish, a buddy of mine, in fact, my roommate in Hanoi, came up with what he called the POW hand code.
If you took the deaf-mute code and tried to figure out to make letters with your hands so that you had big letters, for example, an A, we could hold up one finger, that's an A. You can see that with good eyes, and we had great eyes, up to about 100 yards away.
And so this is a B. It looks like the letter B. So anyway, using his hand code, it revolutionized our communication capabilities and made life not only bearable, but survivable.
We had to communicate to survive.
Well, and one of the things in looking at the lessons, and we're going to get back to your history.
Jim, I want to switch back to you for just a second.
In looking at these life lessons, what he just talked about, about communication, and I've looked at over some of the ways you've titled these chapters, and that is, you know, finding what you're thankful for, adopting values, standing shoulder to those who came before you, you know, hoping for the best, preparing for the worst, patience.
Those were all communication skills that when you met Barry, when he came back and you were teaching, It's communication actually connects us to each other, isn't it?
Yeah, it sure does.
It's the way that we become friends, the way we become lifelong friends is Barry and I have become...
We both were in financial services together and Barry developed ways of communicating to clients better ways to Communicate why people needed financial plans.
And I was director of training at that time, so we worked together to provide these to the other financial advisors that we work with.
Barry actually was our top producer for four years while he was a financial advisor.
One of the reasons It was because of the experiences that he had.
Those experiences caused him to think about why financial independence was important and he could communicate it in a way and protection was important.
He could communicate in a way that none of the rest of us could communicate it.
Barry, going back to your look and looking at the book and thinking about, you know, again, the traumatic experience of being a POW in Hanoi Hilton during that time.
Your life, though, started off in a way that was, you know, sort of at best Explain your time.
You're an orphan and give the listener a little bit.
You know, we've talked about that part.
We're going to get back to the POW part.
But being an orphan also affected you as well, didn't it?
Oh, heck yes.
That was quite an experience.
My first memory of life was...
A big room with picnic-style tables with a bunch of screaming kids.
The walls were painted drab green and brown and there was a toilet nearby for us to throw up the green pea soup we ate so much of.
We had a place at least to deposit it.
And it was a wild affair and it was every man for himself.
And the older kids took all the balls and bats or whatever the heck might be available for the younger kids.
We just didn't have any of that.
So we had to make up our own fun.
And one thing we started doing was climbing up in a chinaberry tree and hanging up there like a bunch of vultures.
But the older kids couldn't come up there.
They were scared to come up because they had never been up there.
They didn't have to go up there, but we did.
And we got strong as heck.
And if we caught one of those older kids in the top of that tree, we'd run him out of there.
And then I was given the opportunity to go home with the Spake family and spend the weekend.
And you have to realize that this orphan had never seen a pond of water.
I'd never seen a train.
I'd never seen a car other than just pieces of them.
And so everything was an incredible adventure for me.
I spent the night with this family and got up before everybody the next day because I couldn't wait to get up and look around.
And I walked out in front of the garage and I had never seen a goldfish pond.
And there's a goldfish pond, a goldfish.
I'm perplexed.
What is this?
And I'm five years old and I'm looking at these goldfish.
Now comes their son, Ellis, who's a bigger boy.
And I took an immediate disliking the first time I saw him.
And he grabbed one of the goldfish and started squeezing the life out of it.
I went ballistic.
I immediately jumped on him, knocked him into the goldfish pond, knocked the goldfish out of his hands.
Here comes his dad and grabs me with a nap in the neck, picks me up, puts me in his car, takes me back to the orphanage.
And my first trip away from the orphanage did not go well.
You ended up back at the orphanage.
At the orphanage, too, and I think this is a great preparation.
Jim, you talk about this in your part of the writing.
It was the relationships there, and I'm going to let Barry and Jim talk about this.
Tell us about Billy.
Billy was the only dear friend that I had in the orphan.
We were about the same age.
I met within a year, probably.
And he and I spent all of our time hanging up in that daggone Chinaberry tree and entertaining one another.
And then one day, I was sitting in the Chinaberry tree and the headmaster comes out.
Underneath the tree looks up and says, Billy, come with me.
So Billy comes out of the tree, goes with the headmaster up to the main building.
I'm sitting up in the Chinaberry tree, and pretty soon, within about 15 minutes, here comes Mr. Spake, Mr. Spake, their son Ellis, in a row, and Billy is in tow.
They get in the car and leave.
And I never saw my friend Billy again.
I was all alone in the Chinaberry tree.
And it was very emotional for me.
And I think that, to your point, Doug, I tried to, as I worked with Barry on this book, to get him to connect to being a POW. From that experience, it was so traumatic for him at such a young age.
I believe that Barry at that point decided That he would take control of his life, and he would not let anyone, anybody, do that to him again.
