The League of Wives

by Heath Hardage Lee

  The women talked about everything and seemed to agree on many aspects of the situation. Jane noted that all the ladies enjoyed imagining what it would be like when (not if) their husbands finally returned. Would there be ticker-tape parades for the returning men? they wondered.

  Still, Jane’s sharp eye had already discerned certain divisions and differences of opinion in the group. The strain was slowly beginning to peel off the veneer of politesse. Personality traits that had been submerged in military wife protocols began to emerge more clearly and more forcefully in some of the women. Jane and Louise, in particular, often had differing viewpoints on the war and the men’s role in Vietnam.

  “Louise and I differed on the one matter as we usually do … whether or not professionals [meaning those who had chosen the military as a career] only should be fighting this war. I don’t feel strongly on this point, but Louise and I frequently disagree on one or another aspect of the war.” Jane continued, observing of Louise, “She’s a very positive person and I think it bothers me because she touches a tender spot of doubt in my mind which I want submerged. I don’t know whether I believe and have faith in our commitment and conduct of the war because I really believe [in the war] myself, because Jerry has instilled faith in me or because I want to believe.”3 Perhaps Louise was forcing the more traditional Jane to take a harder look at a conflict she had not questioned previously. Jane seemed to be questioning the whole military code, her government, and the war itself as months without news of Jerry dragged on.

  After the dinner was over, the dishes were cleared, and the women had said their final goodbyes, Jane and Janie collapsed. Jane was relieved all had gone well, but she was also completely worn out. Her instinct after social gatherings with the POW/MIA wives was often to retreat to her bedroom. “Now I have the feeling I would [have] to get in a shell and not see or speak to anyone for days. This reaction is the usual thing for me after making myself project.”4

  While Jane was more soft-spoken and initially hesitant to comment publicly about the war, Louise was more forceful. A fiercely intelligent, no-nonsense New Englander, Louise was skeptical of Washington rhetoric regarding the POWs from the start. As the war wore on and she received letters from the government that she thought were giving her the runaround, she used a special stamp on them: it spelled out BULLSHIT. She wished she could send them back to the government without getting sued, surveilled, or both.

  It wouldn’t be long, though, before she would be putting her own verbal stamp on things by speaking out on behalf of her husband and the other POWs and MIAs.

  * * *

  By April, the nerves of the POW and MIA wives in Virginia Beach were seriously frayed. Agitation was in the air—many of the wives had now gone two years without their husbands and with scarce updates from their government. Harriman belatedly picked up on the smoke signals. On April 4, the Crocodile finally sent two State Department officials to brief Navy and Air Force wives in the area. The reaction of two POW wives who were becoming prominent activists was courteous but skeptical.

  Louise Mulligan took issue with the government’s positions. She noted that after two years of the “soft-sell,” political negotiations “have not produced anything but more lives lost and more commitment” in Vietnam. Louise, like Jane, held up the war crimes trial incident as an example of the power that world opinion held over the North Vietnamese. “Cannot pressure be leveled in this direction to better prisoner relations?”5

  Phyllis had traveled to Oceana for the meeting that day. Like Louise, she was not falling for the government runaround. She wrote to Harriman, “I am still not convinced that the prisoner situation is receiving the priority due it by our government and by the International Red Cross.” IRC was assigned the duty of regulating the mail traffic between the prisoner camps and the families and was failing spectacularly at its job, as Jane had correctly surmised after meeting with Washington IRC reps when her husband was first shot down.

