SYBIL, JANE, AND THEIR fellow POW/MIA wives continued to get the runaround when they visited Washington, desperately trying to find out more information about their husbands.
Fortunately, the women soon gained a powerful ally in Robert F. Kennedy, brother of slain president JFK, former attorney general of the United States and now a New York senator, who urged further investigation of the POW/MIA issue. The result was the creation of the Interdepartmental Prisoner of War Committee in April of 1966. This group comprised one representative each from the State Department, the CIA, the Joint Chiefs, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). By May 18, a government dictate designated Averell Harriman, a longtime friend and ally of RFK’s, as “the single spokesman for the government on all PW matters.”1
Despite vivid confirmations of POW mistreatment in the Hanoi March footage in July, President Johnson and Ambassador Harriman did not act. They had known about incidents of abuse for months by the time Sybil made her way to D.C., but they decided to keep this intel under wraps. What Johnson and Harriman feared most was that POW wives and families might go public with the story. If the media knew about the POW situation, they rationalized, their chance for a diplomatic solution would be lost.
Harriman repeatedly shut down Department of Defense proposals to share evidence of the POWs. In one 1966 Interdepartmental POW Committee meeting, he declared that “no useful purpose would be served by publicizing torture.” Further, he felt that any acknowledgement of this abuse would further taint the diplomatic atmosphere, making negotiations more difficult. “We did not advertise the cruelty we knew existed there because we didn’t want to make propaganda. It was a conscious decision not to go public. We didn’t use it to stir up the American people.”2
President Johnson, such a powerful force in politics at home, was indecisive when it came to this foreign war. He would not fully commit to a clear position regarding Vietnam. Desperate to implement his Great Society domestic policies, and already conscious that this seemingly insignificant war could be his political undoing, Johnson did not want to highlight the predicament of the captured servicemen. What good would it do for his presidential image? “Without hope of bringing them home, Johnson had little to gain and much to lose by drawing attention to their plight.”3
Johnson’s “keep quiet” policy was also based on the American experience in World War II and the Korean War, where prisoners of war were kept for relatively short periods of time. As the American prisoners in Vietnam already realized, and as their wives would soon find out, this was not your parents’ war or even the war of ten years past. It was uncharted territory, further complicated by the fact that the Vietnamese considered the men “air pirates” and political criminals. Since the United States and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) were not yet technically at war when the first pilots were captured, the North Vietnamese refused to recognize captured Americans as true prisoners of the conflict.4
The Vietnamese were a different kind of foe than the Germans or the Koreans. They seemed to be in the torture business for the long haul. This game didn’t just have different rules from those of previous wars—it seemed to have no rules at all. Although the North Vietnamese had signed the Geneva Conventions in 1949 and again in 1957, they decided to toss this agreement out the window even after the United States officially entered the war after the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident. Many American pilots knew instinctively that if they were shot down, the chances that the North Vietnamese would honor the Geneva Convention tenets were slim to none. Charles W. “Chuck” Stratton, an American Air Force pilot who would later be listed as MIA, told his wife, Sallie, that the Geneva Conventions card he carried would not be worth the paper it was printed on should he be captured.5
The POW and MIA wives would find similar scenarios on the home front. None of the old rules of wartime were valid during Vietnam. After months of “keeping quiet” and obeying their government’s dictates, they could see that nothing was moving forward for their captured or missing husbands. Sybil Stockdale later revealed: “I set out to get our own government to acknowledge that we had prisoners who were being mistreated in North Vietnam. Johnson knew this would emotionally involve the American people in the war and they did not want that. They wanted to keep the people as separated from the war as possible.”6
Harriman and his State Department lackeys held to their party line, urging the president not to stir things up by going public with the POW scenario. They could surely solve the problem by diplomatic means. Harriman was old school, following the template of his negotiations in previous wars. He had been encouraged in this line of reasoning by the positive results he and Secretary of State Rusk had seemed to generate regarding the notion of a “war crimes” trial. Their clandestine efforts both before and after the Hanoi March did help to dissuade the North Vietnamese from this approach in the summer of 1966.7 But what the two diplomats seemed not to realize (or perhaps did not want to admit) was that their work was only a secondary factor in halting the trial.
