The League of Wives

by Heath Hardage Lee

  Other wives were not as enthusiastic as Dorothy about their assigned CACO liaisons. Sybil soon informed the Navy about the inadequacies of the system. She felt the CACO officers meant well, but most were too young and clueless to know how to deal with the POW and MIA families sensitively. In September of 1966, she wrote to Captain James Andrews, assistant chief for morale services, warning him, “Don’t forget that when you are talking about CACO’s, you are talking about a group of very nice young men who usually know very little about the Navy. I don’t for one minute think that regular solicitations by a CACO could begin to take the place of a periodic letter from Admiral Semmes and Company.”16

  Sybil was urging the Navy to make the wives a priority, not an afterthought. They deserved attention from the top brass, but this was not the treatment they were receiving. The women were often perceived as an annoyance by many in the military—hysterical females who just needed a shoulder to cry on now and then.

  Even worse than the CACOs’ general lack of experience was the seeming indifference some of them displayed toward the wives’ legal, financial, and business problems. Some of these officers actively fought the women’s right to make any decisions. Evie Grubb was appalled by her Air Force CACO officer’s behavior after her husband, Newk, was shot down in January of 1965. “From the outset, [the CACO officer] adopted an attitude of suspicion and obstruction. It was as though his mission was to protect Newk from me and our children, as if we were the enemy, and he was on a mission to save Newk from us.”

  Although Evie had power of attorney, her CACO officer continued to question her right to access Newk’s pay, and he was stunned to know that she had had any say about the couples’ savings plan. How could he not realize, Evie wondered, that many military spouses had to manage family finances while the men were gone on long deployments? “I could not believe I had to get his permission to handle our money!” Evie fumed.17

  Some of this attitude may have stemmed from experiences in the Korean War. There were instances among the Korean POWs of men who returned home to find that their wives had spent all their pay and wanted divorces. Protocols were then put in place to try to prevent this from happening again.18 As Vietnam War POW and MIA wives like Evie found, these good intentions based on that earlier war were often misplaced and could hobble a POW or MIA family’s finances.

  Even as the wife of the highest-ranking Navy POW, Sybil Stockdale still had to fight hard just to get her husband’s paycheck. After Jim was shot down, she trusted that she would get the money soon, but she quickly became concerned. Her mortgage was due (thank God she had bought the house during Jim’s previous deployment) and she still had no paycheck from the Navy. Her friend Doyen’s husband, Bud, also a Navy man, encouraged her to address the Navy sooner rather than later about the issue: “You can put up with that, but you don’t have to.”

  After her conversation with Bud, Sybil threw down the dishes she was washing (she did not have a dishwasher yet) and, still covered with suds, called her legal officer, Commander Luddy, to inquire about Jim’s paycheck. When she asked if he had heard anything about this matter, the commander nonchalantly said they had not been able to get Cleveland (Navy pay was processed out of there) on the phone.

  By now Sybil’s heart was pounding and her hands were shaking with fury. “I’ll tell you how you can get Cleveland on the line,” she told him, as she recalled in her diary. “You can get up at 5 o’clock in the morning and call them before the lines are busy … It won’t hurt you to get up early for once. I doubt my husband is getting much sleep these days.”

  The officer began to protest, saying there must have been some misunderstanding, but he was no match for Sybil’s rage and indignation:

  You’re right, there’s been a misunderstanding, and in my opinion, it’s between you and your duties as a U.S. Naval officer … I’ve had enough of being backed into a corner and patted on the head waiting for you to get Cleveland on the line. I’ll be fair though. This is Friday. I’ll give you until Monday noon to get my financial status completely straight. If you can’t handle it by then, I’ll call Admiral Semmes, and see if he can get through to Cleveland on the wire.