  Like Sybil and Louise, Phyllis also highlighted the inadequacy of State Department communications with the POW/MIA wives and families. They were both infrequent and impersonal. Washington continued to overlook the emotional impact this dearth of news had on the community. “It would be so reassuring to the wives of the prisoners if we could just be contacted periodically by the State Department … As I said before, we are vitally involved and we are starved for any news that may concern our husbands.”6

  In her diary on the night of the April 4 meeting, Jane Denton recorded her impressions of the edgy meeting:

  I learned nothing new but feel the meeting was very worthwhile in that it gave us an opportunity to discuss all aspects of prisoner situation with them—and altho’ much of the comment and info is based on speculation and indefinite info it does add to our understanding and knowledge to discuss with them. They also learned from us. There were a number of details which we have learned and told them—most important we had the opportunity to show how informed and alert we are to what they’re doing. We are no longer a faceless group.7

  As Sybil had also noted earlier, there was no substitute for a face-to-face meeting. Government officials had avoided these meetings as much as possible. Now the ladies had both faces and voices, and they were refusing to be ignored.

  The party line was still that the prisoners were being treated well, despite much evidence to the contrary. When the government officials still insisted this was true, even Jane Denton, traditional, deferential, and respectful of the military, felt her hackles rise: “I vehemently disagreed today when Mr. Flotte said they [sic] POWs are being treated well.”

  Jane continued her own personal debriefing in her diary, again trying to figure out the players and how the pieces of government machinery all fit together: “I cannot understand the lack of cooperation between Navy and State and I don’t know where to place blame. Navy has same traditional attitude that State is made up of ineffectual elete / efete (sp)—I don’t really feel this is deserved—Navy accuses them of not being cooperative—I don’t know what State’s side is.”8 These tensions and cracks in the government’s facade were already evident to the women who were working with them. Collaboration among the departments, even when it was a matter of life and death for the prisoners of war, seemed near impossible to most government officials.

  It took those intimately concerned with the POW/MIA situation—wives and family members—to zero in on the issues that mattered. The problems were obvious, the solution muddy. But it did not take a genius to see that few in Washington were paying adequate attention to the missing and imprisoned soldiers. The State Department saw the POW/MIA wives as a nuisance, an afterthought and a political liability for the Johnson administration.

  Sweeping POW torture under the rug bought the State Department and Harriman time to do the “soft sell,” but, as Louise Mulligan noted early on, this method had serious flaws. There was no open-door policy for the POW/MIA wives when it came to their president or to most of his staff. Like their Women Strike for Peace counterparts before them who had banged their shoes on the doors of the Pentagon, conservative POW and MIA wives who had sacrificed their husbands for their country found the door to their government officials similarly barred.

  * * *

  As LBJ continued to build up the U.S. ground troops and ratchet up the air war with Operation Rolling Thunder, the bad news spread across the country to wives from all branches of the armed services. Whereas the East and West Coasts were hubs for naval aviators, the interior West was the nerve center for Air Force men and their families. Colorado Springs, Colorado, once best known for its role in the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush, was now home to the Air Force Academy and its large community of Air Force personnel and their families. These aviators were heavily involved in the same dangerous bombing missions as the Navy pilots. They were just as vulnerable to being shot down as their Navy counterparts.

  On April 24, 1967, Helene Knapp, wife of Air Force pilot Major Herman “Herm” Knapp, was in her kitchen c
leaning and happened to look out the window. She saw her neighbor Marion Kunce gazing at a blue car that had just pulled up in Helene’s driveway. Out stepped an Air Force colonel and an enlisted woman. Helene knew immediately that the news could not be good, and her stomach knotted up. She invited her guests into her living room, where they proceeded to give her some terrible news.

  “Ma’am, your husband, Herman Knapp, has been shot down over Vietnam. He has not yet been found.”

  “You must mean he is dead,” Helene said, her voice trembling. Suddenly Helene’s son Robbie burst into the room, having been awakened from his nap by the strange voices and the commotion. “Mommy, did these people come to shoot us?” Robbie asked, his lips quivering. “No, honey, of course not,” Helene responded soothingly as her son nestled close to her on the sofa.

