Two Souls Indivisible (19 page)

Halyburton tried to keep his head up—not in defiance but in hopes of being photographed so that the U.S. military, and ultimately his family, would know he was alive. Every time a light came on, he looked up for a camera, but then a guard would butt him with a rifle or slap him with his hand. Frustration turned to fear as Halyburton realized that the spectators, with overwhelming numbers, were breaking down the protection of the guards. Block after block, the galleries cursed the prisoners, pressing them from either side and throwing bricks, bottles, stones, shoes, and garbage. Scores of Vietnamese darted among the Americans, reaching out, pushing, punching, spitting, screaming. The assailants beat the guards as well. Some Americans took vicious hits—Denton was knocked over with a rock while a famous photograph depicted Air Force Lieutenant Hayden Lockhart holding up a dazed comrade after he had been struck by a bottle. The march lasted for two miles, but the carefully choreographed parade of American humiliation had degenerated into a riot of delirious vengeance.

Halyburton feared that, instead of stones and bottles, he would be attacked with guns and knives. No one knew how the march would end or how the POWs' safety would be secured. Then, suddenly, a file of young men and women in white shirts or blouses, dark pants, and red armbands fanned out on either side of the straggling line. Positioning themselves between the guards and the lunging masses, they clasped hands and formed a new barrier. Then they shouted to the prisoners to run toward a soccer stadium several blocks away.

The Americans fled, but the mob pushed through the new protectors, clogged the path, and continued its pounding. Everett Alvarez was pummeled in the back of the head with a blunt object. Navy Lieutenant Gerald Coffee was hit with a fist that split his upper and lower lips. Air Force Sergeant Arthur Cormier's shirt was torn off and his face streaked with blood. Halyburton was also clubbed, first by guards who wanted him to bow his head and then by ruffians, a beating that left him with knots in the back of his head and bruises on his face, shoulders, and arms. He saw a young girl lying on the ground, bloodied, hurt by the mob. He was afraid she would be killed and the Americans would be blamed and tried for murder, but someone picked her up and carried her away.

The guards opened the stadium's rickety metal doors just enough to allow the Americans to slip through. But the crowd continued to surge from behind, forcing the guards to strike out again at their own people. The mob would not be stopped, pushing against the doors and breaking them down. The Americans by now were walking through a narrow tunnel leading to the track, whose secure door could not be breached. They arrived and sat down on the grass, still in a double column. Some believed that they had been taken to the stadium to replay a chapter of Roman history, in which defenseless men would be pitted against wild beasts for the thrills of bloodthirsty fans. But the scene soon had the trappings of a combat evacuation zone, with everyone nursing wounds and the guards taking a head count. The Americans, most of whom were already weak from captivity, were ill prepared to handle such an ordeal, and they felt fortunate that no one had been killed. For the moment they were out of harm's way, but they were not free of derision. A voice over the loudspeaker announced that they had just experienced the wrath of the Vietnamese people.

***

Fred Cherry's night was no better.

After Halyburton was taken away, a guard entered the cell and signaled him to get dressed. He would be leaving again. Cherry wasn't sure where he was going, but he knew the authorities were again interested in his shoulder. Several days earlier, a doctor had examined it and recognized that the bleeding had increased, the stink had worsened, and the infection was raging. Left untreated, he could again be in peril.

On the night of the Hanoi march, Cherry was taken back to the hospital for his third surgery. This time, however, the hostility in the street had permeated the rooms inside. While the previous procedures were impaired by the staff's poor medical skills, Cherry believed the doctors had tried to heal him and to minimize his discomfort. That was no longer true.

Cherry recognized the doctor, a short, rotund man who in previous operations had offered comforting words. Tonight he was silent and dour. He used a pointed surgical instrument to tap the shoulder, but he pressed too hard. The tip punctured the brittle skin and slid right through. Meanwhile, a nurse prepared the injection that would knock him out. She inserted the needle and began to press, but the doctor stopped her. She withdrew the needle, and Cherry realized he would be awake during this operation.

