Two Souls Indivisible (6 page)

Just before dawn, he awoke and was taken to room 24, a cell with a concrete floor and nothing else, save the gray rats with webbed feet, scorpions, and ants. The doors were large and seemed solid except for holes in the bottom. He slept on the floor and was allowed to go into a small yard to relieve himself and to wash. He continued to receive daily interrogations. By then the Vietnamese recognized that his swollen ankle and contorted shoulder were badly injured, and they used that against him.

"If you don't cooperate, you don't see doctor," an interrogator told him. Cherry refused, so was denied medical attention. He could not shower or bathe; he would receive food twice a day, salty fat pork, moldy bread, and a few greens, or "swamp weed," as the Americans called them. Insufficient water left him dehydrated. The prison gong, sounded by a metal pipe against a railroad iron, dictated the daily regimen: a gong to wake up at six
A.M.
, a gong for food at ten
A.M.
, a gong for a nap at eleven
A.M.
, a gong for dinner at four
P.M.
, a gong for bedtime at nine
P.M.

Keeping time, for Cherry and all the prisoners, was an obsession. Some watched the movement of the sun through slats in the cell or listened for the distant chime of bells in Hanoi, while others tried to steal glances at a turnkey's watch. To create a calendar, Navy Lieutenant (j.g.) Ralph Gaither used string from his blanket and tied a knot for each day, leaving extra space to indicate a new month.

After a few days Cherry was given a mosquito net, which he considered a gift from God.

On November 1 he was taken to another part of the prison, a corridor with four small cells on either side. The Americans called it Heartbreak Hotel, and its conditions—decaying plaster walls, foul wastebuckets, odorous latrines—were as squalid as his previous cell. But at least he was given an olive prison uniform, a cotton blanket, underwear, a toothbrush, a water jug and cup, soap, three pieces of toilet paper (to last ten days), and a small waste bucket that doubled as a stool. He could also speak with other American captives and learn of their mistreatment. He noticed that someone had carved a matrix on the wall—five horizontal rows and five vertical rows—with a different letter in each square. He had no idea what it was but soon learned that it had been carved by the cell's previous occupant. His name was Porter Halyburton.

After several days in Heartbreak, he was inexplicably returned to the isolation of room 24. His shoulder, wrist, and ankle were becoming increasingly swollen and painful, but he received no treatment. At 135 pounds, he was already lean, but he was still losing weight. The days began to pass in a fog, and the interrogations began to subside as his deterioration continued.

On the evening of November 16, a guard entered his cell and rotated his wrists—the signal to roll up your belongings and get dressed. Cherry was blindfolded and put in a Jeep. He prayed that wherever he was going would be better than Heartbreak.

He was taken a few miles southwest of Hanoi, near the village of Cu Loc, where a prison had opened two months earlier. It was the third prison used for the Americans, and as their numbers mounted, the North Vietnamese would ultimately incarcerate POWs in fifteen different camps, though some operated for less than a year.
^*
The two main prisons, however, were Hoa Lo and Cu Loc, both of which held Americans until the end of the war.

On the surface, the two sites could not have been more different. At Hoa Lo, one prisoner later said, "You could hear the screams of fifty years." But Cu Loc, apparently a former French film studio that still had yellowing posters, damaged reels, and abandoned auditoriums, evoked an art colony. If Hoa Lo was an entrenched hub of steel and cement, Cu Loc was the quirky suburban upstart, with ducks, chickens, and other animals roaming the grounds.

But the interrogation, isolation, and oppression were the same. To transform Cu Loc into a prison, the Vietnamese erected brick walls in fourteen single-story buildings to create numerous cells. But the buildings were still in disrepair, their windows boarded up and their interiors filled with dirt, broken glass, insects, and rodents. Outside, separate toilet facilities were built. A wall was constructed around the perimeter of the camp, and sentry towers were installed.

The POWs initially called the compound Camp America, and with farm animals about, designated buildings as the Barn, Chicken Coop, Pigsty, and Stable. Many of the louvered French doors had holes that allowed the guards to peer inside, but sometimes the livestock meandered by and gazed in, which gave rise to the prison's permanent name: the Zoo. As one inmate said, "It's the first kind of place where the animals come and look at the people."

