ON THE NIGHT OF Saturday, July 17, 1965, thirty-nine-year-old military wife and mother Jane Denton sat in the darkness with her three youngest children, Mike, Madeleine, and Mary Beth, at the Virginia Beach Drive-In Theater. The family had just arrived to see Mary Poppins, the Disney blockbuster that was sweeping the nation. The 1950s-era drive-in was just a few miles from the beach, attracting moviegoers from many Navy families who lived and worked around Naval Air Station Oceana as well as the summer tourist crowd.1 Jane’s job description was essentially the same as that of her fictional counterpart on the screen that night: like Mary Poppins, she was on duty twenty-four hours a day while her Navy pilot husband, Commander Jeremiah “Jerry” Denton, was away on a nine-month deployment to Vietnam.
The young members of the “M Society” (composed of Mike, Madeleine, and Mary Beth, with “Mom” Jane being the “founding” member) were thrilled to have some time alone with their busy mother who was consumed with the household duties of managing her small army of seven children. The four older children, Jerry III, Don, Jim, and Billy, were constantly busy with sports and school activities. Jane was a pretty brunette with milky skin and luminous brown eyes. But she often felt older than her years trying to manage her boisterous brood alone.
Jane kept telling herself that the war in Southeast Asia would soon be over and that Jerry would be back home with the family by Christmas. But something deep within her was fearful for their future. Tonight, in the darkness of the theater, her inner radar picked up signals that something was wrong. She went from feeling unsettled one minute to experiencing a gut punch of panic the next. A terrible sense of foreboding engulfed her. She remembered that “a strange feeling of dread and fear came over me and I lost my composure and confidence for the first time since Jerry left. I panicked and wept in the dark there. Was this a premonition? It was between 10 and 11 PM when this took place and the feeling persisted after the tears stopped.”2
Jane was a seasoned military wife used to being alone for months at a time while her husband was deployed. She was not prone to hysterics and had proven her mettle, making numerous moves at home and abroad for her husband’s career. She was now happily settled in the big white house at 3125 Watergate Lane in Virginia Beach. But her instinct told her that her settled Navy family home life was about to change drastically.
The next day, her intuition proved to be spot-on.
Jane had woken up early that Sunday morning, written Jerry a letter, and taken all seven children to Mass. She was a fervent Catholic, and her religion gave her solace, comfort, and a place where (thank you, God) the children had to be quiet, if only for that one hour on Sundays. The family had just returned home when the doorbell rang.
“Mom! Someone’s here to see you!” yelled her son Billy. Jane’s heart stopped. She took a deep breath and rushed down the stairs. Standing before her were Captain Stuart “Stu” Nelson and his pretty blond wife, Barbara. What Nelson told her next was the news she had been dreading: Jerry had been shot down during the bombing of the port facility of Thanh Hóa, in North Vietnam. The “good” news was that he had been spotted ejecting from his plane with his parachute and had made it safely to shore. Now the search was on, but a rescue scenario did not seem likely.3 Jane was in shock upon receiving the news. As the hours passed, she began to tap into her deep Catholic faith to keep herself calm.4
After falling from the humid tropical skies over Vietnam, forty-one-year-old Navy pilot Jeremiah “Jerry” Denton was enraged.
Jerry and his bombardier and friend Lieutenant William “Bill” Tschudy were shot down by enemy fire, ejecting successfully from their A-6 Intruder aircraft. Jerry emerged, wet and dripping, on a riverbank to find himself surrounded by North Vietnamese soldiers who gestured at him menacingly with rifles and machetes. His fighter pilot mentality kicked in instantly: “Dazed and bleeding as I was, my principal emotion was fury. I was mad as hell at being shot down, and even angrier at being captured.”5
Bill had parachuted down perfectly from the aircraft. He remembered it being “very quiet on the way down; I didn’t hear a thing for a good while. The noise increased the closer I got to the ground.” The American pilot landed on his feet in a village hamlet, surrounded by palm trees. He was rushed by villagers, who immediately stripped him of all of his clothes but his underwear. They forced Bill to walk barefoot for about a mile, to a small enclosure. Inside, he was shocked to see Jerry Denton sitting in a motorcycle sidecar. His leg was injured and propped up.
