DIBERNARDO, JAMES VINCENT
Name: James Vincent Dibernardo
Rank/Branch: O2/United States Marine Corps
Unit: Armed Forces TV Hue
Date of Birth: 19 October 1968
Home City of Record: Fulton NY
Date of Loss: 03 February 1968
Country of Loss: South Vietnam North Vietnam
Loss Coordinates: 162700 North 1073500 North
Status (in 1973): Returnee
Category:
Aircraft/Vehicle/Ground: Ground
Other Personnel in Incident: none
Source: Compiled by P.O.W. NETWORK from one or more of the following: raw
data from U.S. Government agency sources, correspondence with POW/MIA
families, published sources, interviews. Updated 2000.
REMARKS: 730305 RELEASED BY PRG
SOURCE: WE CAME HOME copyright 1977
Captain and Mrs. Frederic A Wyatt (USNR Ret), Barbara Powers Wyatt, Editor
P.O.W. Publications, 10250 Moorpark St., Toluca Lake, CA 91602
Text is reproduced as found in the original publication (including date and
spelling errors).
UPDATE - 09/95 by the P.O.W. NETWORK, Skidmore, MO
JAMES V. DI BERNARDO
Captain - United States Marine Corps
Captured: February 3, 1968
Released: March 5, 1973
A 16 hour battle was raging as I the officer in charge of the Armed Forces
Radio and TV station and my men tried to stave off the North Vietnamese and
the Viet Cong. Finally after an encounter with several Viet Cong others
appeared and set fire to the house. I was shot in the arm by enemy small
arms fire but shot my way out and ran to a rice paddy. About 50 North
Vietnamese pursued me and with additional wounds from grenade shrapnel I
soon became a guest of the North Vietnamese. I was slapped around a bit by
one North Vietnamese and another took my glasses and smashed them on the
ground. Later the soldiers poured hot iodine on my wounds bound my arms and
fed me rice and some bones either cat or rat.
Then began the long 55 day trek through the jungles of South Vietnam.
Carrying 40 pound sacks of rice on our backs through the rain and with torn
feet the hardships of the trail were so much that we found that the
Communists did not harass us unnecessarily. There was no way to escape on
the march though as a guard was constantly in attendance, besides with no
glasses I could not see ten feet.
Later my men and I were placed aboard trucks and transported for the 11
night journey over the Ho Chi Minh Trail to a jungle camp in a southern
province of North Vietnam When we arrived two of us were put in solitary
confinement with our feet in stocks.
I then met the interrogator for the first time. He spoke English extremely
well, French fluently, and was well versed in American slang. He had the
ability without using physical force to put the fear of God into one by just
saying, "We won't kill you. We'll just make you wish you were dead." One of
their favorite methods was to hold a gun to a prisoner's head. But they were
not after military information in these sessions, they were after my mind.
It began there in the jungle camp in the closet, my solitary confinement
room, and it didn't end until I left the "Little Vegas" complex in the
Hanoi Hilton on March 5 1973. During one interrogation, they mentioned the
NFL to me; I thought they meant the National Football League. I was to learn
quite a lot about those initials - the National Front of Liberation.
At one point an 18 year old Army trooper, who was paralyzed in his feet and
legs, ate a tube of toothpaste. The North Vietnamese demanded an apology. I
helped write that letter, saying that the man was sorry but that if he had
more to eat he would be less likely to eat toothpaste. This infuriated them
and they put the "culprit" on bread and water and refused to give him
toothpaste for three months.
One of my most trying times was a three week stint, fourteen hours a day, on
a seven inch square stool. They wanted me to make a statement about the
anti-war demonstrators. I held out as long as I could. After three years of
this type of interrogation they finally changed their "brainwashing
technique."
How exciting it was to come home, and what excitement to learn that my wife
had given birth to twins shortly after my capture. They were 4 « when I saw
them for the first time and I had not even known that I had two new
additions to the family. Sharen had been pregnant before I left for Vietnam
in October 1967 and one of the first questions I asked my old friend and
escort, Second Lieutenant Tom Kingry, was what she had, a boy or a girl?
Handing me two cigars, he replied, "She had twins, two girls, Susan and Joy
and they're doing fine."
God Bless you all!
November 1996
James DiBernado retired from the United States Marine Corps as a Major. He
and Shen reside in Claifornia.
-----------------------
The Press-Enterprise Riverside, CA
Thursday, February 3, 2000
A HERO LOOKS BACK: Temecula resident Jim Di Bernardo, a POW in Vietnam, has
lost his idealistic view of the war.
Joe Vargo The Press-Enterprise
TEMECULA
Jim Di Bernardo's shooting war came to an end 32 years ago today.
It was the height of the Tet offensive, the communist invasion of South
Vietnam that helped shift American public opinion against U.S. involvement
in the war. Di Bernardo, a Marine lieutenant, was captured during savage
fighting around the former imperial capital of Hue.
What followed was five years of isolation, mental and physical mistreatment
and repeated attempts by communist interrogators to brainwash him.