Silver-tongued diplomacy got you only so far: media coverage of the prisoners’ plight during the Hanoi March was what immediately caught the world’s attention. The embarrassment the footage caused was the primary factor in the Communists’ decision to back off the threat of a war crimes trial. While Rusk, Harriman, and Johnson congratulated themselves on their diplomatic success, they had missed the bigger picture. The media, especially television, would more effectively spotlight diplomatic issues as the war went on. Groups on both sides of the conflict were only just beginning to realize how the international press could be used for message amplification and for outright warfare against the enemy during Vietnam, the “first television war.”
While diplomacy had seemed to work in the initial stages of the conflict, it would soon prove to be a futile, frustrating, and dangerous approach where the POWs and MIAs were concerned. Though the war crimes threat had passed for the moment, the notion of a trial would continue to hang over the heads of the American government like a sword. “From time to time … the North Vietnamese reasserted their right to try pilots as war criminals.”8 Diplomacy had only provided a flimsy Band-Aid for a wound that would be opened and reopened throughout the war.
Back at Sunset Beach, Sybil finally broke down after the Hanoi March news. She sobbed in her mother’s arms: “I can’t stand it. I can’t stand it … What am I going to do?” Her mother advised her to cry it out for her boys’ sake. The emotional release did her good. Sybil could see that, as individuals, the POW and MIA wives’ voices were ineffective and ignored. No one seemed to listen. It was as if the ladies were shouting into a hurricane, their cries for help drowned out by the diplomatic and military machines of their own government.
Determined to try to change things, Sybil devised a plan, inspired by one of Jim’s favorite sayings: “When in doubt, see a manager.” Sybil added her own axiom to this, one that would serve her well in the coming days: “Nothing can take the place of a personal visit.”9
A few weeks later, Sybil returned to Washington. She had appointments lined up with Ambassador Harriman; Admiral David McDonald, chief of naval operations; and Admiral Semmes, head of the Bureau of Naval Personnel (BuPers). Boroughs again served as her escort, meeting her at the airplane. On the way to the Pentagon, Sybil told Boroughs that she intended to work with Naval Intelligence to send covert letters to her captured husband. Boroughs grinned broadly—now, he thought, they were really in business.10
The West Coast POW wife was particularly nervous to see Harriman.11 Long known as one of JFK’s foreign policy Wise Men, Harriman was also hailed as the “Lion of Diplomacy.” Patrician and handsome, Harriman came from Union Pacific Railroad money.12 With his charm and polished manners, he had been a magnet for women in his youth, including (the married) Pamela Churchill, Winston Churchill’s daughter-in-law. The two carried on a torrid affair during Harriman’s stint as head of FDR’s lend-lease program in Britain during World War II. (Some thirty years later, Pamela would become Harriman’s second wife.)13
This venerated diplomat, former governor of New York, and world-class snob possessed a hard edge that those who worked with him came to know all too well. “His episodes of impatient snapping in the genteel atmosphere of the White House caused [fellow Wise Man and LBJ national security adviser] McGeorge Bundy to liken Harriman to an old crocodile arousing from a feigned doze with snapping jaws.” Far from taking offense at this moniker, Harriman embraced the characterization and collected all manner of crocodile figurines, which he kept on his desk in the State Department. He often used “Crocodile” as his code name.14
One thing Harriman did not possess was on-the-ground combat experience. While most of his college classmates immediately enlisted in the Great War, he chose to stay home and profit from his merchant shipping business, purchased with his mother’s backing. “The fact that Harriman had chosen to profit from World War I, rather than fight in it, was also held against him. Some of his friends from Yale considered his behavior shameful; several would not speak to him for years.”15 Perhaps Harriman’s constant striving to become top diplomat in World War II, and trying to stay relevant in an ambassadorial role in Vietnam, may have been attempts to assuage his guilty conscience over not enlisting. Like McNamara, he found that his skills lay in the business arena: the dirty work of war and military combat was an abstract concept to him.
The other, even more fatal flaw in Harriman’s makeup? He “was renowned for his lack of a sense of humor, especially about himself.”16
When Sybil met with the Crocodile that July, she was intimidated but determined. His quarters in the State Department, with their sense of opulence, reinforced his reputation. The office was fit for a king, with its plush carpets and ornate furniture. Harriman’s lair was guarded by a secretary “who postured like a Vogue model,” Sybil remembered.17 Exactly the habitat one would expect a Wise Man—or a Crocodile—to inhabit.