Bill recalled Jerry saying, “How are you?” Bill blurted out the first thing that came into his mind: “I’m sore!” He hoped later that Jerry did not think he was angry—he just didn’t know what else to say.
That night, both men were taken in separate trucks to Hanoi. Jerry later said he heard Bill making noises that night. Bill could not see or hear Jerry. They would not meet again until 1973.6
Back in Virginia Beach, Jane’s support crew quickly appeared. Her dear friend from college, Kitty Clark, flew down immediately. Local Navy wives and neighbors mobilized to help with childcare and meals. Both Jane’s and Jerry’s families in Mobile, Alabama, were notified. As after a funeral, a whirl of casseroles, phone calls, letters, and telegrams overwhelmed the newly minted MIA wife. Perhaps due to her proximity to Oceana naval base, everyone seemed to know the situation—and Jane’s predicament. Jerry was one of the early shoot-downs, and the protocol for handling these situations quietly didn’t seem to be in place—yet—in Virginia Beach.
On Monday, July 19, the scenario became even more surreal when two letters that Jerry had posted before he was shot down arrived. Jane wrote in her diary: “Had two letters from Jerry today—wonderful, comforting ones. During last night I realized in my heart that Jerry was not going to be picked up and prepared myself for the news that the search had been cancelled. Tonight Captain Nelson brought that news and details of the flight. God helps me to bear what seemed unbearable. My sister arrived tonight. Our children are wonderful and strong. The younger ones (Mal & Mike) are with friends (Carvers).”
The next day, July 20, would have been Jerry’s change-of-command day. Another letter from the lost pilot arrived at the Dentons’ Watergate Lane home. Jane remembered the phone ringing constantly and insistently, demanding her attention. Casseroles continued to flood the household until there was no more room in her refrigerator to hold them all. Jane fervently wished she could send Jerry that food—food she and her children neither needed nor wanted. Instead she arranged a special Mass for Jerry. And they all continued to pray. The next few days passed in a blur, in the same manner. Jane recalled, “I went through the motions. God helped me maintain calm for the most part.”
An official telegram arrived, special delivery, on July 23, confirming the news. Though Jerry had been sighted landing in a small village area, he had been declared missing in action. “It is with utmost regret I must inform you that the report further states that the extensive search by the Navy and Air Force has failed to locate any trace of your husband since 18 July 1965.”7
The same day she received the telegram, Jane also saw the first photo of Jerry in captivity. She already saw evidence in the picture of how he was being treated by his captors. She wrote again in her diary: “Jerry’s picture was released by Com. in Tokyo. It was dreadful and I fear that he is being inhumanely treated. God help him. I saw the picture on TV at noon. Later I went to 7–11, bought a paper, kept it folded until I got to church where I sat in the back pew and opened it to see my love’s poor face on the first page. I prayed. I then went by Fr. Summer’s rectory and sought comfort. Then back home to my wonderful family.”8
Though Jerry and Bill had been assigned to work together in Vietnam, their wives had not yet met. There had been a squadron party at the Oceana Officers’ Club before the two men deployed. Both couples had attended the party, but somehow Jane and Janie had missed meeting each other there.
A chic, friendly young woman with a pixie haircut and sparkling blue eyes, Janie Tschudy had been in Northern Michigan visiting her family when the news of the shoot-down hit. She and her son, Michael, had gone to the beach that day with Janie’s niece Casey. It was a windy, overcast day, and Janie had an unsettling feeling that something was off. Nothing she could put her finger on, but she felt her composure slipping, and the three arrived home early from their outing.
“Janie, you need to eat!” her mother exclaimed.
“Mother, I’m not really hungry,” Janie insisted.
“No, you have to eat. I made a pot roast!”
