Two Souls Indivisible (20 page)

"The plane was shot down," an officer told her. Halyburton's jet hit a mountain, though his status—killed in action or missing in action—had not been determined. He held out little hope. "There was no parachute sighting," he said. He briefly described the mission, showed Marty a map of North Vietnam, and pointed to the site of the crash. He promised to return as soon as possible with definitive information on Porter's status. Words of comfort were probably offered, but Marty did not remember them.

The following day the men returned, and the officer provided a few more details. A Navy helicopter had flown over the crash site but had failed to detect any radio signals that would have come from the emergency beeper. He repeated that no one had seen a chute. "We know he's dead," he told her.

For the next several days, Marty looked at her baby and realized Dabney would never know her father. But it was a thought she could not yet absorb. She was numb and terrified. Her own mother had died several years earlier; an only child, she was not close to her gambling father. And now, at twenty-three, she was also a widow and a single parent.

A friend drove her and Dabney to Davidson for a memorial service. In a town of a thousand people, the death of one young man was a huge loss. Virtually everyone knew Porter and his family; his grandparents had lived there for more than forty years. Flags were at half mast at the post office, the town hall, and Davidson College. The football team canceled practice on October 21. Two days later, before its homecoming game, the squad paid tribute to Halyburton with a moment of silence. Attending the game was Halyburton's mother, Katharine, who worked in the school's public affairs department.

A gravestone for Porter, marking the dates of his birth and death, was placed in a family plot.

Katharine received dozens of condolence letters, including one from Jimmy Woods, the son of a Davidson doctor who had grown up with Porter. He was now an Army captain in the 35th Infantry Regiment. "I know how much he loved his family and his country," Woods wrote. "...he died a hero." A few months later, on February 6, 1966, Jimmy Woods was killed by friendly fire in Vietnam's Pleiku Province. He was twenty-five. Many Davidsonians agonized that this war had claimed two young men from so small a town.

The memorial service for Halyburton was held on October 21 at St. Albans Episcopal Church, a low brick structure that blended inconspicuously with a residential neighborhood. Parking signs were posted to direct traffic. A photographer from the college strolled around taking pictures. More than 150 people attended, well more than the church could seat. Speakers were set up outside for the overflow. It was a sunny afternoon, but the church was dim. An organist played "The Strife Is O'er" and the Navy hymn, "Eternal Father, Strong to Save." Visitors signed a guest book; on the page for Final Resting Place was written "North Vietnam." Attendees also received a booklet with a collection of Halyburton's poems, mostly innocent riffs with such titles as "The Cruel Sea," "An Autumn Fire," and "Katharine," a tribute to his mother. No one disputed Katharine Halyburton's dedication, which said the poems "reveal a depth of soul, a maturing understanding, and a heart and mind sensitive to beauty." The booklet was titled "Thoughts Before 21," the poems having been written by the teenage Porter.

Both Katharine and Marty were escorted by Navy officers and sat in the front row. An honor guard entered the church, folded two American flags, and handed them to the Navy escorts, who presented them to mother and wife. A friend held Dabney, whose soft cries were heard between the prayers and the hymns. Katharine wore her son's pilot wings on her lapel and was remarkably composed. She did not cry during the service; at times, even a trace of a smile appeared—it seemed that she was trying to comfort others. She found less conspicuous ways to express her emotion. Sitting next to her was Bill Thompson, a friend of Porter's, and she squeezed his hand when a poignant moment passed.

While the church was Episcopalian, the ceremony was Presbyterian, and it reflected an ethos of restraint and sobriety. The purpose of the service was more to worship God than to praise the dead. The chaplain, Will Terry, knew the Halyburtons well, and this service was one of his most challenging. Porter's death had spurred the antiwar sentiment—Davidson was, after all, a college town—and the unrest heightened everyone's emotions. Terry rewrote his "meditation" on Halyburton four or five times.