Although Sybil later described Harriman as an elderly gentleman who wore a hearing aid, she understood that he wielded great power in Washington and in the world of international diplomacy. Sybil realized that she had to play her cards carefully with him—that he could turn out to be a valuable ally if she engaged him correctly. She spoke clearly and deliberately and maintained steady eye contact with the aging diplomat, deferring to most of his opinions.18
The POW wife immediately noted Harriman’s keen interest in how the Pentagon was treating her. “You would have thought they were all from different countries the way they kept checking up on each other,” she noted of the State Department and the Pentagon. This did not reassure her, and, despite the debacle over her letters from Jim on her last visit to ONI, Sybil resolved not to “air any dirty Navy laundry in public … I told him the Navy treated me like a queen.” Her instinct was to protect her service branch just as all military wives had been trained to do, but Sybil soon realized that the ambassador at large had never even seen a letter from a POW, even though he was head of the entire POW/MIA welfare operation, eroding her confidence even further.19
Harriman assured Sybil that everything possible was being done for the men but that he could not tell her exactly what those efforts involved. Still, Sybil recalled, “That two-hour visit with Ambassador Harriman meant a lot to me, and afterward I wrote to Jane Denton to the effect that his big points were (1) the things we are trying to do on behalf of the prisoners can’t be discussed publicly but the activities cover a wide range and (2) he was encouraged Hanoi has muted its threats about war crimes trials.”20
The next day, Sybil visited with Admiral David L. McDonald, chief of naval operations, and Admiral Paul D. Miller, deputy chief of naval operations. Both seemed receptive to her wives’ newsletter idea (Harriman had been also) and to her idea of an anti–North Vietnamese propaganda campaign by the Navy.
She also talked to Admiral Semmes, the head of BuPers, and urged him to have the Navy write the POW/MIA wives often to keep them updated about their husbands’ status. Sybil’s argument may seem dated today, but it was cunning in its emotional appeal: “You know you’re dealing with the female psyche in this situation and I remind you that it’s somewhat different from your own. For example, if on your wedding day you told your wife you loved her and then considered that job done, you’d be in for trouble. You have to tell her you love her over and over again. It’s the same with the wives of the men who are prisoners and missing—you need to tell them they’re being remembered and their husbands also.”21
Sybil left Washington satisfied that she seemed to have made an impact. She wrote the other wives: “I came away from my recent visit feeling that our husbands’ lives are in the hands of master statesmen who will do and are doing everything in their power to assure the safe return of the prisoners and bring the conflict to an early close.”22 Was Sybil trying to reassure not just the other wives but herself about the American government’s efforts in this department? She had seen more than one indication that all was not well. She was aware there were issues, but she had not yet completely absorbed the depths of the Washington political swamp, nor the gaping divide between the State Department and the Pentagon. Only months later would she begin to see things as they truly were: Admiral Semmes’s office would finally send her “newsletter” out to the wives, reworked into unrecognizable gobbledygook, “a say-nothing bureaucratic letter, which satisfied no one.”23 Semmes would soon become the focus of her ire and mistrust.
Not happy about this feeble attempt to placate the wives, Sybil finally wrote an open letter to the POW wives herself. She eventually got the Navy to distribute the letter for her without releasing the POW families’ names or addresses. The letter was sent not just to Navy POW wives but also to the wives of senior-ranking POWs in other military branches. MIA wives were not included in this initial letter, but Sybil did offer to provide more information to any MIA wives who might be interested.
Jane Denton was one of the recipients of this first communication from Sybil, as were her friends in Virginia Beach Janie Tschudy and Louise Mulligan, whose husband, Jim, was shot down on March 20, 1966. The letter first apologized for invading the families’ privacy. “If I am invading yours at this point by all means file this in the trash can and let me know you want to hear no more.” For those women who cared to read further, she suggested, “Many of us might benefit from sharing some of the knowledge and experiences which others in our position have had.”24
The relief of the wives who received this letter in the mail in the late summer of 1966 was palpable. Finally, there were others they could talk to who shared their daily grief, frustration, and lack of information. At last there was a wives’ “grapevine” where the women could help one another and communicate. Initially, the wives’ get-togethers were casual events, sitting around kitchen tables. They might have a potluck supper, share a casserole and wine together, play cards, and vent about feeling like a “fifth wheel” at social gatherings. But at least now they were not so alone.