So Janie and Michael dutifully ate. After they finished, Janie’s parents told her the news. Debbie Snead, the wife of Bill’s CO (commanding officer), had called Janie’s father earlier that day to tell him that Bill and Jerry had been shot down and were missing. “That was it. There was no more to go on,” Janie remembered.
A few days later, Janie was on her way back to Virginia Beach with Michael. Her whole world had just fallen completely to pieces. Her instinct had told her something was wrong that day at the beach, but she had no idea of the impact this would have on her life from this day forward. She spent several days with Michael at a friend’s house in Virginia Beach. Then Debbie Snead took her to meet her fellow MIA wife Jane Denton.
There was no awkwardness. The two women talked for hours about their husbands and their mutual predicament. Jane had seven children, Janie just one. Jane was thirty-nine, and Janie was twenty-seven. Jane was a seasoned Navy wife, Janie just a newbie. But these differences, their husbands’ ranks, their places in the military wife hierarchy—it all fell away. Such things were usually a barrier to communication—younger wives were often afraid to talk to higher-ranking officers’ wives—but none of that mattered now. The women became instant friends and confidantes.9
On Friday, an ominous broadcast hit the airwaves from the Communist capital of Hanoi, announcing that two American pilots had been “sent by McNamara [President Lyndon B. Johnson’s secretary of defense] personally, and would be treated as imperialist criminals.”10 Jane and Janie both heard the pronouncement. The two women were so stunned at this point that neither knew quite how to react.
Jane and Janie continued to observe the social graces prescribed during emergencies. They graciously hosted hordes of company and sent thank-you notes for the Jell-O fruit salads, tomato aspic (the children all gagged when confronted with this dish), and Bundt cakes drizzled with frosting.
Southern women like Jane were exceptionally well trained in the exhausting custom of entertaining others during times of mourning. It was just what you did—there were (and still are) whole cookbooks devoted to recipes for the bereaved. Jane and Janie’s situation was like a living death—no one (including their own government) knew exactly what had happened to their men. Everyone assumed the worst. Well-meaning friends continued to flow in. Jane wished everyone would go away and leave her to her own private grief.11
After almost four months apart, Sybil arrived in Tokyo’s Haneda Airport on July 24, 1965, ecstatic to see her husband. Jim was on a nine-month deployment to Japan on the USS Oriskany. Stanford, Sid, Taylor, and Jim Jr. were deposited with their grandparents so the couple could enjoy a romantic reunion. Sybil could not wait to see her husband. This vacation would be a welcome respite from her four rambunctious boys. Sybil adored them, but she had to manage them like a drill sergeant to keep the peace. Being a military wife meant being a single parent for long stretches. Sybil could not imagine being able to maintain her sanity without her work tutoring elementary school children and her local friends.
Within a few days of Sybil’s arrival in Japan, the Stockdales attended a champagne reception at the Atsugi Officers’ Club. A huge ice sculpture of a Navy plane rose above the crowd as the centerpiece. Life on base and within the naval community there seemed idyllic. The couple enjoyed sunset cocktail parties in lovely Japanese gardens, shopping in the upscale Ginza district, massages, and Japanese hot baths together.12 It was truly paradise.
A side trip to the seaside town of Atami provided an unexpected window into Japan and its history. Sybil and Jim’s cook during their stay told them in halting English that her husband had been killed by American bombs in World War II. She mentioned this offhandedly, and seemingly without animosity. The next day, Jim looked out their hotel window and pointed to the hills. “You know, that fellow who speaks English told me there was a Japanese prison camp right there in those hills during the war.” A hotel worker who spoke English had mentioned this to him the previous day. “Kind of gives you an eerie feeling, doesn’t it?”13 Sybil didn’t give this history lesson a second thought. World War II was ages ago. The past was over, and Japan now seemed to embrace the American military men—and their wives. They seemed to welcome their presence and their business on the island.
