The Party Dolls

The tiny shutter door to Room 6 popped open much earlier than usual, before the morning clanger had rung. In a sign the Party might be over, the guard, nicknamed Ratface by the Americans, barked at them to get up. Ratface was not a Sunday substitute turnkey, he was a regular Annex guard also known to some Americans as Magoo, because he shared his nearsightedness and thick glasses with the 1960s American TV cartoon character.

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“He was quite brutal,” Meyer said. “For a while he carried a rubber strap, like a fan belt, he’d cut from a tire. If somebody did something he didn’t like, he’d swat them right across the face with that. The only good thing about that was he wasn’t very coordinated as far as hitting someone. He couldn’t hit very hard. He jumped up when he hit someone, and with his feet off the ground, he didn’t have much weight behind his swing.”

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Ratface/Magoo summoned Heiliger to the shutter. Heiliger was room-responsible.

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“It was light out. It was early morning hours, maybe 5:30 or 6,” Heiliger recalled. Ratface ordered Heiliger to go around the room, lifting mosquito nets, even as some of the Americans were emerging from theirs. “Finally, I’d pulled up others that had people in them, and I came to John’s. [Ratface] asked me, ‘Where are they?’"

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"I said, ‘They left.’”

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The shutter snapped shut.

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“When they opened up our door, I don’t think they knew who was gone,” Baugh said. “I think they saw all the evidence in the camp that somebody was missing.”

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Dramesi and Atterberry had moved tiles and left the rope on the roof of their cellblock, and left Atterberry’s metal loop and one of the camouflage blankets on the Annex wall.

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“Whatever we did, it didn’t work,” McCuistion said. “And that’s when it hit the fan.”

Baugh continues. “Next thing you know, front door opens. All the camp heavyweights, the commander, et cetera, are there. They look around for holes in the floor, some other way out. They left.”

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A guard returned with the room’s daily ration of cigarettes. At the time, Baugh had again quit smoking in what had become an on-and-off habit, but he sat down and chain-smoked three on the spot.

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McGrath recalled a similar scene in Room 5. “There’s a bang on the door. There’s a guy there and he wants us all up for a head count. Very carefully, he counts us. And behind him, there’s about five [NVA] people standing there. So, we knew at that moment, they were caught already.” Meaning, the plot had been exposed, even if Dramesi and Atterberry remained at-large.

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The camp leadership inspected Room 5 as they had Room 6. (Trautman would later learn from other rooms that every Annex cell had been similarly swept.) As soon as they left, Trautman went to the wall and began tapping to Room 6. “I anxiously tapped on the wall, ‘Did they go?’ I get the frightening words back: ‘Hot poop red.’ That was the code word, ‘escape in progress.’ When I got that response, an icy shiver went down my spine.”

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Room 5 was not allowed into their courtyard for their morning cleanings and bucket-dumps until probably around 10 a.m., Trautman said, hours later than usual. They immediately began trying to spread the code “hot poop red” throughout the Annex. “We disseminated that to the rest of the camp as soon as possible,” he said. But in a decision he would later regret, Sunday morning was the first time Trautman sent any word of escape plans over the wall to the Americans in the Zoo—not even the meaning of “hot poop red.” Americans in “the Zoo did not know what that meant,” Trautman said. “They knew nothing. That was my decision.”

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McGrath said he sent word to the Zoo on Trautman’s behalf, using hand code to tell Red McDaniel in the Zoo that two men escaped. It is unclear whether he sent their names or any other information. “That was the first time SROs in the Zoo had heard because [we in] the Annex always thought it would never happen.” McGrath said he signaled that it may be their last communications for a while.

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Back in Room 6, shortly after the initial sweeps by senior camp staff, Meyer said Ratface returned. “Ratface came in and looked at that [ceiling vent] hole in disbelief, then locked the door and left. It was about 30 minutes later they came and got Bill and Don.”

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A group of guards shoved Baugh and Heiliger from Room 6, across the courtyard to the one building that did not house prisoners, the same guard and interrogation building adjacent to the outhouse that the party dolls used to get over the wall.

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“When we were walked up to the interrogation, we could see it,” Heiliger said. The party dolls had left a clear trail from cell to wall. The rope and missing tiles were still obvious on their roof. Atterberry and Dramesi’s footprints and drag marks (likely from the chogi pole) crossed the muddy soil from their cellblock to the outhouse.

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Any hope that they’d be gone more than a day before they were missed was gone before they got over the wall.