The last hymn sung was “Silent Night.” Many of us wept.
We held a Christmas dinner after the service. We had arranged our room to resemble a “dining-in,” a much-loved military ritual, in which officers, attired in their best uniforms, sit at table according to rank, to dine and drink in elaborate formality. Lacking most of the necessary accouterments, we nevertheless made quite an evening of it. The senior officers sat at the head of the table, while numerous speeches and toasts to family, service, and country were honored. All of us were proud to have the opportunity to dine again, even in our less than elegant surroundings, like officers and gentlemen.
After dinner we exchanged gifts. One man had used his cotton washcloth and a needle and thread he had scrounged somewhere to fashion a hat for Bud. Other men exchanged dog tags. Most of us exchanged chits for Christmas gifts we wished each other to have. We all gave one man who had been losing at poker lately an IOU for another $250 in imaginary chips.
Back from Skid Row that Christmas, we were overjoyed to entertain ourselves again in the company of men who had managed through all those years to retain their humanity though our enemies had tried to turn us into animals. From then on, with brief exceptions, our existence in Hanoi was as tolerable as could be expected when you are deprived of your liberty.
The Vietnamese had given us several decks of cards, and we played a lot of bridge and poker. My luck at the table usually ran bad, to the endless amusement of Orson, who liked to taunt me for what he considered my unskilled approach to the games. Almost every Sunday afternoon, we held a bridge tournament that included six tables of players.
We had more profitable uses for our time as well, which made our days pass just as quickly as did our reproductions of various popular entertainments. An education officer was designated and classes were taught in almost every imaginable subject, all the POWs called on to share their particular field of learning. Language classes were popular and to this day I can read more than a few words in several languages. The guards frequently confiscated our notes, however, an impediment that greatly complicated our grasp of foreign languages. Other subjects ranged from quantum physics to meat-cutting.
Lectures were held on the four nights when we were not required to stage a movie reproduction. Orson and I taught classes in literature and history, and I took as much pride in my history lectures as I did in my movie performances, calling our tutorial “The History of the World from the Beginning.”
Our classes and amateur theatrics made time, the one thing we had in abundance, pass relatively pleasantly and helped temper the small conflicts that inevitably arise when men are confined together in close quarters. No matter how irritated we occasionally felt over slight grievances with one another, nothing could ever seriously detract from the pleasure we took from our own company in the last full year of our captivity.
Our situation improved even more in April 1972, when President Nixon resumed the bombing of North Vietnam and, on my father’s orders, the first bombs since March 1968 began falling on Hanoi. Operation Linebacker, as the campaign was called, brought B-52s, with their huge payload of bombs, into the war, although they were not used in attacks on Hanoi.
The misery we had endured prior to 1972 was made all the worse by our fear that the United States was unprepared to do what was necessary to bring the war to a reasonably swift conclusion. We could never see over the horizon to the day when the war would end. Whether you supported the war or opposed it—and I met few POWs who argued the latter position—no one believed the war should be prosecuted in the manner in which the Johnson administration had fought it.
No one who goes to war believes once he is there that it is worth the terrible cost of war to fight it by half measures. War is too horrible a thing to drag out unnecessarily. It was a shameful waste to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere through awful afflictions and heartache, for a cause that half the country didn’t believe in and our leaders weren’t committed to winning. They committed us to it, badly misjudged the enemy’s resolve, and left us to manage the thing on our own without authority to fight it to the extent necessary to finish it.
It’s not hard to understand now that, given the prevailing political judgments of the time, the Vietnam War was better left unfought. No other national endeavor requires as much unshakable resolve as war. If the government and the nation lack that resolve, it is criminal to expect men in the field to carry it alone. We were accountable to the country, and no one was accountable to us. But we found our honor in our answer, if not our summons.
Every POW knew that the harder the war was fought the sooner we would go home. Long aware of the on-and-off peace negotiations in Paris, we were elated when the Nixon administration proved it was intent on forcing the negotiations to a conclusion that would restore our freedom.
As the bombing campaign intensified, our morale soared with every sortie. It was after one raid, and our raucous celebration of its effect, that the guards dragged Mike Christian from our room.
Mike was a Navy bombardier-navigator who had been shot down in 1967, about six months before I arrived. He had grown up near Selma, Alabama. His family was poor. He had not worn shoes until he was thirteen years old. Character was their wealth. They were good, righteous people, and they raised Mike to be hardworking and loyal. He was seventeen when he enlisted in the Navy. As a young sailor, he showed promise as a leader and impressed his superiors enough to be offered a commission.
What packages we were allowed to receive from our families often contained handkerchiefs, scarves, and other clothing items. For some time, Mike had been taking little scraps of red and white cloth, and with a needle he had fashioned from a piece of bamboo he laboriously sewed an American flag onto the inside of his blue prisoner’s shirt. Every afternoon, before we ate our soup, we would hang Mike’s flag on the wall of our cell and together recite the Pledge of Allegiance. No other event of the day had as much meaning to us.
The guards discovered Mike’s flag one afternoon during a routine inspection and confiscated it. They returned that evening and took Mike outside. For our benefit as much as Mike’s, they beat him severely, just outside our cell, puncturing his eardrum and breaking several of his ribs. When they had finished, they dragged him bleeding and nearly senseless back into our cell, and we helped him crawl to his place on the sleeping platform. After things quieted down, we all lay down to go to sleep. Before drifting off, I happened to look toward a corner of the room, where one of the four naked lightbulbs that were always illuminated in our cell cast a dim light on Mike Christian. He had crawled there quietly when he thought the rest of us were sleeping. With his eyes nearly swollen shut from the beating, he had quietly picked up his needle and thread and begun sewing a new flag.
I witnessed many acts of heroism in prison, but none braver than that. As I watched him, I felt a surge of pride at serving with him, and an equal measure of humility for lacking that extra ration of courage that distinguished Mike Christian from other men.
–– CHAPTER 27 ––
Release
The bombing of North Vietnam was halted in October when peace talks resumed in Paris. By December, it was clear that the talks had stalled because of North Vietnamese intransigence. On December 18, at around nine o’clock in the evening, it was renewed with a vengeance as Operation Linebacker II commenced and the unmistakable destructive power of B-52s rained down on Hanoi.
Despite our proximity to the targets, we were jubilant. We hollered in near euphoria as the ground beneath us shook with the force of the blasts, exulting in our guards’ fear as they scurried for shelter. We clapped each other on the back and joked about packing our bags for home. We shouted “Thank you!” at the night sky.