Di Bernardo was held in a string of North Vietnamese prisons, including the
notorious "Hanoi Hilton," where Republican presidential hopeful John McCain
also was a prisoner.
His war became a personal struggle to survive each day.
Di Bernardo helped organize communications among prisoners, passing notes of
encouragement to injured and demoralized Americans and confounding enemy
attempts to uncover and destroy the network.
Confined in the same cell with an American mangled by a land mine, Di
Bernardo's daily care and pep talks are credited with keeping the man alive.
The years have changed Di Bernardo's perspective on the war.
"When I went to Vietnam, I believed we were there to save the South
Vietnamese people from oppression and aggression," said Di Bernardo, 65, an
insurance agent in Temecula. "Now, my thoughts are that we backed all the
wrong people and caused a lot of misery for the Vietnamese and for
ourselves."
Di Bernardo arrived in Hue in October 1967 to run an Armed Forces Vietnam
Network station.
Rumors of an enemy attack on Hue began to circulate in late January 1968. Di
Bernardo discounted them. A Marine division was just a few miles away and
the Army's vaunted First Air Cavalry Division was also in the area.
But mortar and rocket attacks told Di Bernardo that the war had arrived in
his front yard.
"It was like watching a movie and we had front-row seats," Di Bernardo said.
"Our aircraft came in at treetop levels to bomb and strafe buildings
directly behind us. We were shot at by American gunships, who mistook us for
the enemy. We were tear-gassed. We had no gas masks."
Throughout South Vietnam communist forces launched an all-out offensive that
carried the war to most major cities, including Saigon, where the U.S.
Embassy was attacked. The scale and audacity of the offensive, timed for the
Vietnamese lunar new year, made the military's confident predictions of an
American victory seem hollow. Journalists including Walter Cronkite openly
doubted the ability of American and South Vietnamese forces to defeat North
Vietnam and its Viet Cong allies. College campuses exploded in often violent
anti-war protests.
Di Bernardo and a small force held out for several days. He was wounded in
the right arm and the left hand before being trapped in a house and forced
to surrender.
After his capture, Di Bernardo said, he was trussed up with steel wire, his
arms pinned against his sides so tightly that the marks remained visible for
a year. His glasses were smashed. He was forced to walk barefoot on jungle
trails and frequently stumbled, fracturing his toes so many times he lost
count.
He marched or 67 days to the first camp -- dubbed "the Port Holes" by
prisoners. From there, Di Bernardo moved to other camps equally well-known
among American prisoners -- Farnsworth's Camp, Plantation Gardens and the
Hanoi Hilton. He never met McCain, who was housed in a different part of the
compound.
Prisoners were isolated in their cells and never had enough to eat; many
were ravaged by dysentery and war injuries. In an effort to break him
psychologically, his captors showed him posters of Americans protesting the
war and asked him for his reaction, Di Bernardo said.
His reply: "They're not people I know." Another time, an interrogator put a
gun to Di Bernardo's head. "I could kill you now," he said. Di Bernardo's
response: "That would be the best thing that could happen. The war would
be over."
Fellow prisoner Bill Baird was nearly dead already.
Shrapnel had torn though Army Spc. Baird's spine when he stepped on a land
mine. Four toes were blown off and chunks of flesh as big and as deep as a
soup ladle were gouged out. Dysentery plagued him.
Di Bernardo said he could hardly complain about his condition when he looked
at his cellmate lying helpless.
Reached at his home in Fredericksburg, Ohio, Baird said Di Bernardo cared
for his physical needs -- sharing rice rations, putting splints on his feet
-- and boosted his resolve to live with tough love.
"He told me I could either make something out of the situation or I could
lay there and die," said Baird, 50. "If it hadn't been for him I would have
given up and died. He was like a second father to me. To this day, I'm
grateful to him."
As the war wound down and it became clear that Americans would be released,
Di Bernardo began to write a list of captured Americans.
Eventually, 105 names were listed, along with their dates of capture and
medical conditions. The list, compiled on 15 pages of rice paper smuggled
out of prison, became a reference later used to determine the fate of the
POWs. The document is displayed at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San
Diego. Di Bernardo also made and smuggled out architectural drawings of
several Vietnamese prisons.
Di Bernardo's actions in saving Baird and thwarting his captors' attempts to
coerce his cooperation earned him two Navy commendations. He also is
featured in a training film about how Marines are supposed to resist the
enemy if captured.
President Richard Nixon commended Di Bernardo's bravery as well.
"No words can compensate you for the ordeal you have passed through for your
country," Nixon wrote in a note dated March 8, 1973, five days after Di
Bernardo was released. "The captivity you have undergone for more than five
years required a strength of faith, patience and patriotism which can never
be fully comprehended by others."
After returning from Vietnam, Di Bernardo served as director of public
affairs at Camp Pendleton, El Toro and the Marine Corps Recruit Depot. He
retired from the Marines as a major in 1978.
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