Two Souls Indivisible (21 page)

"What's wrong?" she asked. "Are you back at Langley?"

"No, I'm in Mobile, Alabama," he said proudly.

She was stunned but pleased that no barrier—sound or racial—could impede her baby brother.

These memories, shared with friends and family, made Beulah smile and would lift her spirits, but then she would grow silent, the pain returning to her eyes. Everyone knew it was time to stop talking.

Fred Cherry and Porter Halyburton were separated for the rest of their captivity, but their time together had prepared them for the hardships to come. As the enemy's purges intensified, both men suffered the worst treatment of their imprisonment. But their friendship remained a source of inspiration, giving each man additional incentive to resist and endure. Neither Cherry nor Halyburton wanted to let the other down, to negate what had passed between them. As Cherry said, "After all Haly had done for me, I wasn't about to disappoint him."

The treatment of Cherry was always complicated by race. The Vietnamese thought they could demoralize and divide the Americans—and minorities were the ideal target. If African Americans were denied civil rights in their own country, why should they fight and die for that country in Vietnam?

This message was delivered in many ways. In 1965 Hanoi played a tape of Clarence Adams, a black former Army sergeant from Memphis, ridiculing the United States. Adams had been taken prisoner during the Korean War and refused repatriation because of racism back home. In 1966 the civil rights activist Diane Nash Bevel visited Hanoi and saw a movie about Ho Chi Minh, which said he had visited Harlem in his youth and had "resented the exploitation of Negroes in the United States." Bevel, in a broadcast to her "black brothers" in South Vietnam, said, "The Vietnam War is a colonialist war. If you fight in it, you are fighting Asian brothers who are determined to prevent their country from becoming owned and managed by racist capitalist white men."

The following year, the Viet Cong released two black POWs, Army Sergeants Edward Johnson and James Jackson, along with a statement expressing "solidarity and support for the just struggle of the U.S. Negroes ... for basic national rights." The Viet Cong also dropped propaganda leaflets on National Route 13, a major highway in Bing Long Province, urging black soldiers to join the enemy.

The Vietnamese correctly anticipated that black Americans would turn against the war much earlier than whites; opposition stemmed not just from militant leaders like Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X but from mainstream black men as well. The most prominent voice belonged to Martin Luther King, Jr., who concluded that Vietnam was needlessly destroying lives, white and black, American and Vietnamese, while undermining domestic programs for the poor. He was also angry that his government would sacrifice blood and treasure to protect the rights of the Vietnamese but not do the same for its own citizens. "We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society," he said in a speech in New York on April 4, 1967,

and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit.

There is little evidence, however, that the antiwar statements from civil rights leaders or other racially motivated propaganda affected significant numbers of African American soldiers. While they were conscious of race, only rarely did that awareness translate into sympathy for an enemy that was otherwise trying to kill them.

That was why the North Vietnamese believed that Fred Cherry, a decorated combat pilot, a career serviceman, and the highest-ranking black POW, was so valuable—and why they used every means possible, including torture, to extract a statement from him. His credentials would carry weight with African Americans in the battlefield as well as on the streets back home. If Cherry denounced his government for pursuing a morally bankrupt foreign policy, if he urged black soldiers to fight for economic and social justice instead, or if he instructed African Americans in the United States to reject the war, Hanoi would claim its greatest propaganda victory. It would release him with great fanfare, broadcast his views on radio and television, and make him a hero in developing and socialist countries. If Martin Luther King, Jr., opposed the war, then why wouldn't Fred Cherry?

But Cherry was a military officer who believed in his country and its war aims in Vietnam. Even in the face of torture, he would not repudiate America. Doing so would affirm the negative stereotypes, including lack of courage and patriotism, that had long tarnished African Americans in the armed services.

