While serving aboard the U.S.S. Canberra, Douglas Hegdahl was blown overboard in the Gulf of Tonkin and was taken as a Prisoner of War by the North Vietnamese on April 6, 1967. While being held in Hanoi, he memorized hundreds of names of prisoners and was later ordered by his Senior Ranking Officer to take an early release in order to report those names to the State Department, as well as to tell about the horrible conditions and torture that our POWs were going through. He was released on August 5, 1969, and later confronted the North Vietnamese about the treatment of POWs at the Paris Peace Talks. He is the only POW to accept early release under honorable conditions – by order of his superiors due to the importance of the information he had memorized.