Standing on the altar, he spoke firmly, noting that a "memorial service" was a fitting ceremony because "a memorial is something that keeps remembrance alive." Alive first, he said, "is the memory of Porter Halyburton as a friend, a husband, and a son who brought joy rather than pain," and whose memories of "tenderness, devotion, and considerateness fill our hearts with gratitude toward God, who is the origin and author of such virtues." But these memories, he said, are also jarred by tragedy—not of death, for we all must die, but from "the kind of death that comes from the insanity of war ... from the collective selfishness and callousness of man ... and in this sense we are very much participants in his death." But there is yet another memory, Terry said, which he called "the recollection of victory." It is the memory of the resurrection "that allows us to look death in the face ... This is the certitude that God has blessed Porter with. It is the victory of God, and it is our victory as His children. This does not keep our grief from being grief. The separation is real, but the reunion is also real, and this is what saves us from despair ... Our memories end not in grimness, but in the quiet joy of genuine gratitude."

After the service, friends and relatives gathered at Katharine's house, where Porter had grown up, and was soon filled with dishes of spaghetti, baked apples, date bars, and layer cake. Katharine retained her poise, expressing pride in her son, showing little grief, and assuming a fatalistic air. As she told her friend Nancy Blackwell, "If this is the way it was meant to be, then this is the way it's meant to be." Her parents were alive but ailing, and she had to be strong for them. But her steely pose was deceiving. As a public relations professional, she knew the importance of image—her bold scarves and costume jewelry had created a cosmopolitan persona—and she did not want to show her vulnerability. Her friends, however, knew better, and understood how much her own life was vested in her son's. Divorced and remaining single, she had quit her promising newspaper career so she could tend to her parents in Davidson. What she'd had was Porter, and now he was gone. As Erskine Sproul, a photographer who worked with Katharine, said, "She was able to continue her job stoically, but her eyes were always red."

On the night she learned that her husband had been shot down, Shirley Cherry gathered her children and told them what had happened. Her second child, Fred jr., who was ten years old, didn't understand. "What does that mean?" he asked.

It meant leaving Japan and returning to the United States, which surprised some of Cherry's friends. Other wives in such circumstances stayed in Japan, where information was more accessible. Shirley and the children initially moved in with Fred's oldest sister, Beulah, and her husband, Melvin, in Suffolk, Virginia, for they could accommodate Fred's family. On Sundays the children would visit their grandmother in the same farmhouse where their father had once lived.

The arrangement, however, was difficult for the youngsters, who did not respond well to Beulah's discipline. Adjusting to public school was even more difficult. While military schools were rigid, the Suffolk schools were lax, with children cursing, fighting, and ignoring their teachers. "It was a culture shock," Fred Jr. said. "I just wanted to get home, crawl under the bed, and stay there."

Before long, Shirley and the children moved twelve miles east to Portsmouth, which coincided with alarming news for the children: their dad had not survived. "I always thought he was dead," said Cynthia, who was six when her father was shot down. "That's what Mom always said."
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In fact, there is no evidence that Cherry's status had changed. In a letter to his mother, Leolia, five months after the shootdown, the Air Force said it knew that he had "ejected, deployed a good parachute, and was observed to land on a small hill in a slight ravine." He signaled with his radio beeper, but voice contact was never made. Whether he survived was uncertain, the letter said, but "it is reasonable to assume that he may have been taken captive, and is being detained."

In the following three years, the Air Force continued to write to Leolia and Beulah without indicating any change in Cherry's status. The Air Force was proceeding as if he were alive. In 1968 Leolia was told that her son had been promoted from major to lieutenant colonel.

By then, Shirley had severed her ties with Fred's family. When Beulah tried to visit the children, Shirley would not let her see them, so Beulah would park her car and watch the kids play on a basketball court.

Shirley continued to receive money from the Air Force—according to Cynthia, $1,432 a month. They moved from an apartment in Portsmouth to a single-family house, and Shirley began dating. When Sam Morgan, an Air Force pilot who had known the Cherrys in Japan, visited Shirley in Virginia, he was struck by how much she had changed. She had lost weight, bought new clothes, and changed her hair style. "When I knew her in Japan, she was the classic Air Force wife, but when I saw her in Virginia, she had decided that Fred was gone and she was a completely different person," he said. There was another man in the house, he added, "and she was not happy to see me."