"I know how some white Americans feel about blacks," he said years later. "If I do one little thing wrong, they're going to multiply that and you'll hear the same old thing: blacks aren't capable of doing this or that, they can't stand up under pressure, and they're not loyal to their country, which is the damnedest thing I've ever heard. Well, it wasn't going to happen on my watch. I was fighting for twenty-three million black folks. That was my battle."

***

Halyburton's battle was more traditional but no less powerful: he was fighting to uphold the Code of Conduct for U.S. armed forces.

The code itself was written by the Department of Defense in 1955 amid rising concerns, even hysteria, over the conduct of the American POWs in Korea. Studies described massive collaboration by American prisoners with the enemy, their failure to resist Communist propaganda, indoctrination, and even brainwashing. In short, the American fighting man, when captured, was soft—some scholars blamed domineering mothers—and the military had to move quickly to fortify its troops.

These claims were at times exaggerated and often contemptible, destroying the reputations of so many servicemen who endured disease, hypothermia, starvation, and torture. But during the McCarthy era, virtually any hint of weakness against communism escalated into a national crisis, particularly if centered on the military. Thus, the armed services organized programs to prepare their men for captivity in the next war, and standards of behavior were set forth in the Code of Conduct. All servicemen—and women—learned the code in the classroom, and its lessons were reinforced by posters on bulletin boards and office walls.

Its most controversial statement centered on what information a captured serviceman could disclose to the enemy. According to the code, he is "bound to give only name, rank, service number, and date of birth." It was, to some scholars, a guideline for behavior, not an absolute dictum. But the Navy, to Halyburton's dismay, interpreted it literally.

A year before he was shot down, Halyburton was sent to survival school, another by-product of the Korean experience. In a simulated war game, he was set loose in the woods, captured by the "enemy," placed in mock prisons, and even abused. He was shoved into a footlocker, forced to kneel on pencils (like a knife in the knees), slapped around, berated, and humiliated. It was all designed to break him down, to induce him to disclose any information besides the "big four" of the code. In one training scenario, Halyburton was told he had a chest wound that needed a blood transfusion.

"What type of blood do you need?" his captor asked.

"A positive," Halyburton said.

Wrong! Halyburton was reprimanded for revealing his blood type; it was outside the code.

Halyburton thought this hard-line approach was silly. His blood type, for example, was no secret—it was already noted on his dog tags, his military identification card, and his Geneva Convention card. He agreed that no prisoner should make statements disloyal to his country or reveal relevant military information. But why shouldn't a prisoner disclose, say, his medical needs or agree to write a letter home if its contents conveyed information about his status? Halyburton believed such communications were acceptable. The real issue was how strictly should one follow the code in light of threats or torture? How much pain should one endure before cooperating with the enemy, and would such compromises constitute treason? What was more important—honor to country or to life itself?

For Halyburton as well as Cherry, these questions were no longer hypothetical.

Torture had previously been applied to punish only the most recalcitrant prisoners; but now, for at least a year beginning in the summer of 1966, it would be used indiscriminately. The Vietnamese, embarrassed by the Hanoi march but still determined to press criminal charges, wanted to wring out "confessions" that would confirm the aviators' illegal actions while acknowledging their captors' humane treatment. Even if the Vietnamese recognized the obvious—that coerced statements would be ignored by any legitimate court and discounted by world opinion—they still had propaganda value for the Communists' efforts to rally their own people to their revolutionary cause.

Immediately after the Hanoi march, North Vietnam broadcast over the radio several "confessions" or "apologies" allegedly issued by Americans. In one, Navy Commander James Mulligan was quoted as saying:

This war in Vietnam has no appeal for me for it was an unjust war against a people who never did anything to the detriment of the U.S. interests. My military obligation forces me to participate in this war; many other military men share this same attitude ... For my own crime I beg your forgiveness and request that you treat me humanely and allow me to have some part in ending this dirty war waged by our government.

The Communists would go on to seek similar statements from almost all POWs.

