Two Souls Indivisible (12 page)

Integrated troops posed a threat by leaving open the possibility that a black officer would command white enlisted men. Even in the face of urgent manpower needs during World War II, maintaining the racial hierarchy was imperative—a point made by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson in his private diary: "Leadership is not embedded in the Negro race ... Colored troops do very well under white officers but every time we try to lift them a little beyond what they can do, disaster and confusion follow." President Truman's decision to integrate the armed services defied the country's military leaders, including George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower, who had opposed such a move after World War II.

Cherry's slight at the officers' club reminded him of his second-class status. While he received glowing press coverage for his heroics, the incident was a sad postscript that he had carried with him for many years but had told to few people. In fact, he rarely volunteered stories about any of the discrimination he experienced, believing that complaints were useless and preferring the stoicism urged by his parents.

But he saw something different in Halyburton—a white man who would understand. Halyburton's relative youth seemed to give him an open-mindedness and sensitivity that he had not often seen in white Southerners. He appeared to know the difference between right and wrong. "He was more genuine," Cherry recalled.

Of course, in an earlier time Halyburton could have been one of the white officers who ignored Cherry, but he was now forced to reconsider his racial assumptions. He had been impressed by Cherry's travels—Japan, Thailand, Germany—and by his breadth of experience and piloting skills, his rescue of the F-84G being the most conspicuous example. Fred Cherry was unlike any black man he ever knew or heard of, yet his snub at the officers' club sent a powerful message: Cherry was in the military, but that didn't mean the military was truly integrated.

Their common problems drew them closer. To begin with, they were cold. While the temperature rarely dropped below freezing, the high humidity created a penetrating chill. Cherry and Halyburton each had one thin blanket, which was too short to cover them while sleeping unless they lay in a fetal position. They discussed this problem at length, analyzing the exact position that would maximize the blanket's coverage of the body. Compounding the problem was the concrete floor, which intensified the cold against their bare feet. They noticed that other prisoners were wearing shower shoes, and they wondered why they didn't have any. Their anger at the enemy spilled over into envy of the other POWs—and it was one more issue that linked them.

Their contempt for the Vietnamese sometimes fueled resistance. When a guard entered the cell, for example, he required them to show their subservience by standing and bowing their heads. One snarky guard was nicknamed "McGoo"; his squinty eyes evoked the visually challenged cartoon character. While most guards accepted a slight nod of the head, McGoo made it clear that that was not enough.

"Bow!" he yelled.

The Americans stood but didn't bow.

"Bow!" he repeated.

They nodded slightly, so McGoo walked over and slapped the heads of both men.

"Bow!" he said.

Their heads bobbed, but they would not bow.

There were more commands and more slaps, but the prisoners never complied, and the frustrated McGoo eventually left. Individually, Cherry and Halyburton had balked before, but together they pushed their resistance further.

To demoralize the POWs, the prison officials installed the same kind of loudspeakers in their cells that the government used to disseminate propaganda in the countryside. There, multikilowatt boxes were set up in hamlets that didn't even have water or sewage—indoctrination took precedence. Inside the prison cells, the green boxes typically delivered two broadcasts a day from the "Voice of Vietnam," one intended for a general English-speaking audience and one for the GIs in the South. For two hours a day, the audio barrage was made worse by its blaring volume, what one POW described as "two decibels above the threshold of pain." The content included tributes to Ho Chi Minh on his birthday and long tutorials on Vietnam's history, including one frequent segment on its victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu. Some broadcasts were designed to mock the Americans. At the Zoo, one played a violin rendition of "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," a reminder of the inmates' fiery ejections.

Halyburton and Cherry tried to glean some facts from the distortions. The broadcasts often specified how many U.S. aircraft had been shot down, but the two Americans, using information from other prisoners, estimated that the true number was probably one-tenth of the announced figure. The men laughed at some of the more outlandish statements and derided the mispronunciations—the city of Tucson, Arizona, for example, was pronounced "Tuck Sun."