And so it hardened him, which I think prepared him for the Hanoi Hilton later on in life.
Yeah.
And I know you said you didn't.
Did you never see Billy again?
Never saw my friend Billy again.
Wow.
I hung around that tree by the weeks and months hoping to see him again, but he left my life forever.
Wow.
Have you ever had a chance to actually maybe try to find him?
I haven't because like most of us, I've been so busy living life.
I had plenty to do.
I wouldn't mind visiting with Billy, but I had more than I could handle when I was enjoying this.
I can understand that.
Well, I have to tell you, one of the great things about your book, I wrote a book.
I didn't include pictures.
I wasn't as creative as that.
But Jim, in this book, Barry, Myrtle and Henry Bridger.
Oh, my gosh.
Saints.
I mean, I look at this photo, and especially Myrtle.
She looks like, I mean, she's got that same look as my grandma.
But you talk about eating.
Could she cook?
Say that again?
Could she cook?
Well, we had a maid that did most of the cooking that lived in an apartment next to our home.
In other words, I was adopted by a very well-to-do family.
Yep.
I wanted to see if this came out.
I had just arrived in my hometown in my new home and I had to learn all over again my meet first mentality which I had developed in the orphanage because it was survival of the fittest and that's the way I played the game.
It seemed to work the best.
But now Ms. Murrow and Mr. Henry get in my face the first time I get into Bladenboro and mom explains to me from now on your neighbors come first and you come last.
And that is the most important message I got from my mom and dad.
Your last, not first.
That is good.
And again, I'm still going through the book.
What did Mr. Henry do?
Oh man, what didn't he do?
Oh really?
In the insurance business, in the cattle business, in the farming business, in the cotton man, the cotton gin.
He was a wonderful human being and everybody adored him.
I've never met a soul that did not adore my dad.
Let me ask you, Jim, in writing this book, and we're getting into the life lesson, the parks are going to Vietnam here in a minute, but in writing this and listening to Barry tell this story, Did you catch the parts that you began to know later in life?
Were you seeing the pieces developed in this early story of the orphanage and then his new mom and dad, this loss of Billy?
You've already mentioned a little bit.
Were you seeing the building blocks to who you met in the 80s?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
The...
Barry came out of the orphanage a little rough around the edges, and the Bridger smoothed that out.
And it took a long time.
If you see in the book that Barry was still getting advice from his mother when he was about 18 years old, and there's a letter in there from his mom telling them how to operate around the family.
So Barry really looked up to his parents, but he was an unguided missile.
He wanted to see the world.
He didn't see it in the first six years of his life, so he made it He had to get caught up.
And in fact, there's a great story in there, Doug, about the first night that Barry was at the Bridger home and what happened.
And Barry, why don't you share that story of what you did that first night, which caused a lot of problems in your new hometown.
The first night I spent with the Bridger family.
They took me upstairs, opened the door to a room I had not seen.
As I stepped through the threshold, I noticed a propeller on the ceiling.
And all kinds of flight paraphernalia all around the room with a private bath, a balcony, things I had never dreamed of seeing.
I'm staring in the face and I fall asleep.
And immediately around three to four in the morning, I wake abruptly.
I get up, I get dressed.
I walk outside of the house to what we call Main Street.
And it was real simple in my hometown of Bladenboro.
You had a back street in the Main Street.
You couldn't get lost real easily.
So I walked out to Main Street, turned left, started walking at four in the morning by myself.
By daybreak, I was around seven miles from home, not knowing where I was, but absolutely having the time of my life, looking at things I never dreamed of.
I mean, everywhere I look, fireflies, you know, barred owls hooting in the distance.
I'm going to turn into a big wildlife guy as a result of all that.
But I'm out there having the time of my life with not a care in the world.
And about that evening, the darkness fell.
Daybreak came, and the next evening, it's 8 o'clock at night, so I'm in my second day, and I'm still just walking down that daggone dirt road, and I see a car, because I know what a car is, and I had seen headlights, and it's come in my way, and I thought, I'm going to stand right here, and I'm going to watch that car go by.
And so I'm standing there, looking as hard as I can go.
This car pulls up, it's got bubble guns on top.
Guy rolls his window down, looks at me, says, your name's Barry.
I said, how did you know my name?
The whole damn world hear my name.
Yeah, they were all looking for Barry.
He was six years old at that time.
I gotta go back a second because this is one of the most profound messages that I received that every young kid deserves to hear.
I certainly did deserve it.
And that was, I became a very, I came out of the orphanage system with a me first mentality and I was very selfish and I took care of me.
And my mom started off of being nice and telling me that the neighbors come first.
Well, as time unfurled, and you already mentioned I was around 19, I came home one night, walked up to my room, clicked the light on and there's a letter lying on the bed.
And I picked up the letter and I began to read.
And the more I read, the more I cried.
It's hard for me to talk about this.
