Two Souls Indivisible

by James S. Hirsch

  Ultimately, he listed seventy-seven categories of interest, which he memorized in alphabetical order (from Art to Wife). They reflected his interests in liberal arts (music and writing, history and philosophy) while introducing needs that were practical (investing, insurance, typing), personal (family, friends), and spiritual (religion, the Savior).

  The list was also a way to organize his life in his own mind. Each category had its own "folder," and he would imagine sorting through the folders in a giant file, pulling them out and reviewing everything he had "written" on that particular subject. He carried an imaginary notebook and pen, so if he got a new cellmate who was knowledgeable about, say, money, he would ask him for tips, write them in his notebook, and then file the pages in his Finance folder. He was determined, once freed, to make every hour of every day meaningful.

  There was only one problem. When his reveries ended, he was still in prison. His fantasies were possible as long as he was certain that one day he'd be liberated. Indeed, what had made his incarceration bearable was his confidence in his imminent release, his belief that America would use overwhelming force to win the war. He had always established deadlines for the war's end: his birthday, Christmas, or the onset of summer. But this faith created sharp emotional swings, what he called "a never-ending sine wave" of expectation and disappointment. His captors always told him that he would be in prison for ten or twenty years.

  When Richard Nixon was elected president on November 5, 1968, Halyburton believed that the Republican, an outspoken anti-Communist, would escalate the military force against the Vietnamese. Instead, Nixon wanted to reduce air operations, withdraw U.S. forces gradually, and transfer the fighting to the South Vietnamese. (He did begin the secret bombing of Cambodia on March 18, 1969, though the POWs knew nothing of those attacks.) The president believed this policy, known as "Vietnamization," would benefit the peace negotiations already under way in Paris while placating the war's increasingly strident domestic critics.

  While "Vietnamization" did receive strong support in America, it demoralized many of the POWs, who believed the carrot-and-stick approach was doomed to fail against an implacable enemy. Halyburton learned about the withdrawal of troops from his interrogators, and he began to think the Vietnamese were correct. He might be held for twenty years or even longer, a prospect that forced him to develop a completely different attitude.

  He no longer projected release dates but decided that he would go home when the time came and there was no honorable way to rush that moment. After four years, he concluded that imprisonment was not a temporary cessation of freedom but was, simply, life. Previously, he had escaped the present by excavating the past and imagining the future. Now he was going to embrace the present itself: he was going to find meaning to his existence that had no relationship to his freedom.

  This new phase was made possible by group living arrangements, which had begun in April 1968. Until then, Halyburton had either lived by himself or with one cellmate, but as the number of POWs increased, he was placed in a cell at the Zoo with eight other Americans. They lived in room 2 in a building called the Annex, where the cells were comparatively large (seventeen by twenty feet). No longer did communication require tapping through walls, nor was it restricted to one partner. Discussions flowed on politics, history, philosophy, and dozens of other subjects while opportunities blossomed for education, entertainment, and exercise. The Americans had a chance to create a kind of embryonic society that was unlike anything Halyburton had ever experienced.

  The prisoners, all college graduates and officers, organized themselves along military lines. On the basis of rank and time of service, the commanding officer was Navy Lieutenant (j.g.) Glenn Daigle. Halyburton was number two, the executive officer, which involved him more in deciding the resistance tactics of the cell. Even more prestigious was that he was the cell's first shootdown, earning him the nickname FOG, the fucking old guy. His perseverance was a badge of honor.