While the POW/MIA wives received great comfort from connecting with one another, they were all still suffering from their government’s lack of concern regarding their financial support. Many of the women, just like Sybil and Jane, had already experienced major problems getting their husbands’ paychecks and cashing checks. Then came what many wives considered the final blow: the introduction of a savings plan created for the benefit of American servicemen who were fighting in combat zones, whereby their pay would accrue 10 percent interest per year tax-free. On August 14, 1966, Public Law 89–538 established this plan, but it did not include the POWs and MIAs lost in North Vietnam.25
When POW and MIA wives found out about this glaring exclusion, they were dumbfounded. Their husbands were not only deployed to a combat zone—they were jailed or missing in a combat zone. Why would the men and their dependents not be included automatically in the savings plan? The ladies assumed this was simply an oversight. The matter was quickly brought to the attention of the government by the Navy, only to garner a negative ruling from the comptroller general:
“This action would not serve the purpose of the Act since amounts credited to the member’s pay account while he is in a missing or captured status would not ordinarily enter the economy of the country in which he last served and therefore would not affect the balance of payments position of the United States in any way.” Furthermore, the serviceman’s dependents would also not be allowed to make any deposits in his name into a 10 percent savings account.26
Sybil and her fellow San Diego POW and MIA wives, like Debby Burns, as well as the East Coast wives, like Jane Denton and Janie Tschudy, all received this same letter, a further confirmation, in their eyes, that the military could not have cared less about their husbands, and cared still less about the welfare of the men’s families. Public Law 89–538 and the legislators who created it had not even considered the missing men in the first place; upon appeal, these men were still denied access to the 10 percent savings plan.
POW/MIA wives all across the country were stunned at the sheer cruelty of this pronouncement. Many women already felt socially ostracized from their local military communities when their husbands became POW or MIA. But now their federal government was disowning them, setting them adrift on a choppy financial sea without the 10 percent savings lifejacket that other servicemen in combat zones had received.
All these variables were adding up for the women. They could see that the numbers were not compounding in their favor. If they continued to cling to their government officials and to toe the party line as they had been doing, what would be their reward? Their husbands’ reward?
The answer was: nothing.
The women knew this, just as they knew the men were not being treated humanely. Jane Denton wrote Harriman to this effect, upset by reports she had read from unidentified State and Defense Department officials that the POWs held in Vietnam were being well taken care of. Anyone who had seen her husband’s film on May 8, 1966, could surmise that was not the case. “I am convinced that, on the contrary, they [the POWs] are being badly treated … I feel that we should show indignation and inform people both here and abroad of the violations which are being committed by the government of North Vietnam.”27
Jane further strengthened her case by referring to a Chilean newspaper report that stated that Jerry was being kept in solitary confinement. Even more chilling was the case of American POW Dieter Dengler, who had escaped from brutal treatment by the Pathet Lao—Laotian resistance fighters backed by the North Vietnamese Communists. Dengler was severely tortured and within twenty-four hours of dying when he was finally rescued in June of 1966.28 (The movie Rescue Dawn is based on Dengler’s story.) After reading the gruesome reports of Dengler’s treatment, Jane wrote to Harriman of her astonishment at the “apathy of the American public on this subject. Where was the compassion for him and his fellow prisoners?”
Jane boldly urged Harriman to take this information and run with it: “I ask you to consider the wisdom of publishing the injustices which the captured American servicemen are enduring thereby arousing world opinion, and hopefully getting better treatment for them.”29
Like the appeals regarding the 10 percent savings plan, Jane’s entreaties fell on deaf ears.
On Friday October 7, 1966, a group of thirteen Coronado Navy wives entered the charming 1950 Tudor bungalow, covered in twisting vines of roses, at 547 A Avenue, Sybil’s cozy home base. The women settled in around the massive oak dining room table that had come with the house. Medieval-looking, it was so heavy and long that it could never be moved. Sybil served the ladies lunch—perhaps her famous Tacos à la Casa Stockdale, one of her specialties.30
East Coast Navy wives were more formal, but here things were as laid-back as they could be in a military community. The women were casually dressed, as they often were in California even in this era. Some women wore pedal pushers with pearls. Athletic Sherry Martin came straight over from her tennis game still wearing a tennis skirt. She hadn’t had time to change before lunch.31
The women were all 1960s Navy wives at ease with the military dictates that governed their day-to-day lives. They met regularly for squadron wives’ lunches, baby showers, and cocktail parties at the officers’ club. They accepted the prescribed rules and regulations regarding what to do, say, and wear for every occasion without question or protest. Until recently, the military rule book The Navy Wife had been their bible. But today, none of these protocols applied.