I understand.
Mom had written a letter and I'll paraphrase it.
She said, you're starting to do things that trouble me.
You come and go.
And you only seem to stop here to get something to eat or pick up some clothes.
And that pattern will not work when you're a dad and a husband.
Wow.
And then at the end she says, however, we're not going to give up on you and you're not going to give up on yourself.
And my prayers will be answered that you will become a great dad.
From that day forward, I changed dramatically.
Wow.
Jim, you can see that in your friend here.
I mean, I can hear it in his voice if you're listening on this podcast or watching on this podcast.
I mean, that's emotion.
It's the kind of stuff that changed you, and this was just still at 19 years of age.
Barry, go ahead and tell us now, because I mean, about that time will be the time that you'll be getting ready.
How did you end up in the Air Force and end up in Vietnam?
Well, my brother turned out to fly in the hump with Barry Goldwater and C-47s.
And he was flying T-38s and P-41s and 40 Mustangs and all of those aircraft to the South Pacific.
He was an incredible aviator.
He didn't have any GPS. He had to get his wind corrector.
He read deep to do it, Dave.
You talk about the men that flew aircrafts in those days and the men who fought those battles on the ground and whatnot.
You talk about extraordinary human beings.
They're amazing.
Every one of them.
Now I dropped off of my...
There you go.
You're good.
Okay.
So how did you...
So did you take out...
Now you were...
Let's get this straight for our listeners.
So you were much younger than your adopted brothers, correct?
Right.
He was in his probably...
I was 20 years younger.
20 years younger.
Okay.
All right.
So it came time to go to school.
How did you get into the Air Force?
Okay.
So what happened?
Because of my brother's influence, obviously, I wanted to be an aviator.
And when I arrived at the University of North Carolina for my freshman year, I marched first directly to be signed up for ROTC. And I completed the ROTC program, and I went from there into the Air Force directly, learning to fly T-38s and T-37s in those days.
And it wasn't too long after that, I got to go overseas.
When you were doing T-38s, where were you doing your training at?
A Big Spring, Texas.
Webb Air Force Base.
Webb.
Yeah, I was stationed at Moody Air Force Base.
I'm back at Warner Robins right now, but I was at Moody, and Moody still had the T-38s for a long time.
In fact, that was where George Bush actually did some of his initial flight training in T-38s was at Moody.
Yeah, that was a fun aircraft.
It's pretty fascinating.
Jim, before I get Barry into the war and actually getting shot down, spending that time, and then moving forward, let's stop it here for a second and get from your perspective of coaching and teaching what this book is about of life lessons.
As you were writing this and putting these life lessons together, was there a progression?
For the listener out there, so many times they think, and I appreciate Barry's story about getting the letter and his life changed.
A lot of people will experience that moment of saying, okay, this has shook me to my core.
I want to change.
What about the building blocks in this book that can allow somebody to have that moment and then begin to put it to real use in the future?
Yeah, I... You know, it progresses through his life.
So as time goes on, the lessons are more indelible.
They make such an impact on someone's life.
That when we get into him being a POW, chapter 10 really changed my life.
Chapter 10 changed my life.
And so they sort of build up to that point.
And then we put in there, as time goes on, we start reflecting.
We got Barry to reflect, you know, what has made this a life worth living?
Why is an individual...
Who has gone through what he went through throughout his life, is still very happy, very successful, and still reimagining himself at the age of 81. Doug, let me add something to this.
I'll introduce it with this thought.
A spark can create a fire.
Yep.
I can't tell you how surprised I was about, I don't know, maybe six, 10 years ago to get a letter from an individual that was in my ROTC unit.
And the letter read something like, Dear Barry, I know you're not expecting this.
I know you've forgotten me after all these years.
But I want you to know that not too long ago, I was reminiscing over the people that I had met in my lifetime that had a profound and positive impact on my life.
And the first name that popped up was yours.
And I want you to know how important our relationship was as it turned out for me.
Then I got another letter.
Same basic set of words.
So all I can say to all of us is, look out, you're influencing people all the time and a spark can create a fire, make sure it's well contained.
Amen, Barry.
I agree.
I mean, I think the thing that we fail to realize so many times is we don't know how many people are watching us that we never know.
And many times we fail to recognize the ones that are watching us.
We forget that they are lessons, and that's our kids and our family members beside us.
They're watching everything.
And as a father, you know, we know that.
You've made it now to Vietnam.
You got out of training.
You come to Vietnam.
You're in, I believe, your 75th, was it, mission?
Well, that's enough.
75 will work for me.
And that was the one that was the last one for a while, wasn't it, Mary?
Yep, that's exactly right.
If you would, give us a little bit about what happened on that mission.
That day, we were sending up about 60 aircraft to try to suck up the MiG-21s.