  Everyone was given a different job: exercise, education, recreation, morale, operations, and administration. The last one was the historian, charged with remembering, or writing when possible, everything that occurred in the cell. Some jobs were more important than others, exercise being one of the most critical. Each morning the entire group did calisthenics. Not everyone enjoyed it, but the peer pressure was too much to resist. Competitions were organized for who could do the most pushups, jumping jacks, situps, or leg bends. The Navy pilot Irv Williams, a fitness enthusiast from Florida, did 1,250 consecutive pushups, which he then surpassed several years later when he did 2,250. He said he did them to keep his sanity. Halyburton had strong legs, so his specialty was leg bends, his primary competitor being a broad-shouldered Air Force lieutenant from Baltimore named Bernard Talley. Halyburton did 200 leg bends to Talley's 500. Halyburton did 1,000; Talley, 1,200. Halyburton 2,000; Talley 2,500. And back and forth. Halyburton finally did 5,000 and thought that might be enough to win. Then Talley did 7,000. Halyburton finally relented, not because he couldn't surpass 7,000, but because he couldn't do that many without interruption from a guard.

  Halyburton was proud of his physical progress. He had never done more than twenty-five straight pushups before; now he could do a hundred. He also developed the strength to walk on his hands, another first.

  Exercising their minds was equally important, with each man serving as both teacher and student. Courses were taught on history, gardening, music theory, math, and foreign languages—the basis for a trilingual dictionary (Spanish, French, and German) that Halyburton would later assemble. Math instruction led to the creation of a slide rule made of bamboo. Halyburton's own specialty was literature, favoring Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, and such classics as Billy Budd and Moll Flanders.

  Entertainment tended to be a nighttime activity. Each man was required to dramatize a movie or book, with creative liberties encouraged. Entertainment, not interpretation, was all that mattered. The cellmates also took turns "cooking" meals and snacks, describing the ingredients, preparation, presentation, and taste, and then offering them with great panache. Halyburton was considered a very good cook, though he occasionally bluffed. He had never made Chateaubriand, but he did in Vietnam.

  If they could create food, they could certainly create music. Mike Christian, an Alabaman who hadn't worn shoes until he was thirteen years old, liked country music and could play the guitar, so he transformed a bamboo fan into a six-string instrument. It made no noise, but he fingered the strings as if he really were playing while humming the chords; he taught Halyburton how to pick as well. Fred Purrington, a jazz enthusiast, used two sticks to play the drums and formed a combo with Christian. Music had always been important to Halyburton, and he had spent many hours in prison singing to himself. Now he began recalling the words to every song he knew. When he forgot a line, he asked the others if they could supply it. Once he had all the lyrics to a song, he would commit them to memory. Then—and for the rest of his captivity—he would ask his cellmates to teach him new titles. He ultimately devised a jukebox in which he catalogued almost a hundred songs to a specific letter and number. When bored, he'd look over his jukebox, say "B12," and sing Patsy Cline's "Born to Lose."

  Christmas always tested the emotional strength of the POWs, so it was fitting that the Annex cellmates tried to revive the holiday. Halyburton secretly got a stick, draped a green towel over it, and decorated it with tin foil so his cellmates could wake up to a Christmas tree. It was placed on a small platform of clothes and blankets beneath the window, out of view of the guards. Also on the platform were red socks, sent in packages from home, hung as stockings. The men had a Christmas service, sang carols, and exchanged gifts. One person received a rosary made of tin foil; another used bread dough sprinkled with brick dust to make a red ashtray and red dice. Halyburton, using a bone he found in his soup, made a cross for a gift; he received a cigarette holder made of bamboo. The men also exchanged imaginary gifts that were redeemed after they were re
leased. Halyburton gave Irv Williams a fishing reel, while he received from Mike Christian a triangular brass plate engraved with DREAMS, ACTION, REALITY, which reflected his philosophy of life: your dreams are followed by action, which creates reality. Not every gift was so philosophical. Halyburton received from Rod Knutson a gold-plated Zippo lighter inscribed FUCK COMMUNISM.

  Halyburton devised the cell's single most ambitious idea. Earlier, he had created a chess board out of toilet paper. Other prisoners had created backgammon boards by laminating toilet paper with leftover rice and using pieces of pinched bread, dusted with red brick dust and ashes, as checkers. Now Halyburton wanted to play bridge, a game that his mother had taught him and he had played all his life. To create a deck of cards, he cut—with a stolen razor blade—the rough brown sheets of toilet paper into fifty-two squares and marked them with cigarette ashes and brick dust. He then had to teach all but one person how to play bridge—a complicated task under ideal circumstances. The rapport between partners, the bidding conventions, the play of the cards to win the most tricks, the ability to finesse an opponent—the game can take years to master. But under these conditions, the challenge was part of its appeal. It forced them to think, it absorbed many hours, and it involved all eight men—two games of four each.

