The League of Wives

by Heath Hardage Lee

  A total of six hundred prisoners of war (591 Americans and nine foreign nationals) would return home in groups of forty. Those who had been captured first would also come home first. All American prisoners would first pass through Clark Air Base, in the Philippines, then be flown to the United States to their home bases. Of the 591 Americans, more than half (325) were Air Force, followed by Navy (138), Army (77), Marines (26), and civilians (25). Their time of captivity ranged from a few days to almost nine years. The prisoner releases would take place from February 12 through March 29, 1973.26

  The National League weighed in on the Operation Homecoming plans, though its input was not solicited by the government. As board chair, Phyllis sent Shields recommendations from the League’s own Committee on Repatriation, Rehabilitation, and Readjustment in late December of 1972. The most important recommendations included: helping to pay for education for the POW/MIA children; recommendations that the DoD work with the VA hospitals to sensitize them to issues they would face in treating the returning POWs; and a directive that draft boards exempt sons of returning POWs for at least one year after their father’s return.27

  Operation Homecoming was a tall order to fill and a Herculean organizational task. In addition, the operation would take place under a harsh media spotlight, with grieving MIA families in the background. “Intense pressures could be anticipated from families, members of Congress, news commentators, and editorial writers for fulfillment of the government’s assurances that the fullest possible accounting would be obtained.”28 Still, Shields and his team were determined to pull Operation Homecoming off to the best of their ability. They felt the country owed it to both the men and their families to get it right.

  * * *

  On February 12, 1973, 116 men who years earlier had been high-flying Navy, Air Force, Marine, and Army pilots shuffled, limped, or were carried off three government C-141 military transport planes at Clark Air Base. The first two planes held 40 POWs with the third holding the last 36 prisoners. The first group to return, the men had suffered years of brutal torture, spent months and sometimes years shackled in solitary confinement, and starved in rat-infested, mosquito-laden prisons. They had finally left their cells in the infamous Hanoi Hilton and its associated jails—for home and the families they had not seen in years.

  These first POWs to set foot on the base in the Philippines—the planes would come to be known as Hanoi Taxis—had spent the longest time in captivity: between six and eight years. Captain Jeremiah Denton, one of the most senior naval officers to be held prisoner, was the first man off the plane. He would be the spokesman for the first group of returnees.

  With tears in his eyes, Denton gave an address to the nation on behalf of all the returning POWs: “We are honored to have had the opportunity to serve our country under difficult circumstances. We are profoundly grateful to our commander in chief and to our nation for this day.” In his memoir, Denton recalled that he felt like something was still missing from his remarks. “I hadn’t said all that was in my heart. Final, unrehearsed words slipped from me.” He paused before the right words tumbled forth: “God bless America!”29

  Though some cynics later accused the government of coaching Denton and other POWs on their speeches, nothing could have been further from the truth. It may have seemed old-fashioned and “square” to antiwar activists such as Philip Berrigan, who stood among these accusers, but as Navy POW Captain Howard Rutledge later stated, “This thing all came from the heart.”30

  Several days later, on February 15, at 2:35 a.m., Jerry Denton, Jim Mulligan, and Paul Galanti emerged from a C-9 military transport plane at Naval Station Norfolk. Jim was quickly mobbed by Louise and their six sons. Louise put aside the years of battle she had done, with two presidential administrations and innumerable government staff, and thanked God that her husband was finally home. (She would keep her BULLSHIT stamp forever, though, just in case.)

  Jane stood on the tarmac, glowing with pride. With her were the couple’s five sons, two daughters, and two new daughters-in-law. The look of pure joy on Jane and Jerry’s faces as they held each other close lit up the runway. The Denton family would stay up all night that evening as Jerry debriefed them on all that had happened to him while in prison.31 Jerry later wrote, “Of all the emotions I have experienced, nothing yet compares with my feeling of pride at the strength of character shown by my family while I was away and during my recovery period. Jane especially cannot get enough credit.”32

  Phyllis was nervous about her husband’s homecoming. She had matured while he was away, from a shy young housewife into an international diplomat. In a newspaper article published a few days before Paul’s release, she had confessed to having some worries related to Paul’s years in captivity. “We’ll never catch up with our contemporaries. We’ll be behind in education, finances, social life and having a family.” Navy psychiatrists had warned Phyllis that she and Paul would probably face arguments during the first thirty minutes they were back together.33

  Phyllis and the Navy psychiatrists were all wrong.