A few weeks earlier, we had pretended we were F-105s and we sucked up the MiGs and shot down seven of their MiG-21s and they had about maybe seven left.
And we were up to try and do it again.
We figured that the North Vietnamese had forgotten what happened, and we were going to try and do the same trick.
But on that particular mission of about 60 aircraft, and I was in like the first wave of probably six or eight aircraft in groups of four.
Anyway, We were carrying something called the QR-160 pod, which jams the guidance radar signal from a ground unit to the aircraft, or excuse me, to the missile once it's fired and guides it into the aircraft.
And we were told by the scientists who briefed us since it was a new system that if, when you turned it on, it didn't work, you couldn't get it running correctly to slide up next to your element leader and his His QRC 160 pod would jam for both of you.
Well, sure enough, my pod was not working.
And so I slid up.
I was a number four aircraft.
I slid up close to number three.
And I'm sitting there, but I did have a raw scope.
And the raw scope showed every radar signal that was hitting my aircraft.
I just had to figure out which one it was.
Is it a, you know...
Is it an aircraft radar signal or is it something else?
But I knew how to do that.
And that day it was really bad weather.
It was just weather from the zero all the way up to about 24,000 feet.
It was clouds.
Breaks in the clouds here and there.
And so I realized I wasn't going to be able to get my system to work, so I slid up next to the four aircraft and we're in what we call pod formation, a flight of four pretty tight together.
And supposedly the jamming pod is going to take care of everybody, although I had none.
And I was using number threes.
All of a sudden, my Rothscope showed a strobe that left 11 o'clock and left 8 o'clock.
And I'm looking at, it's the Fansong radar signal.
And I know I'm being looked at by an SA2 guidance radar system.
And so I started looking very hard down because I knew where to look.
The other folks, raw scope did not work because they had the QRC working and it blanked out your detection system.
And so I'm looking real hard and I see A flash of intense light coming up through the clouds and I realized it's a mess.
I hit the button and said, Shark flight break left.
Sam's 10 o'clock low and everybody's turning real gentle in pod formation.
And I said, this ain't going to work.
He is looking at me.
I have no doubt.
I flipped upside down and pulled as hard as I could pull and went straight down.
The missile went off at about 24,000 feet.
It blew the right wing off half the left wing and the tail.
And I had never seen all of the lights on my F-4 come on at the same time.
All of a sudden, this light pops on and says, you need to service your oil pressure.
You're overheating on your left engine.
You're on fire on the right engine.
And I saw something I'd never seen as a caution light said during deep chemistry.
So anyway, I decided this was not good at about that time, the missile exploded.
Bam!
And all that stuff.
And I was reported when the guys got back down, Bridger was missing in action, but he's probably killed in action.
And that's an interesting story by itself, because when that information flowed down to my little hometown in Bladenboro, The citizens of my little community, maybe 600 or 800 people at that time, they broke into two groups.
One group said not even Bridger could survive that.
The other group said baloney.
Bridger, he did.
It don't happen.
Well, about within months, the word got out that I was alive and the town went bonkers.
Part of you.
I love it.
Now, Barry, was your mom and dad still alive?
Your adopted mom and dad?
They did not have to endure that.
It was my brother who had been in the World War II. He survived with his family, so that was my family at that point.
Okay.
All right.
Now, Jim, you explained this out on Instagram.
You talked about this.
Before we get back, Barry, the next step is capture.
But, Jim, you made a comment that 10 changed your life.
And for those who don't know, the title of that chapter is Make Every Day a Good Day by Controlling Your Mind.
Jim, why did that change your life?
Well, we have all experienced or a lot of people have experienced and people say, you know, control what goes into your brain.
It can have a deep effect as to how you approach life.
And so we were interviewing Barry regarding his time in the Hanoi Hilton.
The question posed to him was, What was your worst day in the Hanoi Hill?
Now, as Barry will share, there was torture.
There was loneliness.
There was that not knowing if the individual was going to come back.
Is anybody even care at home over that many years?
And Barry, who's very energetic, very quick to answer, sat back quietly and sat there.
And he thought for a while, And then he said, I don't think I had a bad day.
He said, when you have control of your mind, you will never have a bad day.
And what that changed was, I had heard that time and time again, motivational speakers, individuals saying about your mind.
But it finally hit me that if someone like Barry could have a good day every day, why couldn't I? And that changed my life.
Now, I will tell you, I still have bad days, but they're very minimal.
Very minimal because of what he said.
That's the same.
I mean, this is beaming true here, and I wish I had Sam to bring into this right now, Barry, with you.
Sam, of course, has departed from us, but Sam had that same attitude, and it was, you know, again, I've been through this, and I controlled that mind part of it.
Barry, walk us through, because for the vast majority of people, and most people would never experience a POW situation, especially falling from the sky, What was the first, like, 24 to 48 hours like after you were brought out, you know, you were shot down, you landed?