After their seaside visit to Atami, they decided to journey to the mountains near Hakone. They lodged at the famous Fujiya Hotel. Sybil remembered Jim holding her “with extra gentleness and closeness as we danced to the haunting strains of ‘Beyond the Reef.’ If life could stand still forever, I thought, I’d have it do so now.” All too soon, the Stockdales found their leave together coming to an end.
A few days later, Jim checked in with his fellow officers at the officers’ club. After a few beers with his buddies, they revealed that his Naval Academy classmate Jerry Denton had been shot down and captured just a few days earlier. A melancholy mood descended over the club and the revelry quickly subsided. Denton was an experienced, highly skilled naval aviator. Clearly, it was not just the young, hotshot pilots who were getting shot down.
Before Sybil flew home, Jim bought her a beautiful strand of pale blue baroque pearls as a Christmas gift. The couple agreed that he would bring them home to her at Christmas, when his deployment ended. As Sybil departed for her flight home, the couple said one final “I love you” and walked away from each other. They had mutually agreed not to look back.14
In Virginia Beach, Jane continued to deal with the news of Jerry’s shoot-down. She didn’t wait long—only eight days—to head to Washington to see what else she could learn from the top. Jane was one of the first POW wives to use her D.C. connections to obtain additional information. Her college friend Kitty Clark, who worked at the State Department as a congressional liaison, provided a conduit for Jane to find out more about her missing husband.15 At this point, only a small number of aviators had been shot down, but the numbers would continue to steadily increase as the American bombing campaigns in Vietnam intensified.16
Despite her visit to Washington, Jane was the last person on earth who wanted to “rock the boat” or make any kind of waves in her Navy community. She was a southern lady from a genteel family in Mobile, Alabama, who avoided attention. Jane had been raised with the adage that a lady’s name should appear in print three times only: at birth, marriage, and death.
Jane and Jerry were very much a couple of their era in 1965. They each played their assigned roles just as society expected them to. She had left Mary Washington College, in Fredericksburg, Virginia, two years early to marry Jerry at the U.S. Naval Academy. From this time on, Jane was a devoted, dutiful Navy wife. Her husband gave her high marks for her positive attitude: “From the day I married her,” Jerry once said, “she was an ideal Navy Wife, and was later elected President of many Officers’ Wives Clubs. She put up with many common Navy Wife hardships with a smile and was a tremendous boost to my morale.”17 Jane had played the role of traditional, conservative wife well, pleasing her more dominant husband. But the thought of losing Jerry was enough to set a fire under Jane. She couldn’t just sit there and accept the role of the helpless military wife—she was capable and resourceful. She had to find out what else she could do to get him back home.
On Monday, July 26, Jane drove to Washington with her old friend Doris Beatty. She and Jerry had met Doris and her husband, Navy doctor Ralph Beatty, when the couples were stationed together at Villefranche-sur-Mer, in the South of France. In 1956, Jerry and Ralph joined forces to create the “Haystack concept,” which made aircraft carriers more difficult to find during times of combat. Thanks to Haystack, Jerry and Ralph achieved a measure of fame and respect among their peers. This experience together had created a bond between the men and subsequently between their wives. As a fellow Navy wife, Doris knew better than most the dangers Jerry faced and the fallout Jane was dealing with on the home front.18
Despite the seriousness of the situation, Jane made sure to get her hair done before her meetings at the State Department. Appearances were crucial. Her hairdo was lacquered firmly in place when she arrived for her meetings. More important, she made and organized pages of her notes, preparing her questions in advance.
On Wednesday morning, Jane went to work with Kitty, who had facilitated numerous introductions on her friend’s behalf. Jane was pleased that Ambassador Leonard Unger, the ambassador to Laos, was most considerate and interested in Jerry. She wrote her questions and his answers down in her notebook. She also saw Walter Jenkins at the State Department, an old U.S. Naval War College friend of her husband’s.
