CHAPTER 19

A WALK IN LAFAYETTE PARK

MAY 24–25, 1973

EIGHTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD IRVING BERLIN had just finished leading the thirteen hundred dinner guests on the White House lawn in singing his famous anthem “God Bless America.” Emotions soared under the sprawling dinner tent. Jerry continued to be exuberant with happiness and thoughts of freedom.

At the finish of formal entertainment for the evening, most guests acted on President Nixon’s invitation to tour the White House —as they pleased and unaccompanied. The Curtises followed others upstairs to admire guest apartments, especially the Lincoln Bedroom, with its massive rosewood bed. It was thrilling to be able to roam freely through the historic rooms.

When they came back downstairs, it was obvious from the sounds of merriment and dancing that the revelry was going to continue —and in fact it did, until past 2:00 a.m. Jerry looked at his watch: nearly midnight.

“Let’s head back to our hotel,” he said. Terry nodded in agreement.

He stopped to ask an attendant the easiest way out and was shown to the White House door facing Lafayette Park. Exiting here, they turned right, walked down through the guard gate, and were about to get a taxi when Jerry asked his wife if she would like to walk back. Their hotel, the Statler, was only a couple of blocks away.

“Okay,” Terry said, and they made their way along brick sidewalks through Lafayette Park. The rain had stopped, but the deluge of the past thirty-six hours had left the air clean-smelling, fresh, and surprisingly not too muggy even for a May evening in the capital. Streets were still wet, and at this hour there was little traffic. The sound of Les Brown’s band continued faintly in the distance from the other side of the White House. It had been a perfect evening.

As they strolled along, Jerry thought about the past three months. They had been a mind-numbing whirlwind of activities: parades, speaking engagements, television appearances. It seemed everyone in the United States wanted to hear from the returning POWs.

Many of the men who had experienced life under the atheistic Communist regime for so long wanted to get their stories out —wanted their fellow countrymen to know what had happened to them. Jerry had made a pledge to God that for as long as he lived, whenever he was asked to share, he would. He remained certain God had been with him and was the only reason any of them had made it home.

Returning to freedom caused no problems for him personally. As he would often say when he spoke to groups, “Freedom is easy to live with —it’s when freedom is taken away that living becomes hard.”

However, he and Terry already were discovering what some of the challenges were going to be moving forward. Disagreements mostly concerned the children. Jerry wished to be their father now more than ever, but he believed in strict discipline. Terry, who had had complete control for so long, found it extremely difficult to share her role in decisions pertaining to Tommy and Lori’s behavior. It would prove to be a lifelong challenge for them.

As the couple walked along, Jerry placed his hand on his wife’s shoulder. Such a small thing, but a tender pleasure he had missed. At least his mind seemed to be settling down, like something that unwinds slowly but has not quite completed the process. He hadn’t really thought through all that had happened to him while in prison. He guessed that would come —he had no idea in what a dramatic way.

They arrived back at the Statler, along with several other couples, who evidently had decided to take advantage of a lovely evening for walking also. They were all exhausted. Jerry went to sleep that night as soon as his head hit the pillow.

In the early morning hours, however, a dream startled the newly repatriated prisoner awake —a dream so vivid, it caused him to react violently in his sleep. The same scenario would reccur often for several years to come. He dreamed he was climbing over a wall to freedom, as hard and as fast as he could. But beneath him, Communist guards grabbed at his legs to pull him back down. He jabbed forcibly at them with his feet in an effort to get away and over that wall.

With his vigorous kicking, he had awakened Terry. He slid quietly out of bed and assured her everything was all right. His lovely wife, exhausted from the day’s activities, rolled over, welcoming sleep again.

Jerry walked over to a chair next to the window and sat down. On the small side table, he noticed his Meerschaum pipe, another small pleasure he had missed in prison. He reached over, filled its bowl, and in the darkness, lit it. Pulling back the curtains slightly, he looked out over the streets of Washington, DC, and took a deep breath. From where he sat, he could catch a glimpse of the White House, and beyond it, the Washington Monument in the distance.