  The newly minted MIA wife listened skeptically as her military visitors told her that Herman could be alive and a POW, but that she should not tell anyone about his circumstances. Helene’s immediate gut reaction was, “This was ludicrous. How does one live a daily life keeping such a life-changing situation a secret?” Without her consent, she had just entered the same reluctant sorority that many of the East and West Coast wives had been initiated into some months before.9

  * * *

  Dot McDaniel, in Virginia Beach, was another POW wife who was quickly becoming more forceful in her efforts on behalf of her POW husband, Red McDaniel. Like Jim Stockdale, Red was a friend of Jerry Denton’s and a fellow Navy pilot shot down in North Vietnam, during a routine bombing run on May 19, 1967. He had written Dot numerous letters and sent audiotapes about his growing disillusionment with the leadership in Washington. He felt the bombing targets had been chosen by Washington, for political reasons, not by military commanders in the field. Though the bombing runs were extremely dangerous, the targets were insignificant. The feeling among many of the experienced pilots like Red was that “we’re fighting this air war with our hands tied behind our backs. It’s a tough way to fight a war. And it’s probably going to last a long, long time.”10 Like Jane and Louise had noted before, there was a huge divide between military men and non-military government officials about how the war should be fought, which was making the airmen’s job nearly impossible.

  As the months wore on after Red’s shoot-down, Dot grew more resentful of government POW policy. “Our whole world had collapsed, but we weren’t supposed to talk about it. That made it really hard to explain to people what had happened.” Her children, Mike, David, and Leslie, were her primary concern. Her two boys did not understand why they could not tell anyone what had happened to their dad. “Is there something wrong with being shot down?” Mike asked. Dot simply did not know how to answer her son without compounding his worry.11

  When Dot made her first pilgrimage to Washington to talk to State Department and Pentagon officials, as Sybil, Phyllis, Jane, Janie, and many other POW and MIA wives had before her, she, too, returned home shocked and disillusioned. “The man in the State Department told me he had ‘reason to believe’ our POWs were being treated well, but he couldn’t tell me what made him think so.” Even worse were congressmen and senators on Capitol Hill who hadn’t a clue. Most knew little about the war and nothing about the POWs. One congressman suggested that Dot contact the Red Cross about getting mail through to her husband. Dot politely told him, “The Red Cross isn’t allowed into Vietnam.” She mentally noted that all the government folks seemed to parrot the same script—“we will do everything we can”12 to help, they all said, like mechanical dolls or puppets. But Dot, like all the other wives, knew that there was no substance or knowledge of the situation behind this generic claim.

  * * *

  Dot quickly became a friend and an ally to both Jane and Janie. They were all trapped in the same horrible scenario, desperately trying to figure things out. They knew of Sybil Stockdale and her work within the San Diego community, of course. Sybil was frequently in Washington, pressing the flesh with senators, congressmen, State and Defense Department staff—anyone who would talk to her about the POW/MIA plight.

  Sybil and Jane had talked many times on the phone since Jim’s shoot-down, but on July 18, Sybil arrived in Virginia Beach to see Jane in person and to meet with some of the other POW/MIA wives in the area. July 18 just happened to be the second anniversary of Jerry’s shoot-down. Jane’s diary recorded the visit with the momentous date at the top of her mind:

  2 years today. I wouldn’t have believed this could go on like this. It’s all a nightmare that never ends. Sybil Stockdale flew down here today and I spent several hours talking to her. We had so much to talk about and have like thoughts, concerns and, of course, hopes. I like her and we think generally alike. She isn’t as positive as she seems to be in letters but is as confused as I am about like things. We agree that prisoners are not being well treated at all and want everyone to be aware of this and gov’t to use all possible force to get better treatment. She heard about and has corresponded with ex-prisoners and gave me copies of letters. We’re going to try to work on best possible arrangements being made now for repatriation and rehabilitation, so that past mistakes will be avoided. Navy is working on this—we want to be sure they’re giving it top priority.13

  Though there was still a divide between Jane and Louise Mulligan, Sybil encouraged both of them to work with her—and the other West Coast women—for the POW/MIA cause, though no formal group had been created just yet. Dot had recently joined the group and remembered the tension between the two senior officers’ wives. “Louise Mulligan and Jane Denton were always arguing with each other: they had very different points of view.”14 Though the meetings were always civil and respectful, they were also tense.