All the ladies who attended the luncheon that day had recently experienced the stomach-churning sight of an official-looking black car in their driveways. As Sybil noted, “The chaplain always came to tell you about death in a black sedan.”32 The sight of that car was what led all these women to Sybil’s rose-covered cottage for lunch. The women who had young children had all gotten babysitters; the discussion was not going to be child friendly. Some wives were so traumatized that they could barely drag themselves out of bed to get their children off to school. A few of the women had received some vague information about their husbands’ whereabouts, but many had no idea where their spouses were.
In the naval community, a wife’s status mirrored the rank of her husband, and according to this long-standing protocol, Sybil was by default the wives’ leader on the home front. To the younger Navy wives whose husbands went missing, she was also a maternal figure. Sandy Dennison was a twenty-year-old San Diego Navy officer’s wife with two small children when her husband, Terry, was shot down on July 19, 1966. She felt like Sybil became her second mother.33 POW wife Karen Butler described her friend Sybil similarly: “Sybil was many things … She was a natural leader with an indomitable spirit, a loving presence always, especially when you needed it, and a mentor who helped others to cope and stand strong.”34
The women were still talking at Sybil’s home at 5 p.m. that evening. Sybil remembered later the “outpouring of exchange of information—who was being told what, and so forth. We agreed to meet on a regular basis as regularly as squadron wives would meet every month.”35 Structure might just save their sanity.
When Sybil and the other POW and MIA wives first received news of their husbands’ shoot-downs, some had panicked, gone numb, or taken tranquilizers to get through the awful, unending first night—or week or month or year—of this new life in limbo.
Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s 1969 work On Death and Dying was the first to study the human condition of grief from a clinical perspective. This seminal work was published five years after the Vietnam War began and soon became well-known in popular culture. As Sybil became aware of Kübler-Ross and her theories, she later realized that what she, like the other POW/MIA wives and their children, experienced was also a kind of death—the death of their normal life and existence.
In retrospect, she would define the POW/MIA wife experience using the same terms Kübler-Ross employed. Sybil observed six stages that she and the other POW/MIA wives seemed to pass through after they received word of their husbands’ shoot-downs: shock, confusion, assessment, learning, planning, and action.36 In these early days of the war, only the first two stages would apply.
The first state was shock as she herself had experienced it. Utter disbelief, denial, and, in some cases, a dissociation from reality for a time seemed to affect most of the women. This could last a few days, a few weeks, or even longer. There was often a period of self-medication among the women, with sleeping pills being the drug of choice. Sybil’s advice to wives in this scenario? “Be pessimistic: watch out for ‘all will be fine.’ Don’t count on your intuition about [your husband being] dead or alive.”37
The second stage was confusion. What was really going on? What do we know? Who can we trust? The wives were not the only ones who were confused. Very often, the Naval Intelligence “experts” who came to tell the women about their husbands’ shoot-downs had little information about the missing pilots’ whereabouts. This was an era before GPS systems, before cell phones, before Twitter and Facebook. The lack of information was compounded by the secrecy surrounding the American pilots flying bombing missions in Vietnam.
The bombings had two goals: to disrupt the North Vietnamese supply routes on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and to aid U.S. allies in North Vietnam against the Pathet Lao. The Ho Chi Minh Trail also ran through parts of Cambodia and Laos, and these countries suffered huge amounts of collateral damage among civilians. LBJ did not want Americans to know the ugly truth about the extreme loss of human life or his strategy to take out the North Vietnamese.38
Sybil’s counsel to her wives during this stage was still pessimistic, but it offered some practical advice: “Find other wives in your same situation. You will probably get no government help. Invest in a phone message machine so you can listen and answer to messages as you feel like it.” And, perhaps most important, “Don’t exhaust yourself being nice to people. Save all your strength for you, your family, and the fight ahead.”39
Sandy, Sherry, and Patsy Crayton, a young POW wife whose husband, Render, had been shot down February 7, 1966, had contacted Sybil early on, as well as the twenty-seven other San Diego POW/MIA wives, to form a “reluctant sorority.” As Sherry put it, they were an exclusive club that “no one wanted to belong to.”40 These “waiting wives” had begun to develop a sisterhood—something that went beyond their relationships with their blood families, something that often meant more to them and their children than any prayers the Navy chaplain could offer them.
