Two Souls Indivisible (25 page)

"Robert, Porter's alive."

Bourdeaux hollered, and suddenly Marty felt that same excitement. "This is just what you wanted!" he yelled. Until then, she wasn't sure, and she hadn't accepted that it was possible, but the telephone kept ringing and the reporters kept asking her questions, and she kept saying, Yes! He's alive! And her words made Porter—his revival? his rebirth? his resurrection?—more real. One reporter told her that the White House was having a 4
P.M.
press briefing on the new POWs, so that evening she watched
The Huntley-Brinkley Report
on NBC, which showed sketches of the three captives, including Porter. Seeing the image finally dispelled her disbelief and oscillation. If his sketch was beamed out across the entire country on national news, she knew it had to be true. The telephone kept ringing and friends and journalists kept asking her questions and she kept talking until the phone was finally pulled from its plug at two-thirty in the morning. It was, Marty later recalled, the most exciting night in her life.

When she returned to Decatur, she received a package; it was the green sweater that she had knitted for Porter and given away. "I think you're going to need this," her friend wrote.

While Katharine survived her surgery, the cancer still crippled her body. Usually medicated but often in pain, she spent her remaining months in Huntersville Hospital, a former tubercular center near Davidson that was, according to one resident, "the place people would go to die." Coincidentally, one of her nurses was a woman named Julia Johnson, who had worked as a maid for the family and had watched Porter grow up. Now, holding hands, they would reminisce about his youth—how he would fix the backyard feeders so the birds wouldn't go hungry, how he would be a leader for other boys in the neighborhood, and how he would obediently eat the snacks his grandfather made for him each day after school. Johnson recalled Porter as having "beautiful hands and a gorgeous smile," and talking about him made it seem as though he were there.

"Miz Halyburton" Johnson said, "what would you have done if Porter had been the opposite of what you wanted?"

"I never crossed that, so I don't know," she said.

Johnson soon realized that Katharine was trying to survive for just one reason: to see Porter.

"Julia," she said, "I know Porter's alive, and I'm going to be here to see my son."

"Miz Halyburton, how do you know?"

"I feel it in my heart. My son is somewhere on this earth. He is alive."

Her father died in January of 1968, at the age of ninety-four. Two months later, on March 4, Katharine died at the age of sixty. She wore her son's pilot wings to the end.

The news that Beulah Watts was waiting for finally came in 1969. In January, film footage of prisoners attending church at the Zoo's auditorium had been released to the United States. In addition to examining the tape, the government extracted photographs that were used to identify the men. In March, copies of the pictures were sent to Beulah as well as Shirley, and Beulah confirmed what the Air Force had suspected: Fred Cherry was in the picture, he was a POW, and he was alive. The film was shown on the news in Virginia, and Leolia could sing out for everyone to hear: "My baby's alive!"

She believed her prayers had been answered, though she could not slow her own decline. Diagnosed with cancer, she reconciled herself to never seeing her son again in this life. Her friends thought that, knowing Fred was alive, she could finally rest in peace. Leolia died in May of 1970, at eighty-two.

While Fred was now alive in the eyes of his friends and relatives, he was still dead to his wife. Her insistence on his demise surprised Calvin Hightower, an Air Force officer who had been the best man at their wedding. He called her after he saw the POW photograph in a magazine.

"I saw the picture of him—that's Fred!" he said.

"No, it's not," Shirley said.

"But it's a picture of him!"

"That's not Cherry because he's dead."

She didn't tell her children of their father's status—galling punishment for a man who had paid dearly for his life.

While Halyburton and Cherry led separate lives in Vietnam, their experiences overlapped in one critical respect. Both discovered that their lengthy incarceration had a transforming, even uplifting, effect. As the years passed, they were forced to shun conventional ideas of happiness and success, to reappraise the meaning of their own lives, and to create a world very different from the one they had known. Trapped, brutalized beyond despair, each man eventually survived by finding a higher plane of existence.

In the early years, Halyburton tried to escape the present by living in the past. He recalled every memory, cherished every achievement, confronted every mistake, and underwent what he called "the catharsis of regret." His "atonement" for his imperfect past was to think of everything he wanted to do in the future. In that process, he began identifying "categories of interest"—the aspirations of a young man who felt he had squandered opportunities in his carefree youth, a wish list of personal goals that would validate his imprisonment, a way to ensure that no minute of his freedom would be wasted.

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 released. 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.