  At thirty-four, Dot was a seasoned military wife but still a good bit younger than Louise and Jane. She felt more like a spectator at these early, informal get-togethers. She watched the two older women debate the pros and the cons of “keeping quiet” versus “going public” with their husbands’ scenarios. It was a bit like a tennis match, watching the ball being hit back and forth between two wives who were polar opposites personality-wise. At this point, Jane and Louise possessed totally different opinions about how to proceed in the murky waters that surrounded them all. Jane was a “stabilizing force,” wrote Dot, who considered Jane her role model. She described her as a real lady, dignified, “but she was always scared we would lose our dignity and the men’s if we did something wrong.”15 Louise was more willing to put herself out there publicly. As Dot put it, “she would tear the roof off the White House” to get results. “She was brash, in your face. She did not care about manners, the niceties, she wanted to get things done.” Dot also remembered that Louise would always quote Sybil to the group as the authority on the POW/MIA issues.16 Sybil and Louise were two of a kind. Both New Englanders, they did not have the deference that many southern women of the time were raised from birth to project. Sybil may have sensed a certain reluctance in Jane to come forward early in the crisis. Jane and the other wives had good reason to mull things over and to think before jumping into the fray. More traditional women like Jane were important in the group dynamic. They kept the peace, held the group together, and smoothed the path for Louise and others who were more willing to speak out.

  What the Virginia-area POW/MIA wives would find was that they needed the yin and yang of Louise and Jane to make their efforts a success. These two senior wives provided checks and balances for each other. Each would strengthen the women’s cause in different and valuable ways.

  * * *

  Sybil and Jane had a key friend in common, though they would not have discussed this connection at their July 18 meeting. On July 31, Jane went to D.C. to visit with Bob Boroughs at Naval Intelligence. She was desperate for new information about Jerry, but Bob had none to offer that day. Jane also visited representatives in the State Department—they also came up empty-handed, as did the Bureau of Naval Personnel. Jane felt even more hopeless after this latest visit.

>   “I feel no progress has been made toward peace or treatment of prisoners. It’s [sic] seems so damn empty and bordering on hopeless—I can only pray—what else—can’t someone untangle this damn mess. I made it clear that I consider the present state of affairs unexceptable [sic]—something new must be tried.”17

  Jane’s growing feeling that the government was not doing their job well in terms of the men was compounded by an August 8 article by syndicated columnist (and later Pulitzer Prize winner) Jack Anderson, titled “Disturbing Reports on U.S. Prisoners.” In the article, Anderson reported: “Disturbing whispers have leaked out that the Johnson administration has not done all it could to arrange better treatment of American prisoners in enemy hands.”

  The columnist, who cultivated lower-level State Department officials to get the straight scoop on D.C. politics, revealed: “One high official complained to this column that prisoner problems have been given low priority in the State Department.” Ultimately, Anderson concluded, “The great Pentagon hush-up seems to be aimed less to protect the prisoners than to protect the authorities from criticism.”18 The article dovetailed with what Jane, Sybil, Louise, Dot, and other wives had noticed at State Department meetings. After reading a copy of the column in the New Haven Register, Sybil immediately sent telegrams to Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Admiral Thomas Moorer. Moorer, who was relatively new to his job, had refused to see Sybil before. Now she had thrown a hand grenade that might allow her to blast down the CNO’s office door.

  It worked. Two days later, she had not only a response from Moorer, but an invitation for lunch on August 16 in Washington.19 At the luncheon, Sybil was surprised to be having lunch with not only Admiral Moorer and his wife but also the outgoing CNO, Admiral Semmes, whom she had deemed worthless in the past. Though Sybil liked Moorer and found him a vast improvement over Semmes, she was shocked and infuriated when Semmes blatantly tried to buy her off by offering her a job working for him. “Keep quiet” had reached a new low—now hush money seemed to be on the table.