The next day, Jane was escorted by Captain Julian Lake to the Pentagon, where she met with Admiral Hare, second in command in the Judge Advocate General’s office. This meeting led to a visit to the Bureau of Naval Personnel (BuPers), where Captain Bob Baldwin had scheduled appointments for Jane. She met with Captain Higgins, Commander Jenkins, and Mr. Miller in the Casualty Assistance office. The men showed her more releases of information concerning Jerry and Bill, answered her questions, and discussed the situation further with Jane. They day was capped off with a short but sympathetic meeting with Vice Admiral Benedict “B. J.” Semmes Jr., the chief of BuPers.
After this exhausting round of interviews at the Pentagon, Jane retreated to the Beattys’ home in Washington. Chaplain Leon S. Darkowski came to the Beattys’ that night to visit with Jane. Coincidentally, that very week, he was escorting a priest from South Vietnam around D.C. “I wonder if we could help your husband through my contact?” suggested Darkowski. Jane’s heart leapt—this might be an additional way to gather information, she thought. However, the Navy quickly discouraged this plan. As Jane later reported in her diary, “The chaplain checked on this idea, and it was decided that such a move might do more harm than good.”19
Jane was determined to follow the U.S. government rules to the letter. She was terrified of deviating from protocol in any way. The priest from South Vietnam represented a tempting opportunity for information gathering, but it was too far off the beaten path for her to risk it.
Jane returned on August 10 for another series of meetings, beginning with one at the American Red Cross headquarters. In foreign wars, the International Red Cross was (and still is) authorized to act as a conduit for communications between prisoners of war and their families back home. The Geneva Conventions of 1949 also defined the rights and privileges of prisoners of war. Jane expected the men’s North Vietnamese jailers to abide by these rules.20 But as Bill Tschudy would explain years later, “the Red Cross was forbidden to set foot in North Vietnam” by the Communists.21 The signs were there, even at this point, that the Red Cross was not making any inroads on behalf of captured Americans.
When Jane met with Samuel Krakow, director of the Office of International Services for the American Red Cross, and Winston Henry, adviser to the vice president on Red Cross matters, she was immediately struck by how ill at ease the two men seemed. She later wrote, “We sat on a sofa, they seemed uncomfortable—for all their impressive titles, they were pretty helpless.” They showed her letters that had been written on behalf of Jerry and Bill to the International Red Cross: predictably, there had been no response from the North Vietnamese.
Jane next met with Henry Hall Wilson, LBJ’s liaison to the House. He was no more helpful than the Red Cross reps and less sympathetic. Wilson warned her, in his condescending manner, “If you try pushing too many buttons, you can mess up the switchboard.” Jane wrote later that he had instructed her to go home to her family and “stop trying to punch buttons myself because the best qualified people would be doing it for me.”22 This bitter pill, meant to tranquilize Jane, only fired her up more. Still, she took Wilson’s dubious advice and left. Jane wasn’t yet sure what rules to follow, and she still felt that Jerry would want her to follow Navy guidelines to the letter. She decided that for now, adhering to military protocol was all she could do to help her captured husband, but she wasn’t going to wait forever.
In 1965, Vietnam was still seen by most Americans as a faraway war in a small country that could not possibly pose a significant threat to the U.S. military. At this point, many pilots going into the conflict saw a Vietnam deployment as an opportunity to try out state-of-the-art F-4 Phantom jets and A-6 Intruders. Some U.S. Navy and Air Force pilots considered their Vietnam tours to be joyrides from which they would emerge triumphant. This assumption would prove tragically incorrect.
By 1966 the number of POWs was increasing due to LBJ’s intensified bombing campaign, Operation Rolling Thunder, which involved constant airstrikes. That year saw 105 officers shot down, and their numbers continued to grow. They joined 102 of their fellow servicemen in captivity, some of whom had been held since 1961 in the filthy Vietnamese prison system.23
Despite this scenario, both Jim Stockdale and Jerry Denton deployed to Vietnam never suspecting the extent to which the country would turn out to be a black hole for pilots, an endless war, and a political quagmire for the United States. Stockdale and many other pilots flew dozens of bombing missions over Vietnam unscathed. Like soldiers in the American Civil War, most American pilots believed this war would be short and over in a matter of months.