But other news was more difficult to discount. Finding the names in
Stars and Stripes,
an announcer would recite a list of American casualties, described as "comrades who gave their lives in a needless, illegal war," with a violin dirge in the background. Once, the announcer named a Marine drill sergeant who had instructed Halyburton as an air cadet in Pensacola, Florida. The news of his death, exploited by the enemy, was disturbing, but over the years Halyburton and Cherry were even more enraged by the broadcast of antiwar statements from Joan Baez, Stokely Carmichael, and Ramsey Clark.

One time, Halyburton heard a recording of US. Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska, who said that Americans who had been killed in Vietnam "have not died for their country ... but have been mistakenly sacrificed as part of an inherited folly." Like virtually all of the prisoners, Halyburton despised the protesters—the actors, the college students, the hippies—but he held the politicians in particular contempt. He believed they provided comfort to the enemy, weakened America's will to win the war, and prolonged their imprisonment.

The Vietnamese reveled in these taped denunciations, which provided the very propaganda that the POWs resisted under mistreatment or torture. Once, Cherry was in leg stocks, tied to a bed, when he heard Jane Fonda accuse the POWs of cowardice for bombing children at night. Outraged, he "tried to tear his irons from the wall."

In the early days of December, the cold remained their worst problem, but their hunger was also acute. Food was precious, and each man's response to the meager offerings became an important—though unspoken—subplot in their relationship.

Twice a day, guards left bowls of food, usually soup, greens, and bread, outside their door. Halyburton would bring them in and serve Cherry, who would devour his meal with his one good arm. One day Halyburton noticed that one bowl had considerably more food than the other. Though Cherry was more emaciated, Halyburton, also famished, took the larger serving for himself. But when they finished eating, he felt terrible. He didn't say anything but vowed that from then on he would let Cherry select his own meal. Day after day, meal after meal, Halyburton brought in the two bowls and placed them before Cherry. Sometimes Cherry took the larger portion; other times, the smaller. Halyburton concluded that only he was focused on who got more food, that such judgments were irrelevant to his cellmate. He admired Cherry's apparent indifference to such petty concerns.

Cherry, in fact, found Halyburton's handling of the food admirable. He was mindful of the portions but did not want to take more than he deserved. What was more, he appreciated that Halyburton gave him first choice, and he also noticed that Halyburton would not eat until he had finished, just in case he needed more food. On several occasions, the Vietnamese, trying to energize Cherry, left piles of sugar, which could be spread on bread and were considered a delicacy. Halyburton could have taken them for himself, but he never did.

While Halyburton was directly contributing to Cherry's physical well-being, Cherry was having his own effect on Halyburton. Until they met, Halyburton had been interested only in how he was going to survive. As a junior officer, he was low in the chain of command, so he knew he would not be a central figure in the prisoners' resistance. He felt sorry for himself, but Cherry's example began to shake him from his self-pity. Cherry was in far worse shape than he—his shoulder was in severe pain—yet he never complained. Halyburton could not lament his own plight when his roommate seemed to bear his own suffering with so much pride and determination.

Cherry's example prodded Halyburton to try to do more for the Americans' collective resistance. Using the tap code, he asked Knutson the names of all the prisoners he knew so that he could memorize them. He wanted to reach other POWs as well, ask them who they knew had been captured, and keep a running tally in his head. (Other Americans were doing the same thing.) This gave Halyburton a chance to use his mind and stem the boredom, but it was also critical to ensure that, once freed, no one was left behind. Thus, Halyburton committed himself to memorizing every name, an assignment that became increasingly difficult as the years passed and the numbers swelled. (In December 1965 fewer than sixty-five Americans had been captured in the North.)

Halyburton had already met a handful of prisoners at Heartbreak, and now Knutson tapped him other names, sorting them by date of shootdown. "Everett Alvarez ... Robert Shumaker ... Carlyle Harris..." Halyburton later learned the names alphabetically, then by rank and service, and even by cell. He was no longer in his F-4, but he had rejoined the war effort.