  When, in a random search, the guards confiscated the cards, it appeared the game was over. They were, however, determined not to allow the enemy to take away their game, but how do you play cards without the cards? Halyburton had another idea. If they could imagine food and music and movies, why couldn't they imagine a deck of cards? A new game was born: memory bridge.

  It was a slow game, to be sure. One person was designated the dealer, and he dealt by whispering to four others the thirteen cards each one held. Those four were known as the memory banks, and they kept the hands for four different players. The players consulted with their memory banks to play their cards and to keep track of the tricks already played.

  All the facets of memory bridge took at least twice as long as the conventional game, and disputes inevitably arose over who held which cards and which cards had been played. Instead of bringing the men together, memory bridge threatened to divide them, so it ended after a few hands. But it did represent a huge psychological victory, confirming the ingenuity of the Americans and proving they still had the freedom to use their minds as they chose.

  Throughout the prison camps, the Americans became increasingly adept at converting their meager resources into instruments of survival. They stole string, nails, matches, toilet paper—and anything else that could be used for hygiene or communication. String and nails, for example, could make a mosquito net, while burnt match tips could etch notes. Wood and chicken bone were turned into toothpicks; blanket threads became dental floss; one prisoner with a sore gum put a pinch of tobacco between the gum and his lip and got "instant relief" from an aspirin-like effect. Stolen red peppers were used to plug ratholes—even the rodents couldn't eat through them—while pieces of metal, string, and a tin can produced a mousetrap.

  Halyburton was one of the more resourceful prisoners. For example, he could sew. With their clothes and blankets always tattered, Halyburton wanted to repair them, but their captors wouldn't give him a needle. So he saved a pork bone and rubbed it against a brick to create a tip. He then found a nail and rubbed it to a fine point, which he used to bore a hole in the thick part of the bone to create the eye. He pulled threads out of a blanket to mend his own clothes as well as those of the other prisoners. He later found a copper wire, which made an even better needle (it was thinner than the pork bone). When he received red socks from Marty, he sewed them to a shirt and made a dickey, which kept him warm in the winter.

  No one questioned Halyburton's toughness or military competence, but Purrington still thought his close friend was miscast in combat, for his creativity and artistry set him far apart from the other aviators. "I didn't know what the hell he was doing in the back seat of a Navy airplane," Purrington said.

  Another close friend, Irv Williams, believed that Halyburton was haunted by the randomness of his own survival and perhaps even by guilt—that he should live while his more experienced pilot had died. "We talked about everything," Williams said, "and I always thought that in the back of his mind he didn't understand why he got out and Stan didn't."

  Halyburton spent more than two years in different cells in the Annex, and while some of his cellmates changed, he was always in a group of eight or nine. He was in a community that could support him intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually, and he discovered that he could create a meaningful existence that did not depend on his freedom or on the conventions of success—money, academic degrees, career achievements, or the baubles of modern life. He could stay another ten or even twenty years without fear that his time would be wasted. He knew that the power of his mind was greater than the force of his captors; there was no place he couldn't go or imagine.

  He and Purrington, for example, took long cruises on a forty-foot Concordia yacht. Purrington couldn't afford one in the real world, but he could in his fantasies. The yacht had a perfect name, taken from a song they heard on the radio, Nancy Wilson's "The Good Life." Her words rang true:

  O' the good life; to be free

  And enjoy the Unknown.

