The League of Wives

by Heath Hardage Lee

  Dah, dah-dah-dah, di-dah-di, dah, dit-di-dah, di-dah-di, dit. It was Morse code for “torture.”16

  Pat Twinem, Bob Boroughs’s assistant at Naval Intelligence at the Pentagon, viewed the Denton film along with Boroughs and many others there before the ABC broadcast. Decades later, Twinem recalled with raw emotion the immediate reaction he and his fellow officers had upon watching it:

  “We just cried.”17

  Their worst fears regarding the POWs were real.

  * * *

  Just days after the Denton interview aired, Sybil was on her way to Washington to meet with Commander Bob Boroughs—the same man who had warned Jane about Jerry’s Mother’s Day television interview. Sybil had talked to Boroughs on the phone days before, but she was still puzzled by his interest in her. What could she possibly offer the government that they didn’t already have?

  What Sybil did not realize at this point was that she could be a crucial government asset. Being Jim Stockdale’s wife made her the wife of the highest-ranking Navy POW. Intelligence officials desperately needed a link to the prisoners, someone smart, a quick learner, a potential collaborator in the fight to save the men. The intelligence officials had identified her for just this purpose. She could be a covert tool of the American government, they figured, if she would cooperate.

  More important than her cooperation, though, was that she possess the “right stuff,” the same bravery and confidence a Navy pilot like her husband had to have to survive in hostile territory. That part was still to be determined. Right now, Sybil thought, she didn’t know if she had the strength to do anything but make it through each day.

  The day after Sybil landed in D.C., she arrived at the mall entrance to the Pentagon for her arranged rendezvous with Boroughs. She wondered idly: Would he look like a spy? What would a spy even look like? Then she saw him.

  He was not a spy in the James Bond mode. This secret agent was not wearing a tuxedo or bringing her a dry martini, as Sybil might have hoped. Instead he was inconspicuous, wearing a striped suit rather than a uniform, to blend in with the crowd. He looked to be about five foot nine, with blondish hair and a receding hairline. Boroughs possessed a reassuring, calm manner that immediately put Sybil at ease.18 Despite his serious tone on the phone, his gray eyes seemed to contain a mischievous glint.

  Robert Sams Boroughs Jr. was a southerner, born in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1925. A skinny seventeen-year-old with a crooked grin, he enrolled in the Navy Reserve as an apprentice seaman in 1943. Through the Navy, he attended the Georgia School of Technology beginning in 1943 where he earned his B.S. By 1945, he was appointed an ensign in the Navy Reserve. He was a veteran of both World War II and the Korean War. He showed an early aptitude for intelligence work, with many of his superiors noting his talent in this area.

  Boroughs was trained in air intelligence, security of classified matter, national security, and many other facets of intelligence tradecraft. He became a lieutenant in 1951, a lieutenant commander in 1956, and a commander in 1961 in the Navy Reserve. He consistently scored top marks in his classes and received numerous military commendations and awards. His background in air intelligence and weapons analysis was highly sought after by the Navy.

  By October of 1962, Boroughs was deep into intelligence work at the Pentagon. He was acting as an intelligence duty officer, heading up the Targeting of Intelligence Requirements and the Coordinating Section of ONI as well as the Targeting Unit for Air Warfare Intelligence. His job plate was already overflowing when he met Jane, Sybil, and the other POW wives and families. Scenarios with American POWs and MIAs in Vietnam were just beginning to unfold. This Navy Reserve commander was about to become a key player in the drama.19

  Boroughs’s job at the Pentagon brought him into frequent contact with POW and MIA families. He could see and feel the purgatory they were all in on an almost daily basis. Boroughs had observed the runaround the women were experiencing, and, unlike most of his peers, he also noticed how smart and capable these wives were. He had a particularly good head for thinking out of the box, finding creative solutions to difficult problems. He loved puzzles of all sorts.20 The POW puzzle and how to solve it would prove to be Boroughs’s biggest challenge. He connected the dots early on that the wives might be the missing link.