After Halyburton departed, Cherry remained at the Zoo and was eventually moved into a building called the Barn. His roommates were two experienced Air Force majors: Lawrence Guarino, a firebrand from New Jersey who was forty-three when he was shot down in 1965 and who spearheaded much of the prisoner resistance with his hard-line opposition; and Ronald Byrne, a Korean War veteran from New York who combined a strong religious faith with a sense of duty. The three men lived together during the early days of another campwide purge, fueled by U.S. bombings. The crackdown included twice-daily room searches, beatings over such infractions as improperly folding one's bedding, and bare-knuckle quizzes.

Cherry did not appear to be in bad shape until he took off his shirt and shoulder bandage. Then he revealed a quarter-size hole oozing fluid—the color of "pale strawberries," Byrne said—and, beneath that, muscle tissue. According to Guarino, the shoulder "had no muscle tissue left and looked like a wire clothes hanger." Cherry explained the history of the injury; Byrne, incredulous, asked how he had survived.

With his typical stoicism, Cherry initially said, "This is the way things are, and that's the way things have to be." But he also talked about Halyburton's contributions in sustaining him throughout his near-death drama—demanding medical help, dragging him around the floor to keep him alive, feeding and bathing him. "I was down to eighty-five pounds," Cherry said. "If it wasn't for Porter, I wouldn't be here."

On August 15, Guarino was taken in for interrogation, and when he returned he said, "We're going into torture."

Cherry was then taken into interrogation. "You have a bad attitude, and you disobey camp regulations," Dum Dum said. "You communicate with other criminals. You must be punished. You must have 'iron discipline.'"

He was returned to a small building called the Gym, where Guarino and Byrne had already been taken, and the guards dragged in manacles and leg irons for each man. When they tried to clasp Cherry's wrists behind his back, his left arm could not be twisted up and back. He screamed while Byrne yelled, "No! No! No! You'll break it!" The guards, agreeing, used nylon rope instead, still tying his wrists behind his back but without twisting them. Because the rope could be untied by a cellmate, Cherry was returned to his previous cell, where the leg irons were slapped on.

He was alone, released twice a day to eat and wash but otherwise tied up and locked in. When he refused to confess his crimes or condemn his government, he suffered the "fan belt treatment," in which a guard beat him with bamboo or strips of rubber, raising welts on his back.

He had no place to go and no one to speak with. He wouldn't cooperate with the Vietnamese but treated them as he did the bigots at home. He was firm but not antagonistic, using humility as a defensive maneuver. When an interrogator demanded that he write something, Cherry said, "I wouldn't ask you to do this. Why are you asking me?" He told them they were both military men and that this was not the way soldiers treat each other. His strategy was to avoid writing that first word, which could lead to a stream of regrettable statements. The Vietnamese, of course, did all they could to prompt that first word by asking innocuous questions.

"What do you do for Easter?" the interrogator asked.

Cherry picked up the pen and drew eggs and children, but he never wrote any words.

Cherry used his race to his advantage, playing ignorant, agreeing that black Americans received poor educations, and saying that he simply didn't know enough to answer questions about his government or the war. "I've been out of the limelight of things," he said.

For ninety-three days, Cherry mostly sat on his bed board, chained and tied like an animal. In his frail condition, any mistreatment constituted torture. Guarino wrote in his official report: "Taking advantage of his disabilities ... the Vietnamese put Major Cherry in leg irons and then tied his arms together. This comparatively low-key method of coercion nearly cost Major Cherry his life because it aggravated his wound considerably."

During the ordeal, American prisoners in an adjacent room heard soft bumps through the wall and recognized the tap code. The noise came from Cherry's cell, but how could he tap with his legs and arms bound? They figured it out: Cherry was knocking his head against the cement wall, and his message was not idle chatter but important information about enemy tactics. As Air Force Captain Bob Lilly, in a nearby cell, later wrote: Cherry's words described "what the V wanted and how he was avoiding giving it to them. It was important to the rest of us to know what was working and what was not. Any insight into what they were after helped prepare a defense."