The League of Wives

by Heath Hardage Lee

  In addition, the number of POWs captured in Vietnam would ultimately be relatively small compared with those captured in World War II and in the Korean War—and most were officers, not enlisted men. Although there were Army and Marine POWs, most Vietnam War POWs were Navy or Air Force pilots captured after F-4 Phantoms, A-4 Skyhawks, and, later in the war, B-52s were shot down. Handling these sophisticated planes and their equipment required years of training. Most pilots had a college education. Thus, American POWs in Vietnam tended to be highly educated men and career soldiers, not draftees or enlisted men.42

  When men were taken prisoner, the women would begin their journey by running in circles around the Pentagon, trying to figure out whom to talk to and what to do next. Despite this frustration, they believed in their government. They trusted it. Averell Harriman, one of Kennedy’s venerated “Wise Men” of U.S. foreign policy who was acting as the president’s ambassador at large in the State Department, and scores of other government officials, both military and civilian, would soon dispatch soothing letters to the women as the crisis wore on, to tranquilize them. They worried most that the women would became hysterical. What if a male government official had to deal with a crying—or, worse, screaming—POW or MIA wife or mother in their office? God forbid that might happen. The truth was, when confronted with the Vietnam POW/MIA scenario and the women the men had left behind, neither Whiz Kids nor Wise Men knew what the hell to do.

  * * *

  On August 2, 1964, the destroyer USS Maddox reported that the North Vietnamese had fired upon the vessel in the Gulf of Tonkin. On August 4, the Maddox and another destroyer, the USS Turner Joy, claimed that a second attack had occurred. Though U.S. naval commanders could not confirm the second attack, and the situation was murky, President Johnson and his administration used this incident to justify air strikes against the North Vietnamese and officially enter the war.43

  LBJ and his cronies tried to use the war as a political tool: by flexing their muscles against the Communists, they aimed to strengthen their American electoral support. The second Gulf of Tonkin incident was most likely a false alarm, but it presented the justification that allowed the president to escalate the war in Vietnam. For LBJ, it yielded a too-good-to-be-true political opportunity. “A one-time strike on North Vietnam would allow Johnson to continue as the candidate for peace while demonstrating he was neither indecisive nor timid.”44 He quickly ordered the strike, attempting (and failing) to time it with the evening news.

  This “retaliation” resulted in short-term good publicity for Johnson, but it came at a human cost. Lieutenant Everett Alvarez Jr. achieved the dubious honor of being the first naval aviator to be shot down and captured by the North Vietnamese. A few weeks later, Lieutenant Richard C. Sather became the first U.S. naval aviator killed in action over Southeast Asia.45

  As the last American pilot to leave the scene of the incident on August 4, Jim Stockdale was deeply conflicted about what he had witnessed. The air group commander would say many years later, “It was a bastard war from the beginning.” What he saw there, or rather did not see, haunted him for years afterward. The lack of clear-cut evidence of Vietnamese aggression during the second Gulf of Tonkin incident left Stockdale feeling as though the war had been declared under false pretenses.46

  After the Gulf of Tonkin, Jim’s intellectual side began to spar internally with his warrior side. He was a professional soldier but also a trained philosopher with an unshakable ethical code. He realized that policy made in Washington did not always translate into good decisions on the ground. In response to this feeling of disillusionment, the pilot regrouped and formed a new mission. “Before the Gulf of Tonkin incident, I’d seen myself as a shield of protection between my pilots and the North Vietnamese; now I saw myself as a shield of protection between my pilots and McNamara’s Pentagon whiz kids.” After the Tonkin incident, Jim’s biggest worry was that he would be captured and the North Vietnamese would beat a confession out of him that would result in international headlines reading AMERICAN CONGRESS COMMITS TO WAR IN VIETNAM ON THE BASIS OF AN INCIDENT THAT DID NOT HAPPEN.47

