The League of Wives

by Heath Hardage Lee

  Louise also had a temperament that was well suited to speaking out. Like Sybil, Louise was convinced that this was the one and only way to rescue their husbands from a terrible fate. Jane Denton, Janie Tschudy, Dot McDaniel, Phyllis Galanti, and other Virginia POW and MIA wives admired her for this, even if some of them were not as strident in their approach. The women needed everyone’s talents, and all different kinds of personalities, to make their organization a success.24

  That same August, Phyllis received a warm letter from Louise, explaining that she was the new National League’s area representative. She also related to Phyllis that she, Jane Denton, and another POW wife, Martha Doss, had all gotten letters brought back by Rennie Davis, the antiwar activist and top lieutenant for the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. While no one was happy about who was relaying this information, any communication from the men was treasured. Louise noted of her letter from Jim, “Mine was dated July 7th and sounded good. Says he’s gaining weight, hope so.” She went on to say that several of the women from her area had been in Washington and had lunch with a newly released Navy POW, Lieutenant Robert Frishman, who gave them encouraging news. “He said that morale was tremendously high and felt that we were worrying more than the men.”25

  Rennie Davis himself had brought Frishman, Navy petty officer second class Douglas Hegdahl, and Air Force captain Wesley Rumble back along with the mail. The men had not sought early release, but Rumble and Frishman were both seriously injured and thus deemed by their Communist captors as good candidates for early release. The North Vietnamese considered Hegdahl “the incredibly stupid one,” but he was, in the words of fellow POW Gerald “Jerry” Coffee, “dumb like a fox.”26 Once he was released, Hegdahl “turned out to be a gold mine of information. To the tune of ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm,’ he had memorized the names of more than two hundred prisoners.”27

  For his part, Frishman confirmed at a press conference on September 2 that Hanoi was indeed lying about providing “humane” treatment to the prisoners. He began by “refuting that claim by listing the abuse he and others had endured: the withholding of mail and lack of medical care, long periods of solitary confinement, torture, and forced confessions.”28 Later, when Rumble, the most seriously injured returnee, recovered, he was also able to give his debriefers his own list of prisoners, which was cross-checked with Hegdahl’s original one.29 This was part of the ripple effect of going public—a huge break for military intelligence, the wives, and the POWs and MIAs themselves.

  The antiwar and peace activists, like Davis, Cora Weiss, and many others, seemed to have swallowed whole the North Vietnamese line that the prisoners were being treated well, perhaps to support their personal political agenda. Despite so much evidence to the contrary, Weiss still questioned Frishman and Hegdahl’s account, and she was highly skeptical of their torture reports. “Weiss flippantly dismissed Frishman’s arm injury with the comment that ‘since he was captured as a “war criminal,” he was lucky to have an arm at all.’”30 Weiss and her crew continued to blatantly deny the facts and to create their own fictional world where prisoners of war were treated as honored guests by their North Vietnamese hosts. It was clear by now that nothing could be further from the truth. The motives of the most radical antiwar groups, who wanted to stop the war at any cost, were mixed at best, self-serving at worst.

  Between the POW/MIA wives’ going public in 1968 and ’69, the formation of a National League, Laird and Capen’s “go public” efforts, and new intelligence, the more radical antiwar groups appeared to be North Vietnamese sympathizers. Still, they remained the most reliable and consistent source of mail and packages for the POWs. Their work continued, and many POW wives remained trapped in this uneasy but necessary alliance. Phyllis Galanti, among many others, publicly acknowledged the growing dependence of POW wives upon antiwar activists. “Let’s face it,” she said, “it’s too valuable a source to dismiss. It’s the only way I’m getting mail.”31

  * * *

  While Louise, Jane, and others had recently received news about their husbands, MIA wife Helene Knapp remained in the dark regarding her husband’s fate. In an interview with the Sunday Denver Post, Helene described the limbo of not knowing the truth about her husband’s disappearance. “It’s like I lived until two-and-a-half years ago [when Herman was shot down] and then my life stopped,” she revealed. “It’s been such a lonely wait. And, each morning I think maybe today I’ll know for sure.”

