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Admiral Jeremiah Denton speaking at the Cincinnati Catholic Men's Conference in 1998.
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Admiral Jeremiah Denton speaking at the Cincinnati Catholic Men's Conference in 1998.
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Admiral Jeremiah Denton speaking at the Cincinnati Catholic Men's Conference in 1998.
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Jeremiah Denton is a highly decorated military officer who served in Vietnam and was captured and held as a prisoner of war for over seven years. During his captivity, he defied his captors by blinking the word "torture" in Morse code during an interview, providing evidence of the mistreatment of POWs. Denton also served as the senior officer among American POWs and was the spokesperson for the first group of POWs released. After his release, Denton was shocked by the moral decline he witnessed in the US and expressed his support for efforts to combat this decline. He emphasized the importance of faith in God and the strength that can be found through prayer and communication with others. Denton encouraged his audience to continue their efforts to uphold moral values and preserve the concept of "One Nation Under God." Jeremiah Denton is the recipient of numerous military awards and decorations, including the Navy Cross, the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the Navy Distinguished Service Medal, three Silver Stars, the Distinguished Flying Cross, five Bronze Stars, two Air Medals, and two Purple Hearts. But certainly his most well-known military service began in 1965. In June of that year, he was assigned as a squadron commander with combat flight duty from the aircraft carrier Independence, which was conducting operations in the Gulf of Tonkin off Vietnam. A commander at the time, Denton was leading a group of 28 aircraft on a mission over North Vietnam on July 18, 1965, when his A-6 intruder was hit and the aircraft controls were destroyed. Both he and his bombardier navigator ejected, but were captured by the North Vietnamese. Jerry Denton would spend the next seven years and seven months as a prisoner of war. Denton first came to national attention in April 1966 during an interview arranged by his captors with a Japanese TV reporter. Prior to the interview, Denton was tortured for an excluded period in an attempt to force him to condemn U.S. policy. When asked the question by the reporter, Denton replied, I don't know what is going on in the war now, because the only sources I have access to are North Vietnamese radio, magazines, and newspapers. But whatever the position of my government is, I agree with it. I support it, and I will support it as long as I live. Not only had Denton defied his captors with his words, he consistently blinked T-O-R-T-U-R-E in Morse code into the camera. Detected by naval intelligence experts, it was the first confirmation of the torture of U.S. POWs by the North Vietnamese. Following the interview, he was severely tortured again, and thereafter was subjected to the worst kind of treatment, including a total of four years in solitary confinement. Having been the senior U.S. officer in several prison camps, Denton also acted as the officer in command of all American POWs for a large portion of his time in prison. He was the most senior officer in the first aircraft of prisoners to be released, and was chosen by the Defense Department to be the spokesman for the entire first group of POWs released. From Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, February 5, 1972, Denton spoke the memorable words, We are the United States of America. We are the United States of America. We are the United States of America. We are the United States of America. We are the United States of America. We are the United States of America. We are the United States of America. We are the United States of America. We are the United States of America. We have a real honor and a distinct pleasure to present to you Admiral Jeremiah Denton, a genuine American hero and a God-caring man. Admiral Jeremiah Denton. Thank you, Admiral. Thank you. Thank you. We share. We share as much as men can share. I applaud you for the same sentiments, the same graces that I've enjoyed, the same motivations I have. I can't think of anywhere in the world I'd rather be than here in this spot in Cincinnati at this time. I think in the history of the world, in God's eyes, the history of mankind, however mysterious way he regards it, I think he regards this as a punctuation mark in history. When I said God bless America stepping off the plane, I really meant it. I thought we had prevailed in that war, which was a just cause. And I thought that in that prevailing, men like you had prevailed over lesser men of the late 60s and 70s who were mocking God, mocking our country, joining in the embrace of the new morality, which you and I know is the old immorality which delayed the dawn of civilization and whenever tried has interrupted it and is hardly suitable for adoption by the people of one nation under God. I thought that it happened. But as you know, it hasn't happened. And my life since then and yours for some time and others here older than I, and there aren't too many, have been fighting that battle a long time. Maybe since 1973 I've been fighting it. I was culturally shocked when I got home from that plane ride to the Philippines and then back to the United States. I'd never seen a massage parlor sign or an triple X-rated movie sign. And I had to ask my wife on the way to the hospital as I went through downtown Norfolk what all that was. I couldn't believe the magazines on the news racks in the Navy Hospital, which never would have permitted Playboy, much less Hustler and all the other stuff that was