Tortured PoW survived to become a staunchly conservative US congressman

‘‘I could not believe a body could endure such excruciating pain and remain conscious.’’ Johnson on his torture in the ‘‘Hanoi Hilton’’

On the night of April 16, 1966, Sam Johnson was flying his 25th mission over Vietnam when his Phantom II fighter jet, loaded with napalm, was hit by enemy fire. An engine caught fire. The 35-year-old Texan was forced to eject, parachuting into the jungle with a broken back, broken arm and dislocated shoulder. He was captured by North Vietnamese soldiers and taken to the infamous Hoa Lo Prison, better known as the ‘‘Hanoi Hilton’’, where he was incarcerated for the next seven years.

Johnson, who has died aged 89, spent half that time in solitary confinement in a unit for 11 of the most defiant US prisoners known as the ‘‘Alcatraz

Gang’’. He occupied a tiny, windowless cell whose lights were never turned off. He lived on the edge of starvation, was routinely tortured and subjected to mock executions. He was put in leg irons and his captors blasted recordings of American peace protests.

‘‘I could not believe a body could endure such excruciating pain and remain conscious,’’ he said. At times he fell asleep ‘‘thinking it would be OK if I never woke up again’’. It was ‘‘a place so dark and desolate it could only be described as hell on earth’’.

He survived with the help of his faith and his fellow inmates, notably a future Republican senator named Jeremiah Denton, who blinked the word torture in Morse code during a North Vietnamese propaganda broadcast. Denton taught him how to communicate by tapping on their cell walls with tin mugs. Later he shared a cell with John McCain, another future US senator.

Johnson was finally released in 1973. He weighed less than 57 kilograms and had a permanent limp and disabled right hand. Like Denton and McCain, he parlayed his experiences in Vietnam into a political career. He served for 28 years as one of the most conservative members of the US House of Representatives, a staunch champion of the military and fierce critic of backsliders.

He denounced Bill Clinton’s draft avoidance during the 1992 election, pointing out that, as a young Rhodes scholar, Clinton visited Moscow while Johnson was ‘‘sitting in a PoW camp in Vietnam eating fish eyes and pig fat’’.

He disagreed with McCain on various issues, including his support for normalising relations with Vietnam, and backed his fellow Texan George W Bush, who also avoided service in Vietnam, against McCain in the contest for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination. ‘‘I happened to be with McCain for the last year and a half over there in Vietnam,’’ he told a Bush rally. ‘‘I know him pretty well. I can tell you, he cannot hold a candle to George Bush.’’

Four years later he rounded on another Vietnam war hero, US Senator John Kerry, Bush’s Democratic challenger in the 2004 presidential election. Kerry had turned against the Vietnam War in its later stages and testified about US atrocities there. Johnson named him ‘‘Hanoi John’’ and accused him of ‘‘aiding and abetting the enemy’’. Still, there were limits. He rushed to defend McCain when US President Donald Trump mocked his Vietnam service because he spent much of it imprisoned. He said Trump’s comments were ‘‘not only misguided, they are ungrateful and naive’’.

Samuel Robert Johnson was born in San Antonio, Texas. He grew up in Dallas and earned a degree in business administration from Southern Methodist University, where he met his wife, Shirley Melton. They married in 1950 and had three children.

He served in the Korean War, flying alongside Buzz Aldrin, and wrote in his 1992 autobiography, Captive Warriors, how much he enjoyed dogfights. ‘‘It was what I did best. I liked seeing the enemy – battling against another pilot eye to eye.’’

He later became an instructor at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, and a member of the elite Thunderbirds aerobatic team. He was sent to Vietnam in early 1966.

In 1971, after five years of captivity, Johnson found a tiny roll of microfilm embedded in a gumdrop sent by his wife in a food parcel. From that he learnt of the Son Tay raid, a failed attempt to rescue PoWs from another camp. ‘‘We knew then that our country had not abandoned us,’’ he recalled.

He flew home to a hero’s welcome and in 1979 retired from the air force with the rank of colonel. He returned to Texas and set up a construction firm.

In 1984 he was elected to the Texas legislature and in 1991 he reached the US Congress, where he won re-election 13 times. He helped to pass the 2003 Military Family Tax Relief Act, which cut taxes for servicemen and improved death benefits for their families. He opposed a Democratic timetable for withdrawing US troops from Iraq in 2007, arguing that ‘‘Americans want to win the war . . . not leave with our tail between our legs’’.

His wife died in 2015. By the time he stood down as a congressman in 2019 he was the oldest member of the House of Representatives, as well as the last Korean War veteran and last former Vietnam PoW left on Capitol Hill. – The Times

Sam Johnson pilot/politician b October 11, 1930 d May 27, 2020