  Just over a month after the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, Jim flew his final mission over Vietnamese airspace. On September 9, 1965, he was shot down in his A-4 Skyhawk, ejected, and was promptly captured by Vietnamese villagers. Although Jim’s left leg was broken and his left arm and shoulder were terribly injured, he was still beaten to a pulp. Eventually he was operated on and then surreptitiously driven overnight to the seventy-year-old Hoa Loa Prison, in the North Vietnamese capital city of Hanoi. Here he would join his Naval Academy classmate Jerry Denton and Bill Tschudy; by now, the two had been imprisoned at Hoa Loa for almost two months.48

  This was the same prison that the French had used in the First Indochina War to hold Vietnamese prisoners, and it had a fearsome reputation. Though Hoa Loa was most famous for its pottery, the name Hoa Loa had an alternate meaning in Vietnamese: “hell hole.” The POWs soon decided to Americanize this horrific place, with all their gallows humor, and dubbed it the “Hanoi Hilton.”49

  Being locked up there was like being a guest at the Eagles’ “Hotel California”: You could check out anytime you liked, but you could never leave.50

  Three

  A GREAT SOCIETY FOR SOME, NOT FOR ALL …

  WHEN PRESIDENT LYNDON B. JOHNSON was inaugurated for the second time, on January 20, 1965, his address to the nation mirrored his character: “It was pragmatic rather than poetic, utilitarian rather than inspirational,” remarked the Associated Press. LBJ’s delivery lacked the smooth theatrics and aristocratic cadences of JFK: “It was so slow and deliberate that one critic said it sounded as if the president was dictating to a stonemason.”1 In contrast to Kennedy’s gossamer Camelot, the Johnson administration was clearly earthbound.

  LBJ promised that all Americans would be part of his “Great Society,” where everyone would be a valued part of the national community. Minorities would be respected, immigrants encouraged to rise, the environment protected. It would be a democracy where, he promised, “every man must someday be free.”2

  What about prisoners of war and those missing in action? They were barely on LBJ’s radar at this point.

  And American women? They did not even rate a mention in his speech.

  Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned sex discrimination in employment along with race discrimination. But as the law went into effect, Johnson and his administration just rolled their collective eyeballs. “The sex discrimination part had been tacked on as a joke and a delaying maneuver,” wrote Betty Friedan. “After the law went into effect, the administrator in charge of enforcing it joked about the ban on sex discrimination. ‘It will give men equal opportunity to be Playboy bunnies,’ he said.”3

  This attitude was typical of the time. In this pre-feminist era, women were expected to tolerate discriminatory jokes and innuendos without complaint. Highly educated women like Sybil Stockdale and Jane Denton accepted and embraced the concept that their primary duty was to be a wife and mother. How had these women arrived at that point of view?

  When America was founded, women and men alike were just trying to survive. The defining of roles was of little concern to women initially as they endeavored to keep their families alive in the New World. By the eighteenth century, some women were beginning to think more critically about what their place in society should or could be. After allowing women a period of relative freedom in the pre–Revolutionary War era, American men once again tried to confine them, to categorize them and contain them as much as possible. More leisure time among the upper classes also allowed men more time to write about and define gender roles to their own advantage.

  The American eighteenth-century concept of “republican motherhood” created “an ideology that gave women a political function, that of raising children to be moral, virtuous citizens of the new republic.” Also called moral motherhood, this role did afford women a place in the new republic, although they
were not allowed distinct political roles outside the home.4

  American women’s status in the nineteenth century devolved still further, reducing women (at least those of the upper classes who could afford it) to Victorian goddesses of the hearth whom society decided had no business being anywhere else. According to nineteenth-century lecturer and physician Dr. Charles Meigs, women had “a head almost too small for intellect and just big enough for love.”5

  Beginning in the 1820s, the “cult of true womanhood” gained precedence, reaching its peak after the Civil War. This cult identified four key womanly virtues: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. A woman’s “job” was to act as the spiritual and moral guardian of the family.6 Ideal Woman’s next incarnation evolved slightly: the New Woman, with her pert Gibson girl nose and sporty mien, was more independent. Under the Nineteenth Amendment, women were finally granted the right to vote. Free-thinking “flappers” like Zelda Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker, and Clara Bow dominated literature, pop culture, and movie screens in the mid- to late twenties. Still, society’s collective vision that a woman’s ultimate objective should be marriage and children remained largely unchanged.

