The Cold War (56 page)

The government at present identifies 1,859 men as still missing in Southeast Asia (down from a maximum of around 2,600), not an especially high figure compared to other major wars the U.S. has fought. That is not to dismiss the number or the compounded suffering of survivors. Doubt disables. But it is worth comparing the figure to that of the Vietnamese missing, which includes not just Communist Vietcong and North Vietnamese but the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam (ARVN). No one will ever come up with the exact number, which is estimated to be at
least three hundred thousand. Communist dead were typically buried in unmarked graves, if their bodies had not been pulverized or vaporized in B-52 raids. The Pentagon's treatment of MIA families, as Marilyn Elkins writes here, was frequently, and inexcusably, callous. But it was positively humane contrasted with the ordeal of silence that families in the North had to endure. Years often passed before the government notified them of a death in battle—if it did so at all—and it provided no information about where the bodies were buried. The North Vietnamese authorities probably didn't know. Families had to content themselves with a redbordered certificate bearing the name of the deceased and the words “Vietnamese martyr in the struggle against America.”

Marilyn Elkins, the wife of an MIA, did eventually get more than just a comfortless certificate, but she had to wait twenty-three years for the proof she sought and dreaded. She had been married to navy lieutenant Frank C. Elkins just nine months when he flew his A-4 Skyhawk from the U.S.S.
Oriskany
on October 13, 1966, on a mission over North Vietnam. He never returned, joining the growing official numbers of the missing. He did leave a diary, which a friend forwarded to his wife—who, for years, was not prepared to think of herself as his widow. That diary, which she edited and had published, is one of the remarkable documents to come out of the war. Elkins, like his wife, had a talent for writing: He eventually hoped to become a college professor of English, as she is now.

Lieutenant Elkins had been flying in action just three months when he disappeared. The record he left of that time is memorable for its honesty and refusal to hide his own misgivings—and his fear. “Today was our first day of actual combat flying,” he wrote on June 30, 1966. “I almost gagged in my mask when the forward air controller (FAC) said they were shooting at us.” Later, he added, “It never occurs to you while you're flying that there are people down there…. The area we hit yesterday was walked through afterward by the cavalry units, and the body count of VC was up around six hundred…. The real shame that I feel is my lack of emotional reaction. I keep reacting as though I were simply watching a movie of the whole thing…. I only hope and pray that I don't change my mind about what I am doing here. I will lose my mind if I do.” To him, the conclusion was inescapable: “War is legalized murder.”

What did happen to Frank Elkins that day in October? Did a surface-to-air missile destroy his plane, and him with it? Or was he, as the Pentagon
kept hinting to his wife, possibly still alive, a prisoner of war? For years her quest would continue. Politicians, both right and left, would try to use her. Spokespeople for supposedly friendly causes would try to silence her when she asked uncomfortable questions. In an attempt to get a direct answer, she would go to Paris, making daily visits to the North Vietnamese consulate. Even when she thought she had found that answer, years would pass before she could be absolutely sure. She would never remarry.

The story of Marilyn and Frank Elkins is a Cold War story, too.

MARILYN ELKINS is a professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles, where she teaches twentieth century American literature. She edited her hus-band's war diary,
Heart of a Man,
which was originally published in 1973 and republished in 1990 after his remains were recovered in Vietnam. She has also published a number of critical studies, and has been a visiting professor at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. She lives in Los Angeles.

E
VERY WAR HAS PRODUCED
some number of men whose remains could not be recovered. In previous centuries, accurate counts of those missing in action (MIAs) were often unobtainable. When Napoleon Bonaparte embroiled Europe in war, for example, soldiers were recruited as armies advanced. The result was huge numbers of men about whom relatives heard nothing and about whose whereabouts the military cared little.

