During the mid-1970s the league did little to slow down the speed with which the government began perfunctorily changing MIA status to “presumed finding of death” (PFOD). In December 1976 a House panel determined, later with President Carter's agreement, that no live MIAs remained in Southeast Asia. In March 1977 a presidential commission traveled to Hanoi and subsequently agreed with a House select committee that the Vietnamese were acting in good faith to “repatriate” the remains of all American MIAs. The government provided wives and family members with no explanation for these decisions. Because they were made by our government, we were expected to assume they were trustworthy.
These announcements only confirmed my suspicions that Frank had been used as a pawn. I became convinced that our government would make no more real efforts to recover him—alive or dead. And I realized how powerless I remained.
The navy changed Frank's status to PFOD on October 31, 1977. The telegram arrived at my door in Oakland along with a group of young trick-or-treaters. The following year Frank's family and I held a memorial service for him at the National Cemetery in Wilmington, North Carolina. By 1978 the Pentagon had declared all MIAs to be PFODs, except for Colonel Charles E. Shelton of the air force, who remains listed as a POW for symbolic reasons. His wife took her own life in October 1990. She left no explanation, but friends suggest that her suicide is a result of battling about POW/MIA issues for over twenty years. To me, her action seems as symbolic as her husband's status.
In 1983, President Reagan announced that the MIAs were a high priority for his administration. He sent delegations to Vietnam, and 150 sets of remains were identified and returned. The military's Joint Casualty Resolution Center at Barbers Point in Hawaii, established in the 1970s, increased its efforts to recover remains and make identifications. In 1985, Vietnam turned over the remains of another five persons believed to be MIAs; in 1988 the first joint American-Vietnamese team uncovered two more sets of MIA remains.
But no one had asked me for additional information about Frank, and by the time another twelve silent years had gone by, I felt sure that I would never know his exact whereabouts. Consequently, I was unprepared for the telephone call I received from the navy in December 1989 asking me if I “happened to have” a copy of my husband's dental X rays.
“No … Why?”
“Well … uh … we have a piece of a jawbone and some teeth that we think may have belonged to him.”
My anger at the unfeeling language obscured my initial shock. How could this stranger choose his words so carelessly, ignoring their possible effect upon me? But his tone of voice indicated that he was not so unfeeling as his choice of words implied. He explained that Frank was only one of several men who were being considered as the possible source for a box of remains that the North Vietnamese had turned over to American authorities in June. I suggested that he contact my husband's family. Then, as I had during the previous twentythree years, I tried to remain calm as I confronted this latest unexpected reminder of Frank and of my own irretrievable loss.
On January 22, 1990, exactly twenty-four years from the day I married Frank, the navy notified me that the remains had been positively identified as his. (The bones included those of the torso, legs, and a part of the lower jawbone that seemed to be broken. No bones were available from the rest of the face and head or the feet and hands.) If I regarded the pathologists' reports as “inconclusive,” I would have the “option” to arrange for someone else to review the paperwork and remains to provide “quality assurance” of this decision.
A few days later, members of Frank's family and I met with military officials to review their evidence. They explained that the government research group had reached their decision based on a combination of evidence. First they looked for the names of all of the men who were listed as having disappeared in the area of Dien Chau district, Nghe Tinh province, the area from which the bones had been recovered. Using a section of the pelvic bone to determine the age of the person at death, they were able to narrow the possibilities even more. By measuring the torso and leg bones, they could estimate the person's height. Because of the prominent muscle insertion in the bones, the pathologists were certain that the person had had an unusually muscular build. Frank's medical records show that he had a forty-two-inch chest, a thirty-one-inch waist, and a twenty-two-inch thigh and could military-press two hundred pounds; he had begun lifting weights when he was in high school, an activity that he had continued. Using information from the computer database of missing persons' dental records, the researchers narrowed the possibilities to three men. And while they were able to obtain dental X rays on all of the men except Frank, none of the X rays fitted the dental work remaining on the lower jawbone. Although no X rays of Frank's teeth were available, the dental charts showing his fillings and earlier extractions matched those of the jawbone. So he filled the description in every possible way, as did no one else who had disappeared within a fifty-mile radius of the site.
With the recounting of each explanation, I was asked if I wanted to see photographs of the bones or medical records substantiating each claim. At first I could only respond, “I don't know yet. Wait a minute, and I'll let you know.” Then I would tell myself that I had to look or continue to doubt their judgment. Each decision to look at the evidence became a little easier, and I managed to get through the afternoon without embarrassing any of us by becoming hysterical. Frank's family told me later that if I had not agreed to look at the photographs, they would have done so; they also felt we needed to look to be able to know.
At first I did wonder if the remains were really Frank's. But because I had put no pressure on our government since the early 1970s, its decision to assign them to him, rather than to the husband of a more insistent wife, seems to serve no ulterior purpose. The government had nothing to gain by returning Frank's remains, which made its analysis more convincing to me. I can imagine no other motivation. Frank and I were just lucky.