  World War II presented a turning point for American women’s history: Rosie the Riveter, the idealization of the can-do American female worker, arrived on the scene. Women were called to work in the factory, just as American women had been called to work on the farm during the Revolutionary War, to fill in for the men who’d gone off to fight. The war economy demanded that women use their brains and muscles for the good of America. But this independent, highly competent working woman would (at least temporarily) disappear as the need for female labor evaporated after the conflict.

  The postwar economic boom of the fifties brought the relative luxury of automatic dishwashers, shiny new cars, and, most important, television. This magic square box updated and then further cemented the vision of women as domestic goddesses. Harriet Nelson, June Cleaver, Donna Reed—they were all Hollywood concepts pitched to and accepted by American consumers. Rosie the Riveter was plucked from her perch in the factory and set firmly into place in the household environment. Instead of her factory denim, she now sported a crisp shirtdress. Her bandanna headband was replaced by bouffant hair set with Dippity-do. This formerly powerful paid worker now stayed home with children and wielded a vacuum instead of a blowtorch. After one step forward, most American women took more than two steps back.

  * * *

  In the fall of 1965, Sybil was completely content. She did not see herself as oppressed, deprived, or downtrodden. She found her role as a mother and wife fulfilling. Her three oldest boys, Jimmy, Sid, and Stanford, were all in school full time—only her youngest, Taylor, was home with her all day, so she was able to do a little tutoring in the afternoons to keep her mind occupied. The only thing she regretted was her husband’s absence. Jim’s deployment would be over in December, she reminded herself. Sybil had always been good at keeping busy: years as a Navy wife had taught her the value of distraction and constant activity, and finding those things was not a tall order with four energetic boys to manage.

  On the afternoon of September 9, 1965, with the boys finally enrolled in school, Sybil accepted an invitation to see Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly! in San Diego—a play she and Jim had seen together in Japan that summer. The songs made her a bit sad as she thought about the romantic time she and Jim had spent together in July during his leave. No children, hot Japanese baths, cocktails! Now the boys were back to school and she was back to her daily routine in Coronado.

  Sybil went home after the play, fixed a quick supper for the boys, and was shortening up the boys’ pants for school at about 9 p.m. when her best friend, Doyen Salzig, suddenly appeared on the stairs. Startled, Sybil asked what in the world Doyen was doing there so late.

  Doyen pulled Sybil close to her and whispered, “Sybil, Jim is missing,” her voice cracking on the word “missing.”

  It was as if Doyen were speaking underwater or in another language that Sybil did not understand. What was she talking about? This made no sense at all. What the hell did it mean, “missing”? Sybil thought. You are either dead or alive. She felt sluggish, as if she were struggling through a nightmare.

  “What do you mean, ‘missing’? Is he dead?”

  “We don’t know, Sybil. His plane was shot down and they think he may have gotten out, but we don’t know. The chaplain is downstairs talking to Jimmy.”7

  Sybil’s reaction was more stoic than she herself would have expected: “No tears gushed forth. No screams of anguish. Just a puzzling sensation of shock that this was happening to me.” Then, later, the panic set in. “I began to shake all over.” Doyen ended up spending the night with Sybil and her boys on the sleeping porch.8

  Then there was the terrible task of explaining the situation to her children. Jim Jr., a high school sophomore at the time of his father’s shoot-down, tried hard to be a grown-up and help his mother. Sid, at eleven, cried his eyes out. Her youngest, Taylor, was too little to understand what was going on.