  Commander Luddy called Sybil on Monday at 9 a.m. Her financial status had been resolved.19

  * * *

  On Friday, April 15, 1966, something happened that improved Sybil’s morale “1000%.” As she was leaving the house to do errands with her youngest son, Taylor, the mail arrived. As she flipped through, it seemed at first as though there was nothing but circulars and junk that day. Then her heart stopped as she recognized something. Hold on a minute, she thought. That handwriting looks familiar. She looked closer and realized it was her husband’s. The envelope bore stamps from Vietnam and a postmark that read “Hanoi.” Then she discovered that there were not just one but two letters from Jim in the stack. Sybil hurried to a friend’s house with Taylor to read the letters, just in case they contained bad news. On the contrary, she found out Jim was alive and well in a detention camp for captured American pilots somewhere in Vietnam.

  One letter was dated December 26 and the other February 3. These relatively long missives indicated that Jim had been injured when his plane was shot down. The solitude was trying, he said, and he often dreamed of his family and their eventual reunion.20 Even so, Sybil was ecstatic. She wanted to scream and jump up and down. “How incredible to get those letters from him out of the blue. How wonderful to know he was truly alive. How I thanked God for having watched over him.”21

  Sybil reported the letters to Commander Hill at the local Navy intelligence office and gave the staff her assessment of the contents. The San Diego–based intel specialists, impressed with her commentary, referred her along to Commander Bob Boroughs at the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), in Washington.

  What was her and Jim’s favorite song?

  A bit taken aback, Sybil hesitated, then reeled off a list:

  “Near You.”

  “Que Sera, Sera.”

  “Putting On the Style.”

  And finally, though she was embarrassed to admit it, “Fry Me a Cookie in a Can of Lard.” Sybil thought that title would at least lighten things up a bit, but Boroughs did not react.

  At the end of the conversation, Boroughs asked Sybil to come see him in D.C. to talk more—all expenses paid by the government. Thrilled, she planned to go see him in early May.

  The evening of May 1, Sybil got another call, but this time it wasn’t Boroughs. It was a commander from Naval Air Forces’ Pacific headquarters, warning Sybil that Jim’s capture had finally been announced. An article would run in the morning’s paper, possibly with a photo of Jim.22

  In the middle of that cold and foggy night, Sybil went to await the arrival of the San Diego Union on the Coronado dock. The dock lay just across from the Mexican Village restaurant, a popular Navy hangout where she and Jim always enjoyed going for their enchiladas and potent margaritas. She had continued to have girls’ nights out with her POW/MIA wife friends here, at a familiar place where they could drown their sorrows. She even took her boys there sometimes for a quick bite. It was a total dive, but it reminded her of better times.

  The fun and camaraderie of those evenings, contrasted with the horrible scenario she was trapped in now, seemed surreal. She felt like she was in a spy movie, but with no training and no idea of the intelligence she would receive. Sybil sat in the car shivering, waiting for the 2 a.m. boat while her oldest son, Jim, remained at home with the younger children. The newspaper didn’t arrive on that shipment, so she had to go home and come back for the 4 a.m. delivery.

  When Sybil finally had her hands on the paper, she saw a photo of Jim, unshaven, looking determined but wary.

  The headline blazed in front of her: “Hanoi Claims S.D. Man Captive.” Sybil later recalled that she was “relieved it was less horrible than it might have been. Very cautious about the press.”23

  Just in case Sybil had decided otherwise, it seemed the Navy was going to mak
e sure that she was cautious in her public response. The article in the San Diego Union noted that “Mrs. Stockdale, at her home yesterday, would not comment, a family friend said.”24 When she read the article, Sybil was puzzled—who had the family friend been?

  The “family friend” was almost certainly the Office of Naval Intelligence acting in accordance with the dictates of the LBJ government. Right now, Sybil and all her friends were terrified to speak to the press. As they had been told over and over, they might endanger their husbands and put their lives in jeopardy by speaking to the media. All the prisoners’ wives could do for now was lie low, do what the American government commanded, and keep quiet.

  Four

  WIVES OR WIDOWS?

