Two Souls Indivisible (30 page)

Halyburton was on the second flight, and when he boarded, he hugged and kissed an Air Force nurse—and noticed that she was wearing Marty's perfume. He also had mixed feelings, his joy muted by the ambiguous outcome of the war. He knew that the United States hadn't won and doubted that the government of South Vietnam would hold once American troops were withdrawn. If the Communists prevailed in Vietnam, what was the purpose of the POWs' sacrifice? He certainly did not consider himself or any other prisoner a hero. After all, they had been captured, they had been pawns for the enemy, and they had failed in their mission. He puffed a Marlboro, jotted notes in his diary, and began writing a poem about freedom.

In the days leading up to her husband's release, Marty received so many telephone calls from Navy officials, friends, and family that she was forced to hire someone just to answer the phone. She finally had to install a second line. She didn't know what time Porter's plane would land at Clark Air Base, nor did she know which network would broadcast it, but she was prepared. An Atlanta station had given her two televisions, which she stacked on top of her own so she could watch all three networks at once.

On the release date, a dozen people crowded into Marty's small den and waited with her. Each network, it turned out, would broadcast the return live, as the event riveted much of the nation. But the vigil dragged late into the night, the festive atmosphere giving way to exhaustion, anticipation surrendering to impatience. It was one more painful wait for Marty. Porter's letters had been reassuring, but they had also been censored; and she wasn't sure what injuries he had suffered or whether he'd show any effects of his imprisonment.

When his plane landed around four-thirty
A.M.
EST, Marty recognized Porter immediately. He stepped off the plane confidently. He walked well. He looked healthy. He shook a hand firmly. Marty screamed and cried and hugged her friends. Porter was free. He was on the screen for only about ten or fifteen seconds, but it was enough to reassure her. The only mystery was his sideburns. They weren't fashionable in 1965, but the new shootdowns had probably told him they were now in style.

The phone soon rang—a local station. The producer knew Marty from her television appearances and asked if she wanted him to replay Porter's few seconds of fame right then, so she was able to watch her husband a second time that night. In the coming days, she went to the station, sat in a room, and watched Porter's tape over and over again. She still needed to convince herself that he was free, and she never tired of looking at the step-down, the walk, and the handshake.

The following morning Marty told Dabney, by then in second grade, that Daddy would be calling soon.

"You don't have to go to school today if you don't want to," she said.

Dabney went to the refrigerator, where the lunch menu was posted. "No," she said. "I think I'll go to school. They're having hot dogs for lunch."

Cynthia Cherry was sitting in her seventh-grade class when a friend, carrying a newspaper, looked at her.

"Your dad is in the newspaper," she said.

"What do you mean?" Cynthia asked.

"He's on the list of POWs and he's coming home."

"My dad is dead."

"No he's not. He's in the paper."

"No he's not. He's dead."

The two girls argued until Cynthia looked for herself: "Fred V. Cherry." His name was in the newspaper, and she was giddy. She took the bus home, ran into the house, and told her mother the great news. "Guess what, Mom. Daddy's coming home!" She danced around, but her mother didn't say anything.

"She already knew," Cynthia later said. "Her expression was severe."

"The world she had built," Fred Jr. said, "was coming apart."

When the C-141 landed at Clark, Fred Cherry hoped to see an American flag. Stepping off the plane, he saw hundreds; the Americans were met by a cheering crowd of two thousand people. The men walked off the plane in the order in which they had been shot down. They waved and saluted as the well-wishers screamed, "Welcome home! We love you!" The senior ranking officer, Jeremiah Denton, stepped to a microphone and made a brief statement: "We are honored to have had the opportunity to serve our country under difficult circumstances. We are profoundly grateful to our commander in chief and to our nation for this day. God bless America."

On the first day of Operation Homecoming, 116 prisoners were released. By April 1, 591 were returned. In all, with more than a hundred military and civilian personnel classified as having died in captivity and with nearly a hundred who returned previously by escape or early release, almost eight hundred Americans spent time as prisoners during the Vietnam War.

