Jeremiah Denton Jr., Vietnam POW and former U.S. senator, dies at 89

Jeremiah A. Denton Jr., a retired Navy rear admiral and former U.S. senator who survived nearly eight years of captivity in North Vietnamese prisons, and whose public acts of defiance and patriotism came to embody the sacrifices of American POWs in Vietnam, died yesterday at a hospice in Virginia Beach. He was 89.

The cause was complications from a heart ailment, said his son Jim Denton. Denton was a native of Alabama, where in 1980 he became the state's first Republican elected to the Senate since Reconstruction.

Denton lost a re-election bid six years later. But he remained widely known for his heroism as a naval aviator and prisoner of war, and particularly for two television appearances that reached millions of Americans through the evening news during the Vietnam War.

In the first, orchestrated by the North Vietnamese as propaganda and broadcast in the United States in 1966, he appeared in his prison uniform and blinked the word "torture" in Morse code -- a secret message to U.S. military intelligence for which he later received the Navy Cross.

In the second television appearance, during Operation Homecoming in 1973, he became the first freed POW to step off a plane at a U.S. base in the Philippines. Through tears, he voiced gratitude for having had the opportunity to serve his country under "difficult circumstances."

Denton was shot down south of Hanoi on July 18, 1965.

Over the next seven years and seven months, Denton was incarcerated in prisons including the infamous Hoa Lo complex, also known as the Hanoi Hilton, and the facility dubbed "Alcatraz" that was reserved for the most willful resisters.

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He was subjected to four years in solitary confinement. Living in roach- and rat-infested conditions, he endured starvation, delirium and torture sessions that at times lasted days.

Once, Denton was ordered to submit to an interview with a Japanese TV reporter. He said the North Vietnamese tortured him before the meeting.

In the footage, looking into the camera lights as he speaks, he blinks his eyes hard and repeatedly, in a manner that to an untrained observer might have seemed involuntary -- and that in Morse code spelled t-o-r-t-u-r-e.

At one point, the reporter asked him what he thought about the war.

"Well, I don't know what is happening," Denton replied. "But whatever the position of my government is, I support it fully . . . I am a member of that government, and it is my job to support it, and I will as long as I live." Another torture session followed.

Denton was among the highest-ranking officers to be taken prisoner in Vietnam and retained his full sense of responsibility toward his men. He recalled devising a communication system involving coughs, sniffs and sneezes. Such noises, because of the men's poor health, was not readily discerned by the North Vietnamese.

Jeremiah Andrew Denton Jr. was born on July 15, 1924, in Mobile, Ala. He attended more than a dozen grammar schools and lived in hotel rooms as his family followed his father's jobs in the hospitality industry. His parents later divorced, and he credited his mother with instilling in him a deep Catholic faith.

In Washington, Denton was most outspoken on issues related to the preservation of the nuclear family, a goal that he sought to pursue through a $30 million bill to push chastity among teenagers.

Denton once reflected on his survival in North Vietnam. "If I had known when I was shot down that I would be there more than seven years, I would have died of despondency, of despair," he told Investor's Business Daily. "But I didn't. It was one minute at a time, one hour, one week, one year and so on. If you look at it like that, anybody can do anything."