  JANE DENTON WAS ABOUT to see her husband speak again after more than a year of separation. She had received a call from a Naval Intelligence officer based out of the Pentagon, Commander Bob Boroughs. A special broadcast would appear on the national evening news that night, he warned her. It was imperative that she tune in. Jane and her seven children dutifully gathered around the television that night, Mother’s Day, May 8, 1966, anxiously awaiting whatever was to come. Watching the news with them were Jerry’s father and stepmother; two men who had been on the flight detail with Jerry when he was shot down, Bill Salada and Bill Bowers; their wives, Betsy and Kay; and Janie Tschudy.1

  Suddenly, Jeremiah “Jerry” Denton appeared in front of his family on the screen. He looked forty pounds lighter than when they’d last seen him. He seemed dazed by the bright camera lights. His oldest son, Jerry III, who was twenty years old at the time, recalled his mother’s horrified reaction.

  “When she saw his haggard look, my mother swore, ‘Those bastards!’ That shocked me. I had never heard my mother use a word like that in my life. We all yelled something, or cried, or sat in shocked silence.”2

  What was Dad doing with his eyes? the Denton children all wondered. He kept blinking violently. He looked as though he might be drugged. Jerry told his younger siblings that the Vietnamese had probably dragged their dad up from a dark dungeon and that the light might now be blinding him. The children were scared and mystified by their father’s odd behavior.

  Jerry’s Japanese interviewer continued with his leading questions, attempting to get the American prisoner to betray his country on television, but Jerry slowly seemed to gather his strength. He clearly and firmly stated, “I don’t know what is happening but whatever the position of my government is, I support it—fully. Whatever the position of my government is, I believe in it, yes sir. I’m a member of that government and it’s my job to support it and I will as long as I live.”3

  Jane and the older children knew instantly that these words might be his last. “I was horrified and haunted for years after, at the thought of what consequences he would pay for having done so,” Jerry III said. 4 It would mean serious trouble for his father, for sure. Perhaps even execution. Despite their terror and fear for his safety, the family was so proud of Jerry, and so astonished at his courage, that they could barely speak.

  The only glimpse of Jerry that Jane was permitted to see that night was her husband’s zombie-like figure on television, a ghost of the larger-than-life naval aviator she had long known. This image would be seared into her brain and into the nation’s consciousness for years afterward. But the question remained: What did Denton’s strange appearance and behavior that night really mean? What happened next took Jane and her children years to fully understand, but it would eventually make Jerry Denton a national hero.

  On May 1, the night before Jerry was forced to film what his captors had hoped would be his confession, he had managed to communicate about the situation with his friend and fellow POW James Robinson “Robbie” Risner, who was in a nearby cell. Both men had already faced horrific torture and repeated attempts at Communist indoctrination at the hands of the North Vietnamese. Risner advised Denton to try to render the interview harmless. But Denton decided to do more than that with his interview opportunity.

  “I’ll go,” Denton told his fellow POW. “I’ll blow it wide open.”5

  * * *

  By 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson was utilizing attack aircraft such as A-6 Intruders, F-4 Phantoms, and A-4 Skyhawks to bomb the enemy. American POWs and MIAs in Vietnam were, consequently, those who had been sent on dangerous bombing missions like Jerry and Jim.6 In these early days of the Vietnam conflict, Jane, Sybil, and their fellow POW and MIA wives—on both the East and West Coasts—trusted that the U.S. government would bring the men back quickly and safely. They had all been warned by the military to shun the media. Sybil was terrified to think that the press might swoop in and try to coerce her to speak publicly about her family’s plight.7

  Originally, Sybil felt “somewhat reassured by remembering that in a briefing about guidelines if your husband was taken prisoner, the commander said our government believed that the men being held were well-treated. If I kept quiet, the Navy felt that the Communists would continue to treat the men in a humane and civilized way. I felt sure our government had reason to insist on this ‘Keep Quiet’ policy.”8

  Official military guidelines for Vietnam-era POW and MIA wives were stark and not very comforting. The women were not allowed to speak with anyone outside of their immediate families about their husbands’ personal history and military service. They couldn’t write to Communist leaders or heads of state to plead for their husbands’ release. Neither the Department of Defense nor the Department of State would share much additional information.

