No story of the air war in Vietnam is complete without mentioning the plight of the POWs. While a full accounting is beyond the scope of this work, it deserves mention.1 From 1964 to 1973, 771 men were imprisoned in Southeast Asia. The majority were aviators, shot down during Rolling Thunder. As professionals, these men differed from POWs of previous wars. Their average age was thirty-four. Nearly 80 percent had a college degree or higher.2 These characteristics helped shape the men’s resistance to the depravities of their captors. From the beginning, the North Vietnamese refused to treat downed pilots as prisoners of war, ignoring the Geneva Convention. Instead, they referred to pilots as “war criminals,” guilty of committing crimes against the Vietnamese people during an illegal war of aggression. Because North Vietnam and the United States did not have diplomatic relations with each other, pilots simply vanished when shot down. North Vietnam did not allow inspections by the International Red Cross and refused to provide the names of men detained. The U.S. government simply had no idea who was imprisoned or dead.
Communist indoctrination was constant, as was systematic torture. North Vietnamese torture was exceptionally cruel, learned over years of colonial occupation and honed under the Communists. In the wake of World War Two, nationalist and Communist movements brought resentment to a boil, and American prisoners experienced that wrath during their captivity.3 Unfortunately, the frequent bombing pauses followed by escalation only served to anger Communist captors, who alternated torture and leniency according to the shifting U.S. policy.4 Extreme beatings were common. Prisoners were bound in tight ropes until their arms or legs were dislocated. Men faced solitary confinement or were left in leg irons for weeks on end—sometimes both. Medical treatment was often withheld, threatening men who had been grievously wounded during their ejections. This brutal treatment was intended to force prisoners to confess to war crimes or participate in staged propaganda activities. While military information was gathered from newer prisoners, its usefulness was minimal when compared to the overall goal of complete subjugation.
At the core of the prisoners’ resistance was the Code of Conduct. Following the Korean War, the U.S. government learned of the shocking Chinese Communist treatment of POWs. Sociologist Albert Biderman’s research into methods used to coerce information and false confessions led directly to the creation of the Code of Conduct, which outlined expected behavior of American service members.5 While the code provided a framework to guide POW behavior, it quickly proved unrealistic as POWs experienced the Vietnamese wrath. Every man eventually reached his breaking point, no matter what the code said.
The overall POW experience can be divided into four distinct periods: the beginning, the torture era, the good guy era, and the homecoming. August 1964 until October 1965 marked the beginning, when early prisoners were housed with common Vietnamese criminals. As the initial trickle of shoot-downs turned into a flood, conditions worsened. In October 1965 guards discovered a list of policies and a master list of POW names while searching a cell; this discovery elicited a swift change in North Vietnamese policies.
The torture era lasted from October 1965 until the end of 1969. This brutal period consisted of torture and isolation as the North Vietnamese sought to use the prisoners for propaganda purposes. As the bombing escalated, so did the number of POWs: more POWs arrived in camps in 1967 than in all the other years. The climax of Rolling Thunder in October 1967 gave the POWs false hope that the end was near, and when President Johnson suddenly ended the campaign, they faced the darkest of times.
The good guy era began after the Nixon administration began a large public relations campaign to improve treatment of prisoners coupled with the death of Ho Chi Minh. Although the North Vietnamese attempted to stop the negative publicity and regain world opinion by improving prisoner conditions, they still branded the men as criminals, refusing them rights and recognition as POWs. Food rations improved from the starvation diet. Prisoners could suddenly communicate. POWs began to receive packages and letters from home. The Vietnamese even allowed them to write one letter per month. Torture and extortion were replaced by simple and “straightforward detention.”6
The resumption of bombing during Operation Linebacker was the United States’ attempt to stop the invasion of South Vietnam by the North in 1972 and marked the turning point for the last phase. It also marked a generational split between prisoners who endured years of brutality during the bombing pause and the new generation of pilots shot down after bombing resumed. Finally, with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, the POWs began going home. Operation Homecoming lasted from February to April 1973, with transports airlifting prisoners out of Hanoi. POWs were released in the order of their shoot-down, traveling to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines and then to Travis Air Force Base in California.