  Almost the minute that fun-loving, laid-back Paul saw his wife, Phyllis’s worries seemed to melt away. He quoted poetry to her the minute he got off the plane and swept her into his arms for a very public kiss. (Ever mischievous, Paul later admitted that he swiped the poem from a newspaper on the way home.34)

  The next day, Jane, Louise, and Phyllis held a press conference at Portsmouth Naval Hospital, where their husbands were all being held for medical testing and intelligence debriefing. Jane was bubbly and upbeat about her husband’s return: “We have had no difficulties with the adjustment. This is the happiest week of our lives.” Louise said the same thing of her experience. There were no adjustment issues, and the family was enjoying reconnecting with one another. “As far as I can determine, Jim Mulligan is the same man now as when he went over,” she noted fondly. The anger that had kept Phyllis going for so long seemed to have evaporated: “I’m not even going to regret the time we missed,” she declared, incredulous that Paul was finally home.35 “The reunion surpassed my expectations,” Phyllis admitted. “A lot of the problems I was concerned about just weren’t there.”36

  The men had another visitor besides their wives and families during this time—a benevolent but shadowy figure who had thrown a lifeline to the prisoners during their captivity by working in tandem with their wives. A man they did not know yet, but who knew each of them well: Bob Boroughs, soon to be known as “Mr. POW” among the naval prisoner-of-war community.37

  Boroughs had also brought his twelve-year-old daughter, Merriann, with him to the debriefing. (It’s hard to believe, in today’s top-secret world, that you could once bring your kid with you for intelligence work.) Merriann kept a scrapbook and a diary of the POWs return. In her very neat print handwriting, she wrote about their day at Portsmouth Naval Hospital: “Dad went into the suites to set up for the prisoners and their wives, to talk to Captain Mulligan and Captain Denton. After a few minutes, we got to see Mrs. Mulligan and her husband Captain Mulligan. I was so happy to meet him, I didn’t know what to say. We also got to see Captain Denton and his wife Jane, Mrs. Galanti and Lieutenant Cmdr. Galanti’s parents.”

  Jim Mulligan wrote Merriann a note, which she kept pasted neatly in her scrapbook on the next page. It read:

  Merriann,

  Thanks for keeping faith in the Hanoi P.O.W.s—

  Good luck and God bless you.

  Jim Mulligan

  Captain U.S. Navy

  2-17-7338

  Merriann would later paste another thank-you note in her scrapbook from Jim Stockdale, who would also be debriefed by her dad. “There has been no other man who has helped either myself or my family so much as your wonderful Dad!… You are a lucky daughter.”39

  While reunions among the Navy families were taking place in Norfolk, Andrea and Donald Rander were reunited at the Army’s Valley Forge hospital, in Pennsylvania. The Army psychologists had tried to prepare her for the re
union, advising her, “You have to decide how to greet him. What to leave in, and what to leave out.”

  Andrea had been very optimistic and upbeat, as was her nature. “I would just be my wifely self!” But still, it was a shock for her to see him looking so thin. Donald swept his wife up in a dramatic embrace, and her worries disappeared. That fall, the reunited couple would finally take that honeymoon they had never had, in Montego Bay, Jamaica. They needed to make up for lost time.40

  * * *

  The day before Jim Stockdale returned home to the West Coast was Valentine’s Day. A true romantic, Jim sent Sybil a dozen red American Beauty roses and a note that read “God Bless You, Syb. All my love, Jim.” Jim Jr., Stan, and Taylor spent hours preparing a gigantic banner reading WELCOME HOME, which they draped across the porch roof at 547 A Avenue on the morning of February 15.