Clean sheets. Fresh soap. Hot water. Good food. The base hospital was nirvana indeed.

The men ate prodigiously; three-fourths of the returnees were able to eat a regular diet. Steak and ice cream were the most popular items, while green salads, rarely seen in captivity, were piled on. Banana splits were in such demand that the kitchen ran out of bananas. Also served in large quantities were eggs, sausage, chili, pizza, chitterlings, collard greens, strawberries, and peaches. One serviceman ate an entire loaf of bread, one slice at a time, two pats of butter on each slice.

Halyburton's favorite meal was breakfast, so he ate eggs, toast, and sausage, regardless of the time of day.

Cherry's first meal was also breakfast. He told the dietitian, "One platter of scrambled eggs. One platter of sausage patties. Laid out on two plates."

"But, sir," she said, "it's five o'clock in the afternoon."

"I don't care," he said.

She brought the plates.

In addition to food and reading material, many of the former prisoners requested vitamin E, which was supposed to improve sexual potency. (The men were advised that there was little scientific evidence to support that belief.)

Though slightly underweight, ashen, or pale, most of the men returned in generally good health, a reflection of their improved treatment in their later years of captivity. But the physical toll was still evident. About one-third of the men had suffered fractures, including many of the vertebrae broken during ejection. Others were infested with various intestinal parasites, such as hookworm. The dim cells had strained the vision of many men, necessitating eyeglasses. Chipped teeth were a common byproduct of the beatings, while the rope treatment left almost ten percent of the returnees with "peripheral neuropathy," nerve damage.

Also noteworthy was the absence of amputees, leading some to believe that the Vietnamese simply shot those POWs who were badly injured.

Less easy to document were the emotional scars, but the damage for some was clear immediately. Two former POWs committed suicide in their first four months of freedom, and mental health experts at the time predicted that every prisoner who had had a long period of captivity would suffer psychologically. "It is not possible for a man exposed to a severe degree of abuse, isolation, and deprivation not to develop depression born out of extreme rage repressed over a long period of time," said John E. Nardini, an Air Force psychiatrist who was himself a POW during World War II. "It is simply a question of when and how the depressive reaction will surface and manifest itself."

Halyburton, now thirty-one, emerged remarkably fit for his seven and a half years in prison, checking in with a few chipped teeth, some parasites, and a sore back. He weighed 159 pounds, 21 less than when he was captured, but he had gained about 20 pounds from his low point. At five-eleven, he was an inch shorter, apparently the result of vertebra damage from the ejection. He was also lucky. When he was on the
Independence
and a wisdom tooth had begun to hurt, a medic said he would be okay for a few months but would then need to have it removed. The tooth, however, never bothered him in prison—a blessing, given that the Vietnamese used pliers in dentistry. Halyburton had his tooth removed on his return to the States.

When he initially arrived at Clark, he saw the other prisoners calling their families, but he was told he had to speak to the chaplain first. He assumed that his grandparents, both of whom would be in their late nineties, had died, and he feared his mother may have passed away as well, for Marty had rarely mentioned her in her letters. But the chaplain was slow to arrive, and when he did appear, he was uncomfortable telling him the news. Instead of talking directly, he spoke elliptically, and he irritated Halyburton to the point where Porter almost felt sorry for him. When the chaplain finally said it—your mother and grandparents are deceased—Halyburton was determined not to display any emotion, as if to deny the chaplain any chance to comfort him. He just wanted to be alone. When he returned to his room, the news sunk in—the people who had raised him and loved him had died; his entire immediate family, except for Marty and Dabney, was gone. He'd never had a chance to say good-bye, and he didn't know if they had passed away believing he was dead or alive. In his room, he allowed himself to cry.

He finally called Marty.

"I love you and I miss you and I'm okay," he told her.

She responded in kind. He said he had just been told about his mother and grandparents.

"Yes, they didn't want me to tell you about that," she said. She soon asked her first question: "Are you going to fly again?"

Halyburton didn't want to continue as a navigation officer, forever in the back seat, but he didn't want to retrain as a pilot. In truth, he wasn't sure what he would do next, but he knew what to tell his wife.