then out. The worst thing I'd seen in the movies was Rhett Butler saying to Scarlett O'Hara, frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. I don't know, a lot of you old guys might remember this. I was in New Orleans, 15 years old, at the premiere in New Orleans of that movie. And my girlfriend wasn't old enough to drive either, so my grandmother had taken me there and I'll tell you, when that came out on that screen, frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn, the whole movie went berserk. There was a chitter of, ah, we're liberated, my gosh, what is this? Aren't we really thrilling there? So you can imagine the shock I felt from that big deal and what was happening in our country then. And I guess we've either come so far with that new immorality that we are shocked sufficiently by its consequences, witness you here, not that you're ever in that, but at least you've done what I wouldn't have done, you young men, when I was 20 years old. I doubt if I would have shown up at a Catholic rally downtown. Of course, there wasn't maybe quite as much reason, and particularly the young guys here. You know, we had everybody stand up 20 to 30 and up to 50 and infinitely after that, but we didn't have the young guys stand up. And you know, they might be the most important people in here, right? Well, I'll sort of start on what I had planned to say. I do salute you all for what you're doing here. I think it's critical, not only to you and me morally, and I've learned more here today than I'm going to teach, but it's the perfect remedy for what's wrong with our country. What's wrong recently with our church, let's face it, we've had some problems. And what's wrong with the world? We're not the only country going down that trail, but we're probably the weakest, because as Jesus said, more difficult for the rich man to reach heaven than for the camel to pass through the eye of the needle. Same thing for a nation, and we've seen that throughout the course of history. So what you're doing here is desperately important, and as Jim Belushi said, if it's spread, it will be critically advantageous to the course of the rest of history. And I'm going to do everything I can to help it spread. I'm going to go back to my hometown and tell my bishop about this, tell my friends. Thank you, guys. We do share. We do share. Kevin kept trying to tell me about this in the small groups, and it just didn't sink in. I hadn't been accustomed to that milieu of evangelism or moral advancement, but I get it now. After what I've heard today, I get it. And I want to tell you, there is something very similar between what you're doing, and honest to God, it is more meritorious than what we did in prison, what I did in prison. Because what we did in prison was rise above our mediocre talents and capabilities, and endure what we would have called unendurable in the face of a rather cruel adversary. And we did it because we found super strength from prayer to God. We were in trouble, intense, constant trouble for a long time. So we prayed with consequent extra intensity. And anybody that really thinks about it, or has been through this themselves, know if you go through that, God's going to answer your prayer. He's going to answer you more generously than you ever even dreamed of asking Him. And what's your response to that? Well, you're grateful, and you're confirmed in your faith. Faith becomes knowledge of God. You're not only listening to the flame of whispering of conscience and of God's revelation to you, through the sacraments and in your inner self, but you see Him, help you, you feel Him move in with you. You feel Him as a brother, if you really get in deep trouble and ask Him to come. And the other source of strength we had was communications with one another. We had to communicate or try to communicate at the risk of torture for four years. And even that risk, and having been through the experience of being caught a few times, we would keep praying because we couldn't do it without the other guy. We had to feel we were sharing his misery, he was sharing ours, and we had to maintain a communication for our military discipline and our line of resistance. So it's the same thing here. You feel the pressure. I don't know what troubles you've had in your own lives. You don't have to be a prisoner of war in Vietnam to feel the stress of the difficulty of, say, trying to raise teenagers today, or being a teenager yourself, and feeling the temptations and the peer pressures that come on you that you know are going to compromise your best self if you yield to. Or a woman with a difficult child delivery, or a woman that's had an abortion, or a woman that's tempted to have an abortion. How more intense can suffering be? Or a kid in the fifth grade, and the peer pressure on him to do this or that that he knows is no good. Or maybe he doesn't, and he's sorry. Those pressures are just as severe, maybe more severe from my memory of life when I was a little kid than they are later, and we know that. So all of us have those pressures, and we indeed have the additional pressure of watching our whole nation go down. And along with it, the One Nation Under God concept, which I think God must have been very pleased with for those who shared it for so many generations. The good that this country has done, not only to its own citizens, but to the whole world will be diminished as we continue to stop at and abandon the concept of One Nation Under God. So you've got that pressure, and I hope you feel it. I hope you feel that what you're doing is not just important for you and for Cincinnati or for your family. It's important for this country. It's important for the world. I hope, I feel you believe that. I believe you know that. Well, I was asked to come, I think, because I did have an unusual experience, a