One thing that Cherry and Halyburton shared—indeed, a central part of their time together—was their love of cigarettes. Before they were captured, Halyburton smoked a pack of Winstons a day while Cherry plowed through three packs of Camels. In prison, they were limited to three cigarettes a day, distributed one at a time. It was, according to Halyburton, "the one big event of the day—or actually, three events."

They occasionally received inferior imports or damaged domestic smokes: a stick or tobacco stem would end up inside the wrap, making it difficult to draw, or a loose seam allowed the weed to escape. But compared to the food, the cigarettes were pretty good—strong, aromatic, with a definite kick. Their quality may have reflected the personal taste of Vietnam's most famous smoker, Ho Chi Minh.

Cherry and Halyburton tried to make their cigarettes last as long as possible; but without tobacco additives, the cigarette would go out unless puffed, a serious problem if they didn't have matches. (Stolen matches were valuable contraband.) In later years, many of the prisoners solved this dilemma by making smoldering "punks" out of toilet paper. The cigarettes themselves were occasionally withheld as punishment, and one guard who delivered them in pans would sometimes shake them to knock out the tobacco, which could then be smoked by the Vietnamese.

But cigarettes were elemental to both prisoners, a balm to their senses, a brief remove from their burdens. The soft white wrapper felt like cotton against their fingers, the glowing tip waved in the air like a spark of life. Each man inhaled slowly, holding his breath for a full count of unfiltered pleasure, releasing tides of nicotine into his system and—in Cherry's words—"satisfying every nerve." They blew the smoke out unhurriedly, smoothly, through their mouth or nose, the way serious smokers do.

Smoking was, Cherry said, "the most important thing of the day." He and Halyburton discussed the cigarettes before they arrived—when they would come, what their condition would be. They talked about their quality once they were received and then rehashed the experience when it was over. It was bliss, it was communal, and it was three times a day.

Virtually every POW spent considerable time thinking about his wife or girlfriend, remembering past intimacies, imagining idyllic reunions, and summoning a world with unconditional love, emotional support, and extravagant affection. By sustaining these relationships mentally, the prisoners sustained themselves, giving them a powerful incentive to survive. Their faith, however, was tested by constant fears that their loved ones had moved on to other relationships, fears that intensified with each year in captivity. What was she doing? Who was she seeing? Was she faithful? When a POW learned, either in Vietnam or after his repatriation, that his wife or girlfriend had ended the relationship, it was heartbreaking. One prisoner whose wife divorced him while he was in captivity later said he resented his former wife far more than the North Vietnamese.

For Cherry and Halyburton, the fate of their wives, as well as their children, weighed heavily on them. The men discussed their families often, but while they were both husbands and fathers, their circumstances could not have been more different.

Fred and Shirley had met in 1954 when Fred was stationed in Great Falls, Montana, and Shirley was a hostess at a club. According to Fred, they married after Shirley became pregnant. (She already had a son, Donald, from a previous relationship.) Their first son, Fred Jr., was born in 1955, and two daughters, Debbie and Cynthia, followed. To outsiders, Shirley was considered a dutiful Air Force wife who followed her husband to different postings—Delaware, Oklahoma, Arizona, Japan—raised the children, and participated in all the right social activities, such as a mahjong club on the Yokota Air Base.

But the marriage itself had little chance for success. Shirley later told Cynthia that marrying Fred "was my ticket out of Montana."
^*
Once she was pregnant, Fred knew his career would be hurt if he had a child out of wedlock; his standing, however, might benefit if he were seen as a family man. Marriage seemed to serve everyone's purpose, but only briefly. Shirley resented Fred's infidelity, and she also had a temper. When he came home late, she would wax the floor to make him slip. Fred belatedly concluded that combat pilots were better off single.

Despite the turmoil, Fred remembered the gentler moments with Shirley and worried how she was faring with four children. His daughter Cynthia later speculated that Fred really fell in love with his wife during his years in prison.