The fact that Oriskany and CVW-16 lost so many aircraft meant that a significant number of men became POWs. These men went on to play a critical role in the POW saga. CAG Stockdale is synonymous with the POW experience, and his leadership was crucial to the prisoners’ survival. Cdr. Harry Jenkins became one of the first men to be tortured as the Vietnamese tightened the screws. Released early, Ens. David Matheny memorized the names of fellow prisoners to provide the first confirmation of who was actually alive in North Vietnam. Lt. Cdr. John McCain was the most seriously injured POW, yet he refused early release on the grounds it would provide the North Vietnamese even more propaganda value. Lt. (junior grade) Chuck Rice became one of a handful of men selected for special treatment by Cuban Communists. It is not possible to cover all of the prisoners or all their years of captivity. A short summation of the highlights will suffice, acknowledging that their story is one of incredible perseverance and bravery in the darkest of hours.7
James Stockdale is the central figure in the POW story. His leadership during the seven and a half years he spent in prison allowed a great many of the POWs to “return with honor.” Unlike the leadership of the air war, POW leadership was a joint effort from the beginning. It was a conscious decision between Stockdale, the senior naval officer, and Lt. Col. James Robinson “Robbie” Risner, the senior air force officer. Both men were shot down within a week of each other in September 1965. These two men provided the wisdom and spirituality the POWs needed to survive the long years ahead.8
Stockdale was horribly injured during his September 1965 ejection. He suffered a broken back. His left knee was broken and sticking out at a ninety-degree angle when a mob of angry villagers attacked him upon landing. Stockdale talked doctors into not amputating his leg—a decision that likely saved his life, as it is doubtful he would have survived the operation. He arrived at Hoa Lo in downtown Hanoi on 12 September 1965 and was transferred for surgery to fix his mangled leg at the end of the month. After one surgery, another followed in early October 1965. At the end of the month, he was transferred back to Hoa Lo. Though he remained in isolation, his leadership began affecting his fellow POWs. As they tightened the screws on the others, the Vietnamese remained reticent to do Stockdale further harm. To date, he was their biggest prize. Stockdale alive was very valuable to the North Vietnamese, though in time he became the biggest thorn in their side.9 He remained in isolation, slowly recuperating. Then in January 1966, while still hobbling around on crutches, Stockdale was finally introduced to torture. Locked in leg irons and tortured with ropes, Stockdale was forced to denounce the war. The torture reinjured his leg, giving him a reprieve from the famous Hanoi march in response to the POL strikes.
In early 1967 James Stockdale made his greatest impact yet. One of the prisoners had been forced to read Harrison Salisbury’s inflammatory articles over the camp’s loudspeakers. The articles were published in the New York Times in December 1966 after Salisbury was invited to Hanoi by the North Vietnamese. That his articles were manipulated as part of the North’s propaganda efforts is important; however, they also provided a counterpoint to the five o’clock follies’ sterile reporting on the air war and fueled dissension, something the POWs could not afford. Stockdale ordered prisoners to take a week in leg irons before agreeing to talk over the camp radio. This instruction “reflected his penchant for finding a middle ground between doctrinaire obedience to the Code of Conduct and a principled yet tenable standard of resistance.”10 Stockdale’s guidance lifted morale at the time when it was needed most. He followed that first edict by promulgating a new set of policies that became the basis for POW resistance. Known by the acronym BACK US, they set the standard for the POWs’ behavior until their release in 1973.
B—Bowing. Do not bow in public, either under camera surveillance or where non-prison observers were present.
A—Air. Stay off the air. Make no broadcasts or recordings.
C—Crimes. Admit to no “crimes,” avoiding use of the word in coerced confessions.
K—Kiss. Do not kiss the Vietnamese goodbye, meaning show no gratitude, upon release.
US—Unity over Self.11
Time after time, men became despondent after failing to live up to the Code of Conduct during torture sessions. Therefore, Stockdale’s guidance became the moral and legal compass for POW conduct. It was a set of orders that followed the intent of the code but in a manner that the men were able to follow.