  When Jim finally arrived on the tarmac at Naval Air Station Miramar, in north San Diego, Sybil, Jim Jr., Stanford, and Taylor were waiting. (Sid would be home in time for dinner; his family did not want him to miss the championship hockey game he was playing in that day at South Kent Prep.) The Stockdale boys’ now famous dad gave a short but poignant speech, quoting the Greek Stoics, whose philosophies had sustained him in prison. He then smiled at his family and declared, “We’re home. America, America, God shed His grace on thee.”41 Then Sybil and the boys tackled him in a mad rush. Sybil would never forget seeing her beloved husband, now gaunt and silver-haired, approach her. “We come together with so much force and emotion that for a split second I think we might topple over.”42

  The Stockdales drove to nearby Balboa Hospital, where Jim would be staying for his medical checkups. That evening, the whole family came together for their first meal in more than seven years. They devoured juicy steaks and talked about Sid’s victorious hockey game. Jim Jr. drove the younger boys home to Coronado, but Sybil stayed with Jim, despite the lack of a double bed. The couple decided to sleep on the carpeted floor together, amid a nest of pillows and blankets. Sybil and Jim cracked open a bottle of champagne to celebrate their reunion. As they drifted blissfully off to sleep, Sybil noted with satisfaction “how completely wrong our briefers had been about the sexual impotence.”43

  Another expectation the military psychologists had, which they would later be stunned to find themselves completely wrong about, was the strikingly low occurrence of PTSD among Hanoi Hilton prisoners of war. During a fourteen-year postwar study period, researchers at the Robert E. Mitchell Center for Prisoner of War Studies, run by the Navy in Pensacola, noted that “only 4 percent of the aviator POWs, all of them officers, experienced PTSD.”44 What contributed to this extraordinary resilience among the men?

  With few exceptions, the prisoners were highly educated, most were college graduates, and many had attended elite American military academies. They tended to be older and more mature than the average draftee. All aviators flying in combat zones were required to attend SERE school. As a result, these pilots became “the products of one of the most rigorous military training systems in existence at the time.”45

  The bonding and mentoring that occurred while the men were imprisoned and the unity that resulted among these servicemen were unprecedented in the history of warfare. Jim Stockdale would later describe his role in prison as “‘presiding over a unique society.’ This society was built upon mutual care, unity, and optimism in the face of adversity. Newly captured prisoners would later speak of being ‘mentored’ by the more experienced prisoners.”46 Unlike enlisted Vietnam vets, who often returned home to hostile antiwar sentiment, Vietnam POWs were treated to ticker-tape parades, a White House gala hosted by President Nixon, and ongoing admiration in their communities. “Their suffering was acknowledged, processed, meditated upon, and even celebrated by their culture.”47

  Though Jim didn’t realize it at the time, his capable and accomplished wife had established a mirror society on the home front among the POW/MIA wives. Sybil’s New Girl Villages were built upon remarkably similar principles. While the women were not threatened with death if they spoke to one another via the tap code their husbands had used to communicate within their prison walls, they were told to “keep quiet” and warned about the supposed harm they would cause their husbands if they spoke out. Both the POWs and their female partners ultimately defied their captors—or, in the case of the wives, their government handlers—to beat their respective systems.

  Though there would be exceptions among the men in terms of PTSD, Donald Rander being one of them,48 “the Hanoi Hilton experience is a unicorn in the literature of trauma, a case in which the perfect storm of circumstances converged to produce a group of people who defied the odds.”49

  * * *

  The MIA wives, like Helene and Kathleen, looked on from the wings, many feeling left out and concerned that the MIA situation was being forgotten by some in the midst of the POWs’ triumphant return home. Helene recalled seeing the famous cover of Newsweek featuring her friend and League colleague Phyllis and her returned POW husband, Paul, and being “simultaneously thrilled and saddened.”50 The MIA wives and families knew that the window of opportunity to find their husbands was running out: with the return of the POWs, the country had the Hollywood ending it wanted, and after it was over everyone would forget about the missing men forever.