Why were American military men sent to this Southeast Asian hinterland to begin with?
This war in Vietnam between the Vietnamese and outside powers wasn’t the first. The French had fought unsuccessfully against a colonial rebellion by the North Vietnamese in what was known as the First Indochina War, losing spectacularly at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
When the French were not able to reestablish control of Vietnam, U.S. president and former general Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans that if North Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh and his new regime were allowed to grow unchecked, and if one Southeast Asian country fell to Communism, so might other countries surrounding it. This “domino theory” became the foreign policy base from which the U.S. government would operate for decades to come.24
Despite their awareness of the bloody French defeat in Vietnam, Americans unhesitatingly plunged into the Vietnam abyss for round two. The Vietnam War would prove to be the longest war in American history until the U.S. conflict in Afghanistan began in 2001.25 In September of 1954, the United States and its allies (France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Pakistan) created SEATO (the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization), joining forces with the Republic of Vietnam (i.e., South Vietnam) against the Communist forces of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), controlled by Ho Chi Minh, and those of the Viet Cong (VC), based in the South.
U.S. involvement in the region escalated in the 1960s during President John F. Kennedy’s administration. Though the United States had strongly supported South Vietnam’s first president, Ngo Dinh Diem, since his 1955 inauguration, the American government began to recoil from the regime as the political situation in South Vietnam deteriorated. On May 8, 1963, Diem’s soldiers fired on Buddhist protesters at Hue, killing eight people, six of them women. Buddhist monks burned themselves to death in protest. Diem’s minority Catholic regime brutally repressed and openly discriminated against those from the Buddhist majority. After repeated warnings from the U.S. government, JFK, his ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., and others in the JFK cabinet decided Diem was on his way out. In early November of 1963, the United States facilitated his demise by handing him over to the South Vietnamese military.26
According to historian Luke Nichter, “What we did was to provide important signals to the South Vietnamese, who did want Diem toppled and gone—and some thought killing him was the only way to make sure he stayed gone—as well as different types of logistical support … We effectively provided the gun, but they pulled the trigger. We were an accomplice to murder, but not the murderers.”27
Consequently, it was found that JFK himself had “engineered a cover-up [of the Diem coup] and ordered incriminating cables at the State Department, the CIA, and the Defense Department destroyed.”28 When JFK was assassinated that November, his vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson, not only inherited the presidency—he also inherited the problematic Vietnam conflict, with all its bloody, complex diplomatic history.
Former U.S. national security adviser, U.S. Army lieutenant general, and military historian H. R. McMaster claims that LBJ inherited a dysfunctional military structure created by his predecessor. When Kennedy took office in 1961, he dramatically altered President Dwight Eisenhower’s National Security Council (NSC) structure. The result was that the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) had a much diminished voice regarding national security matters in both the Kennedy and Johnson governments.
This would prove to be a fatal flaw in decision-making going forward. “Kennedy’s structural changes,” McMaster wrote, “his practice of consulting frankly with only his closest advisors, and his use of larger forums to validate decisions already made would transcend his own administration, and continue as a prominent feature of Vietnam decision-making under Lyndon Johnson.”29 Both JFK and LBJ were wary of accepting input from the Joint Chiefs due to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and the narrowly averted nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis.30
The preeminent issue on the Johnson agenda from 1963 on was the outcome of the 1964 presidential election. What mattered most to Johnson was winning. “He wanted to be viewed as a ‘moderate’ candidate, so he resolved to take only those actions in Vietnam that bolstered his image.”31 Vietnam was an issue to keep under control, off the table and out of the American public’s mind as much as possible.
LBJ’s Republican presidential challenger, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, repeatedly accused LBJ in the press of not being tough on Communism and being soft on national security issues.32 Johnson’s close advisers, like “Whiz Kids” Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, and McGeorge Bundy (all holdovers from the Kennedy coterie of intellectuals),33 agreed that their president could not seem weak or indecisive on the Vietnam War issue—not for the sake of American soldiers, but because he needed to keep his poll numbers up.