In the past hundred years, the numbers of American MIAs have been reasonably well documented: In World War I, there were 2,912; in World War II, almost 79,000; in Korea, 8,200; and in Southeast Asia, as a result of the Vietnam War, 1,859 remain unaccounted for. The Department of Defense (DOD) still lists three unaccounted for from the Persian Gulf War and one from the War with Iraq. (The DOD also lists 126 who disappeared during the Cold War. The DOD continues to make efforts to account for them.) Since World War II, reported sightings of prisoners of war (POWs)—with attendant claims that Americans are still being held in captivity—have also been common.

Compared to the numbers of American MIAs from earlier wars, the 1,859 listed from Vietnam seem almost insignificant. The number in relation to the total killed—4 percent—also pales compared to some earlier wars: 5.5 percent in World War I; 27 percent in World War II; and 15.1 percent in Korea. It is insignificant, that is, unless you happen to be related to one of them.

Few of their wives or other family members were prepared for the length of time these servicemen would be listed as either POWs or MIAs. No American soldiers had ever officially been held for over three and a half years. While the law provides that a person who has been missing for seven years can be presumed dead, this does not apply to MIAs during a time of war. Americans had never fought in such a long war, and no military policy on MIAs had been established.
A majority of the MIAs in Vietnam were pilots—America's best and brightest. Exceptional athletes, intellects, and aviators, they had seemed invulnerable. They had not been expected to fall prey to a small Asian enemy.

Certainly I thought my husband, U.S. Navy lieutenant Frank Callihan Elkins, was immune to MiGs and SAMs. We'd been married for only nine months; he was twenty-seven and I was twenty-two when his A-4 Skyhawk disappeared during a flight from its vessel, the U.S.S.
Oriskany
. I still believed that death was for other people. When I received the notification on October 13, 1966, I had just returned from spending two weeks with Frank in the Philippines and Hong Kong. He had December orders to a test squadron in China Lake, California; I was residing with my parents in Tennesse while I waited out his Vietnam tour. When the casualty assistance officer arrived, I answered the doorbell in a blue floral housecoat, half awake and half smiling: I knew that this man would be embarrassed when he learned he had delivered his message to the wrong wife.

The officer told me that Frank had been killed. After making a telephone call to report that he had delivered his message, he returned to say that he had misunderstood the original communication: Frank was only missing. Eager to see this as portentous, I interpreted the whole episode as additional proof that Frank was invulnerable.

Because Frank's father had a serious heart condition, I immediately contacted my brother-in-law and asked him to break the news to his parents. I didn't want them to receive the same misinformation I had. I could not cry but was shiveringly cold, despite the numerous quilts my parents wrapped around me. I seemed to be watching myself participate in conversations, observing these events as though they were happening to someone else.

While official policy demanded that such news be delivered in person by an officer of equal or higher rank, practice—as in my case—sometimes fell short of the ideal. No matter how it bungled the delivery of such news, the Pentagon assumed that families of MIAs in the Vietnam War would maintain the official expected silence—the traditional stiff upper lip that guaranteed a husband's continued military success—as they had done in past wars.

The Korean War was the first one in which the behavior of POWs under stress had been blamed on the prisoners rather than on their captors. Suspected of conspiring with the enemy and succumbing to Communist brainwashing (this was during the McCarthy era), the Korean POW became a symbol of national
dishonor, although the number of Americans who chose not to return— twenty-one—was small compared to the eighty-eight thousand Chinese and North Korean prisoners who refused repatriation (over half of those who fell into American hands).

Consequently, the U.S. military code of conduct used in the 1960s insisted that a captive conduct himself as a fighting man rather than as a powerless prisoner. The code was designed to produce soldiers who could resist torture, remain silent, and attempt escape against overwhelming odds and under brutal conditions. As part of this doctrine, pilots who were being prepared to fly over Vietnam were sent to a weeklong survival school in which they were beaten, forced to curl up in a tiny black box for hours, and verbally assaulted if they failed to escape from their “captors.” When he returned from this week in March 1966, Frank had bruises on most of his body and slept for a full twentyfour hours from exhaustion. While many of the simulations were classified and therefore not subjects he could discuss, he confided that he had found the solitary confinement most difficult. To occupy his mind during these seemingly endless episodes, Frank had imagined happy scenes from his childhood and of his return home.