"No," he said. "I've had enough of that."

As Marty later said, "He hadn't been away from being a husband so long that he didn't know what the right answer was."

Fred Cherry's return had already sent alarms through the Pentagon, which had a thick file about his family: the death of his mother, Shirley's living with another man and having a baby, the depletion of his savings account, the legal troubles of his oldest son. Air Force Colonel Clark Price, an old friend of Cherry's, took these problems to Air Force Major General Daniel "Chappie" James, a highly respected black officer who had developed close ties with POW families.

"We have a brother who's going to face some strong music when he gets back, and he doesn't know what's going on," Price said.

"Is Cherry violent?" James asked.

"Not when I knew him," Price said.

James dispatched Price to the Philippines on a special escort mission.

When Cherry arrived at the hospital, he weighed 132 pounds, which was close to his weight when he was shot down, but he had gained about 20 pounds in the last couple of months and about 50 pounds from his low point. He had had open sores or infections for six years, but they had all healed, as had his broken wrist. He hoped the surgeons would be able to restore mobility to his left arm; he could move it only about thirty-five degrees in front and seventy degrees in back. But the bones in his shoulder, now tightly fused, had previously been infected, and the surgeons concluded that opening up the shoulder would be risky. So Cherry learned how to use one hand for such tasks as buttoning a shirt and changing a light bulb. He also returned with blind spots in his left eye and hearing loss in his right ear, the result of exposure to jet engines and slaps across the head.

When Price visited him in a private room, he brought a folder with the litany of woes, and he started with the easiest.

"Your mother died on May 28, 1970," he said.

"I already knew that," Cherry said. He had spoken to Beulah, who had told him only about their mother.

Then Price described the betrayal of his wife, the problems of his children, and the raiding of his finances: during his years of imprisonment, he had earned $147,184 in pay and allowances, but he now had $4,720.98 to his name. He absorbed each piece of news as he had the threats and taunts from the Vietnamese, without emotion or anger. He just made the same comment.

"I can handle that."

"I can handle that."

"I can handle that."

Clark also told him that his sons were in the Army, not in college as he had hoped, but he wasn't upset. He was just glad they were not in jail.

Some returning POWs were devastated by the breakup of their marriages, but Cherry believed that, given what he had endured as a prisoner, he could survive any personal setbacks. He never said an unkind word about Shirley; fearing the worst about her health, he was just relieved that she was alive.

For that matter, Cherry refused to criticize the Vietnamese, even those who tortured him. He said they were "just doing their job." His friends concluded that he was incapable of hatred.

"I was frustrated by his lack of bitterness," Price said, "but I've never heard him say a bad thing about anyone." As if to humanize the enemy, Cherry gave Price some cigarettes from Vietnam.

"They taste just like Camels," Cherry said.

He did receive one piece of good news in the hospital. Two months earlier he had been promoted to colonel. That meant more prestige, control, and money, but they did not compensate for his biggest loss: his piloting days were over.

When Halyburton went to the PX to buy clothes, he got a sense of how much America had changed. Escorted by a young ensign, he saw a bizarre array of bellbottoms, floral shirts, shoes with brass buckles, white belts, orange hot pants, and miniskirts. He later called Marty and told her he had gone shopping. That evening on the national news, she watched a story about an unnamed former prisoner shopping at the PX and wearing a garish outfit. As the camera zoomed in, she felt faint. "Oh my God, it's Porter." He was wearing plaid bellbottoms with a red shirt—for the last time.

***

One night in the hospital, the emergency bell rang, and someone yelled, "Fred Cherry's dead! Oh my God, he's dead!"

The nurses sprinted down the hall, opened the door, and saw Cherry lying on his bed, motionless, his hands folded over his chest. They tried to revive him as other servicemen watched in apparent disbelief. Doctors hustled into the room while orderlies rolled in special equipment. No one seemed to notice that his bed was surrounded by four burning candles and vases stuffed with flowers. Everyone was thinking, how would it look if a legendary survivor of the Vietnam POW camps died in an American military hospital?