Of course, the Vietnamese could not let the leadership and resistance provided by Stockdale stand unchallenged. The extensive bombing throughout the summer and fall of 1967 nearly caused prison officials to come unglued and led to the “Stockdale purge.” They systematically tortured men to find who was issuing orders and providing crucial leadership under the BACK US program. By September 1967, as Stockdale’s fellow aviators came so close to knocking Hanoi out of the war, the Vietnamese caught him communicating with another prisoner. The Vietnamese had their man. Stockdale later claimed he “felt like Jesus about to go on the cross.”12 They tortured him for three weeks, rebreaking his left knee in the process as they attempted to gain information on subordinates in the prisoner chain of command. Stockdale stalled by giving them a list of all the prisoners, 212 names in rank order, claiming they were the head of a snake. Cut off one, and the next would replace him. The Vietnamese elicited an apology, but he managed to obscure the key players. His resistance was becoming legendary, and he later recalled that at some point during the ordeal “some fellow, unknown prisoner, pretending to shake his bath rag dry, snapped in unmistakable code, ‘GBUJS’ for ‘God Bless You Jim Stockdale.’”13
As the air war reached its high point in October 1967, the Vietnamese became anxious to stop any further resistance. They moved Stockdale and ten other “hard-liners” whom they viewed as the most influential and unmanageable prisoners to Alcatraz, a former colonial prison for France’s most feared political opponents.14 Each man sent there spent his entire time in solitary confinement in a 4-foot-square cell. When the ordeal was over, James Stockdale had spent four years in solitary confinement, two of them in leg irons. Yet his leadership of the POWs continued unabated. On the third anniversary of his shoot-down, Stockdale heard “the most meaningful citation I’ve ever received.” As the other men in Alcatraz cleaned their waste buckets, they swished out in code, “Here’s to CAG for three great years. We love you. We are with you to the end.”15
In late January 1969, fellow Alcatraz inmate Harry Jenkins suffered from an attack of intestinal worms. To gain medical care for his fellow Oriskany pilot, Stockdale ordered a two-day hunger strike. Jenkins got the attention he needed, and Stockdale was hauled away to the famous Room 18 torture chamber at Hoa Lo. It was there that James Stockdale gained infamy. In less than twenty minutes of unusually harsh rope torture, the Vietnamese made him submit. The torture continued for two months as they elicited more information. Stockdale sensed that the Vietnamese wanted him to make a filmed propaganda statement, and his thoughts were confirmed when they arrived with soap and a razor, ordering him to clean himself up. Stockdale used the razor to give himself a reverse Mohawk, cutting his scalp badly in the process. When the Vietnamese decided to cover up his wounds with a hat, he then took a stool from his cell and proceeded to bludgeon his face with it. With his face a bloody pulp and his eyes swollen shut, he had thwarted their attempt. To keep the upper hand, Stockdale would “freshen” his wounds by beating his head against the walls. As Stockdale later recalled, he was “finally learning what Dostoevsky’s ‘underground man’ knew: ‘What a man craves is not a rationally desirable choice, but an independent choice.’”16
Torture continued throughout the summer of 1969, and through it all, Stockdale kept communicating, leading the POWs. Then in late August the Vietnamese caught him communicating again. He was sent back to Room 18 for more torture. As his captors whipped him in the face with a fan belt, Stockdale decided he would rather die than divulge details of the communication scheme. Left alone that night, Stockdale broke the cell’s window and sliced his wrists with the shards. Panicked guards discovered him and summoned medics, who saved him. Stockdale was moved back to solitary confinement to heal. The incident happened shortly after Ho Chi Minh’s death and after the press conference highlighting Vietnam’s mistreatment of POWs. Losing one of their most valued senior prisoners would only bring further attention to the issue. From this point forward, things began to change for the better in the prison system.17
James Stockdale led the POW resistance to the end, even when it became apparent that other officers outranked him, as they were unwilling or unable to lead. Upon repatriation, Stockdale received the Medal of Honor not only for his incredible leadership but for his two episodes in Room 18 during 1969. Fellow inmate Dick Stratton summarized it best: “Jim Stockdale is a man for all seasons. Hanoi did not make the man; Hanoi provided the stage for him to play his finest role.”18
After being shot down in November 1965, Cdr. Harry Jenkins became the first senior officer to proceed directly into torture. After his capture and a ten-day journey, he arrived at Hoa Lo, where his captors recognized his name from news articles in the Stars and Stripes. A week of torture and interrogation followed, with Jenkins sinking into despair over his inability to follow the Code of Conduct. Stockdale’s leadership proved critical to Jenkins’s survival. Men slowly developed a more realistic attitude toward the code and life as POWs under the Vietnamese. Having already served alongside Stockdale as one of his squadron commanders, Jenkins became an able deputy in the prison system. Considered a hard-liner by the Vietnamese, Jenkins was one of the eleven men moved to Alcatraz in the fall of 1967. During the good guy era, he was one of the extraordinary men to be placed in Cell Seven of Camp Unity. He was one of the ringleaders of the Church Riot of December 1970. When the Vietnamese hauled Jenkins and other senior officers away for more torture and interrogation, he helped turn the tide and improve the POW situation.