long, unusual experience. It might be very similar, identical in kind to some you've had, but it was different in detail. I was without my family, without my friends, without my country, without the sacraments, without a priest, without decent food, without the personal assurance that you get from being face-to-face with a friend for seven years and seven months. For over four years, I was the first military prisoner, and I don't mean to be boasting about it. I'm just telling you, the first military prisoner to ever endure four years of solitary confinement. I think about a half a dozen of us ended up with that distinction. Less than 5% of the guys had over six months solitary. But most of the guys were tortured. Almost everybody performed in ways that would please you, and I'm very proud to have been among them and to return with my sense of honor and with my sanity, which we did principally by private and group prayer and by finding ways, as I said, to communicate. God's grace was our saving feature, not our own merits or our characters. We begged for God's help. He gave it. I must report to you, this particular audience, that you know this, but I got to know it in an especially intimate and repetitious way. Catholic prayer. The devotion to the sacred heart. Praying through Mary. Those things worked. Applause The morning offering, the aspirations. I don't mean to imply that the prayers of Protestants and Jews did not work. They did. God's house has many mansions. But I must say to you that the detail by detail experience I had in prison, as well as the totality of my experience in life when I added up to it and reflect one against the other, to me proved the total validity of Catholicism. Applause It is one. It is Catholic, holy and apostolic. Apostolic meaning that it stems from them, from that time. We are it. The others are acceptable, but this is the faith and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. No matter what happens on this world. Applause And of course, I don't want to give too much credit to my prayer, my buddies' prayers, the prayers of our families and friends were, one less Hail Mary I wouldn't be here. It was very close. I prayed to die on a number of occasions. And if I had known what I was facing before, you know, like the first day I was shot down, I would have died of despair. I would know that I could not possibly be aware. Okay, I'm going to tell you a few examples of stories. I'm really here to praise God, to say things in His honor and glory. You can do it, and I don't mind doing it either. But I'll fill in some of the details so you get a better context of it and perhaps a little greater appreciation for what we had to contend with and what God overcame for us. The torture, everybody always wonders what that was, what it's about. Some of you have read books about it. I wrote a book about it. But it was torture. It wasn't just beating. If they beat you up, that was the preliminary. Then they might put you in real tight rear cuffs and put your legs in irons, and you might be in that blindfolded for weeks, sometimes months, and that was still warming up. Then they beat you up some more and point a gun at your head and say, we're going to kill you if you don't do this, and you'd say, okay, pull the trigger. But then they get really serious, and they tried to stare your eyes, your ears, your teeth. They tried not to scar you. But with ropes and bars, bars on bone, bars on nerves, the ropes freemen can pull together around the tops of your arms behind you, and with only that, they cut off the blood circulation in your arms and really about a fourth of your body, and if you can't feel them anymore, with the agony having subsided, they become numb when the blood stops flowing. Then they loosen the ropes, and the blood surges back through the arteries and veins, and it hurts pretty bad. After about four hours of that, if they know what they're doing, you have passed out, and you can't suffer any more than that point. You might as well die. They can put more pain on you, but you can't feel it after that. That was done to most everybody and to some of us many times, that kind of thing. It would take more time than it's worth to explain some of the things they can do with a bar that weighs about 90 pounds, and they cross your legs and put it into shackles around that bar, and you're sat on a stool, and it's like having a broken ankle every second, and you can't fall forward. If you do, you bash your head on the concrete, and you're dead because it's a couple. There's a huge force trying to pull you down there. I spent all night like that one night, and the only thing that saved me, I have no idea how many times I said the rosary, but I said it over and over again. A typical example, and it's a miniature of where you and I, where you are, where I am now, and where I was then. The more you surrender to God, you know, we've all heard the story about the footsteps, the two sets of footsteps, and then there's only one, and the guy says, well, why weren't you, where were you, Lord, when I really needed you? And you said, whose footsteps do you think those were? They were mine. Well, it was like that one time with me. They normally were only after propaganda, and you would resist that, and you were really exchanging your life for the threat that they were going to have to kill you if they persevered in getting a confession or a biography or whatever they wanted. If they kept doing those things, you'd be dead, and they didn't want you dead because they thought they'd be accountable for that. But you gave as much as you could. You had to convince them that it wasn't worth it for them to continue to get after you for propaganda, useful material. I don't think many of us gave them any useful propaganda material, but they can make you write down or say, I