  Above all, the American government admonished the women never to speak to the press. The government warned POW and MIA wives that any information they gave the newspapers, TV, or radio might be used against the men. These dictates might be given in person or they might arrive by a Department of Defense letter or telegram. Adding to the devastating nature and sometimes impersonal delivery of these admonitions was the ominous suggestion that accompanied them: “Any violation might result in harm to a wife’s husband.”9

  After receiving these terrifying warnings, these wives were instructed to go about their daily lives as if nothing had happened. They were told to go to the grocery store, to church, and to school to pick up their children with smiles plastered on their carefully made-up faces. With their bouffant hairdos perfectly set, the women had to present a good front to the world while living in limbo. The women and their children were condemned to a purgatory for months, or even years, in which they did not know where their husbands and fathers were, or if they were dead or alive. And by some superhuman fortitude, these military wives and families were supposed to keep this situation TOP SECRET!

  Of course, the “keep quiet” policy was a farce. Within the naval aviation community, word spread fast about what was going on. The men had gone to school together, at Annapolis or elsewhere. They had trained together and gotten drunk together (probably more than once). When a high-ranking officer—a group commander like Jerry Denton or Jim Stockdale—went down, everyone in his home community, as well as those in other naval aviation communities, heard about the loss sooner or later.

  This familiarity between Navy pilots extended to their wives and families as well. The women tended to stay at their home base while their husbands were deployed, which facilitated widespread support when needed in their local Navy community. The main “home port” naval aviation bases were Coronado, Lemoore, and Alameda Naval Air Stations on the West Coast, and Naval Station Norfolk and Pensacola Naval Air Station on the East Coast. This handful of towns played host to most Navy pilots and their families.10

  In the early spring of 1966, POW wives all across the country were praying that their husbands’ North Vietnamese captors were following the tenets of the Geneva Conventions. These women lived in a constant state of high anxiety: Were their husbands being starved? Tortured? Interrogated for government secrets? In dire need of medical care? Those whose husbands were listed as MIA were just praying that their spouses were alive. Many women in t
his quandary, particularly the MIA wives, were asking themselves: Are we wives, or are we widows?11

  What the women feared—and, on a gut level, strongly suspected—was that the Third Geneva Convention, “Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War,” first ratified by the North Vietnamese12 in 1949 then again in 1957,13 was being ignored in the Vietnamese prisons. This part of the Geneva Conventions had established guidelines for humane treatment of war prisoners that included decent food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. Communication with those outside the prison camp was to be allowed at regular intervals. Prompt next-of kin notification of capture and imprisonment was also a firm requirement.

  The visceral feeling among the POW wives that all was not well had just been graphically confirmed on television by Jerry Denton’s eerie interview. Military families were startled by Denton’s scarecrow-like appearance. He looked malnourished and possibly drugged. Dorothy McDaniel, whose husband, Red, was also a Navy pilot stationed in Virginia Beach, remembered seeing the broadcast: “I thought he looked horrible and the film made me even more worried about sending Red off to war.” Red had another perspective: “I thought he looked pretty good considering what he had probably been through.”14 Both realized almost immediately that Jerry was being badly treated.

  What Naval Intelligence would soon confirm, thanks to this broadcast and other bits and pieces of intelligence, was that the downed American aviators were being treated as war criminals, not as prisoners of war. They would later learn that the men were put in leg irons for up to sixteen hours a day, stretched into cruel contortions by rope torture, and beaten to a pulp on a regular basis to force “confessions” from them. They were frequently isolated from their fellow American POWs for months, and sometimes for years.15

  Though Jane, her children, and the American public did not realize it at the time of the broadcast, in May of 1966, Naval Intelligence operators almost immediately grasped what Jerry Denton’s strange blinking meant.