What was that first 48 hours like?
Well, first of all, I was hoping with all those clouds, when I finally came through the last layer of clouds, I was landing in a jungle.
Because I'm a big outdoorsman.
I'd love to have had that opportunity.
But I landed about 212 yards from the front gate of the Hanoi Hills downtown.
So if you can't take a joke, don't fly.
Some of the brave citizens where I landed ran up and hit me with their fists and whatnot.
My backseater, he got hit a bit.
But we literally got shooed right into the system.
And the first place you ended up was Heartbreak Hotel.
That's for all the very, very, very new guys.
And then not far from that was the torture center.
And I was treated to my backseater screaming bloody murder for about two or three hours until it stopped.
And then my door opened.
And so we were going through what all of us went through.
If you didn't give them more than your name, rank, service number, and date of birth, then they didn't fool around.
You went immediately into the straps, which was their primary torture technique in which they put your arms behind your back in manacles.
Manacles have no chain in between.
They're rigid.
And the wrist of the Vietnamese is much smaller than the typical wrist of an American, so it bit into the flesh when they tighten those things up on your wrist behind your back.
Then they ran on a nylon strap, which was about 20 feet long, starting at your wrist, and they kept pulling your elbows together.
And then the shoulder muscles, they pulled them out of the sockets and tied you up and left you there and shut the door and walked off.
Absolutely incredible pain within a few minutes.
And then it just got worse and worse.
How long you could last in the straps was, you know, depending on you.
But it was anywhere from a few hours, if you were lucky, to get a day or two.
And then they brought you in to an interrogation after you basically said, yeah, my name is so and so.
And they brought in two MiG-21 pilots.
And if I give you an example of mine, we call that resorting to a second line of resistance when they ask you a question and you respond other than saying, you know, name, rank, service number, date of birth.
Well, the interrogator in my case was a guy we call Pig Eye because he had a funny little red dot on one of his eyes bouncing around.
And he said to me, and this is, by the way, probably pretty typical of what we all did.
He said to me, how fast can the F-4 fly?
And here are these two MiG-21 pilots sitting there along with the interrogator.
And they asked me that question.
I looked at him.
I said, it's very fast.
And he turns to the mid-pilot and he says, hey, the guy says it's very fast.
He says, well, yeah, we want to know how fast.
So he comes back and says, how fast is it?
I said, I'm not allowed to fly fast.
I'm a junior pilot.
He turned to the mid-21 guy and he said, that's so much.
He said, junior pilot, he can't fly fast.
He said, okay.
You were tempted to play games is what I'm trying to say.
You were tempted to play.
But you better not.
Exactly.
Exactly.
As time progressed in the Hanoi Hilton, did your time change?
You were there, of course, over five months.
You were there, what, five months ahead of McCain, right?
About right.
Yeah.
And I was reading my time frame there.
You were there before him.
After you came through, as you said, the Heartbreak Hotel, the torture, and that initial phase, Describe how it was like, because I've heard these stories before, but it'd be interesting to hear from you.
You became into, as best you can describe it, a normal battle rhythm.
There were different parts of the day, but it was a very similar thing as the time increased.
Would that be true?
Yeah, we developed all kinds of ways to entertain ourselves.
And plus, we spent most of our time helping those in greater need than ourselves that desperately needed us to intervene in whatever way we could.
So we were busy as the dickens taking care of each other.
Yeah, even when you didn't have the resources and they weren't taking care of you.
And we weren't even face to face.
Exactly.
Doing all kinds of crazy things.
Wow.
Now, were you a part of any of the, I know that at one point they had the videos that, you know, the North Vietnamese tried to do as propaganda kind of stuff.
Was that ever a part that you had to go through?
Not that I'm aware of.
They never came that I recall it, but I have a story to tell, Steve.
Interesting.
When I got shot down, scratenal hit my helmet.
And I was bleeding like a stuck pig and all the blood coming out of the head with a big gash on top of my head down into my face and down into my flight suit.
So I looked like I might be dying pretty soon.
I looked pretty bad.
And I immediately said, I'm going to play this for everything it's worth to try and convince the North Vietnamese that I can't see.
I started that the day I hit the ground, and they took me into this torture chamber program, and I was tortured multiple times.
They were asking me questions, but they finally got around to deciding we need to get everybody to write a biography.
And so they asked me to write a biography one day and I said, this was after I'd been through all that torture session.
I said, no, I'm not going to write a biography.
So they took me to the torture chamber.
That was the way they did everybody.
If you didn't do what they said, then you went to the torture chamber.
And so they put me in a room.
They put two bricks on the ground.
They told me to put my knees on the bricks.
This was typical for a lot of us.
And then hold our arms straight up.
And they stood there in this little teeny room with a door in the front of the room.
And I forgot that there was a window in the back of the room, which caused me some grief later.