I soon found that equal stoicism was expected of military wives. The official policy was to give us as little information as possible so that we could not harm our husbands with any indiscretion. The government ensured our silence through effective manipulation of our concern for our husbands' safety. The navy's telegrams and other communications insisted that because my husband might be “held by hostile force against his will,” “for his safety” I should reply to inquiries from outside sources by revealing “only his name, rank, file number, and date of birth.” These were exactly the orders given to Frank during his survival training.

Determined not to compromise him in any way, I began a period of intense, silent waiting. My own needs for comforting were subordinated to government policy that, for most of the period of 1966–68, insisted secrecy was in the MIAs' best interest. Designed to protect national policy without considering their effect on family members, the government's instructions did not include tips on how to survive this vigil. No one suggested that I might find psychological counseling helpful. No one offered to explain what Frank's chances for survival might be. No one offered suggestions as to what I should do—except wait in silence. Treatment of MIA wives during the Persian Gulf War seemed to indicate that this atavistic attitude toward the exigencies of military wives remains relatively
unchanged, even though American soldiers now are instructed to give transparently false “confessions” if they are captured. (During the war with Iraq, the rules for appropriate behavior for families of POWs and MIAs have become more relaxed. The DOD no longer forbids families to speak to the media and has a website that offers family support.)

I, however, was left in the hands of whatever emotional support I could find—primarily a group of navy wives who generously called me from their homes in California to extend what comfort they could spare from their concern about their own husbands. I now realize how emotionally costly this solace must have been; I must have reminded these women that their husbands could suffer Frank's fate at any moment. No wonder they sometimes presented me with unfounded rumors and speculations.

Except for my cousin Shirley, whose husband was also a pilot on the U.S.S.
Oriskany,
no one in my immediate family or community knew what to say or do. My parents lived on a farm in rural Tennessee; the nearest town, Pikeville, has a population of about a thousand people. I soon found that even though I had remained silent, most of these people knew about my husband's status and wanted to help. However, no one had provided any of us with a script for appropriate behavior. I couldn't understand why people kept arriving with casseroles, pies, and cakes—rural custom following a death. On the other hand, a friend of my father's who had been a POW in World War II returned home after everyone but his immediate family had given up hope; Clint's experiences, known by everyone in our community, became the repeated evidence they could offer that Frank would survive.

But I needed no assurance of that. Within a few weeks I insisted that my father install another telephone line so I could be reached immediately when Frank came tap-dancing out of the jungle. I was certain my teenage brothers' constant conversations were responsible for the delay in news about Frank.

On October 26, 1966, fire broke out on the U.S.S.
Oriskany,
and many of Frank's friends were killed. One friend, Bill Johnson, had already sent me Frank's diary, which I carefully stored away for Frank; he had kept it with the intention of writing a novel about his Vietnam experience. Bill was killed in the fire, before he could ship the rest of Frank's gear. When the navy finally forwarded Frank's belongings, many items—including the typewriter I had given him and a surprise Christmas gift that I knew he had purchased for me in Hong Kong—were missing. The navy was unhelpful in retrieving these items, which I had embroidered with sentimental significance.

By December, I had become accustomed to the fact that my presence often made other people uncomfortable; I had lost twenty pounds and had nearly perfected the role of zombie. I remained intent on fooling myself: I was convinced that I was helping Frank by staring at my special phone, willing it to ring. Finally, my first bout with Crohn's disease, a chronic ailment that is exacerbated by stress, forced me to spend Christmas week in the hospital. My doctor convinced me that I might die if I continued to do nothing but wait. Even I knew my death wouldn't help Frank.