Three-Piece Suits

1955–1979

 

 

IN PANMUNJOM IN 1953, WARRING FACTIONS IN spotless three-piece suits turned in their licenses to kill for a paper armistice. Prisoners of war were repatriated. One day passed into the next, seven days turned into a week among many, and turned into years that cast an indelible pall over the Girardin household. Over time, the news of Roger’s disappearance dissolved into the plume of history and the woe and sympathy expressed in a casual hello faded. An all-pervading conviction took root among mother, father, daughter Berta and son Arthur, that Roger remained alive, lost someplace on the other side of an unreachable underworld.

 In 1955, the parents received a final notice:

Since your son, Private Roger F. Girardin, RA 22 006 482, infantry, was reported missing in action on November 24, 1950, the Department of the Army has entertained the hope that he survived and that information would be received dispelling the uncertainty surrounding his absence. However, as in many cases, no information has been received to clarify his status. Full consideration has been given to all information bearing on the absence, including all reports and circumstances. Accordingly, an official finding of death has been recorded under the provisions of Public Law 450, 77th Congress, approved March 7, 1942, as amended.

“Damn it!” hollered Girardin, so loud his wife came running.  

“What’s the matter, cheri?” she asked, drying her hands on her favorite, thinned apron.

“Those idiots are giving up,” he clamored, flapping the letter. “I know Roger’s out there somewhere, they’re just giving up.  I’m calling Congressman McKnight.  We need answers.”

Lisa rushed to the kitchen, her head in her hands. She wept inconsolably. Jean wondered if she would ever stop.  He sat in the living room and later heard a pot boiling in the kitchen, but Lisa’s sobbing persisted. Thoughts about what he might possibly do raced through his head. He wanted to comfort his wife, but thinking about what to do next, while fighting his own grief, took all his strength. He went to his room, threw the letter on his desk, and sat, head on his chest.  He waited while the letter faded into the silhouettes of late afternoon, waited while the moon cast its penumbral light on the last letter he would receive about his son’s fate.

The next day, Girardin called McKnight’s office. A staff member listened politely and promised he would get back in a few weeks. He received a letter from the congressman the following month telling him there was nothing he could do. To McKnight, Girardin was a potential liability to the image he was polishing up for the ’56 campaign. In fact, his re-election manager told him to avoid the subject of MIAs at all costs.  What McKnight did not share with anyone, including his staffers, was that he attended a meeting between the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the Committee on National Security and President  Eisenhower, where the President said, “We have had long, serious discussions with the Chinese Communists, trying to make them disclose where our approximately 450 prisoners are being held. We might be making progress. Just last month four F-86 pilots were returned. They’d been shot down in Manchuria. Gentlemen, I trust you will keep this to yourselves.”

 

Art Girardin never discussed the idea that his brother Roger might still be alive beyond the occasional commiseration with his parents when Roger’s birthday rolled around.  But it wore at him through his college years, then his marriage, and the death of his mother in 1976. Following the Vietnam War, a new controversy erupted over claims that Americans were still captives in Vietnam and Laos. In March of 1977, Art was listening to the radio in his living room, when he heard a newscaster report that a U.S. commission had traveled to Vietnam to make inquiries about GIs missing in action and to lay the groundwork for diplomatic relationships. During the visit, the Vietnamese surrendered the bodies of eleven identified American servicemen. Art could not stop thinking about what he had heard. The next month he took time off from his job at the Department of Transportation to travel to the U.S. National Archives in Washington D.C. to investigate whether there was anything that might shed light on Roger’s disappearance. Under the heading “Korean War” he found a yellowed folder on POWs/MIAs, including something McKnight apparently did not share with his father: HR Resolution 1957-3544 titled Korean War POW Initiative-A309 demanding an account of 450 POWs. He leafed through dozens of official documents. The papers came in a variety of forms, from thick, brown thermographic paper to an occasional onionskin carbon copy. A document in the last category listed more than 400 names under the heading POW. His fingers trembled while he scanned the list.  Under “G” he saw Girardin, Roger. Pvt. RA 22 006 482, infantry. How could Roger have been listed MIA if the government knew he was a POW? Struggling to contain his wide-ranging emotions, he managed to calmly ask the clerk for a Xerox.  He went back to the carrel where he was working and held the copy under a lamp, studied it like a Dead Sea scroll, praying it would lead to answers about whether or not Roger might still be alive.

Armed now with a piece of evidence concerning his brother’s possible fate, Art wrote the Army requesting the last known whereabouts of the men who had information about his brother. He received a tersely worded letter signed by an Army captain, indicating that such a review or hearing would be “impracticable.” The refusal came in a four-line letter read to him by his wife when he spoke to her one afternoon from a payphone on a noisy street.

“Yeah, Art, the letter just came.  It says...  ”

“I can’t hear you, Marge, talk louder,” he yelled anxiously.

Raising her voice she continued. “It says, your letter doesn’t provide ‘sufficient specificity’... it says that ‘if it did, we have insufficient resources to gather up information of this kind for matters long since disposed of...  We appreciate your request...  ”

Art finished the sentence, “But unless you have political pull, we’ll dispose of your request in the circular file.” At that moment, an eighteen-wheeler raced by.

“I can’t hear you,” Marge yelled.

“Goddamn it!” Art yelled back, hanging up the phone.

The following week, Art made a trip to Stamford to visit Dave Walkovich, his congressman, who held Saturday “Meet Your Representative” forums. When he arrived the congressman was out of town, so he only spoke to a clerk. But through the clerk’s efforts, Walkovich did send a letter to the Office of the Secretary of the Army to ask if the Army might provide a “better answer” than the one Art had received. August and September passed. In October, Art received an envelope with a transmittal letter from the same captain he had heard from earlier, that began, “Dear Mr. Girardin, The army has reconsidered...  ” Attached was a freshly typed list naming two soldiers, Broadbent, who had died in 1960, and Montoya, who had seemed to have disappeared.

The following June, Art went back to the Archives. In a dark corner of the public vault that he had passed by on prior visits, he found a 1952 account by the International Red Cross (IRC) following its inspection of North Korean prison Camp 13. Again, Roger’s name was listed among the other POWs. This time he thought Roger might still be alive. After all, he reasoned, the IRC does not list as “alive,” someone who is “dead,” despite having been “pronounced dead” by the Army.

In April 1978, Art filed a petition with the U.S. Army Board for the Correction of Military Records requesting an amendment to the record, from the presumptive finding of death to that of prisoner of war. Even after several appeals by Congressman Walkovich—the last one in 1980—the Army refused to change the record. A short time later, on account of fried fish, one might say, Art met Nick Castalano.