And they said, OK, now you must stay there until you write biography.
Well, I was there five days and five nights.
And I said, okay, I'll write you a biography.
Now, what all of us did when we went to a second line of resistance, we would do things like one of my buddies, he wrote, when they asked him to write his biography, he says, I have a pet electric duck.
I wind it up and it flies around my room and goes quack, quack, quack.
That was his biography.
And they thought that was great.
And so what I did instead is I took my left hand, which I'm also, remember, I'm pretending I can't see, and I scribbled something you would never be able to figure it out.
And I put things like D-E-L-A-A-B. I just put random letters on a page.
And they thought that was great, so they took off and left that alone.
Now, here's the interesting part.
One day, the interrogator comes to my room.
He opens up the peephole and says, you write biography?
I said, yep, wrote a good one.
He shuts the peephole and leaves, comes back two days later and says, you sure you write biography?
I said, did you lose my biography?
Well, he comes back a third time.
He says, tonight we take you to hospital.
If you like, you'll be severely treated.
And they put me in a jeep and took me to the Hanoi Hospital.
Oops, here's second floor.
They've got a room with a desk at one end and a chair for me and for the interrogator.
And then at the other end, they have a technician and he opens up a drape and it's the eye chart.
The E is about the size of a small car.
It's so big.
And he takes his porter, which looks like a pool cue, and he's pointing at the E. And then the interrogator says to me, he says, Okay, now you must tell us, what is the letter?
And I did this.
I stood up on my feet, and I started turning around in a slow circle saying, where is it?
Where is the letter?
And he's about to have a fit.
And so I played that for all it was worth, and finally they got frustrated and took me and threw me back in my room.
Two years go by.
They have now opened up a camp which holds 150 at either side by brick wall separated.
And we called it the good guy camp.
In other words, we weren't getting tortured every day, but just ever so often.
Anyway, one of the things I had learned to do to bide my time, and we were all doing this, I learned to juggle.
And I made my own little balls out of String and paper and whatever.
I had five balls that I could throw up and I could juggle them and keep them going.
Well, one day in this new camp, I'm in the big room we had and I'm practicing my juggling and unbeknownst to me, the interrogator that took me to the hospital is standing in the doorway watching me juggle.
And the first thing I hear is, you lie!
You lie!
And I looked up, I said, oh my gosh, it's a damn interrogator.
And I said, okay, brother, you've got to be real careful what you do at this point.
It's got to be convincing, and it's got to be emotional.
And I looked at him and said, no lie!
You still juggle 10, now I'm at 5!
And this interrogator looked at me, he said, damn, that's pretty bad.
You dropped it off for a minute.
He left.
That is amazing.
That's what we were doing constantly.
And again, it goes to this idea of controlling your mind.
You were the one controlling.
Even though you were being held captive, you were controlling the day.
I absolutely was.
And I think that's such an important lesson for me.
It's such an important lesson, and I'm going to make my kids, you know, my boys watch this and others, you know, out there.
I mean, it's a matter of controlling your day.
I can't tell you how many days, and I've pastored for a number of years, and I told people, I said, how many people have let, how many times have you let somebody who cut you off maybe in the morning going to work, you got mad at them, you yelled at them, and you were mad the whole morning, and they didn't even know you existed?
Yeah.
You know, it's a matter of your mind being there.
Jim, we talked about this, and I'm going to get Barry here in just a second.
This idea of mind, though, I think contributed to what you and I talked about before we started, and that's this issue of PTSD. Right.
And in the book, you talked about that.
Do you think that that had a lot to do with that?
I think it did.
You know, as I was telling you, Doug, I've studied the brain in...
I too was, I couldn't believe that our POWs have such a low rate of PTSD. And I think that what happens in life, and this is just my theory on it, is that it's those surprise things that we allow to get to us.
Like you say, somebody cutting you off, you're not expecting it, you You get enraged.
But I think what happened with the POWs is that they decided that they would take control of their lives.
Because what else did they have?
They had a dirt floor and maybe a towel to lay on or something like that.
They had nothing.
But if they allowed themselves to accept where they were and that they would never get better, They would have trouble.
And so I think that controlling of the mind did contribute to the low rate of PTSD. And they knew they were going to get tortured.
Everybody around them was being tortured.
In fact, they made, as Barry is talking about it, they made gains of these things.
So they turned what was terrible into fun.
Well, let me just give this to the listener out there, listen to this, that the rates, and it's a 2009 study that said almost 31% of Vietnam veterans had PTSD, 10% of Gulf War veterans, 11% of veterans of war in Afghanistan, and 20% of Iraq, and the 5% 11% of veterans of war in Afghanistan, and 20% of Iraq, and the 5% Yeah, that's right.
Barry, turning back to you, and I think Jim laid that out pretty well, but Barry, when you got...