The doctor placed a small white sheet over Cherry's face, neck, and good shoulder, then he took a scalpel and cut away the dead flesh of the crippled shoulder, literally scraping the infection off the bone. Perspiration poured out of Cherry's body; it was, he later said, "the worst straight pain I've ever felt," an act of sadism. He couldn't believe that a man who was supposed to heal would hurt him so badly. But he refused to cry out. He heard the doctors and nurses talking; it seemed they were puzzled that their patient remained conscious but didn't scream. Cherry believed it was a test of wills, and they were not going to break his. He was not going to plead for his life. Gritting his teeth until he thought they would break or fuse together, he made sure he was smiling whenever the sheet was raised from his face. For at least an hour, he kept saying to himself that he could make it. When they finished scraping and washing the bone, bandaging the shoulder, and wrapping the arm, the same grin appeared on his face. While the operation was his most excruciating one, it finally arrested the infection.

Cherry was taken back to his cell, where Halyburton had just returned from his own harrowing night. He noticed that Cherry's sling was already a bright red.

"Fred, what in the world did they do to you?"

"Oh, Haly," was all he could say.

Halyburton carried him to his bunk as the blood spilled out of Cherry's shoulder, running all the way to his feet and drenching everything around him, including Halyburton.

"I can't believe they took you on the march as well," he said.

"I haven't been on a march," Cherry said. "Where have you been?"

"They marched us through the streets of Hanoi and they kicked the shit out of us."

Cherry described his ordeal.

"It looks like we've both been through it," Halyburton said.

"Do you know what you look like?" Cherry asked.

"No, but I know what I feel like."

"Well, you look pretty bad too."

Outside the cell the brutality continued, as Americans were tied to trees in the courtyard, locked in small black cells, and berated during interrogations. The following morning, Bob Purcell tapped to another prisoner, "I hope this doesn't sound too presumptuous, but after last night I think I almost—up to a point—know how Christ must have felt."

The march itself backfired against the North Vietnamese. They had hoped to photograph and film humbled Americans before a victimized but orderly population; they instead captured manacled prisoners being terrorized by locals. Rather than generating international sympathy for their claim of war crimes, they provoked anger even among American doves who had previously defended Hanoi. The Johnson administration vowed to use overwhelming force if the POWs were tried as war criminals, and, prodded by public outrage, the administration became far more sensitive to the captives' plight. The government, never having formally declared war in the first place, had been reluctant to say "prisoners of war," but a new Committee on Prisoner Matters was given the resources to contact other governments, solicit support from international aid agencies, and even initiate conversations with Hanoi about the captives' welfare.

The days after the march also marked a new era of extreme hardship for the prisoners. The Vietnamese, still outraged over the recent bombing but now embarrassed as well, vented their frustrations at the prisoners. His interrogators threatened Halyburton that he would be tried and executed as a war criminal, and McGoo struck him with a fist. These tactics had been used before, but typically in a haphazard or bureaucratic manner. Now his captors were genuinely angry, eager to harm the Americans.

Halyburton and Cherry were unaware of the international reaction to the march. All they knew was that the Vietnamese were preparing for another purge. Halyburton continued to change Cherry's bandages, wash the soaked sweatshirt every morning, and knock the ants away. In this new climate of oppression, both men took comfort from their having each other.

The prison officials, however, finally realized that their scheme had failed, that they had not put Halyburton in a "worse place" when they locked him up with their only black captive. By now they knew that Halyburton had not just endured his roommate but saved him. On the night of July 11, a guard walked in and motioned to Halyburton to roll up his clothes. As always, he began to roll up Cherry's belongings first, but the guard said, "No, just you."

Both men knew what that meant: if you leave without your bedroll, you're coming back; if you take it, you're gone for good. Their time together was over.

"Fred, I'm sure you're going to be okay, but it looks like this is it," Halyburton said.

Cherry's eyes welled up as Halyburton gathered his clothes. Cherry leaned forward, pulled something from behind his back, and stood up. "Haly, you forgot your sweatshirt."