For two weeks Cherry lay alone in his cell, the only daylight or air filtered through cracks and gaps in the door and through a brick-sized air vent high on the wall. A single, naked, low-wattage light bulb hung from the ceiling and stayed on day and night.

A small blue box with a radio speaker piped in an endless stream of propaganda as the pain from his shoulder and wrist spread through his torso. He ate little and felt too weak to move. The premonition he'd had at the Yokota Officers' Club was playing itself out. His captors had given him no reason for hope. But he had faced adversity his entire life, and he wasn't giving up. He was confident he would survive. He just didn't know how.

On the morning of May 10, 1965, the USS
Independence
sounded its long, bellowing horn and shoved off from the gray coastline of Norfolk, Virginia. Its mission was to steam across the Atlantic Ocean, around South Africa, and through the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea, where it would assume duties with the U.S. Seventh Fleet in the Pacific. The attack carrier, to be gone seven months, received a patriotic farewell. Children waved American flags while a band played "Auld Lang Syne." Dignitaries toured the ship, wives and girlfriends said tearful good-byes, and Miss Norfolk, in a sleeveless white dress, white gloves, and white floral headband, smiled for photographers. The Norfolk Chamber of Commerce gave the captain a silver Goodwill Cup; the port city, proud of its naval tradition, also gave the
Independence
another memento—a bomb inscribed with white paint:
GREETINGS FROM THE PEOPLE OF NORFOLK TO THE

VIET CONG.

The ship was eighty thousand tons of steel and metal, a gray, angle-decked war machine that hauled forty-five hundred men and eighty fighter jets. Such a vessel is known as "a city at sea," loaded not only with mechanics, engineers, and sailors to keep it running but also with doctors, dentists, postal clerks, printers, career counselors, legal assistants, and educators. The
Independence
even had a musical band composed of shipmates who had brought their instruments.

The civic metaphor was fitting, but it hardly captured the delirious energy, the unremitting clamor, the sheer life-and-death drama of the enterprise. The jet names—the Phantom, the Intruder, the Vigilante, and the Skyhawk—conveyed the threat they posed to a distant enemy; but the planes themselves, loaded with fuel, cluster bombs, heat-seeking missiles, and 20-millimeter ammunition, could imperil their American handlers as well. A single miscue, particularly on takeoff or landing, could saturate the flight deck in a cataract of metal and flame.

On takeoff, a jet taxis onto a catapult track as crewmen race about, signaling with their scarred hands, ducking under moving wings, and looking for cover. The fighter engine wails as a deck officer in a yellow shirt waves his right index finger over his head. The pilot salutes from the cockpit and the deck officer drops his hand. The aircraft screams down the catapult, red flames spewing from its afterburners and steam billowing from the track. It accelerates to more than 100 mph in 250 feet. Just as it reaches the edge of the ship, its nose tilts up, and the machine is flung toward the sky. A jet that fails to reach sufficient speed crashes into the ocean.

The blast from takeoff can knock crewmen to the ground; anyone not working on the plane tucks his hands under his armpits to protect them from the heat. As the last jet takes off—planes can launch, day or night, every thirty seconds from four different catapults—crewmen turn around and find the first aircraft of an incoming mission. In seconds, it hits the deck and accelerates, trying to hook one of four "arrest wires" stretched across the ground. (Accelerating, though seemingly counterintuitive, gives the plane speed to take off again if it misses the cables.) Once hooked, the wire pulls taut and stops the jet; if it breaks, it snaps across the deck and can cut through a crewman like a weed-eater. And if the plane fails to stop after it engages the wire, without enough speed to become airborne, it will slam into a barricade or tumble helplessly into the ocean.

The
Independence
suffered two violent accidents on its Pacific cruise. On July 20 a Vigilante jet, returning from a reconnaissance flight, broke its arrest wire, could not stop, and dribbled off the carrier ninety feet into the sea. Two aviators were killed. Later, a tank on a Phantom ruptured on takeoff, spraying the flight deck with four thousand pounds of fuel—which was then ignited by the plane's afterburner. Roaring flames devoured the next plane in line and spread into a compartment belowdeck. Sixteen men suffered burns or injuries; no one was killed. The Phantom flew safely to shore.