am sorry. They can make you do that. They can get you to the point where I don't care what kind of a football player you are or whatever you are, what a brave, strong man you are, they can get you to the point, as they did Karl Monsanti and other heroes of the church, where you will do what they tell you to do or at least try to because all you can think about is getting out of the pain. You have no other mental reference except I'm in such intense pain I've got to get out of it. You'll do just about anything at that point. If you can then, after they let you rest a day, because when I tried to write my confession the first time I couldn't even hold a pencil, the next day all I did was make palmer circles, and I didn't even know I was doing that. By the time they tried me again, I refused. So they tortured me again, and I ended up writing some stuff. I wish were on the front of the New York Times. It wasn't credible. It was all messed up. When I wrote my biography, I insulted them. They tortured me. I wrote a biography saying my family was in the hotel business when I was a kid. That was true. I said we lived in nine hotels. That wasn't true. And I said all nine of them burned down. Now they knew that wasn't true, but after what they put me through to get it, they were glad to get it. And they said, OK, all right. And they took that. At this time I'm talking about now when I surrendered totally, they were after operational information. They wanted to know from me, and I was the camp commander. I acted as the senior officer for half of the four years, about a year and a half of that, and another guy after six months, and another guy about a year and a half. Anyway, whatever that's up to, I did it a lot, a lot. When you were commanding the other guys, they knew you were doing it. They don't write. Everybody stopped writing anything. They get you for it. They punish you first. Well, they were after me, and they wanted to know how we were conducting our camp communications. And at that point, it had become a pretty sophisticated measure, countermeasure thing. I won't go into the details, but we had some pretty good secrets about how we were doing it, and I wasn't about to tell them. So they put me in a rig that went like this. They put my board bed, stock that went in. They put my ankles in those stocks. They put my hands with my wrists joined together in what they call hell cups, and they put a bar under my Achilles tendons and rigged it up to some pulleys so that they were pulling the bar against my ankles, my Achilles tendons, and they blindfolded me and left me there. And I went through that five days and five nights. I lost all feeling except your back can keep hurting. The rest all went numb. But you can't lean back because of the cuffs. It's impossible to go backwards and lie down, so you're five times 24 hours. I was in that, and I finally said, well, I'll give them something that they already know, and they'll take it like they did my biography, which they knew wasn't true and didn't help them. So I said, bow cow, which means I surrender. They came and got me, took me in, and they didn't accept what I gave them. Some stuff they already knew. So they put me back in, and I was there five more days and five more nights. By that time, I was not only out of all bodily fluids. I wasn't eating anything. I stopped drinking anything. But I was out of all mentality. I couldn't think of any more prayers. I couldn't think of any impromptu prayers. I couldn't think of anything, but yet all I could think of was, God, I have no alternative. I have nothing else I can do for it. It's all yours. It's yours. You've got it. I can't express the totality and helplessness of that surrender. The instant I made that surrender, some things happened. I'd been going from alternating chill and hot spells. They could hear my chains all over the camp when I shuddered. I was in one of those. As soon as I surrendered, I felt like somebody had just put a warm blanket all around me, all over my body, over my soul. I felt no pain. I felt total comfort. I felt the assurance that there was nothing in this world that could bother me again, ever. It was total joy. They sent the guard in. I'm sitting there, no problem. They sent the guard in. The camp commander came out. It was the first time and only time I know of it happening. He came out to my door, told the guard, the key guard, the head guard, and another guard to go in there. He was addressing the key guard. He said, You go in there and break his damn legs off, but get him to break. Make him surrender. The guard came in with the subordinates and started to pull on the pulley that forced this bar into my pulley center. He looked at my face, and my face just was a message to him, just telling exactly the condition I was in. You can't hurt me. I'm okay. He was a pretty good guard. We called him Smiley. He was about 18 years old. He would do the torture, but he was all at one minute. He saw my face, and he immediately reacted. He just dropped the thing, ran out beyond the door, outside. His tears streaming down his face, and he started screaming at the officer, He's hopeless. I'm not going to do it anymore. And that went on for about 10 minutes. A Vietnamese officer, South Vietnamese, who was in prison, would just translate what went on later to me, but I knew what was going on. They gave up. And about five hours later, they came in and put sulfur on my wounds and carried me to another cell. That's one time I really beat them. Well, I got so cocky about that that I told them once when they threatened me again, you guys will never break me again. I did it once, and you'll never get me again. Well, they found another way, and it would work, so that's the way that happened. As I say, I don't think I ever gave them anything they could use, but I would say