"You keep it."

The two men hugged, cried, and said good-bye. Halyburton walked out, leaving his roommate standing in the middle of the cell. Cherry later said, "That was the most lonesome night I ever spent in my life."

Their time together, seven and a half months, would represent less than ten percent of their time as prisoners, yet it was the turning point of each man's captivity.

They had been forced to live in a very different world than they had ever known. That world was harsh, but it also had a kind of pureness and clarity of purpose. Survival transcended all other concerns, and traditional sources of tension—race, service, rank, family background—were replaced by the bonds of compassion and sacrifice. It would not be the last time that Halyburton and Cherry would create a rarefied existence in their prison cell.

Every POW confronts the same question—Do I want to live or die?—and everyone answers it in deed or thought. The closer he is to death, however, the harder it is to maintain his will to survive. But as a former Air Force psychologist, Ludwig Spolyar, wrote in 1973, "If he does decide to survive, everything he does from then on is dependent on the need to survive." At that point the prisoner can accept his suffering as "necessary for the fulfillment of future freedom," and he can "endure the suffering, which now has meaning to him."

The symbiotic friendship between Cherry and Halyburton had layers of meaning. Cherry would have died without his roommate—but in surviving he also rescued Halyburton from his despair. Each man inspired the other and helped make that elemental decision, to live or die, easier.

Cherry knew that Halyburton could have done less, or nothing, and no one would have held him accountable. That Halyburton was a white man from the South deepened his gratitude. Cherry's self-sufficiency had always helped him get along with whites. He made few demands and took pains not to discomfit others. But as a prisoner, he was in perpetual need and was at times an invalid. What's more, their relationship completely reversed the social order in which each had been raised: the white man was the ultimate servant to the black man, feeding him, exercising him, bathing him, sweeping the room, and more. It was not a true role reversal: in the segregated South, blacks had to perform those jobs to survive, whereas Halyburton did them voluntarily, without compensation or acclaim. Cherry now realized that some Southern whites were capable of more humanity and generosity than he had thought possible. "I didn't expect Haly to do all that," Cherry said years later. "He was white and he was from the South, but he taught me that you can grow up in that environment and separate the good from the bad and the right from the wrong. He was one who did that."

Cherry's impact on Halyburton was less visible but equally vital. All Halyburton's energy had been focused on his own plight, his own discomfort, and he had reached an emotional nadir before meeting Cherry. Their friendship renewed his spirits and motivated him to find meaning in his captivity.

"Caring for Fred," he later wrote, "was the first opportunity I had to turn from my own concerns to another's. I realized how trivial mine were by comparison and how he bore his pain and suffering with such dignity—never complaining, never cursing his fate, never giving up. The task of caring for him gave a definite purpose to my immediate existence, and it was a task that I gratefully took up. In the process, I received much more from him than I was able to give."

The experience forced Halyburton to confront his own bigotry. Cherry was certainly not limited, as Halyburton had always thought of blacks. Indeed, Cherry's life was testimony to unlimited imagination, ambition, and skill; he mastered the intricacies of combat flying while displaying courage, resilience, and patriotism. Halyburton had never considered such a possibility, that blacks were his equal. Yet he had to acknowledge that Fred Cherry was his superior—in rank and in reality.

"I was in awe of him," he said, "and I had learned to love him."

The families of the early POWs were racked by uncertainty, not knowing the condition of their loved one, he was being treated, or whether he would return. One wife said her husband was "with the living dead." Coping took many different forms, but the wives of Halyburton and Cherry responded in extreme ways—for good and bad.

In October of 1965, Marty Halyburton was visiting an aunt in Atlanta when she heard a car pull up and several doors slam. She looked out the window and saw an official Navy car; approaching the house were two men in uniform and a chaplain. They had found Marty by speaking with her relatives in Florida, whose house she had just left. Marty knew there was only one reason that a chaplain would visit a serviceman's wife at home: something had happened to Porter.