Johnson’s secretary of defense, McNamara was the former president of the Ford Motor Company and one who, in his own words, came to the Pentagon with “a limited grasp of military affairs and even less grasp of covert operations.”34 A superb number cruncher, McNamara tended to ignore gut feelings, military intelligence, and military experience in favor of pure data. Historian David Halberstam characterized McNamara’s approach to the Vietnam War as “the quantifier trying to quantify the unquantifiable.”35 Human emotions were taken out of McNamara’s equations in favor of a “just the facts” approach. This would prove a fatal mistake.
This lack of interface between civilian and military in Washington extended to and encompassed those on the domestic military front. The wives, mothers, and other family members of lost military men were seen not as bereaved individuals who needed comforting but as the stuff of public relations nightmares, and potential liabilities for the POWs. Janie Tschudy remembered how State Department officials would act when they saw the POW or MIA wives in Washington. “Oh, no, here they come! They did not want us to rock the boat.” At the beginning of the conflict, most American government officials were patronizing, placating, or just plain disinterested in the women’s plight.36
As the POW and MIA wives would soon find out, the government departments they appealed to for help during the Johnson era were suspicious of one another and divided into military and civilian adviser camps. Instead of working together to help the bereaved families, American bureaucrats seemed to be focused on proprietary political wars against one another, making it difficult to obtain information about the missing or imprisoned men. Former deputy assistant secretary of defense Richard Capen remembered, “There was always friction between the State Department and the Defense Department. This got worse under Johnson as the Vietnam War went on.”37
This problem again had its roots in the Kennedy administration. During JFK’s presidential tenure, “a relationship of mutual distrust between senior military officials and civilian officials” had developed.38 Under President Johnson, the divide continued to grow. The two groups and their respective departments began to build their policies in separate silos.39 Many Vietnam POW wives, like Janie Tschudy, would later witness this split firsthand: “The war was run not by the military but by Washington,” noted Janie. “The State Department and elected officials who had to please their constituents.”40
Janie, Jane, and, later, other POW and MIA wives were dropped without warning into the alien landscape of Washington, much as their husbands were in Vietnam. The women had to negotiate a complex and secretive political climate that spoke in what would at first sound like a foreign language to them. Military and government doublespeak filled the women’s ears with reassurances that the government knew exactly what was going on with the men, but at this stage information on the situation was scarce and incomplete. What would later be called “mansplaining” was almost always how men in power communicated with women. It would not even have been remarked upon or noticed. At the start of their predicament, POW and MIA wives accepted the men’s word—and that of their government—without too many questions.
And most didn’t care enough to do much about the ladies’ plight. As POW wife Debby Burns Henry explained, unless you had a family member who was a POW or MIA and the issue directly affected you, Vietnam was just a faraway war that no one cared to know much about.41 The country preferred to remain in denial and easily could, with the issue being so unpopular and so removed from American daily life.
In addition, the number of POWs captured in Vietnam would ultimately be relatively small compared with those captured in World War II and in the Korean War—and most were officers, not enlisted men. Although there were Army and Marine POWs, most Vietnam War POWs were Navy or Air Force pilots captured after F-4 Phantoms, A-4 Skyhawks, and, later in the war, B-52s were shot down. Handling these sophisticated planes and their equipment required years of training. Most pilots had a college education. Thus, American POWs in Vietnam tended to be highly educated men and career soldiers, not draftees or enlisted men.42
When men were taken prisoner, the women would begin their journey by running in circles around the Pentagon, trying to figure out whom to talk to and what to do next. Despite this frustration, they believed in their government. They trusted it. Averell Harriman, one of Kennedy’s venerated “Wise Men” of U.S. foreign policy who was acting as the president’s ambassador at large in the State Department, and scores of other government officials, both military and civilian, would soon dispatch soothing letters to the women as the crisis wore on, to tranquilize them. They worried most that the women would became hysterical. What if a male government official had to deal with a crying—or, worse, screaming—POW or MIA wife or mother in their office? God forbid that might happen. The truth was, when confronted with the Vietnam POW/MIA scenario and the women the men had left behind, neither Whiz Kids nor Wise Men knew what the hell to do.
