Douglas Hegdahl
Douglas Hegdahl was born in 1946 in Clark, South Dakota. He enlisted in
the U.S. Navy on October 25, 1966 and was trained as a Postal Clerk. On
April 6, 1967, the 20 year-old Seaman Apprentice was knocked overboard
by the blast from a 5-inch gun mount from the USS Canberra (CAG-2) in
the Gulf of Tonkin, three miles off the coast of North Vietnam. He swam
until he was picked up several hours later by North Vietnamese
fishermen and made a prisoner of war. Hegdahl was one of three POWs who
were released from North Vietnam on August 5, 1969 as a propaganda move
for the North Vietnamese. Because he had a phenomenal memory that
enabled him to memorize the names of the more than 250 POWs then
imprisoned in North Vietnam, he had been ordered by his Senior Ranking
Officer to take an early release in order to report the names of POWs
that the State Department may not have known about, as well as the
torture that our POWs were going through in North Vietnam. He was
honorably discharged from the Navy on July 1, 1970.