  After he picked up Sybil at the mall, Commander Boroughs did not waste a minute of her time. He had urged Sybil to meet first with representatives in the State Department. Boroughs’s assistant, Pat Twinem, escorted Sybil over to her first meeting with Philip Heymann, an assistant to Averell Harriman, ambassador at large in charge of POW matters. Sybil almost went ballistic when they arrived at the appointment to find two staffers reading over Jim’s letters to her from Vietnam. Sybil was taken aback by what she considered a total invasion of privacy. She recalled, “I had my conversation with Mr. Heymann and heard lots of bla bla bla about what the U.S. State Department was doing about the POWs. When I got back to Boroughs office, I lit into him but good about letting my letters get over there and put him on notice that one more mistake like that and he’d never hear from me again.”21

  After that mishap, Sybil would send copies of the letters directly to Boroughs’s home address in Arlington.22

  Perhaps the State Department visit was meant to show Sybil what Boroughs already knew: that the department was operating as a separate silo. It did not want interference from ONI at the Pentagon or anyone else on POW issues. A collaborative approach was frowned upon. Twinem and Boroughs were no fans of Harriman, about whom Twinem noted, “He didn’t interact with us or Naval Intelligence.” Twinem also lamented that there was “too much competition between departments. We had less to do with the State Department than anyone else.”23

  Sybil and the other wives would find Boroughs to be the straight shooter they had been searching for in a sea of government bullshit and bureaucrats. He would never tell them more than he was permitted to, but he would tell them what others would not: the truth. Boroughs would soon become known as “Uncle Bob” among the POW wives for his kindly demeanor and willingness to be honest with their families.

  The commander was also a bit of a rogue agent who would go over, above, and around if needed, using his government contacts and friends in other departments to get the best results. Twinem noted their team approach to problem-solving regarding the POWs: “We would meet often with contacts in other agencies like the CIA and DSA to share info on the POWs and MIAs. Not with the State Department, though!”24

  After Sybil had calmed down from her disastrous meeting at State, Boroughs got down to real business. He asked Sybil if she would consider working with him to pass secret messages along to her husband in prison. All those questions Boroughs had asked Sybil on the phone about songs she and Jim both liked now made sense: Naval Intelligence would translate the couple’s personal history into symbols for covert communication. “That sounds dangerous,” Sybil gasped. “What if he gets caught?”

  “He’d be on his own,” Bob replied calmly. He advised Sybil to think long and hard about covert communication and her involvement in it. It was a critical decision, and not one she should jump into without serious reflection. If Jim were caught, he would surely be executed on the spot. Working covertly with Naval Intelligence on such a dangerous mission could mean the difference between life and death for Jim and the other POWs. Sybil’s decision had to be made carefully, but soon.25

  * * *

  By July of 1966, even more evidence of American POW mistreatment presented itself; this time it was the North Vietnamese themselves who inadvertently alerted the world to this fact. Sybil and her four boys were at Sunset Beach, Connecticut, that July, per their usual routine. She, Jim, and the children had always gone there every summer to visit her parents at their beach cottage. One hot evening, as Sybil sat on the seawall watching a particularly gorgeous sunset, she was startled to see her parents rushing toward her with concerned looks on their faces.

  They had just watched the evening news, whi
ch showed grim-faced, malnourished POWs being forced to march through the streets of Hanoi. The news commentator had talked about the possibility of the men being tried for “war crimes.” Though her father had not seen Jim in the footage, he described what they had just witnessed on TV.26 As Sybil would find out years later, Jim did not participate in the march: he was locked up in solitary confinement. The North Vietnamese did not want Jim, a senior officer, to spend any time with his men. Instead they continued to torture him for information while he was isolated from his fellow POWs.27

  The North Vietnamese had filmed the march on July 6, and it was broadcast on American television a few days later, when Sybil’s parents saw it. Fifty-two American prisoners were put on public display and marched through the streets of Hanoi. The men were handcuffed, beaten, and led through hostile and violent crowds, who attacked some of the men during the march. By some estimates, the North Vietnamese who lined the streets of the city that night numbered 100,000.28

