Two Souls Indivisible (26 page)

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, used 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?"

"No."

"The madam opened the door and said, 'What do you want?' He said, 'I want to come in and get laid.' She said, 'How the hell can you get laid? You have no arms and no legs.' He said, 'I rang the doorbell, didn't I?'"

Cherry laughed loudly. As he later wrote, "Here I was, damn near dead from torture and infection, and there's this guy in the next cell who has never even met me in person, risking his ass to tell me a joke in tap code. You just had to know what they would have done to Spike if they had caught him communicating with me at that particular time. It was at that exact second I realized how absurd the whole world was, and that I wasn't going to let it get me down."

Cherry always took pride in his professional appearance, even in prison, and he encouraged his cellmates to do the same. If their razors were dull, Cherry told them to keep the blade wet to improve the cut—they had no shaving cream—and then dry it immediately afterward to stave off rust. That would also minimize the chance for infection. Respect for religion was important as well. Many of the POWs said that God played an important role in their survival, but Cherry reinforced his own moral authority by disapproving of anyone using the Lord's name in vain. If someone said, "God damn," he would respond, "Do you have to say that?"

Cherry's behavior motivated others to do anything to help him. When he was living with Navy Commander Theodore Kopfman and Air Force Major John Stavast, his shoulder wound was oozing pus, and he spent some days drifting in and out of consciousness. His cellmates feared that the infection would be fatal. They had no medicine, but Kopfman recalled that his grandmother used to make her own soap with lye and would use it specifically to sterilize clothes. If it could be used for fabric, why not flesh? "We're going to stuff that wound with lye soap," Kopfman told Stavast. They did, and two weeks later the wound was dry and clean.

Kopfman had never had such a close association with a black man, but he would carry Fred to the washroom and help him bathe, something he could have never imagined himself doing. "Bathing a body that is black was different," he said, "but after about a week, I never saw his color."

In September 1969, two events improved the conditions for all the POWs in the North.

First, two recently freed prisoners, Navy Lieutenant Robert Frishman and Seaman Douglas Hegdahl, held a press conference at Bethesda Naval Hospital and described their abuse in detail, making a mockery of Hanoi's claims of lenient treatment.

"I don't think," Frishman said, "solitary confinement, forced statements, living in a cage for three years, being put in straps, not being allowed to sleep or eat, removal of fingernails, being hung from a ceiling, having an infected arm which was almost lost, not receiving medical care, being dragged along the ground with a broken leg, or not allowing an exchange of mail to prisoners of war are humane."

The second event was the death of Ho Chi Minh. The new leadership of North Vietnam, faced with mounting criticism in the United States and around the world of its treatment of the prisoners, reversed course and markedly improved their conditions. The random torture all but ended, and the POWs received better medical care and were given more blankets, cigarettes, mail, and food (three meals a day instead of two, larger bowls of rice, eventually canned meat and fish, and tastier soup). Prisoners in solitary confinement suddenly received cellmates. The requirement to bow was dropped. Penalties for communicating were lessened. As a group, the Americans slowly gained weight, healed, regained color in their skin, and returned to something approaching physical normalcy.

A year later, another important incident altered the course of the prisoners' captivity.

To accommodate the overflow of Americans, the Vietnamese had opened a prison near the town of Son Tay, twenty miles northwest of Hanoi. It was one of the North's worst camps, with filthy cells, horrible food, and predatory rats. It was nicknamed "Camp Hope." On November 22, 1970, a U.S. strike force raided the Son Tay camp, lighted up the sky with bombs, landed helicopters, fought off defenders, and returned without losing a single man. Unfortunately, they also had no prisoners, for they had all been evacuated four months earlier.
^*

At the time of the raid, Halyburton was in a new prison at Dan Hoi, a barracks ten miles west of Hanoi. Comfortable by comparison, it was the only compound built specifically for the Americans, with freshly painted rooms, showers, courts for volleyball and badminton, and even facilities to make instant coffee. It was called Camp Faith. Halyburton described it as "a country club," and had he stayed there, the rest of his incarceration would have been relatively easy. But after the Son Tay raid, the Vietnamese feared additional rescue attempts and moved the POWs from the suburban camps at Dan Hoi and Cu Loc back to the more secure Hoa Lo Prison in Hanoi.

This turn of events left Halyburton with mixed emotions. Back in Hoa Lo, he found himself in a compound that held 340 American POWs; it was the first time all of the aviators had been together. Called Camp Unity, it was also crowded and tense, with forty or fifty to a cell. The prisoners walked shoulder to shoulder, sleeping mats overlapped, and the guards, concerned about another raid, patrolled with hand grenades.