The tale of VF-111’s Ens. David Matheny became very contentious. Shot down in early October 1967, the young aviator quickly became targeted for early release. As the Tet Offensive raged, the Vietnamese released three men to peace activists Daniel Barrigan, a Jesuit priest, and Howard Zinn, famed professor of history at Boston University and author of A People’s History of the United States. The three men released were Matheny, air force Maj. Norris Overly, and Capt. Jon Black. The three received a red carpet sendoff in front of newsmen and Communist Party officials. To make things worse, the prisoners left behind had to listen to the events, plus recordings of the three men making confessions prior to their release.19 Contempt for the men known as MOB (from the acronym formed by their last names) ripped through the prisoners. It was a blow to prisoner morale throughout the camps. The code forbade early release, and most POWs believed these men committed a grievous offense. To be certain, the issue was not a black and white one. Moral and legal arguments were made, often depending on whether a POW was a hard-liner or a pragmatist. The three men left without senior ranking officer (SRO) permission. Their act had opened a potential floodgate, threatening senior authority and POW unity at a time when the prisoners could least afford it.20
To the men’s credit, they provided critical information to the U.S. government upon their return. Seaman Doug Hegdahl was a well-known prisoner who had been blown overboard from USS Canberra (CA-70) during a nighttime bombardment of North Vietnam. A strong swimmer, he survived and was rescued by fishermen. At first the Vietnamese believed him to be a covert operative, but they quickly realized that he was indeed a nineteen-year-old sailor. Because they believed him to be no threat, the Vietnamese gave him nearly free rein of the camp. They couldn’t have been more wrong. With careful coaching from Cdr. Dick Stratton, Hegdahl began memorizing the names of all the POWs in the North.21 Hegdahl was meant to leave but then was replaced by Overly. Hegdahl managed to teach Matheny seventy of the names before the swap occurred. Matheny eventually conveyed the names to officials in Washington. Upon his release in 1969, Hegdahl provided the remainder of the names. These men provided the first confirmation of who was alive and interned. Black also provided valuable information. Imprisoned at Hoa Lo, he gave analysts drawings of the camp’s layout and even more names. This allowed photo interpreters to locate and plot the prison’s location for the first time. It is beyond me to pass judgment on these men. They broke faith with their fellow POWs, but in doing so, they provided their country information it needed to begin improving the plight of those still in Vietnam.
Shot down while attacking the Hanoi thermal power plant, John McCain was lucky to survive his ejection and subsequent capture. He remains the most grievously injured POW to survive imprisonment. The Vietnamese tortured him for four days in Hoa Lo before taking him to a rat-infested hospital room in central Hanoi. They realized the propaganda treasure they had captured and set about to capitalize on it as McCain passed in and out of consciousness. As his condition stabilized, the Vietnamese again tortured him for information—before treating his injuries. McCain spent an agonizing two hours in pain as doctors attempted to set his mangled right arm without anesthetic. Incapable of setting the bones, they eventually settled on wrapping him in a body cast. Unable to care for himself, McCain was guarded by a teenage boy who stole more of McCain’s food than he fed him. Around this time, McCain’s captors advised him that repair of his leg was contingent upon him being filmed to show his lenient treatment. McCain agreed, mostly as a way to let his family know he was alive, although he demurred when pressed for further statements. He was saved by a French Communist journalist who told the Vietnamese the short footage sufficed.22 The Vietnamese eventually operated on his leg, leaving him in yet another cast and still bedridden.