  Helene’s home remained full of mementos of her husband, like the bronze plaque inscribed with the words FLY HIGH, FLY TRUE, FLY PROUD, a gift Herman had sent to his son, Robbie, on his third birthday. The plaque, a bronzed copy of Herman’s favorite poem, “High Flight,” by John Gillespie Magee, and his picture were displayed on a wall near the front door of the Knapp home. Helene placed these precious items there because “this is his home. I don’t want that forgotten.” It was still possible, Helene must have thought, that Herm might walk through the door one day and scoop up her, Robbie, and Cindy in his arms.

  Like Sybil, Helene was not one to sit around and wait for things to happen to her. She was by nature a worker bee, full of energy and curiosity. Helene and her fellow Colorado Springs MIA wife Mary Dodge had recently gone to D.C. to support the passage of a congressional resolution demanding humane treatment for all American POWs as well as a full accounting of all the prisoners. Both Helene and Mary were members of Sybil’s National League of Families and among the first members of the Colorado branch of the League. Mary was currently serving as the League regional coordinator for five states: Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Montana, and Idaho.32

  Another military wife had joined the fight in the Springs. Joan Pollard, whose husband, Air Force captain Benjamin Pollard, had been shot down on May 15, 1967, had just moved back to town in September of 1970, after three and a half years living in Shelbyville, Kentucky, her husband’s hometown. While everyone there was solicitous and supportive of her, she felt isolated and alone as an MIA wife there.

  Joan eventually heard about MIA and POW wives in other states. This sorority’s members began to reach out to one another across state lines. Sybil’s informal newsletters also found their way into Joan’s hands. “Sybil knew more than anybody else did” at that time, Joan recalled. She felt less alone, more part of a group, because of this. There were others like her who “got it” and understood her position of not knowing if her husband was alive or dead. Joan knew Ben was alive somehow. But no one really believed her in Shelbyville.

  Joan and Ben had been an integral part of the Air Force Academy community when he was recruited to teach there in the mid-sixties. He was part of the nascent astronautics program there, as well as a professor of aeronautics. He and Joan were a popular young couple, and she was soon elected president of the wives’ club. Through this position, she and Ben met many prominent and well-known people from all across the state and the country at Air Force social events, and she still had many friends among the Air Force Academy faculty. Joan decided that was where she and her two children, twelve-year-old Mark and seven-year-old Ginny, needed to be. There she would be part of the Air Force community and perhaps help with the POW/MIA problem. She enrolled Mark at Washington Irving Junior High and Ginny at Longfellow Elementary, in Colorado Springs.

  Joan had been in the Springs scarcely two weeks when she attended an evening meeting at Peterson Air Force Base and was volunteered to help with the local POW/MIA situation by the Air Force chaplain, Chris Martin. She barely knew what she was getting into, but she didn’t hesitate to join the cause. Joan soon meet Helene through their joint advocacy. The two women had very different personalities and might never have met under other circumstances. But they shared a common cause and began working together in the Springs.

  Joan would talk to anyone and was a skilled public speaker with great contacts. “I’d speak anywhere anybody asked me to,” she said. She was the first woman ever to speak at one local men’s club and later cou
ld still recall the utter silence when she began her speech.

  One dark and rainy night, she showed up at the famous Broadmoor resort to tell her story. Only four men sat at the bar, and, while they invited her to join them for a beer, she felt they were all more interested in the baseball game on TV than the POWs and MIAs. “You win some, you lose some,” she thought as she braved terrible weather to get home.