If the flight deck represented organized tumult, then frenetic clatter buffeted the rest of the ship. Helicopters whirled above while squealing elevators lifted jets from their hangar bays to the deck. Carts drove bombs and missiles through the ship. Rock music blared in the cafeteria and bunkrooms, where men slept in three-decker cots, the gray nozzle of an air conditioner humming from above. Doors clanked. Pipes groaned. Chains crashed. Twenty feet beneath the water line lay a metallic jungle of valves and gauges that jeered and squeaked. Then there was the steam—the hissing vapor that whipped the planes down the catapults, cleaned the clothes and dishes, and powered the engines at 30 knots across the sea. At night, taps was broadcast throughout the ship.

It was Navy Ensign Porter Alexander Halyburton's first cruise, and not one he had envisioned. He had thought his first trip might be to the Mediterranean, whose exotic ports—Naples, Barcelona, Beirut, Malta, Genoa—would have been romantic rendezvous for him and his wife, Marty (a nickname for Martha). But Halyburton volunteered for the
Independence.
He had been a Navy officer for only fifteen months and decided he should do as he'd been trained: fly in the back seat of a fighter jet as an RIO, a radar intercept officer, responsible for navigating flights and identifying targets.

Halyburton was no warmonger. Known as Haly, he was interested in literature, poetry, and prayer as befit a gentleman warrior, giving him what one friend called "a rich inner life." Another friend thought it was easier to envision him covering a war as a journalist than fighting in one as an airman. In fact, Halyburton had no intention of making the Navy his career. Years earlier he had rejected a coveted appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy because he could not abide its rigid way of life. Instead, he attended Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina, his hometown, and in 1963 graduated with a degree in English.

He considered becoming a journalist or, enjoying the camaraderie of academic life, perhaps working as a college fund-raiser. He thought he needed to go to graduate school, but uncertain about his career and pressed for money, he could not justify the cost of an advanced degree. The military was not so much an option as an inevitability. He assumed he would be drafted, for the United States, responding to Cold War tensions (the Berlin crisis, the Cuban missile crisis), foreign brushfires (Laos, Vietnam), and international commitments (NATO, South Korea, japan), desperately needed conscripts. Halyburton preempted his draft notice and volunteered, hoping to receive a better assignment as an officer.

He had never thought about being an aviator until his senior year in college, when a former fraternity brother told him about his experience flying a McDonnell F-4 Phantom, an extremely fast (Mach 2), maneuverable aircraft with sophisticated electronics that enhanced its radar intercept and bombing capabilities. That sounded exciting to someone who grew up in a town that didn't even have an elevator. In the Navy, Halyburton could travel around the world on great ships, learn how to pilot high-tech aircraft, and avoid sleeping in a pup tent.

Halyburton was also a product of the South, where Confederate generals were revered, the martial spirit was celebrated, and young men were taught that serving their country in combat was noble. As a boy, he watched the Davidson College ROTC band, color guard, and honor drill march through town. His mother told him about a cousin, a World War II Navy corpsman, who was killed during the invasion of Okinawa while caring for a wounded Marine and was rewarded with a Congressional Medal of Honor. That impressed young Porter.

His naval flight training did not go exactly as planned. He wanted to be a pilot, but he failed an eye exam because his eyes were tired from his college finals. He passed the test on a second try, but by the time the paperwork cleared, he had begun training as a flight officer and saw no reason to retrain as a pilot. An RIO used geometric guidelines to map out where his pilot dropped bombs and fired missiles, a kind of mathematics puzzle that Halyburton enjoyed. He also assumed his military career would be short. In February 1964 he was commissioned as an officer, receiving his shoulder boards with one gold stripe. When he left Norfolk in May 1965, he was obligated to serve twenty-six more months—ample time to return and take a Mediterranean cruise. He knew that many seamen back home feared the Vietnam War would be over before they had an opportunity to fight. For now, he was grateful to get at least one chance at combat.

Halyburton was awestruck by the
Independence,
where he was part of the VF 84 Squadron (the V stood for "fixed wing"; the
F
for "fighter"). The ship hauled more people than the population of Davidson and seemed to offer more diversions, sponsoring boxing matches, basketball games, skeet shooting, and variety shows. While Davidson's movie theater had burned down in the 1950s, the
Independence
showed a different film almost every night. Halyburton, who as the designated "popcorn officer" ensured that munchies were available, wrote to Marty about
The Sound of Music
and
West Side Story,
neglecting to mention the more popular pornographic flicks.