At the beginning of 1968, McCain remained weak and unable to care for himself. He was transported to the Plantation, a prison used for propaganda by the Vietnamese, as they continued to focus on his special status as the son and grandson of famous admirals. Upon arrival, McCain shared a cell with two air force officers, Col. Bud Day and Maj. Norris Overly. Day, who also received the Medal of Honor for his actions as a POW, was nearly as badly injured as McCain. Day’s strength proved to be a source of inspiration for McCain as Overly nurtured both injured men. Overly was released early, and Day was eventually transferred to another prison, leaving McCain in solitary confinement for the next two years. During the summer of 1968, McCain’s father relieved Admiral Sharp to become CINCPAC, and the Vietnamese made more propaganda demands of him, even proposing early release. According to Bud Day, John McCain was the only person who qualified for early release due to his injuries, yet McCain resisted.23 He would wait his turn according to the Code of Conduct and Stockdale. This propaganda failure incensed the North Vietnamese, who made John McCain pay, “singling him out for what was probably the harshest sustained persecution of any prisoner at the Plantation, lasting over a year, including an episode in September 1968 when over a span of four days his left arm was rebroken, he was trussed in ropes, and he was beaten ‘every two to three hours’ until he signed a confession of criminal wrongdoing and apology.” That statement was about all they got out of the “crown prince.” He fended off pressure to meet with delegations. He diverted his interrogators with useless information, once listing the offensive line of the Green Bay Packers as the members of his squadron.24
When McCain emerged from solitary, he became one of the primary leaders of the resistance both at the Plantation and later as a member of Cell Seven at Camp Unity. He perhaps withstood more than most men, although he firmly believes that the Vietnamese were unwilling to kill him because of his propaganda value.25 This tenacity cost him dearly. John McCain’s wounds never fully healed. Upon homecoming, he was still limping on his bad leg, although he left his new crutches behind, because as he remembered, “I wanted to take my leave of Vietnam without any assistance from my hosts.”26 His mangled right arm remains a full 2 inches shorter than the left.
Following his shoot-down on the same mission as John McCain, Lt. (junior grade) Chuck Rice entered his own special hell. As a new prisoner, Rice had yet to experience the torture and extortion that had reached inhuman lows. Because of this, he was singled out to prepare him for early release. It was not to be.27 Transferred from Hoa Lo to the Zoo, Rice and twenty other men were randomly persecuted by a Cuban known as “Fidel.” Fidel’s goal was compliance, pure and simple, and it was achieved through brutal torture. This Cuban institutionalized water boarding and whippings with automotive fan belts. He also introduced confessions written in little blue books. Chuck Rice was one of the lucky ones, because not all men survived their encounters with Fidel. Even the Vietnamese were shocked by his excesses. The Cuban program slowly wound down, and Fidel lost influence. Chuck Rice summed up the later years in Zalin Grant’s Over the Beach:
By 1970 the pressure had eased a bit. The publicity campaign spearheaded by the POW families, along with the attention the Nixon administration gave the problem, achieved results in terms of the kind of treatment we were given. . . . For the first time we were all together. A formal military structure was secretly established. The ranking officer, an air force colonel, was our camp commander. Rules and regulations were laid down. The communication system began working so well that it became bureaucratic and you almost resented it. In the first years we loved to have contact with other Americans. Now we were together and the military mentality began to reassert itself.28
These men all played a critical role in the POW experience. There were others from the air wing too. VMF(AW)-212’s Capt. Harlan Chapman became the first marine POW. VF-111’s Ens. George McSwain, described as “a tough hombre” by his fellow prisoners, was eventually broken during a wave of violent reprisals following an escape attempt by fellow inmates. VA-163’s Lt. Cdr. Hugh Stafford’s great sense of humor allowed him to tell countless jokes and puns, to the delight and amusement of his fellow inmates. One of his more famous puns played on the saying “A penny saved is a penny earned.” Stafford invented a character named Benny who shaved off all the hair on his body. In his tale, Benny was struck by lightning and reduced to ashes, which were placed in a small jar. After luring fellow POWs with the story, Stafford would ask if they knew the lesson, to which he’d respond, “A Benny shaved is a Benny urned.”29