  The next day, she got a call from one of the men who she thought had been only mildly interested in her plight. “Call me anytime,” he said, “anything you need, I will help you.” A prominent local businessman, he would become one of the local POW/MIA group’s staunchest supporters.33

  In tandem with Joan, Helene was becoming more and more involved with the POW/MIA movement, but she was still struggling with her new status. Though she’d had a gut feeling that Herman might be dead when she was first told that he was missing, now she wasn’t so sure. Aside from the terrible grief she felt, she was also experiencing a loss of her former identity and sense of self. Like other women who had become POW and MIA wives before her, she didn’t fit into any neat category as she had before, as the wife of an Air Force pilot and a mom. Just like her new friend Joan, she was both mother and father, homemaker and activist, the glue that held her family together despite the gnawing sense of grief that threatened to tear her apart. She had no concrete answer for the question so many in her situation were asking themselves: was she a wife or a widow?

  * * *

  That same September, Sybil, as the new National League coordinator, and a delegation of five other National League members went to Paris to meet with the North Vietnamese representatives. The trip was undertaken without any sponsorship by the U.S. government. Sybil wrote to government officials before the trip, to reassure them but also to put them on notice as to the group’s intent: “Our trip should in no way be interpreted as reflecting discredit on our own government. However, we are going independently, and without government sponsorship.”

  Though the government was helping some behind the scenes, the League deliberately occupied a humanitarian, nonpolitical perch. This stance would prove both strategic and wise on the League’s part. As they had found out over the years, any tinge of overt government control could quickly taint the group in the media’s eyes and in the eyes of the American public. A neutral humanitarian approach was the correct play.

  Fortunately, the League members had found financial sponsors in an aviation company, Fairchild Hiller, and Reader’s Digest. The group left for Paris on Sunday, September 28, and would meet with the North Vietnamese delegation in Paris regarding both the American prisoners and the missing in Vietnam.34

  The League delegation’s composition reflected its multiple viewpoints. Members of the group represented each branch of the armed forces and both enlisted men and officers. The six individuals included one missing-in-action father, Thomas “Tom” Swain, and five wives: Mary Ann “Pat” Mearns, Nancy Perisho, Candy Parish, Andrea Rander, and Sybil. Andrea was the only black member of the delegation. Though African Americans formed a huge percentage of combat troops in Vietnam by 1967 (23 percent), only 2 percent of blacks were officers in the Air Force, Navy, or Marine Corps. Since most of the POWs were officers, a similarly small percentage of those POWs were black.35 Donald Rander was among that small percentage of POWs who were both African American and Army.

  Andrea recalled that she had received the call to go to Paris while she was at work one day. To this day, she is not sure who the call was from, but it may have come from the same Air Force wife who had called Sybil to join the group.36 The person on the other end of the line asked her to go to Paris without many details. The first thing the POW wife wanted to know was: Why? When the purpose of the trip was explained to her—that the group would be going to try to obtain information about their missing and imprisoned men—Andrea was intrigued, but she explained that she would have to find childcare for her two daughters before committing. Government officials and trip organizers almost always forgot that most of the POW and MIA wives had children at home and were basically single mothers. They couldn’t just leave the kids alone at a moment’s notice. Thank goodness Andrea had a great babysitter, just four doors down, who could help, as well as family members on the East Coast.37

  She was used to running things on her own and juggling a busy schedule. She also knew a thing or two about managing tough situations, thanks to her day job monitoring the crisis hotline at work. All these management and coping skills would serve her well on her mission to Paris. Andrea used her savings and borrowed funds from relatives to make the trip, leaving her two daughters, seven-year-old Lysa and two-year-old Donna Page, with her neighbor and grandmother, respectively.38 This trip to Paris would mark the beginning of her activism.

