The League of Wives

by Heath Hardage Lee

  After their seaside visit to Atami, they decided to journey to the mountains near Hakone. They lodged at the famous Fujiya Hotel. Sybil remembered Jim holding her “with extra gentleness and closeness as we danced to the haunting strains of ‘Beyond the Reef.’ If life could stand still forever, I thought, I’d have it do so now.” All too soon, the Stockdales found their leave together coming to an end.

  A few days later, Jim checked in with his fellow officers at the officers’ club. After a few beers with his buddies, they revealed that his Naval Academy classmate Jerry Denton had been shot down and captured just a few days earlier. A melancholy mood descended over the club and the revelry quickly subsided. Denton was an experienced, highly skilled naval aviator. Clearly, it was not just the young, hotshot pilots who were getting shot down.

  Before Sybil flew home, Jim bought her a beautiful strand of pale blue baroque pearls as a Christmas gift. The couple agreed that he would bring them home to her at Christmas, when his deployment ended. As Sybil departed for her flight home, the couple said one final “I love you” and walked away from each other. They had mutually agreed not to look back.14

  * * *

  In Virginia Beach, Jane continued to deal with the news of Jerry’s shoot-down. She didn’t wait long—only eight days—to head to Washington to see what else she could learn from the top. Jane was one of the first POW wives to use her D.C. connections to obtain additional information. Her college friend Kitty Clark, who worked at the State Department as a congressional liaison, provided a conduit for Jane to find out more about her missing husband.15 At this point, only a small number of aviators had been shot down, but the numbers would continue to steadily increase as the American bombing campaigns in Vietnam intensified.16

  Despite her visit to Washington, Jane was the last person on earth who wanted to “rock the boat” or make any kind of waves in her Navy community. She was a southern lady from a genteel family in Mobile, Alabama, who avoided attention. Jane had been raised with the adage that a lady’s name should appear in print three times only: at birth, marriage, and death.

  Jane and Jerry were very much a couple of their era in 1965. They each played their assigned roles just as society expected them to. She had left Mary Washington College, in Fredericksburg, Virginia, two years early to marry Jerry at the U.S. Naval Academy. From this time on, Jane was a devoted, dutiful Navy wife. Her husband gave her high marks for her positive attitude: “From the day I married her,” Jerry once said, “she was an ideal Navy Wife, and was later elected President of many Officers’ Wives Clubs. She put up with many common Navy Wife hardships with a smile and was a tremendous boost to my morale.”17 Jane had played the role of traditional, conservative wife well, pleasing her more dominant husband. But the thought of losing Jerry was enough to set a fire under Jane. She couldn’t just sit there and accept the role of the helpless military wife—she was capable and resourceful. She had to find out what else she could do to get him back home.

  On Monday, July 26, Jane drove to Washington with her old friend Doris Beatty. She and Jerry had met Doris and her husband, Navy doctor Ralph Beatty, when the couples were stationed together at Villefranche-sur-Mer, in the South of France. In 1956, Jerry and Ralph joined forces to create the “Haystack concept,” which made aircraft carriers more difficult to find during times of combat. Thanks to Haystack, Jerry and Ralph achieved a measure of fame and respect among their peers. This experience together had created a bond between the men and subsequently between their wives. As a fellow Navy wife, Doris knew better than most the dangers Jerry faced and the fallout Jane was dealing with on the home front.18

  Despite the seriousness of the situation, Jane made sure to get her hair done before her meetings at the State Department. Appearances were crucial. Her hairdo was lacquered firmly in place when she arrived for her meetings. More important, she made and organized pages of her notes, preparing her questions in advance.

  On Wednesday morning, Jane went to work with Kitty, who had facilitated numerous introductions on her friend’s behalf. Jane was pleased that Ambassador Leonard Unger, the ambassador to Laos, was most considerate and interested in Jerry. She wrote her questions and his answers down in her notebook. She also saw Walter Jenkins at the State Department, an old U.S. Naval War College friend of her husband’s.

  The next day, Jane was escorted by Captain Julian Lake to the Pentagon, where she met with Admiral Hare, second in command in the Judge Advocate General’s office. This meeting led to a visit to the Bureau of Naval Personnel (BuPers), where Captain Bob Baldwin had scheduled appointments for Jane. She met with Captain Higgins, Commander Jenkins, and Mr. Miller in the Casualty Assistance office. The men showed her more releases of information concerning Jerry and Bill, answered her questions, and discussed the situation further with Jane. They day was capped off with a short but sympathetic meeting with Vice Admiral Benedict “B. J.” Semmes Jr., the chief of BuPers.

  After this exhausting round of interviews at the Pentagon, Jane retreated to the Beattys’ home in Washington. Chaplain Leon S. Darkowski came to the Beattys’ that night to visit with Jane. Coincidentally, that very week, he was escorting a priest from South Vietnam around D.C. “I wonder if we could help your husband through my contact?” suggested Darkowski. Jane’s heart leapt—this might be an additional way to gather information, she thought. However, the Navy quickly discouraged this plan. As Jane later reported in her diary, “The chaplain checked on this idea, and it was decided that such a move might do more harm than good.”19

  Jane was determined to follow the U.S. government rules to the letter. She was terrified of deviating from protocol in any way. The priest from South Vietnam represented a tempting opportunity for information gathering, but it was too far off the beaten path for her to risk it.