The women and families left behind when their husbands and fathers went to fight in Vietnam also deserve special recognition. Residing at the various air stations in Alameda, Lemoore, and Miramar, they suffered silently, not only during Rolling Thunder, but throughout the war as their husbands continued to fly and fight in their chosen professional careers. In gallows humor, the wives were often referred to as “Cruise Widows,” but that description and reality were only a moment’s heartbreak away. The inevitable casualty notification could send their world into a tailspin, forever changing their lives. Events such as the fire on the hangar deck affected entire communities as grieving families struggled to cope with losses in their close-knit ranks. As the home of the Pacific Fleet’s attack squadrons, Naval Air Station Lemoore in California bore the brunt. During Vietnam, Skyhawk losses were more than double those of any other naval aircraft. One hundred ninety-five navy A-4s were lost in combat, and seventy-seven more in operational accidents—31 percent of the navy’s fixed and rotary wing losses during the war. The majority of them were flown by Lemoore-based pilots. The polarization tearing the country apart affected these pilots’ wives too. No matter their political affiliation, these women supported their husbands through thick and thin. It took understanding and compassionate women to survive—and their attitudes had a direct impact on morale. Not all marriages survived the test.
The POW situation affected morale from the beginning, and the Johnson administration did little to help. With no official channels between Hanoi and Washington, there was no way for bureaucrats to confirm a pilot’s status. Early on, the Johnson administration’s policy was to keep quiet and avoid upsetting the North Vietnamese, who they feared would actually follow through with their threats of punishing the “criminals.” Compounding the issue was the change in policy concerning captured men. As more men were captured in the early 1960s, the Johnson administration worried the public would begin questioning American involvement, so they changed the official phrasing from “captured or interned” to “detained.”30 Whether intentional or not, the change and the administration’s overall stance did nothing to help the POWs or their families.
The wives of downed aviators immediately entered a bureaucratic purgatory. By naval regulations, families of a deceased serviceman were no longer authorized government quarters. So these wives not only lost their husbands but were kicked out of their homes by the navy. The POW issue only muddied the water further. If a pilot went missing, then the families were left in limbo. During the height of the air war in 1967, Capt. Howie Boydston, the commanding officer of Lemoore, began allowing wives to stay on base, no matter the regulation.31 It was a small step, but one that held major implications, especially considering the entire support network available to the wives existed at their base. His support became influential in breaking the bureaucratic logjam at a time when the government told the families nothing.
Sybil Stockdale proved to be just as influential to the POWs as her husband, Jim Stockdale. She saw through the smokescreen and began to seek answers. When the U.S. government failed in its responsibilities, Sybil became energized. She knew that her husband and his fellow POWs were being tortured, and she was frustrated with the government’s lack of answers. During a June 1968 interview with a reporter from Look magazine to discuss Jim’s plight, she and a another wife decided that forming a national organization was the only way to achieve results. Thus began the National League of Families. In less than a month, they had 350 members in twenty-four chapters across the country, and the numbers continued to grow.
With Sybil as the national coordinator, the League of Families began highlighting the POW issue. In less than a year, the organization influenced the new Nixon administration to act. The black POW/MIA flag that is now a common sight to many Americans became the league’s symbol as it gained momentum. Sybil and other wives began visiting American officials in Washington and Vietnamese officials in Paris. Sybil Stockdale later recalled one of her visits to Washington in July 1969:
I couldn’t help liking Secretary Laird. He’d ended the “keep quiet” policy and had the guts to talk about the truth of the prisoners’ treatment in public. I secretly felt that the organizational efforts of us wives and families on a national level had been influential in forcing our government to join us in speaking out publicly. One official in the Defense Department told me they knew they’d better join us or we were going to mop up the floor with them. That was exactly how I wanted them to feel.32
That was the power of Sybil Stockdale. She and the other women caused the Nixon administration to place pressure on the North Vietnamese, highlighting their inhumane treatment of the prisoners to the world. This in turn forced the Politburo to change its stance on the POWs.33 The navy eventually awarded her the Public Service Medal. She remains the only wife ever to receive such an award.