  Helene and her children, Cindy and Robbie, had watched the POW homecoming ceremonies on TV, still hoping against hope that Herman would be among the men. Like many of the MIA wives, Helene felt disheartened. She felt deserted, too, after so many of her POW wife friends had left the League. Helene would remain in her post as the national coordinator of the League until her term was finished, in the fall of 1973.51

  In late May of 1973, Helene would testify before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs about the missing men. She spoke both from her viewpoint as the coordinator of the National League and from a personal standpoint, as the wife of one still missing in action. “In the recent joyous reunion of 590 of our POW families—a joy in which we and all Americans shared—it appears many of our countrymen may have lost sight of the fact that almost two-thirds of our men who were missing and imprisoned in Southeast Asia did not come home.”52 Helene and all the MIA wives and families wanted an accounting of the men immediately. “We want this accounting now; we want our dead returned; we want our search teams allowed to go into all areas of Southeast Asia.”53

  For Kathleen Johnson, the time from her husband’s disappearance until the return of the POWs, in the spring of 1973, was like one long day. Dates and times were hard to recall. Perhaps, she admitted later, this was her way of coping with the unthinkable. She had been absolutely convinced the entire time that he was alive and fought hard to do everything possible to get news of his fate and to bring him home. Bruce used to say to her before he left for Vietnam, “There’s no doubt in my military mind that I’ll be home.” His faith in God, country, and family were strong. She could not imagine any other outcome for him than what he promised her.54

  It was simply not to be. Neither Herm nor Bruce would return home in 1973. Helene and Kathleen would continue their vigils. Though MIA wives often felt adrift and alone, their POW wife sisters would continue to support them by always keeping the MIAs in mind. Andrea and her family have a tradition that began during the war and continues to this day: “Before we eat, we still stay ‘God Bless the POWs and MIAs.’ I don’t know if that will ever end. We still have to keep hope alive.”55

  After the POWs’ successful return, Nixon’s next priority was to follow through on the promised accounting of those missing in action. In a private, now declassified memo from early April of 1973, Nixon told Shields to let the MIA families know: “On the MIAs, you say the President personally will follow through on scrupulous adherence by North Vietnam on this. We will leave no stone unturned. All those families, waiting, hoping. They must know the certainty of their men’s fate.”56

  Nixon seemed to have had the intent to follow through with this accountin
g, but the Watergate break-in had widened into a political tsunami that would sweep the president and much of his staff from office. The president’s inherent mistrust of the press and his political rivals, which had first manifested itself in his reaction to the Pentagon Papers leak, had spun out of control. In her memoir, Washington Post owner and publisher Katharine Graham would recount that Watergate’s “sheer magnitude and reach put it on a scale altogether different from past political scandals.”57 Nixon biographer Evan Thomas wrote, “By the summer of 1974, the U.S. government was essentially running without an effective president. Indeed, it had been running on autopilot for at least a year.”58 On August 8, 1974, Richard Milhous Nixon would become the first president in American history to resign.

  Despite this disgrace, Watergate would not dim the loyalty felt by most POWs—and their wives—for the former president. Most of this population would remain loyal to Nixon: in the men’s view, he was the president who finally brought them home from Hanoi. (The returned prisoners would present Nixon with a plaque inscribed TO OUR LEADER, OUR COMRADE, RICHARD THE LIONHEARTED.59) Though some of the women had switched political sides during the war, out of sheer frustration with its length, most would admit that Nixon had been a massive improvement over LBJ. His administration, unlike Johnson’s, had treated the women with respect and supported their concerns. This laudatory view of Nixon within the POW/MIA community has remained consistent over the years.60

  After Nixon’s resignation, his vice president, Gerald Ford, would become the nation’s thirty-eighth president. Though American troops had been withdrawn and the POWs returned, Vietnam remained a war zone. In April of 1975, President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger would make one last attempt to save U.S. ally South Vietnam by requesting $722 million in emergency military aid for the beleaguered nation. But Americans and the U.S. Congress were unwilling to support further monetary aid. On April 23, Ford announced that American involvement in Vietnam was over and the war there was a lost cause.61