Frank appears to have died in the crash of his plane. The fragmentation of the bones and the broken jaw make this explanation the likeliest. The bones were encrusted with dirt, since Vietnamese bury the dead directly in the ground without a coffin and then, approximately three years later, after the flesh has rotted away, dig up the bones and place them in a smaller grave. This process also partly accounts for the missing smaller bones. When this ritual was explained to me, it was described as something the Vietnamese do because of their “superstitions” about the dead. I couldn't help thinking that we characterize our own practices in such matters, really no more civilized, as “respect for the dead.”
I was touched that the Vietnamese had gone to such trouble to bury someone who had been bombing their country. Their humane customs are partly responsible for my having Frank's remains for reburial. And I was beginning to discover how grateful I was.
Frank's was one of ten sets of MIA remains identified and returned to the U.S. mainland for interment in 1990. (As of 2004, the DOD has recovered theremains of more than 400 MIAs.) They were shipped to Travis Air Force Base and in late February brought home to North Carolina, where our families held a private, quiet interment in the National Cemetery in Wilmington. Knowing the whereabouts of Frank's remains has helped me begin a healing process I was helpless to effect earlier. Unconsciously, I had been unable to forgive myself for “deserting” him, for failing to negotiate the labyrinth of government policies and foreign terrains. My earlier insistence that his final whereabouts did not matter had been dishonest. I had been diminishing the importance of what I could not change. Now I can draw comfort from envisioning his grave site, from having a specific physical location that automatically comes to mind when I think of him. His flesh had already become part of Vietnam, but his bones no longer lie—like those of Thomas Hardy's Drummer Hodge—un-coffined and unmarked beneath “foreign constellations.”
“That's Ocay XX Time Is on Our Side”
GEOFFREY NORMAN
Actual American participa
tion in the Vietnamese War lasted close to a decade, and as long as that national trauma continued, no aspect of it earned more dispiriting attention than the plight of the POWs in North Vietnamese prisons. Most of what the public knew came through propaganda photographs of downed airmen, who often used their moment of worldwide notoriety to send covert messages. They would paste “Merry Christmas” posters to a wall, holding them with their middle fingers; make a series of exaggerated bows to their captors, as if brainwashed; or blink the word “torture” in Morse code for Communist movie cameramen. They were, in fact, tortured and, in some cases, murdered. The majority were downed pilots, whom the North Vietnamese described as criminals, treating them as such. Later, when the Communists recognized how much value U.S. negotiators attached to the POWs, they began to consider them as hostages, pawns in an excruciating diplomatic chess game that went on for four and a half years. To give them up would have meant giving up North Vietnam's most potent bargaining chip.
The number of POWs was long open to debate. In 1969 the North Vietnamese admitted to holding only fifty-nine. That fall, in a gesture to one of the American peace delegations that regularly visited Hanoi, the North Vietnamese released a seaman named Douglas Hegdahl, an ammunition handler who had been blown overboard by a gun concussion two years earlier. What his captors didn't know was that Hegdahl had memorized the names and ranks of all the POWs he had encountered in a prison nicknamed the Plantation: His mnemonic device was to set them to the tune of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” His superiors ordered him to seek amnesty. Now the Defense Department knew there were at least 250 men still alive.
Late in the 1980s, fifteen-odd years after the last POW had returned home, the writer Geoffrey Norman interviewed many of them. Some had been imprisoned for five or six years; one, eight and a half. It was the longest time Americans had ever been held during a war. What Norman learned, and what he later described in a remarkable little book, Bouncing Back, was anything but dispiriting. If, as Ernest Hemingway is supposed to have said, guts can be defined as grace under pressure, then theirs is a story of heroism beyond measure. To be sure, these men belonged to a combat elite. Their average age was thirty-two, and most were career officers, air force captains or navy lieutenants, and college graduates, some of whom were working toward advanced degrees that they had been forced to interrupt for war service. They had taken special training in survival and captivity. The highest-ranking officers established and maintained a strict code of discipline and solidarity among the POWs that their captors tried, with little success, to break down with torture, long periods of isolation, and psychological abuse. Mostly, though, the POWs survived by learning to fill years of empty hours with improvised mental and physical activity, trying as best they could to salvage a youth that seemed to be slipping away.
In the excerpt that follows, Norman details the life POWs led in the Plantation. The year was 1968, though chronology existed for these men mainly as a string of small incidents of determination and passive resistance pursued in semidarkness. The title, “That's Ocay XX Time Is on Our Side,” was the ironic epigram tapped out from cell wall to cell wall, using a twenty-five-letter grid (the letter C could be substituted for K). The POWs had adapted the basic matrix that generations of convicts had employed. Communication was the key to staying sane. But there were other constants of prison life to be dealt with, which Norman details. How to make a plaster substitute to seal a rat hole—and, when that failed, what common Vietnamese vegetable would keep the rodents at bay. How to make a toilet pail comfortable. How to exercise without being caught—which might lead, best case, to being locked in irons or, worst, a beating or a session of rope torture. How to play bridge when a potential foursome was in different and not always adjacent cells.