  Jane returned on August 10 for another series of meetings, beginning with one at the American Red Cross headquarters. In foreign wars, the International Red Cross was (and still is) authorized to act as a conduit for communications between prisoners of war and their families back home. The Geneva Conventions of 1949 also defined the rights and privileges of prisoners of war. Jane expected the men’s North Vietnamese jailers to abide by these rules.20 But as Bill Tschudy would explain years later, “the Red Cross was forbidden to set foot in North Vietnam” by the Communists.21 The signs were there, even at this point, that the Red Cross was not making any inroads on behalf of captured Americans.

  When Jane met with Samuel Krakow, director of the Office of International Services for the American Red Cross, and Winston Henry, adviser to the vice president on Red Cross matters, she was immediately struck by how ill at ease the two men seemed. She later wrote, “We sat on a sofa, they seemed uncomfortable—for all their impressive titles, they were pretty helpless.” They showed her letters that had been written on behalf of Jerry and Bill to the International Red Cross: predictably, there had been no response from the North Vietnamese.

  Jane next met with Henry Hall Wilson, LBJ’s liaison to the House. He was no more helpful than the Red Cross reps and less sympathetic. Wilson warned her, in his condescending manner, “If you try pushing too many buttons, you can mess up the switchboard.” Jane wrote later that he had instructed her to go home to her family and “stop trying to punch buttons myself because the best qualified people would be doing it for me.”22 This bitter pill, meant to tranquilize Jane, only fired her up more. Still, she took Wilson’s dubious advice and left. Jane wasn’t yet sure what rules to follow, and she still felt that Jerry would want her to follow Navy guidelines to the letter. She decided that for now, adhering to military protocol was all she could do to help her captured husband, but she wasn’t going to wait forever.

  * * *

  In 1965, Vietnam was still seen by most Americans as a faraway war in a small country that could not possibly pose a significant threat to the U.S. military. At this point, many pilots going into the conflict saw a Vietnam deployment as an opportunity to try out state-of-the-art
F-4 Phantom jets and A-6 Intruders. Some U.S. Navy and Air Force pilots considered their Vietnam tours to be joyrides from which they would emerge triumphant. This assumption would prove tragically incorrect.

  By 1966 the number of POWs was increasing due to LBJ’s intensified bombing campaign, Operation Rolling Thunder, which involved constant airstrikes. That year saw 105 officers shot down, and their numbers continued to grow. They joined 102 of their fellow servicemen in captivity, some of whom had been held since 1961 in the filthy Vietnamese prison system.23

  Despite this scenario, both Jim Stockdale and Jerry Denton deployed to Vietnam never suspecting the extent to which the country would turn out to be a black hole for pilots, an endless war, and a political quagmire for the United States. Stockdale and many other pilots flew dozens of bombing missions over Vietnam unscathed. Like soldiers in the American Civil War, most American pilots believed this war would be short and over in a matter of months.

  Why were American military men sent to this Southeast Asian hinterland to begin with?

  This war in Vietnam between the Vietnamese and outside powers wasn’t the first. The French had fought unsuccessfully against a colonial rebellion by the North Vietnamese in what was known as the First Indochina War, losing spectacularly at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

  When the French were not able to reestablish control of Vietnam, U.S. president and former general Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans that if North Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh and his new regime were allowed to grow unchecked, and if one Southeast Asian country fell to Communism, so might other countries surrounding it. This “domino theory” became the foreign policy base from which the U.S. government would operate for decades to come.24

  Despite their awareness of the bloody French defeat in Vietnam, Americans unhesitatingly plunged into the Vietnam abyss for round two. The Vietnam War would prove to be the longest war in American history until the U.S. conflict in Afghanistan began in 2001.25 In September of 1954, the United States and its allies (France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Pakistan) created SEATO (the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization), joining forces with the Republic of Vietnam (i.e., South Vietnam) against the Communist forces of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), controlled by Ho Chi Minh, and those of the Viet Cong (VC), based in the South.

  U.S. involvement in the region escalated in the 1960s during President John F. Kennedy’s administration. Though the United States had strongly supported South Vietnam’s first president, Ngo Dinh Diem, since his 1955 inauguration, the American government began to recoil from the regime as the political situation in South Vietnam deteriorated. On May 8, 1963, Diem’s soldiers fired on Buddhist protesters at Hue, killing eight people, six of them women. Buddhist monks burned themselves to death in protest. Diem’s minority Catholic regime brutally repressed and openly discriminated against those from the Buddhist majority. After repeated warnings from the U.S. government, JFK, his ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., and others in the JFK cabinet decided Diem was on his way out. In early November of 1963, the United States facilitated his demise by handing him over to the South Vietnamese military.26

  According to historian Luke Nichter, “What we did was to provide important signals to the South Vietnamese, who did want Diem toppled and gone—and some thought killing him was the only way to make sure he stayed gone—as well as different types of logistical support … We effectively provided the gun, but they pulled the trigger. We were an accomplice to murder, but not the murderers.”27

  Consequently, it was found that JFK himself had “engineered a cover-up [of the Diem coup] and ordered incriminating cables at the State Department, the CIA, and the Defense Department destroyed.”28 When JFK was assassinated that November, his vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson, not only inherited the presidency—he also inherited the problematic Vietnam conflict, with all its bloody, complex diplomatic history.