  Though the men were “guarded” by Vietnamese soldiers with bayonets, the angry mob attacked the prisoners repeatedly, hitting Jerry Denton in the groin and pushing fellow naval aviator Robert H. “Bob” Shumaker into a brick wall, rendering him unconscious. Despite this brutal treatment, Denton reminded Shumaker and the other prisoners, “You are an American! Hold your heads up and show your pride!”29 Shumaker later remembered thinking that the prisoners “were not going to make it.” He counted himself lucky that he was knocked out—when he awoke late that night in his cell, it was to the sound of the screams of the other POWs, who were being tortured.30 All the men sustained head and facial injuries, “nursing loosened teeth, broken noses, blackened eyes, and various bumps, bruises, and lacerations.”31

  The North Vietnamese Communist captors were constantly attempting to “break” the American prisoners, to turn them against their own government and military. Then, they felt, they could use the American POWs as political pawns and instruments of propaganda.32 Jerry Denton, his copilot Bill Tschudy, Bob Shumaker, Everett Alvarez, Porter Halyburton, Robbie Risner, and many other POWs forced to participate in the Hanoi March made sure this approach backfired.33 Denton’s “screw you” Mother’s Day broadcast, coupled with the POWs’ military bearing during the Hanoi March, conveyed their unwillingness to be turned.

  While not planned by the POWs, the march also helped the men’s chances of release. It showed the world both the brutality and the illegality of prisoner-of-war treatment in North Vietnam. In the wake of Denton’s television appearance and the march, television and newspapers became the greatest allies of the POWs and their wives. Once the film and photos from the Hanoi March surfaced, the North Vietnamese treatment of the POWs was widely condemned all across the globe. Secretary-General U Thant of the United Nations, Pope Paul VI, British prime minister Harold Wilson, Indira Gandhi, and many other world leaders called for this maltreatment to stop immediately.34

  World leaders also spoke out against the notion of a “war crimes” trial for the POWs, as the North Vietnamese had earlier threatened. Soon after, LBJ warned of consequences that would follow if any such trial were held. Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Averell Harriman worked behind the scenes to reach a diplomatic solution. On July 24, North Vietnamese president Ho Chi Minh announced, “There was no trial in view,” backing away from his original plan.35

  Jerry Denton correctly predicted to the North Vietnamese that the march would backfire. The Hanoi government’s attempt at producing a film to be used in their “psywar”—psychological warfare—against the American enemy created an enormous international backlash. “The organizers’ intent was to show cowed Americans slinking cravenly through the streets of Hanoi before the jeers of a victimized but orderly populace. What they got instead was footage of manacled prisoners comporting themselves with admirable dignity and courage against an unruly mob.”36

  Jerry, Jim, and most of their fellow POWs had yet another card up their sleeve in their resistance plan against the North Vietnamese. They possessed special skills and training that could mean the difference between life and death for them in the prison camps. As noted earlier, naval aviators flying into combat zones were required to attend SERE school, based on the experiences of Korean War veterans who had been held as POWs. President Dwight D. Eisenhower prescribed this training for all first-line carrier pilots.

  As such, Jim attended SERE school twice, first in the San Diego mountains in the late 1950s and then again right before he deployed to Vietnam. He spent a week in the wilderness learning to survive and a week in a mock prison learning how to resist his captors. The SERE training was created within the Code of Conduct, which reminded POWs that if they were captured, the American chain of command remained intact within the prison walls.37

  Once Jim was shot down in Vietnam, he, Jerry, and the other senior POW officers realized that what they had been taught in survival school had to be adapted to a new sort of enemy, much different from the one the country faced in the Korean War. In Korea, American captives had learned that if they could hold out and not crack in the first month or two, their jailers would put them aside as a waste of time and leave them alone.38

  By the time of his May 1966 filmed interview, Denton also knew the game was not a traditional one. Though he was not taught specifically to use his eyelids for Morse code, he was taught in SERE school to use any methods necessary to survive, evade, resist, and escape. Any hope hinged on the men’s ability to outsmart this new enemy, who was not going to play by any established rules of warfare.