On August 2, 1964, the destroyer USS Maddox reported that the North Vietnamese had fired upon the vessel in the Gulf of Tonkin. On August 4, the Maddox and another destroyer, the USS Turner Joy, claimed that a second attack had occurred. Though U.S. naval commanders could not confirm the second attack, and the situation was murky, President Johnson and his administration used this incident to justify air strikes against the North Vietnamese and officially enter the war.43
LBJ and his cronies tried to use the war as a political tool: by flexing their muscles against the Communists, they aimed to strengthen their American electoral support. The second Gulf of Tonkin incident was most likely a false alarm, but it presented the justification that allowed the president to escalate the war in Vietnam. For LBJ, it yielded a too-good-to-be-true political opportunity. “A one-time strike on North Vietnam would allow Johnson to continue as the candidate for peace while demonstrating he was neither indecisive nor timid.”44 He quickly ordered the strike, attempting (and failing) to time it with the evening news.
This “retaliation” resulted in short-term good publicity for Johnson, but it came at a human cost. Lieutenant Everett Alvarez Jr. achieved the dubious honor of being the first naval aviator to be shot down and captured by the North Vietnamese. A few weeks later, Lieutenant Richard C. Sather became the first U.S. naval aviator killed in action over Southeast Asia.45
As the last American pilot to leave the scene of the incident on August 4, Jim Stockdale was deeply conflicted about what he had witnessed. The air group commander would say many years later, “It was a bastard war from the beginning.” What he saw there, or rather did not see, haunted him for years afterward. The lack of clear-cut evidence of Vietnamese aggression during the second Gulf of Tonkin incident left Stockdale feeling as though the war had been declared under false pretenses.46
After the Gulf of Tonkin, Jim’s intellectual side began to spar internally with his warrior side. He was a professional soldier but also a trained philosopher with an unshakable ethical code. He realized that policy made in Washington did not always translate into good decisions on the ground. In response to this feeling of disillusionment, the pilot regrouped and formed a new mission. “Before the Gulf of Tonkin incident, I’d seen myself as a shield of protection between my pilots and the North Vietnamese; now I saw myself as a shield of protection between my pilots and McNamara’s Pentagon whiz kids.” After the Tonkin incident, Jim’s biggest worry was that he would be captured and the North Vietnamese would beat a confession out of him that would result in international headlines reading AMERICAN CONGRESS COMMITS TO WAR IN VIETNAM ON THE BASIS OF AN INCIDENT THAT DID NOT HAPPEN.47
Just over a month after the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, Jim flew his final mission over Vietnamese airspace. On September 9, 1965, he was shot down in his A-4 Skyhawk, ejected, and was promptly captured by Vietnamese villagers. Although Jim’s left leg was broken and his left arm and shoulder were terribly injured, he was still beaten to a pulp. Eventually he was operated on and then surreptitiously driven overnight to the seventy-year-old Hoa Loa Prison, in the North Vietnamese capital city of Hanoi. Here he would join his Naval Academy classmate Jerry Denton and Bill Tschudy; by now, the two had been imprisoned at Hoa Loa for almost two months.48
This was the same prison that the French had used in the First Indochina War to hold Vietnamese prisoners, and it had a fearsome reputation. Though Hoa Loa was most famous for its pottery, the name Hoa Loa had an alternate meaning in Vietnamese: “hell hole.” The POWs soon decided to Americanize this horrific place, with all their gallows humor, and dubbed it the “Hanoi Hilton.”49
Being locked up there was like being a guest at the Eagles’ “Hotel California”: You could check out anytime you liked, but you could never leave.50