I surrender, and I would pick up the pen, and in a few days I'd write something. One other story that shows the wonder of God's universality of appeal to men of all kinds, colors, nationalities, and I think shows the hope that I saw in Montgomery, Alabama, at a rally I kicked off when Alan Keyes was one of the speakers. I was kicking it off. It was about this Judge Roy Moore that won't take the Ten Commandments down from his courtroom. Alabama's not a bad place either, guys. And I looked out on the square in Montgomery. There are about three square blocks that represent a park out in front of the Capitol steps. You can sit 10 or 15,000 people in there, and I mean, it was jammed. And for the first time, because when I came home in 1973, I shortly formed something called the Coalition for Decency. I got 18 inches off the ground crusading to straighten out television and get us back on the track and all that sort of thing. But I was never able, the problem I always ran into was each group was turf-jealous, like the Christian Broadcasting Network or some other, like PTL, I'm the poor guy that messed that up, other kinds of little groups of different denominations wouldn't work together. We can't win. The bad guys are all working together. They're making money selling us in. But if we don't work together, we could, well, at Montgomery that day, there were 20% black guys, 80% white guys, a good mixture of Hispanics. There were Jews there. The Jews put on a Hebrew ceremony up on the Capitol steps. There was every possible religion there. They're slamming us in the face that there is no God, that this country doesn't have anything to do with God. It's like it was in prison. It was easy for me to behave myself, to resist, if they grab you by the shirt and say, look, you've got to condemn your country or we're going to hurt you. Turn away! Now they're looking at us with that. We are going to respond to that. It's the same challenge, it's an even more hideous challenge that we're facing, that you men of all ages are facing. Our founding fathers founded this nation on the belief, the experiment, and they were smart guys. They knew all about Socrates and Athens and that democracy wouldn't work because people are just too, human nature won't float the luxury of democracy. There'd be too much self-indulgence, too much buying of privilege, too much all of that. Our guys saw we had Christianity. Christianity says you don't even get a non-smoking ticket on the big trip if you don't love your neighbor as you love yourself. That's the whole thing. You've got to love God and love your neighbor as you love yourself. The Greeks didn't have any guys that said that. The Greeks had God, but they didn't have any one, and they didn't believe in compassion and self-discipline. Okay, how long have I been going? I've got zero time. No, no. I'll finish up. But that's kind of sad, you know. The brightest guys, the British prime minister, a few years after the revolution, said, you know, the constitution those guys write and the system of government they came up with and the constitution they wrote is the best ever invented by the minds of man, the best political system. And it was based on the hope that the experiment of democracy could float as long as we had enough self-discipline, compassion, based on our religious beliefs. It had to be morality, not political correctness, and Washington and many others said the only place you're going to get that kind of morality is religion. Religion, where you deeply feel, that will tell you strongly enough to behave in a democracy. Well, we had it. We're about to lose it. Our culture did away with it in about the 70s. The government started doing away with it officially and formally in the late 80s and we're now a nation. I passed a bill called the Adolescent Family Life Bill, for example, one of the bills I passed. It said that we're not going to just have the government giving money to Planned Parenthood, which is telling kids to be sexually active or they're not normal, and the way to do that and enjoy it is contraceptives and abortion as an alternative. I took the movie they were using and I showed it to Ted Kennedy. I showed it to Howie Metzenbaum and some other conservatives up there. And it blew their minds. I took it to Catherine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post. I took it to Meg Greenfield, the lovely Jewish lady who was their editorial writer and director. It blew their minds. So unanimously they passed my little bill. We were giving Planned Parenthood $100,000 a year, $100 million, and mine was $30 million. And it said, okay, the girl can get her sex education from her parents with government money. Planned Parenthood, parents, pastor, rabbi, whatever, no mention of contraception, no mention of abortion. You just talk about the things you ought to talk about. And it passed. And it was floating along fine. It did great. There were people out here in Cincinnati, Chicago, everybody took it up. Good people were doing what you think. Well, it doesn't exist anymore because through the federal judges and the Supreme Court, you can't talk about God on something the federal government appropriates money for. That may be changing. John Ashcroft, the Republicans at least got the welfare back. I don't mean to be political. I'm just a guy. They're great Democrats. I don't mean this to be political. But we've got to save this country and restore one nation under God as our basic national principle. I'm leaving. One more. I thank God for you guys. I thank God for this conference. I thank God for the men who formed it. They are leaders. You are leaders. You're leading yourself. You're going to lead your family. And you young men in grade school, you're leaders. Lead. Bring everybody to God.
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