  A different approach was clearly required on the home front as well. Sybil saw this almost immediately. With Bob Boroughs’s help, she would become the first trainer, administrator, and public relations director in the POW and MIA wives’ version of survival school. But the first obstacle she had to overcome to communicate with the outside world was that of her own government.

  Five

  A RELUCTANT SORORITY

  SYBIL, JANE, AND THEIR fellow POW/MIA wives continued to get the runaround when they visited Washington, desperately trying to find out more information about their husbands.

  Fortunately, the women soon gained a powerful ally in Robert F. Kennedy, brother of slain president JFK, former attorney general of the United States and now a New York senator, who urged further investigation of the POW/MIA issue. The result was the creation of the Interdepartmental Prisoner of War Committee in April of 1966. This group comprised one representative each from the State Department, the CIA, the Joint Chiefs, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). By May 18, a government dictate designated Averell Harriman, a longtime friend and ally of RFK’s, as “the single spokesman for the government on all PW matters.”1

  Despite vivid confirmations of POW mistreatment in the Hanoi March footage in July, President Johnson and Ambassador Harriman did not act. They had known about incidents of abuse for months by the time Sybil made her way to D.C., but they decided to keep this intel under wraps. What Johnson and Harriman feared most was that POW wives and families might go public with the story. If the media knew about the POW situation, they rationalized, their chance for a diplomatic solution would be lost.

  Harriman repeatedly shut down Department of Defense proposals to share evidence of the POWs. In one 1966 Interdepartmental POW Committee meeting, he declared that “no useful purpose would be served by publicizing torture.” Further, he felt that any acknowledgement of this abuse would further taint the diplomatic atmosphere, making negotiations more difficult. “We did not advertise the cruelty we knew existed there because we didn’t want to make propaganda. It was a conscious decision not to go public. We didn’t use it to stir up the American people.”2

  President Johnson, such a powerful force in politics at home, was indecisive when it came to this foreign war. He would not fully commit to a clear position regarding Vietnam. Desperate to implement his Great Society domestic policies, and already conscious that this seemingly insignificant war could be his political undoing
, Johnson did not want to highlight the predicament of the captured servicemen. What good would it do for his presidential image? “Without hope of bringing them home, Johnson had little to gain and much to lose by drawing attention to their plight.”3

  Johnson’s “keep quiet” policy was also based on the American experience in World War II and the Korean War, where prisoners of war were kept for relatively short periods of time. As the American prisoners in Vietnam already realized, and as their wives would soon find out, this was not your parents’ war or even the war of ten years past. It was uncharted territory, further complicated by the fact that the Vietnamese considered the men “air pirates” and political criminals. Since the United States and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) were not yet technically at war when the first pilots were captured, the North Vietnamese refused to recognize captured Americans as true prisoners of the conflict.4

  The Vietnamese were a different kind of foe than the Germans or the Koreans. They seemed to be in the torture business for the long haul. This game didn’t just have different rules from those of previous wars—it seemed to have no rules at all. Although the North Vietnamese had signed the Geneva Conventions in 1949 and again in 1957, they decided to toss this agreement out the window even after the United States officially entered the war after the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident. Many American pilots knew instinctively that if they were shot down, the chances that the North Vietnamese would honor the Geneva Convention tenets were slim to none. Charles W. “Chuck” Stratton, an American Air Force pilot who would later be listed as MIA, told his wife, Sallie, that the Geneva Conventions card he carried would not be worth the paper it was printed on should he be captured.5

  The POW and MIA wives would find similar scenarios on the home front. None of the old rules of wartime were valid during Vietnam. After months of “keeping quiet” and obeying their government’s dictates, they could see that nothing was moving forward for their captured or missing husbands. Sybil Stockdale later revealed: “I set out to get our own government to acknowledge that we had prisoners who were being mistreated in North Vietnam. Johnson knew this would emotionally involve the American people in the war and they did not want that. They wanted to keep the people as separated from the war as possible.”6