At their first few meetings, they proceeded through stages one and two of their new normal. Their goal at this point was simply to get through the day without losing their sanity. No formal agreements were signed, no bylaws created, no roles assigned. But this incubation period was crucial. The women learned to trust one another, rely on one another, and communicate with one another discreetly, since they were not allowed to speak publicly about their plight.
Soon, other women joined the sorority, with several of them moving to Coronado and the surrounding area from Lemoore naval base. Their backstories were all eerily similar, taking place before these Navy wives had even met Sybil. Jenny Connell was one of these women. Her husband, James “J. J.” Connell, was lost July 15, 1966, just two weeks before his scheduled return home. A Navy A-4E Skyhawk pilot with attack squadron VA-55 aboard the USS Ranger, J.J. was flying a mission along the Red River south of Hanoi when he was shot down and taken prisoner. Petite and brunette with a wide smile, Jenny was a twenty-five-year-old stay-at-home mom with a two-year-old, James, and a three-year-old, Ruth, at the time of her husband’s shoot-down. She and J.J. had been married for only five years. Her naturally optimistic nature would help keep her and many of her fellow POW and MIA wives afloat.
Three months later, Jenny heard about Debby Burns, also a Lemoore Navy wife, whose husband, Doug, had been shot down on June 30. Blond, beautiful Debby was also a stay-at-home mom, with three children: Scott, age seven, Steve, six, and Linda, three. Jenny went to “call” on her. “I recall Debby saying she was shocked that I could laugh and joke. She was still in a raw and vulnerable state.”41
It would not be long before Debby was in Jenny’s position, comforting yet another Navy wife in Lemoore. She remembered: “I was still in Lemoore & in our little cul-de-sac of 6 boxy Navy ‘houses,’ 3 of the men were shot down! Paul Galanti, Mike McGrath, & Doug. When Mike was shot down I heard Marlene [his wife] scream so I ran over & gave her some of the ‘Librium’ they had given me the night I was told about Doug.”42
Jenny also met Karen Butler at Lemoore. Karen was a vivacious registered nurse whose husband, Phillip Neal Butler, had been shot down on April 14, 1965. She got a knock on her door at six thirty one morning and opened it to see two men in Navy uniforms. She was told he was missing, presumably killed. But she was soon called by a hysterical friend who informed Karen that her husband’s photo had just appeared on the Today show—he was now listed as captured.43 Karen had one daughter, two-year-old Diane, who had been born just one month prior to her husband’s shoot-down.44
Jenny, Karen, and Debby would soon meet Sybil and be brought into the POW/MIA wife fold, which was becoming more regional than local as more and more Navy pilots fell from the Vietnamese skies. Sybil recalled that they did not differentiate between POW wives and MIA wives: both were welcome. “Our meetings weren’t sad, sober-faced affairs, but frank and open-hearted exchanges about feelings and information. We always drank wine and laughed. We knew some of our behavior might seem ghoulish to others, but among ourselves we felt free to do and say whatever we felt. Being together gave us all strength.”45
An undercurrent of female subversion was also floating in the crisp California air. Sybil and her San Diego–area POW wife friends Karen and Jenny were aware of the rising feminist movement and books like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963. Friedan’s book outlined “the problem that has no name.” She vividly described for her readers a malady prevalent at the time among suburban housewives: “As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even herself the silent question—is this all?”46
Though most POW/MIA wives would never be feminists à la Friedan, some would take a page from Mystique—ditching the “problem that has no name” for activism, in response not to a husband’s indifference but to their own government’s maddening neglect. Prejudice against women in general was an intrinsic part of the fabric of American culture. Women had so often been treated as second-class citizens that most military wives barely noticed and did not often complain.
But when their gender started to affect the outcome of their husbands’ fates as prisoners or missing in Vietnam, a revolution slowly began to simmer, bubbling just under the surface among POW/MIA wives. It would be a long, slow burn, but eventually it would hit a boiling point.