  The big issue on Andrea’s mind when she made this trip was rank, not race. She recalled, “My experiences growing up in NYC allowed me to be very flexible and open about the race issue. So when it got to the point where I’m with the women to go to Paris … I felt a little twinge because I was not the rank that the other women were. The race part did not enter my mind.” As the wife of an enlisted Army man, Andrea was briefly intimidated to be among older, more senior wives from other branches of the military. But it didn’t take long for the ranks and the branch differences to vanish. “It wasn’t as distinct as it could have been … because we knew what our goal was. The common goal was that we were seeking information about our husbands. This became more important than anything else as this trip developed.”39

  Once in Paris, the group checked into the InterContinental Hotel, a luxurious spot chosen for its superior phone service and its proximity to the American embassy. The hotel was in one of the most fashionable neighborhoods in Paris, not too far from the chic shops on the Rue de Rivoli and near the Champs-Élysées, but these pleasures were of little consequence to the dispirited visitors. Exhausted from both nerves and their transatlantic flight, the delegates dumped their bags in the plush lobby and began to plot strategy for the week.

  By now, Sybil and Jim were deep into their covert communications work with Bob Boroughs at the State Department. Though blessed with a strong constitution and a calm demeanor, Sybil was terrified that the North Vietnamese were on to her. She thanked God for the Seconal sleeping pills she had brought with her to get her through the long nights of waiting.

  The League delegation met each morning to review plans as the tension mounted and minor quibbles erupted. But still, they decided to stick it out until the Vietnamese agreed to see them. Sybil called each day for an appointment, and each day she was put off. After a week of tense waiting, the group was finally granted an audience at the North Vietnamese embassy on Saturday, October 4. Sybil was so nervous that day that “three times I went into the bathroom and had dry heaves as never before in my life. My whole digestive system seemed to be pushing itself way up into my throat.” The only plus from this unpleasant experience was that Sybil was so worn out that she felt a sense of calm when she finally entered the embassy. She wore a favorite bright-pink wool suit, bought in 1965 for her husband’s last change-of-command ceremony. Perhaps, she thought, it would bring her luck.40

  Sybil’s blood ran cold as Xuan Oanh, the head of the North Vietnamese delegation, greeted her with “We know all about you, Mrs. Stockdale,” holding up a photo of her on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. “We know you are the organizer.” Well, thank God, Sybil thought with relief. At least they don’t know any more than that! 41

  To her colleagues, Sybil seemed cool and unflappable. Andrea noted later, “I remember her being so calm and I thought, ‘How is she doing this?’” The Army POW wife had deep faith in Sybil and her leadership abilities. “I looked at her as a teacher, trainer, reader and writer—she was keeping all the notes for us.” During the meeting, Andrea kept reassuring herself, Sybil’s going to get us out of this. We’re going to walk out of here and these men are going to be free! “I was being unrealistic,” Andrea recalled, “but
I was thinking this was going to end—not the war, necessarily, but the situation with the men.”42

  Sybil, Andrea, and each member of her delegation then demanded information about their POW and MIA family members. They also delivered hundreds of letters of inquiry they had brought with them from POW/MIA families at home. Andrea specifically carried letters for the men (her husband among them) believed to be held in South Vietnam.43 In between, they drank gallons of tea and ate Vietnamese candies and French crackers, not daring to offend their hosts by refusing the refreshments.

  Andrea recalled the two-and-a-half-hour meeting as one long propaganda fest. “The women were questioned about their husbands, shown movies of napalm bombing, and urged to participate in peace movements.” The North Vietnamese representatives promised Andrea that every effort would be made to arrange an interview for her with Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, the foreign minister and chief negotiator for the National Liberation Front (NLF).44

  Before the group finally parted from their hosts, the mood had lightened somewhat. Sybil recalled: “We got the recipe for the candy, exchanged American cigarettes for Vietnamese cigarettes, and even took souvenir toilet paper from their bathroom.”45 Andrea remembered thinking that the whole place must be bugged.46

  The Vietnamese gave them no information of substance or real promises to help. Andrea never did get to see Madame Binh. What the delegation did receive from the enemy was unintended: the publicity generated by the visit shone the world spotlight on the POW/MIA plight once again.