The POWs were held in eleven prisons in the North (which were at least an improvement over the prisoner cages used by the Vietcong in the South). Four were in Hanoi—the most notorious was Hoa Lo, the “Hanoi Hilton.” Six were within fifty miles of the North Vietnamese capital, and one was on the Chinese border. The POWs gave them names, hardly out of affection, such as the Zoo, Skidrow, Rockpile, Briarpatch, Alcatraz, and Dogpatch. From 1965 until l969, conditions were the dismal standard that Norman describes here. Then, in the latter year, Ho Chi Minh died; for some reason, still unexplained, the new leadership of North Vietnam eased up on the severity of treatment. Perhaps it was the delayed recognition, which the peace negotiations brought home, that the Americans were more useful alive than half dead.
GEOFFREY NORMAN has written thirteen books, including Bouncing Back, from which this excerpt is taken; Alabama Showdown, an examination of the football culture in that state; The Institute, a history of the Virginia Military Institute; and Two for the Summit, a narrative of climbing mountains with his daughter, including Aconcagua in Argentina, the highest mountain in the world outside of Asia. Norman is a former contributing editor to MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History and a frequent contributor to a number of periodicals, notably The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Vermont.
ON MARCH 31, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson told the American people that he was suspending bombing of North Vietnam above the 21st Parallel. At the end of his speech, he also announced that he would not be running for reelection. Johnson had been defeated by the North Vietnamese; he was quitting and going home. It remained to be seen if the U.S. prisoners of war, mainly airmen who had been shot down, would be so lucky.
The news was broadcast over speakers in every prison camp. And when there was nothing said about their release, many of the POWs drew the darkest conclusion. In a camp called the Plantation, on the outskirts of Hanoi, Lieutenant Commander Richard Stratton, the senior ranking officer, said to the three other men in his cell, “If we weren't part of some deal—no more bombing in exchange for our release—then we are going to be here for a long time. Probably until they start bombing again.” Stratton's prediction was accurate. He and the others would spend five more years in North Vietnam.
While Hanoi was no longer being bombed, the air war continued in the Panhandle of North Vietnam, and new shootdowns arrived with the unwelcome news that the war was still going on. There were no negotiations yet and no reason to believe that peace and repatriation were at hand.
A single rail line ran outside the Plantation, just beyond the back wall of the old building that the men called the Warehouse, which had been divided into cells. In his cell, designated Warehouse One, Stratton and his cellmates could lean a pallet bed against the wall, climb the ladderlike studs that held the boards together, and look through the gunports at the passing trains. Even after Johnson's decision to halt the bombing of Hanoi, the passing cattle cars were full of young men in uniform on their way to the fight. More than any information from recent shootdowns or the small seeds of truth amid the propaganda of the camp news, this was the most vivid proof that the war was not winding down.
Guards still came to take prisoners out for interrogations, but these increasingly became what the POWs called “temperature quizzes.” Instead of being pumped for military information or pressed for propaganda, they were asked how they were getting along and how they felt about their captors and the war. Most of the POWs maneuvered to avoid head buttings. They answered vaguely and were eventually returned to their cells. They began to suspect that in many cases the quizzes were merely a pretext for interrogators to practice their English. Still, to see the door open and the guard point his finger at you was a frightening experience.
There was no way of knowing, when you left the cell for the walk up to headquarters, if you were in for a temperature quiz or something a lot more serious. Delegations were still coming into Vietnam for tours; prisoners in all the camps were still being pressured to make statements, sometimes with the promise of early release; punishments were still being inflicted on men caught violating camp rules. In short, the weeks and months that followed the Tet Offensive of early 1968 were not better by any objective measure.
The P
OWs began psychologically digging in, adjusting to the long haul. Most were in their twenties or early thirties. A few were barely old enough to have voted in one election before they were shot down. Some were fathers of children they'd never seen; husbands of women they had lived with for only a few weeks. It seemed increasingly possible—even probable—that they would be middle-aged or old men before they left Vietnam. Their survival now included facing this hard reality. Somehow, they had to find ways to fill those years, to salvage something from their youth.
At all of the POW camps in North Vietnam, communication between prisoners was strictly forbidden. Roommates managed to communicate without being overheard, but a man could not shout through walls or windows, or leave messages, or try in any other way to make contact with fellow prisoners in the camp. Men were thrown into solitary, locked in irons, hung by ropes, and beaten when they were caught trying to communicate.
The Cold War Page 45