  Six-year-old Stanford, or “Stan,” was the one whose expression of condolence Sybil would never forget. Stan was a striking little boy with black hair and his father’s big, round blue eyes. He snuck up on his mother quietly one day while she was doing the laundry. Looking Sybil straight in the eye, he said, “Mom, I’m so sorry about Dad.” Sybil thought she might cry but managed to whisper back, “Thank you, sweetheart” as she wrapped him up in her arms along with the laundry.9

  The POW/MIA children suffered from shock and despair just as much as their mothers did. When Jim Stockdale was shot down, his second son, Sid, was about to begin sixth grade. The day in early September of 1965 when he rode his bike to school to pick up the information packet for the first day of classes, “all the other moms were looking at me sympathetically and saying things like ‘Isn’t it sad that he’s here all alone.’”10

  How could Sybil explain to Sid and her other children that their dad might never be coming home? Perhaps all the Stockdales realized this possibility on some level, but it was best to shut the thought out, to lock it up and throw away the key to get through the day.

  * * *

  POW and MIA wives on the East Coast were struggling with the same issues as their West Coast counterparts like Sybil, and experiencing a bewildering silent treatment from the American government. After her Air Force pilot husband, Wilmer Newlin “Newk” Grubb, was shot down in January of 1966, Virginia POW wife Evelyn “Evie” Grubb knew immediately “that our children and I were an unwanted problem for the senior Air Force commanders in the United States. They didn’t appear to have too much training in handling this kind of situation. I was expected to sit down, shut up, keep a low profile, and not bother them with questions.”11

  Some military husbands had the foresight to give their wives power of attorney when they departed for their tours in Vietnam. These wives were luckier than most. Without that (and even sometimes with that), POW and MIA wives could not complete day-to-day financial household management in the absence of their spouses. Some could not draw their husbands’ pay, which accumulated in special accounts while they were held prisoner. Many could not buy or register a car, create and manage a mortgage, refinance, rent an apartment, or buy a house.

  The women needed their husbands’ signatures to do anything on their own. When your husband was locked up in the Hanoi Hilton, this signature was impossible to obtain. If your husband was shot down in the jungle and listed as an MIA, he generally did not leave a forwarding address. Without her husband’s written endorsement, a POW/MIA wife and her family could be denied funds for their basic financial needs. Any legal bills that arose for these families from trying to combat such issues also had to be borne by the women.

  When the Pentagon was asked to comment on the unique problems facing this population, a spokesman nonchalantly replied that these issues were “normal things that must be put up with when a man is missing or captured. Anyon
e with someone missing or captured will hit snags.” This same spokesman advised POW/MIA families, “Don’t write anything that would bring a flood of letters or calls … It would create unnecessary problems.”12

  These two important groups, women and POW/MIAs, were shut out from LBJ’s Great Society. While the men lived in prison cells in Vietnam, their wives were trapped by their own service protocols, endemic societal prejudice, and, worst of all, their own government representatives. Most 1960s D.C. politicos didn’t even bother to hide their disdain: What could women possibly know about war and diplomacy? The ins and outs of negotiation? Their husbands’ fates?

  As it turned out, plenty. By late 1966, the realization was sinking in among the POW and MIA wives that they were low priority on the Johnson administration agenda. LBJ happily appeared in photos with these wives (Smile for the cameras, ladies!), but he avoided meeting with them one-on-one or even in groups to discuss their concerns in depth.13 Sybil realized early on that LBJ couldn’t have cared less about the women and their concerns. “What truly infuriated her … was the Johnson State Department’s benign neglect.”14 This neglect would turn out to be anything but benign, endangering the prisoners as time went on.

  Though the State Department all but ignored the plight of the women, the military assigned a casualty assistance calls officer (CACO) to each POW and MIA family. These officers often acted like surrogate heads of the families. Some were helpful and dedicated, their presence greatly appreciated by certain POW and MIA wives. Dorothy McDaniel, whose husband, naval captain Eugene Baker “Red” McDaniel, was shot down in May of 1966, felt strongly that “Navy casualty assistance was … outstanding, and I was grateful to those who worked so diligently to make my life easier as the wife of a missing serviceman.”15