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.