So many things were different from when he had left the country in 1965. Pizza could be ordered to his doorstep —and during something called the Super Bowl. Men wore pants with flared ankle cuts, and women wore their hair piled sky-high on top of their heads. Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon, and Boeing had introduced the first 747 jumbo jet.

And enormously consequential national events had happened during the time he was imprisoned in Vietnam. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, followed two months later by Senator Robert Kennedy.

When he had returned to Louisiana, the state was still a hotbed of adjustment for integration. He himself, as a member of the military, was accustomed to being around people from various ethnic backgrounds. But the country continued to struggle.

Those were not the only social changes evident in society, however. He and Terry had gone to a movie together just a few weeks prior. The film, Pete ’n’ Tillie, dealt with adult themes totally unlike anything Jerry had been accustomed to seeing in movies before he left the States. And when Walter Matthau grabbed Carol Burnett’s derriere on the big screen, Jerry walked out of the movie theater. Things had changed.

It was well past midnight, and the deep quiet produced by plush carpet and thick curtains engulfed his hotel room. Suddenly, Jerry’s mind seemed completely still, truly at peace for the first time since his release. He knew his body was getting stronger every day. The circles under his eyes were fading, and he was gaining a little weight. And right now, he seemed to be able to think with an exquisite clarity.

He ruminated over the days and weeks and years of his ordeal as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. He thought first about his shoot-down —the rush to get away from the crash site, the hiding, the capture. He shook his head in the darkness and thought once more how he wished he had been able to rescue Will Forby that day back in 1965.

The event of the shoot-down of this one rescue Huskie would turn out to have specific historic military significance. His crew chief, Bill Robinson, and his pararescue jumper, Neil Black, became the longest-held enlisted prisoners of war in the history of the United States. While in prison, senior officers had led these two men in officer training, and later Air Force officials honored that, giving both men wartime commissions as officers when they were repatriated.

Jerry was proud of both men and their accomplishments. His thoughts now drifted to his copilot, Duane Martin. He had learned the young man had lived in the jungle for a few days before being caught by the Pathet Lao. While in captivity, Duane had met another downed pilot, Dieter Dengler. Together, the two men attempted a daring escape before Duane was tragically killed.

In addition, out of six-hundred-plus POWs in Hanoi, twenty-five were awarded the Air Force Cross. Four of those would come from that rescue event alone: Jerry and his entire helicopter crew.

God, be with Duane’s family. Comfort them and his children . . .

He sat still a moment. The area of Hoa Lo Prison dubbed Heartbreak Hotel was where his ordeal in Hanoi, North Vietnam, had begun. He remembered those initial days of confusion and bewilderment.

Jerry recalled his first Christmas Eve in prison. It was that night he had sensed God’s presence so vividly. He had wrestled to come to grips with the nightmarish reality of his situation, and he had railed at God until he recognized the wrongness of that attitude.

He remembered the complete peace produced from his submission to God’s authority surrounding him during that night of deep darkness, and it had followed him throughout his imprisonment. It was with him even now in the quiet of his hotel room.

It is a good thing we can’t see into the future. Had I known during those first few days of capture just how long I would be there, I don’t know what I would have done.

He chuckled to himself in the darkness at the remembrance of his first shower, when he had looked up to see, scrawled on the wall, “Smile, You’re on Candid Camera.” Over the years in prison, many other POWs had seen that message, sometimes in different places in the bathing area, and everyone had asked around about it.

We never did find out who wrote that on the shower wall!

He thought how he and all the other POWs had fought so hard to stay connected with one another. He remembered when he first learned the tap code —how he had practiced on a banana peel and had wondered if he would ever be proficient with it. He smiled: by the end of seven and a half years, he had been able to learn two foreign languages using the tap code while in solitary, then became proficient in those languages in the larger cell groups.

Now, for the first time in a long while, he thought back to the torture he had endured on several occasions, the excruciating pain from physical torture and the excruciating pain from solitary confinement —both conditions capable of taking a man to the brink of his mental faculties.

It had been proved over and over that men could indeed come to the end of what they could bear, physically and mentally, even men who were strong in their faith, their courage, and their commitment. They had learned that every man has a breaking point.

