A participant in one of my father’s field briefings described the experience in a letter to me. In the summer of 1968, my father and General Abrams unexpectedly arrived at a battalion base camp in the Mekong Delta. There they received an improvised briefing on the battalion’s operations from the battalion commander. My correspondent, Randy Carpenter, was then a twenty-two-year-old draftee who had through attrition been made a platoon leader. He had been asked to present my father with a captured AK-47 rifle. He recounted what happened after the brief ceremony concluded.
Your father, smoking a very large cigar, in a rough voice politely thanked everyone and asked if he and General Abrams could talk to me in private. He excused the three of us and we went to a small isolated area. Your father asked all of the questions. He wanted to know how much and what kind of action my platoon had seen. He asked general questions about the morale of my men and my morale. What kind of news we were getting from the states and how we were getting it? Had I been inside Cambodia on any operations? Did we have any men missing in action? Would I or my men have any problem expanding the operation into neighboring countries? What would the men’s reaction be if we were asked to go into North Vietnam?… The meeting lasted about fifteen minutes and at the end I was ordered not to discuss any of what we talked about with anyone.
He was the commander my grandfather surely had hoped he would become: forceful, determined, clear thinking, and respectful of his men. Had my grandfather held the post, I believe he would have commanded in the same way. I like to believe my father recognized this, and that the recognition strengthened his confidence, and brought him a good measure of satisfaction.
Late in the war, my father would give the order that sent B-52s to rain destruction upon the city where I was held a prisoner. That was his duty, and he did not shrink from it.
While I was imprisoned, he never spoke about me at length to anyone other than my wife and mother. When friends offered their sympathy, he would thank them politely and change the subject.
He received hundreds of letters from members of Congress, dignitaries, fellow officers, enlisted men, family friends, and acquaintances offering their sympathy and prayers for my return. He politely and briefly replied to each one.
His responses were almost always written in the same style. The first paragraph of each began with an expression of his appreciation for the correspondent’s sympathy, and closed, almost unvaryingly, with the line “God has a way of solving problems and we have great faith in the future.” The next paragraph would address another subject, often extending an invitation to visit my parents in London.
Copies of his letters are kept with my father’s official papers. There are only three I have reviewed that differ substantially from the others. The first is a letter my father wrote to the wife of Colonel John Flynn. John was the most senior American officer in captivity. He had been shot down the day after I was captured and taken to the same hospital where I was held. We never saw each other in the hospital, although one day Cat, in his usual bragging mood, had shown me his identity card. For the first three years of his captivity, John, like the other higher-ranking officers, was kept segregated from the rest of us and out of our communication chain.
My father wrote empathetically to Mrs. Flynn, commiserating with her that they must resign themselves to trusting in God and the courage of their loved ones as the only assurance that they would come home. “There is little anyone can say and even less they can do when personal tragedy strikes,” he wrote. “Our hearts are with you.”
The second letter was a reply to the friend with whom I had completed the escape and evasion course in Germany. He had written my parents to share his observations of me, assuring them that I had been well prepared for my present adverse circumstances and possessed the ability to “come away from this situation in good condition, and to be an example to others.” My father wrote back that he and my mother had “derived much reassurance from the account of your experiences [with John].”
The last letter was a reply to Admiral B. M. “Smoke” Strean, who was the Deputy Chief of Navy Personnel and had approved my transfer to the Oriskany after the Forrestal fire. Admiral Strean had “hesitated to write because I feel I had a part in this—in helping him get what he wanted—and thus a feeling of some blame in the outcome.” Strean assured my father that his normal practice was to go slowly when considering requests for “unscheduled assignments which carry some hazard…. [But] your son badly wanted this assignment.”
My father quickly wrote back to reassure his apologetic friend: “I deeply appreciate your letter. You are a great man in every respect. You should have no regrets. I have no regrets. John wanted to go back and I know he would not have been happy otherwise. I am proud of him.”
Few close observers of my father ever detected that my captivity caused him great suffering. He never let his concern affect his attention to duty or restrain him from prosecuting the war to the greatest extent his civilian commanders allowed.
However, his closest aides knew he kept a personal file containing all reported information about the POWs, the location and conditions of the camps, and every scrap of intelligence about me that could be obtained. Included in my father’s file were copies of the letters I had written to Carol, as well as some copies of letters that other prisoners had written to their wives.
During my first months of captivity I was allowed to write several letters to Carol, a privilege I attributed to the publicity surrounding my capture. Eventually, the Vietnamese withdrew the privilege and restricted me to one or two letters a year. Not until late in 1969 would prisoners be allowed to write home on a monthly basis.
Carol wrote me every month. The Vietnamese withheld all but a few of her letters from me. She also sent me many packages, few of which I received, and none of which contained all the items she had sent. With the exception of 1971 and 1972, I would usually receive a package at or sometime after Christmas.
It was always clear that the guards had taken most of the contents as their share before passing a package on to me. Sometimes I received candy, instant soup, socks, and underwear. Once I received pipe tobacco but not the pipe that had been included with it. One package contained only a single pair of skivvies and a bottle of vitamins. The Vietnamese had neglected to remove the shipping receipt that indicated the package had originally contained five pounds of material.
That I received so few of Carol’s letters and packages is probably attributable to Carol’s refusal to send them through the offices of the antiwar organization COLIAFAM, the Committee of Liaison with Families of Servicemen Detained in North Vietnam. COLIAFAM had arranged with the Vietnamese government to be exclusively authorized to process letters and packages to the POWs. Many families, including mine, refused to sanction this abridgment of a prisoner’s right under the Geneva Convention to receive mail without interference from his captors or any agency working on his behalf.
One Christmas, Carol received a letter from COLIAFAM denouncing the resumption of the bombing campaign in the North and demanding an immediate and total withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam. A postscript contained a none too veiled threat, warning her that letters that were not delivered by COLIAFAM “will not be accepted and… may jeopardize [the prisoner’s] mail rights.”