  Aboard The Good Life, the men sailed to Buzzards Bay, off the coast of Cape Cod, and Halyburton described luxurious ports of call and the raptures of the sea. Beneath the high sky, he would say, the winds pull us through pristine Hadley Harbor, nestled between Nonamesset and Naushon islands. There sailors are forbidden and few houses have been built; sheep, coyotes, and ospreys rule, and boaters sit on their decks and watch the deer roam, unafraid, on the shoreline. We lie out in the sun and grill juicy steaks, drink wonderful merlot, smoke long cigars, and listen to Nancy Wilson and Johnny Mathis, anything romantic.

  Naturally, they need female companionship, so Halyburton decrees that Purrington's date is Dominique Francon (a name from Ayn Rand's Fountainhead), a beautiful and exotic woman with a rich cascade of black hair. Fred and Dominique are lying on the deck in the early evening, snuggling and relaxed, and Fred is touching the waves of her hair and the curves of her body, and the cool wind is picking up; Halyburton is establishing a perfect mood and building to a slow but inexorable conclusion when he says, "Hair is spilling over your chest."

  Purrington, in the prison cell, looked up and said, "How did I get hair on my chest?"

  "No! No!" Halyburton yelled. "Not your hair, stupid! Her hair!"

  The question destroyed the mood and ruined the moment, though it was a venial sin. Halyburton just had to start over again, for there was no reason to leave The Good Life. It was certainly good for Purrington, who characterized Halyburton's imagery and metaphors as "nearly poetic." Porter always had a date as well. Asked later if he sailed with his wife, he paused and said, "Not exclusively."

  Fred Cherry found his equivalent of The Good Life by juxtaposing the unity he discovered in the prison with the racial tensions he had experienced at home—and, for that matter, with the hostilities that were driving apart white and black soldiers in South Vietnam.

  In America's first truly integrated war, black officers commanded white troops, young Army officers like Colin Powell gained experience, and African American casualty rates (12.5 percent) ended at just under the proportion of draft-age black males. But the integrated troops were not always harmonious. Young draftees, white and black, brought with them the racial discord that was roiling America, discord that was exacerbated by the stress of jungle warfare. White soldiers displayed the Confederate flag in hooches, bars, military posts, and at USO shows. Graffiti such as "Niggers eat shit" and "I'd prefer a gook to a nigger" appeared in bars and latrines; in 1969 two white soldiers erected and burned a cross before a predominantly black barracks at Cam Ranh Bay.

  African Americans responded with expressions of racial solidarity. They weaved bootlaces into "slave bracelets," displayed black power flags, u
sed a black power salute, and performed a ritual handshake called "dapping." Some wrote on their helmets "We enjoy being black." Race riots occurred in two different stockades in 1968, the first at Da Nang Brig, the second at Long Binh Stockade. As the journalist Zalin Grant wrote in 1969, "Past favorable publicity about integration of the troops" in Vietnam "has shimmered and disappeared like paddy water under a tropic sun."

  Race could have been a flashpoint in the prison camps. Sixteen black servicemen were held in captivity, most of the white officers had never lived so closely with African Americans, and the enemy tried to exploit racial differences. Disputes often arose among the prisoners, but they were never about race, in large part because of Fred Cherry. As the senior black POW, he set the tone for the other African American prisoners, and he used anything, including humor, to ensure unity between blacks and whites.

  One day, for example, he tapped on the wall: "The Vietnamese are very democratic. They're treating us all like niggers." Another time, during a rough interrogation, he realized the questions were intended for another black Air Force pilot, Thomas Madison. When Cherry got back to his cell, he muttered to the others in his block, "They've got two niggers in here, and they get the wrong guy and they beat me up."

  Humor certainly sustained them through the lowest moments. After a failed escape by two Americans in 1969, Cherry, as a senior officer at the Zoo, was selected for torture and solitary confinement. Afterward, he was placed in a cell next to Air Force Lieutenant John "Spike" Nasmyth's. The two men tapped messages daily, though they would have been punished if caught.

  One time Nasmyth began the conversation by asking, "You got time for a joke?"

  "Sure," Cherry tapped back.

  "Did you hear the story about the armless, legless guy who rang the doorbell at a whorehouse?"