Marilyn Elkins serves as an additional example of how the war touched these women’s lives. Her husband, Lt. Frank Elkins, was killed during a nighttime armed reconnaissance mission in October 1966. As they had just married, she was not living on base, and she was dependent on the few things government representatives could tell her. Two months after her husband was declared missing, she struggled with the reality of it all.
By December, I had lost twenty-five pounds. I was down to a hundred and must have looked horrible, but I never glanced at a mirror. It made people uncomfortable to be around me. I was young, my husband was missing and if they told you they were sorry, you were liable to cry, and they didn’t want to see you cry. But if they ignored it and didn’t say anything, they came across as callous. Shirley’s husband, Jack, who was in Squadron 162, returned home after the fire. She was afraid for me to see him, afraid it would make things worse, Jack coming back, Frank not with him. He finally came around to the house but didn’t know what to say or do. I was in a period of suspended disbelief, a time capsule. You talk yourself into believing what you want to believe and ignore any fact that doesn’t fit in.34
Marilyn Elkins soon found herself ensnared in the political issues surrounding the POW and MIA movement as well as American involvement in Vietnam. Some members of the League of Families would not talk to politicians simply because they were doves with an antiwar stance. It didn’t help that the hawks often used the same issue to further their own political agendas.35 Very few viewed the issue in an objective manner. Marilyn continued to hope that Frank Elkins was alive. She wrote and mailed packages, despite the continually changing rules about what could be said in letters. She eventually became disenchanted with the POW issue, as very little reason was put into the debate.
Marilyn Elkins waited for years to discover her husband’s fate. Was he alive in the prisons, or had he indeed perished? At one point, because the U.S. government could not do it, she traveled to Paris to query officials at the North Vietnamese Embassy. She eventually moved to Paris and began making daily trips to the embassy to ask the Vietnamese if they had any information about her husband. After more than two months, they quietly told her he was dead.36 But whom could she trust? The navy officially listed Frank Elkins as MIA. They could not confirm otherwise, and that status remained. In 1973 Marilyn published her husband’s diary under the title The Heart of a Man in an attempt to raise awareness of the POW and MIA issue. Operation Homecoming was under way, and there was still no official accounting of him. Zalin Grant’s Over the Beach does an epic job of covering the impacts on this young woman as she struggled to make sense of the morass. The Vietnamese eventually returned Frank Elkins’s remains in 1990.
Oriskany’s POWs and their families epitomize the service and sacrifice that occurred during Vietnam. As Stuart Rochester and Frederick Kiley, the authors of Honor Bound, conclude, the POW story “remains one of the few truly shining moments of that troubled era.”37 Upon homecoming, these men and their families felt the weight of their suffering drain from their bodies—what Lt. Cdr. Hugh Stafford later called a “profound, bottomless fatigue.”38 Some men picked up their former lives easily, while others struggled. Some returned to their wives and enjoyed long marriages, while others returned to failing marriages that succumbed to the trauma. On the whole, most did remarkably well, considering the severity and longevity of their confinement.39 Some of the men came home to enjoy further success. Jim Stockdale received the Medal of Honor, was promoted to admiral, and eventually led various academic institutions. Later, he became Ross Perot’s running mate in the 1992 presidential election, in part out of his loyalty to Perot for the man’s outstanding help to Sybil Stockdale and the National League of Families. John McCain also entered politics, eventually becoming a senator from Arizona and a primary candidate during an unsuccessful presidential bid. It is no stretch to say that the POWs from Oriskany and CVW-16 had a greater impact on modern U.S. history than they could have ever imagined while imprisoned in North Vietnam.