I'm going to take it a step further because we know that what happened there was terrible, the torture.
Tell me about the last few days and then getting back home.
Let me interject something.
You go right ahead.
What we had was three things.
Leadership, we had humor, and competition.
To get us through all that crap.
We were busy as hell competing with each other.
Can you imagine having a competition to see who could remain in the torture chamber the longest?
Only a bunch of Yanks would do that.
And we had leadership.
One of the most extraordinary leaders we had was Admiral James B. Stockdale.
He was an aviator and was an extraordinary leader up there for us.
And he's done a lot of writing about how to resist and how to overcome great trials and tribulations.
And he was a real...
The reason why we were able to get along with one another and do it in extraordinarily difficult circumstances.
I can't say enough about Admiral Toxtell.
However, we also were just constantly doing humorous things.
For example, I got a tap on my wall one day after I had moved in with about 36 POWs whom they considered to be troublemakers and instigators.
And he put us in a punishment camp as an object lesson to all the rest of the group, about 550 total.
And as an object lesson to say, if you don't do what we tell you, you're going to be put into the punishment camp.
Well, I've been there a few days and there's a tap on my wall.
And he taps to me and says, this individual says, hey, this is John McCain.
Who's that?
And I tap back, Bridger.
He taps back to me, Barry.
And he says, he says, I have a problem.
And I went thump, thump, which meant pause, danger, don't move, be quiet.
And I looked around my room, which was five foot by six foot.
And I said, I wonder what John's got I don't got.
So I went back to the wall and sarcastically tapped to John.
I said, I said, John, what is your problem?
And he taps back to me.
He says, there's a great big snake in my room.
Well, I grew up in the swamps of North Carolina.
I loved snakes.
They were pets.
You used to put them around your neck.
You know, John didn't do that.
He would lose dang snakes.
So if I tapped to John and said, John, I had some good news and I had some bad news.
This is the humor thing now.
I said, the good news is that snake doesn't want anything to do with you.
He's looking for a rat.
So get away from the snake.
If it's be set still, he'll find a hole and go into that soft concrete and disappear.
So that's the good news.
The bad news, if you let that snake bite you, he's either a bamboo viper, a crate, or a cobra, any one of which will have you.
You'll be dead in two minutes and 14 seconds.
Because they're all hemotoxic.
No, excuse me, neurotoxic.
And he goes, yeah, thanks a lot.
And so that was the kind of stuff we were moving.
Leadership and humor and competition was the order of the day.
You know, I think that is the amazing thing.
And I'm not going to...
The stories here are incredible.
And I want people to go and get this book called The Spirit to Soar.
And I'm showing it right now on the screen for those listening on the podcast.
I'm not going to go into depth of all the lessons, Jim.
I think I want people to go and get this book and learn these lessons.
Barry, your story is amazing.
I do want to give you, though, Barry, I think...
Because Jim highlighted this, and I've heard it in Jim's voice every time I've talked to him, Barry.
He talks about Sheila, and he talks about your girls.
And your mom, who had told you and gave you that letter about being a husband and a father, I'm going to give you sort of a chance to sort of say, we never feel like we do well enough, but it looks like that was one of the objects after you got back and got married and started that family, that that was the priority given to you by a deceased family who took you in and were no longer there.
Well, my response is every day we have a new opportunity to do well.
And we didn't always do well, but every day we were given another opportunity, God willing, to do well.
And it was going on all the time, all around me, which is infectious.
Everybody was pitching in and trying to do better.
And we were all trying to help each other, safeguard our health under these terrible conditions.
We had people who had different kinds of problems that were really difficult, but they survived it with our help.
And so I keep that thought in mind.
Every day I can do better.
I'm better than that is one of my slogans.
You're better than that.
Let's act like it.
And that's the way I look at it.
And by the way, the PTSD people have asked me, how much PTSD? And honestly, I don't think I ever had one milligram of it.
I just never thought about it.
It never crossed my mind.
I was busy helping great Americans live.
That is it.
And your family now has played a great part in that now, hasn't it?
Oh, Sheila is.
There's nothing that lady doesn't do and do well.
Talk about a spark turning into a forest fire.
In fact, when I'm praying, I tell the Lord, I said, I know what you're doing.
You're putting me on ice until I get back so I can marry Sheila.
I said, could you speed that up a little bit?
Those were my prayers back in the day.
I didn't know Sheila back then, but I knew there was somebody waiting for me.
I love it.
Barry, just a couple of last questions, and Jim, I want to sort of end it with you on this.
But Barry, a couple of things.
Do you keep in touch with those that are still living?
We have a network, and we have information flowing amongst the POWs.
Initially, it was amazing.
We had speakers like Henry Kissinger, and we had annual functions and whatnot.
But over time, we've all settled into our old age, as would be expected.