To be sure, Shirley was hardly the only POW wife to start a relationship with another man. As one wife told the
New York Times
in 1972, "I don't want to live as if I were dead." Another woman said, "A lot decided to stay faithful until they met a man who was attractive." The stress on the wives caused many marital breakups. At the end of the war, the Pentagon said that 39 of the 420 returning married prisoners, or 9.2 percent, "have either gotten or were getting divorces." Ten years later,
U.S. News & World Report
said that at least ninety couples, or 21 percent, had divorced. But those numbers represent all married prisoners, including those caught toward the end of the war; the rate for the early shootdowns was higher. Few breakups, however, were so one-sidedly bitter and gratuitously hateful as the Cherrys'.

According to Cynthia, her mother seemed to take pride in telling others what her final words to Fred were: "She said the last thing she ever told him was, 'I hope you get shot down.' And then he got shot down."

Fred's mother suffered a stroke the same year he was captured. Until then, the seventy-eight-year-old had remained spry, still raising chickens, canning fruits, singing out the Lord's name, and threatening malefactors with her .38 revolver. But the stroke slowed her down, and the news of her son was almost more than she could bear. "It was like someone had knocked the wind out of her," said Evelyn Brown, a granddaughter. "She didn't display her emotions and she didn't cry, but you knew from her expression that she was torn up inside."

But as long as Fred was missing in action, she could hope he was alive, and that hope sustained her. She was more confident than anyone else in the family. Each day, surrounded by photographs of Fred in his uniform, she sat in her chair with her head down. She would look up if someone spoke to her; otherwise, people assumed she was praying. Before meals she would say a blessing: "Lord, please take care of my baby, and let me live to see him come home." She did not allow herself to believe otherwise. "He'll be back," she said. "I may not be alive to see it, but he'll be back."

Beulah was now the family matriarch and the principal contact for the Air Force. For three years there was little news, and any information was either misleading or unnerving. In March 1967, the Air Force wrote to Beulah that an American rabbi and minister had visited two unnamed American POWs in North Vietnam, and the pilots "were said to be in reasonably good spirits and receiving adequate medical treatment." But later that month, the Air Force wrote that "increased pressure is quite possibly being brought to bear on our personnel being held captive ... to force them to make unfavorable statements against their country." There was no indication about what type of pressure or how it was applied—nor, for that matter, any new evidence on whether Fred was dead or alive.

The American National Red Cross took packages to the POWs, so Beulah sent some to her brother, hoping that he was in fact a prisoner. But she was less confident than her mother. Typically buoyant and chatty, Beulah was now often quiet, detached. Friends and relatives picked times to talk with her about Fred, re-counting the good times and laughing at his antics.

There were, most famously, his low flights over the community. When he was stationed at Dover, he loved to take detours and buzz the houses in his old neighborhood. Sometimes he would alert his family and friends to "the show," and everyone would stand out in the yard and wait until someone would finally hear a distant rumble. It got louder and louder and soon muffled the screams of the children. Necks would strain, and then this streak of metal would roar right above the treetops, smoke blowing out its rear and spectators gleefully diving for cover. The plane would climb, swoop, twirl, and dive, then peel away and disappear.

Fred loved to impress Beulah. One time, when he was about to land at nearby Langley Air Force Base, he instructed the radio control tower to call his sister.

"Mrs. Watts, your brother is coming in."

"When is he coming?" she asked.

Right on cue, Fred buzzed her roof and rattled the house. "He's here!" she cried, throwing the telephone in the air and running to the window to catch a glimpse.

On another occasion, Beulah took Fred to Langley and was allowed to go up to the control tower to watch her brother in an F-105. At dusk, with the afterburners glowing, Fred waved as he taxied by. He was going to Mobile, Alabama, which at normal flight speed would take an hour and a half. But that evening he flew at supersonic speed, or about 900 mph, which is forbidden across the continental United States, but it allowed Cherry to reach Mobile in an hour. Landing, he jumped out of the plane, raced to a telephone, and called Beulah, who had just returned from the air base.