A few days after the Navy wives’ first meeting at her home, Sybil coded her first letter per Boroughs’s instructions. She was terrified and almost physically ill at the thought that she literally had her husband’s life in her hands. Twice, she rode her bike to the post office and returned home again without mailing the letter. She knew the North Vietnamese would kill Jim if they somehow figured out the letter was coded. Even so, she knew he would want her to take the risk. She and Boroughs had worked references into the letter that Jim would know to be flat-out lies. In this first letter, Sybil wrote about Jim’s mother flying out to see her and the boys, taking a taxi, and swimming in the ocean—none of which were things she would ever do. “All your Mom needs is a good soak,” she wrote. A Polaroid photo was also included in the letter, showing a woman who resembled Jim’s mother; the idea was that these false statements would clue Jim in to soaking the photo, inside of which a CIA specialist had inserted a secret message.
If Jim soaked the photo, he would find a note explaining that the letter had been written on a kind of “invisible carbon” paper that could be used to write his own veiled responses back to America. By writing firmly but not enough to indent the page underneath, Jim could leave invisible messages literally between the lines of his letters home. The CIA could then reveal the hidden messages. This carbon paper could be used multiple times.47 It all sounded like something James Bond’s gadget master Q would come up with. Now all that the Qs at Langley needed was for their James Bond—Stockdale—to figure out their ruse.
Finally, Sybil gathered up her resolve and thrust the letter into the outgoing mail box. “When I finally heard the letter drop to the bottom of the box I thought, ‘for better or for worse, it’s done now. Please God, let it be for better.’”48
As it turned out, Sybil was not the only one coding letters for “Uncle Bob.” Sybil strongly suspected that others in her San Diego group with POW husbands, like Lorraine Shumaker, were doing the same. She would be correct about Lorraine and others, like Debby and Jenny, who would also work with Boroughs as time went on.49
The West Coast ladies were not alone in engaging in spycraft for Naval Intelligence. Uncle Bob had more “Jane Bonds” on the East Coast. Jane Denton and Janie Tschudy were two of the earliest ones in Virginia Beach to participate in the coding. Though Jane and Janie were both coding for Bob, they almost never talked to each other about it. Janie remembered, “It was ingrained in us to be so careful … I trusted Jane implicitly, as she did me, but you felt you were being too risky” if you talked about the coding to anyone else.50
As they began their engagement in covert intelligence work, the women grew even more skeptical of the State Department and the Navy’s generic communications. These women were already realizing that a cover-up was being employed to give the higher-ups room to negotiate with the Communists.
When Jane and the other POW/MIA wives received a form letter from Admiral B. J. Semmes, the head of naval personnel, in March of 1967, they had to be completely disgusted. The letter belatedly suggested guidelines for the POW/MIA families about how to write to the prisoners, urging them, above all, to “try to be cheerful.” Wives should write about sports, entertainment, and family activities and avoid any discussion of the prisoner’s situation, accounts of other losses, the U.S. government’s position on Vietnam, or foreign affairs in general.
The letter then stated that recently published statements from American POWs Nels Tanner and Dick Stratton that the North Vietnamese were using coercion and drugs were likely false. The State Department still clung to its party line: “The prisoners are treated humanely, are well-fed by Vietnamese standards, and receive medical treatment commensurate with the Vietnamese capability.”51 This statement rang false to the women: they knew that American prisoners of war during the Korean War had suffered from terrible torture and starvation: 43 percent of them had died in captivity. Many of these POWs had even instructed the women’s husbands in SERE school before they deployed to Vietnam. Based on this data, the American government’s assumptions seemed worse than placating to the wives. Statistics didn’t lie. The U.S. government and military, however, might.
As one MIA wife noted, “There weren’t any ‘how to’ books to give us direction, no other role models we knew how to emulate.”52 Perhaps some of the women then turned to their protocol guides out of desperation. The Navy Wife, The Air Force Wife, The Army Wife, The Marine Wife—these books had been their go-to manuals, dispensing advice on every issue they might encounter as a military wife. But when the POW and MIA wives desperately searched in the index for entries on “prisoners of war” and “missing,” their dog-eared guides were blank. They might as well have made a bonfire with those books, adding their government’s letters on top. Instinct and common sense were rapidly taking the place of protocol among the wives. Over their communal cups of coffee in the morning and their potluck dinners at night, the women finally began to air their discontent.
The State Department had had its turn with quiet diplomacy and failed. It was time now for the women to take the controls and organize in earnest.