We got to know each other more intimately, I’m sure, than I will ever know my wife. We opened up and talked about damn near everything besides our immediate problems—past life, and all the family things we never would have talked to anybody about. We derived a great deal of strength from this.
A great deal of strength indeed. And I am certain I derived more strength from our friendship than he could possibly have derived from it. Bob Craner kept me alive. Without his strength, his wisdom, his humor, and his unselfish consideration, I doubt I would have survived solitary with my mind and my self-respect reasonably intact. I relied almost entirely on him for advice and for his unfailing ability to raise my spirits when I had lost heart.
He was a remarkably composed man with the courage to accept any fate with great dignity. There were times when I would start to lose my nerve. I would detect some sign that another camp purge was coming, and my dread of another beating would start to get the better of my self-control. Anticipating a beating could often prove more unnerving than the beating itself.
“Bob, I think it’s coming again, and I don’t think they’ll miss us.”
“If it comes, it comes,” he counseled me. “If it doesn’t, it doesn’t, and there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it.”
It may strike others as odd that such fatalism could have comforted us, but it did. It was the best attitude you could hold under the circumstances. It steeled me when I was weak, and made me feel better about myself. Worrying about a beating was pointless. There wasn’t much I could do to prevent it, save disgrace myself, and disgrace hurt more than the worst beating.
Whenever I was plagued by doubts about my situation or my own conduct, I turned to the voice on the other side of my wall. And it was to Bob I went for guidance one June evening in 1968, after the Vietnamese had offered me my freedom.
–– CHAPTER 19 ––
The Fourth of July
For months, I had received conspicuously lenient treatment. By the time Bud and I were separated, I was able to walk for short distances, and the Vietnamese decided I was fit enough to withstand interrogations, or “quizzes,” as the POWs called them. The Vietnamese had caught me communicating several times, and I was forever displaying a “bad attitude” toward my guards. During this period, I possessed the camp record for being caught the most times in the act of communicating, yet the Vietnamese often only punished my offenses with threats. Sometimes they withheld my daily cigarette ration or my bathing privileges, a punishment that served to make me even surlier toward my guards. Once in a while they would cuff me around, but not often, and they never seriously hurt me.
In my first return to the interrogation room after being left alone for many weeks, Soft Soap had asked me if I would like to go home. I had replied that I would not go home out of turn. To this, and with uncharacteristic churlishness, Soft Soap had said, “You are all war criminals and will never go home.”
After I went back to my cell, I relayed Soft Soap’s offer up the communication chain to Hervey Stockman, an Air Force colonel who was our senior ranking officer at the time. Offers of early release were a fairly common practice at the time, and we regarded them as nothing more than psychological torture. So neither the SRO nor I took Soft Soap’s inquiry very seriously.
Sometime in the middle of June 1968, I was summoned to an interview with the Cat. His interpreter was an English-speaking officer we called “the Rabbit,” an experienced torturer who enjoyed his work. I had been brought to the large reception room in the Big House, the room they often brought visiting peace delegations to for their clumsily staged propaganda displays. The room was furnished with upholstered chairs, a sofa, and a glass coffee table supported by two decorative ceramic elephants. An inviting spread of tea, cookies, and cigarettes had been laid out on the table.
The Cat began telling me about how he had run the prison camps during the French Indochina War, and how he had given a couple of prisoners their liberty. He said he had seen the men recently, and they had thanked him for his kindness. He told me Norris Overly and the two Americans released with him had gone home with honor.
After about two hours of circuitous conversation, the Cat asked me if I wanted to go home. I was astonished by the offer and didn’t immediately know how to respond. I wasn’t in great shape, was still considerably underweight and miserable with dysentery and heat rash. The prospect of going home to my family was powerfully tempting. But I knew what the Code of Conduct instructed, and I held back from responding, saying I would have to think about it. He told me to go back to my cell and consider his offer carefully.
The Vietnamese usually required prisoners who were released early to make some statement that indicated their gratitude or at least their desire to be released. They viewed such expressions as assurances that the released prisoner would not denounce his captors once he was back home, and spoil whatever propaganda value his release was intended to serve. Accordingly, they would not force a prisoner to go home.
As soon as I could, I raised Bob Craner and asked for his advice. We talked the offer over for a while and speculated about what I might be asked to provide in exchange for my release. After a considerable time, Bob told me I should go home. I had hoped he would advise me not to take the offer, which would have made my decision easier. But he argued that the seriously injured should be excused from the Code’s restrictions on accepting amnesty and should take release if offered. He said I should go home, as my long-term survival in prison was in doubt.
Close confidants though we had been for months, Bob and I had never really seen any more of each other than a couple of brief glimpses when the turnkeys took one or the other of us to the interrogation room or to the showers. Bob had never observed my physical condition and had only reports from other prisoners and my own occasional references to the state of my health upon which to base his judgment about my fitness for prolonged imprisonment. Yet this good man, who revered our Code of Conduct, and who braved the worst adversity with dignity, offered me a rationale to go home, out of turn, while others in at least as bad shape as I was in remained behind.
“You don’t know if you can survive this,” he argued. “The seriously injured can go home.”
“I think I can make it,” I replied. “The Vietnamese tell me I won’t, but if they really thought that I’m in such bad shape they would have at least sent a doctor around to check on me.”
“You can’t be sure you’re up to this. What do they want from you in return?”
“They didn’t say.”
“Well, when you go back, just play along with them. See what they want to let you go. If it’s not much, take it.”
“I don’t think I should go down that road. I know and you know what they want, and we won’t let it go any further. If I start negotiating with them, it’s a slippery slope. They’ll tell me they don’t want anything, but they’ll just wait until the day I’m supposed to go, and then tell me what they want for it. No matter what I agree to, it won’t look right.”
I wanted to say yes. I badly wanted to go home. I was tired and sick, and despite my bad attitude, I was often afraid. But I couldn’t keep from my own counsel the knowledge of how my release would affect my father, and my fellow prisoners. I knew what the Vietnamese hoped to gain from my release.
Although I did not know it at the time, my father would shortly assume command of the war effort as Commander in Chief, Pacific. The Vietnamese intended to hail his arrival with a propaganda spectacle as they released his son in a gesture of “goodwill.” I was to be enticed into accepting special treatment in the hope that it would shame the new enemy commander.