  * * *

  Former U.S. national security adviser, U.S. Army lieutenant general, and military historian H. R. McMaster claims that LBJ inherited a dysfunctional military structure created by his predecessor. When Kennedy took office in 1961, he dramatically altered President Dwight Eisenhower’s National Security Council (NSC) structure. The result was that the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) had a much diminished voice regarding national security matters in both the Kennedy and Johnson governments.

  This would prove to be a fatal flaw in decision-making going forward. “Kennedy’s structural changes,” McMaster wrote, “his practice of consulting frankly with only his closest advisors, and his use of larger forums to validate decisions already made would transcend his own administration, and continue as a prominent feature of Vietnam decision-making under Lyndon Johnson.”29 Both JFK and LBJ were wary of accepting input from the Joint Chiefs due to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and the narrowly averted nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis.30

  The preeminent issue on the Johnson agenda from 1963 on was the outcome of the 1964 presidential election. What mattered most to Johnson was winning. “He wanted to be viewed as a ‘moderate’ candidate, so he resolved to take only those actions in Vietnam that bolstered his image.”31 Vietnam was an issue to keep under control, off the table and out of the American public’s mind as much as possible.

  LBJ’s Republican presidential challenger, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, repeatedly accused LBJ in the press of not being tough on Communism and being soft on national security issues.32 Johnson’s close advisers, like “Whiz Kids” Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, and McGeorge Bundy (all holdovers from the Kennedy coterie of intellectuals),33 agreed that their president could not seem weak or indecisive on the Vietnam War issue—not for the sake of American soldiers, but because he needed to keep his poll numbers up.

  Johnson’s secretary of defense, McNamara was the former president of the Ford Motor Company and one who, in his own words, came to the Pentagon with “a limited grasp of military affairs and even less grasp of covert operations.”34 A superb number cruncher, McNamara tended to ignore gut feelings, military intelligence, and military experience in favor of pure data. Historian David Halberstam characterized McNamara’s approach to the Vietnam War as “the quantifier trying to quantify the unquantifiable.”35 Human emotions were taken out of McNamara’s equations in favor of a “just the facts” approach. This would prove a fatal mistake.

  This lack of interface between civilian and military in Washington extended to and encompassed those on the domestic military front. The wives, mothers, and other family members of lost military men were seen not as bereaved individuals who needed comforting but as the stuff of public relations nightmares, and potential liabilities for the POWs. Janie Tschudy remembered how State Department officials would act when they saw the POW or MIA wives in Washington. “Oh, no, here they come! They did not want us to rock the boat.” At the beginning of the conflict, most American government officials were patronizing, placating, or just plain disinterested in the women’s plight.36

  As the POW and MIA wives would soon find out, the government departments they appealed to for help during the Johnson era were suspicious of one another and divided into military and civilian adviser camps. Instead of working together to help the bereaved families, American bureaucrats seemed to be focused on proprietary political wars against one another, making it difficult to obtain information about the missing or imprisoned men. Former deputy assistant secretary of defense Richard Capen remembered, “There was always friction between the State Department and the Defense Department. This got worse under Johnson as the Vietnam War went on.”37

  This problem again had its roots in the Kennedy administration. During JFK’s presidential tenure, “a relationship of mutual distrust between senior military officials and civilian officials” had developed.38 Under President Johnson, the divide continued to grow. The two groups and their respective departments began to build their policies in separate silos.39 Many Vietnam P
OW wives, like Janie Tschudy, would later witness this split firsthand: “The war was run not by the military but by Washington,” noted Janie. “The State Department and elected officials who had to please their constituents.”40

  Janie, Jane, and, later, other POW and MIA wives were dropped without warning into the alien landscape of Washington, much as their husbands were in Vietnam. The women had to negotiate a complex and secretive political climate that spoke in what would at first sound like a foreign language to them. Military and government doublespeak filled the women’s ears with reassurances that the government knew exactly what was going on with the men, but at this stage information on the situation was scarce and incomplete. What would later be called “mansplaining” was almost always how men in power communicated with women. It would not even have been remarked upon or noticed. At the start of their predicament, POW and MIA wives accepted the men’s word—and that of their government—without too many questions.

  And most didn’t care enough to do much about the ladies’ plight. As POW wife Debby Burns Henry explained, unless you had a family member who was a POW or MIA and the issue directly affected you, Vietnam was just a faraway war that no one cared to know much about.41 The country preferred to remain in denial and easily could, with the issue being so unpopular and so removed from American daily life.