'American idiot' who outfoxed Vietnamese captors with a nursery rhyme

If he acted like an ignorant, uneducated, country bumpkin - and at the same time convinced his captors that he really did fall off a ship and wasn’t a CIA spy or a jet fighter pilot - they would more or less treat him benignly, and at the very least not subject him to the physical and mental torture they meted out regularly to the high-value Air Force, Navy, and Marine flyers who were shot down or crash-landed during combat missions over North Vietnam.’