But we're trying to make a difference in the lives of our grandkids and our friends around us, and there's plenty of opportunity to do that, and that's what we are privileged to do and pleased to do.
I understand.
One question that, I've always had the Vietnam, you know, I had an uncle there.
I've served now in Iraq and going back, but it always has sort of stuck with me that time.
I was born, Barry, about six, about a year before you were shot down.
And looking at that, I've seen the movies over time, and we know the POWs that were released at one time.
Was there ever a thought that we actually still had POWs still there?
From my perspective, there was no evidence of that.
I will bring up this point, and it may be a valid point.
If you look at the B-52s, I think there were about 13 B-52s shot down somewhere in that neighborhood.
One of the interesting data points is that the crew on a B-52, you've got EWOs, and you've got pilots, you've got co-pilots, and you've got a whole variety of different But if you look at the POWs who ended up in the prison camps that were B-52 related,
we had almost no EWOs, which makes you wonder if the The Soviets working with the Chinese, working with the North Vietnamese, did not, in fact, and the thought was that people had been moved out into the Soviet Union because of their skill set.
Skill set.
I can say that.
Jim, if there was somebody out there listening to this podcast and wanted to get this book, number one, where would they get the book and what kind of thought would you want them to be left with after listening to this podcast?
Well, first of all, they can get the book on any major bookseller site.
You can get it on Amazon, you can get it on Books A Million, Barnes& Noble, any of those sites.
But we also have our own site that they can purchase it, and that's www.thespirit.com.
S-O-A-R.com.
And you can order it there also.
So, books available.
We're getting a lot of great feedback.
I'll leave you with one story there, Doug.
Barry's heard me talk about it, but I had a friend who had a bad COVID experience.
He was going on a cruise, didn't have COVID before he got to Rome, Italy.
And they tested him and he had COVID. They wouldn't let him go on the cruise, put him in a hotel, not a very nice hotel, for 10 days because that was a quarantine.
His wife was in a different room because she didn't have COVID. Pretty lonely during that time.
After the 10 days, they tested him again.
And he had to stay another 10 days.
He still had COVID. So three weeks in a hotel.
He couldn't wait to get back to the U.S. And he said to me, thanks for the book.
I had given him the book because he knew Barry and gave him a copy of the book.
And I said, did you have a chance to read it?
He said, I did.
I read a little bit of it before I got there.
I read the rest of it there.
And he goes, I thought that my life was bad.
It was nothing compared to Barry's, and it got me through the 21 days.
So I would say that these life lessons that are in there, they're for you, they're for your children, they're for your grandchildren, they're for your nieces, nephews, whoever you know, because there's something in there.
That'll make an impact on you and the reason for writing the book and getting the story out there.
Barry doesn't think there's anything special about him.
And it takes people outside of him to see that he meets that outlier definition that Malcolm Gladwell talked about.
And I thank you, Doug, for giving us this time with you.
Doug, I want you to tell Sam, oh no, Sam passed away.
When did he pass away?
About two, about three years ago, I think, or two or three years ago.
That really upsets me.
I did not realize that.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, and that's so neat you say that, Barry.
Sam made a story, and I'm going to sort of time it up here.
Sam made me think about my family and my life and everything in a story very similar to what you told.
old, he told this story about his devotion to his wife.
And he said that, you know, and the story was that every night while he was in capture, his wife would set a place at the table for him and would make and actually make food for him.
He did the whole time.
And when I was in Congress, they were, you know, she was still alive.
She died.
And he told that story.
And I can remember him being very emotional about that she was gone.
And how he had poured...
I mean, this is a man who could have asked for sympathy and people would have gave it to him.
He never asked for it.
In fact, he gave off.
And his love for his wife and his children, when she passed, you could begin to see his light slowly...
You know, go out because it was that love that kept him going during that time that she gave.
It's a powerful story of what y'all went through.
It's a powerful story of the connection of the human spirit and of what I believe God has given each of us to say that we can control the environment we're in.
And Barry, you have blessed me.
You've blessed this podcast audience today with your story.
Jim, thank you for writing it.
We may do a follow-up later and talk some more about this, but I wanted people to get this out.
Go to where you get your books.
It's called The Spirit to Soar by Jim Peterson.
It's a true story of former orphan and POW Lieutenant Colonel Barry Bridger, United States Air Force, retired, one of my branch.
Jim, also one of mine, but I've been 20 years with the Air Force.
Colonel Bridger, you are...
An inspiration to me, and this story has been great, and I'm so glad to be able to share it here on the Doug Collins Podcast.
Please, folks, you'll want to share this podcast with folks all over the country, people who need to hear a good word.
They need to know that the power of the day is within their hands.
No matter what they've been dealt, the key is in their mind, and it's a choice that they have to make.
Thanks for being a part of this.
Share this podcast with everyone that you see, and we'll see you next time.
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