An Anchor of Prayer – Service | Sacrifice

“A man does a lot of praying in an enemy prison.  Prayer, even more than sheer thought, is the firmest anchor.”  – Admiral Jeremiah Denton

In July of 1965, then-Commander Denton, was leading twenty-eight planes on a bombing mission with Lieutenant Junior Grade, Bill Tschudy, his navigator/bombardier. Their jet was shot down over the city of Thanh Hoa in North Vietnam, and they were captured and taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese.  Denton was held in the infamous POW camp, Hanoi Hilton as prisoners of war for almost eight years, four of which were spent in solitary confinement.  Denton is best known for the 1966 televised press conference that he was forced into as an American POW by his North Vietnamese captors.  He ingeniously used the opportunity to communicate successfully and to confirm for the first time to the U.S. Military (naval intelligence) that American POW’s were being tortured in North Vietnam. He repeatedly blinked his eyes in Morse Code during the interview, spelling out the word, “T-O-R-T-U-R-E”.  He writes that the original title he chose for his book, When Hell Was In Session, was Under God, Indivisible, because most of the prisoners when faced with desperation, rediscovered God and became indivisible in their resistance to Communist torture and extreme deprivation.