Seeing all of them earlier at dinner, dressed in formal military attire, polished and shining, had been an incredible sight. He had seen the man he led in a simple Communion service tapped through their adjoining cell walls; he saw most of his former cellmates, including the young man who had passed an empty plate during worship services in prison. They had all been there at the White House dinner. And he heard about many others with whom he had not shared a cell but knew only by name, like Mike Christian, who was known for his remarkable commitment to a scrap of fabric.

Unlike the evening they had just experienced, in prison the POWs had lived day in and day out without any tangible symbols representing their nation or military status —no uniforms, no insignias, no patches, no emblems, and no American flags. As months had turned into years, they often had looked for ways to demonstrate their allegiance to their country. These token tributes always had to be performed quietly and discreetly, to keep guards from seeing or hearing their pledges or patriotic songs —behavior strictly forbidden and punished if caught.

During one of his infrequent showers at Camp Unity, Mike had spotted a dirty rag floating in the open sewer gutter and suddenly had an idea. He sneaked the cloth back to his cell and formulated a plan. He would need to make a needle out of bamboo; he would need a scrap of blue material from someone’s prison uniform, red tile dust, and a little water. And he would need to pull threads out of his thin blanket to use for sewing.

Deep into the night, while his cellmates slept, Mike would sit in the corner under the dim lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. He sewed the blue patch in one corner of the dingy cloth he had whitened as best he could with bits of soap. Next, he formed a red paste with the tile dust and water to make red stripes. Then he sewed a few stars onto the blue patch using his bamboo needle and blanket thread.

It had been crudely fashioned, ragged around the edges, and with squiggly stripes. But when Mike had waved it at the end of the cell one morning and said, “Hey, fellows, look at this!” no one had any trouble recognizing what he had made. They all had stood and quietly recited the Pledge of Allegiance.

Sitting in his hotel room, Jerry remembered the rest of the story. Not long after Mike had finished his flag, guards came into his cell and ordered everyone to strip down and go outside. While ransacking the cell for contraband, they found Mike’s flag. The guards waited to come back for him until that night —the nighttime interrogations were always the worst. And though there had not been any torture in the camp for several months, the prisoners could hear the beating begin as soon as the guards left with Mike for the torture room.

After several hours, the guards had pushed Mike back into the cell, or as one POW would say later, “At least what was left of him.” His face was cut and bloodied all over, his arms hung limp, and he could barely walk. His cellmates comforted him as best they could.

Yet during the middle of the next night, when most were sleeping, several heard a scratching in the corner. They looked up, and there sat Mike, back under the dim lightbulb. His eyes were nearly swollen shut and his hands were trembling, but he had begun pulling threads out once more from his thin cotton blanket.

Jerry marveled again at the story of Mike’s flags, of his dedication and commitment, just as he did the first time he had heard it in prison. The story had inspired all the POWs as they longed for the day when their symbols of freedom could be appreciated in the open once more.

Jerry prayed. God, thank you for freedom, for this country. We may not always get everything right, but we live free. Thank you for that, and for bringing us home. Please honor the sacrifice of those who didn’t make it back.

But every one of them had experienced days when they weren’t sure they could make it. For Jerry, sometimes it wasn’t the years that had been so long. Sometimes it was enduring just the next five minutes. Jerry thought about his cellmate Will Forby, who, when asked how in the world he had endured those years, had said, “One day at a time.”

Jerry glanced down at his Bible lying on the table in front of the window. His thoughts drifted to the apostle Paul in the New Testament. Paul had endured prison many times, had experienced often the Roman versions of torture.

I’ve got a much greater appreciation now of the things Paul wrote, Jerry thought, because I know firsthand something of the pain and torture the apostle often sustained. He recalled Paul’s words to a struggling church:

I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Jerry now knew the truth of this. He prayed, So many times, God, your presence was felt just at a moment of great need. Not anything I ever endured, God —not the torture, not the pain, not the loneliness, not the fear —was able to separate me from your love.

He continued looking out the window of their hotel room. It had begun to drizzle, and raindrops clustered on the glass like crystals. Across the room, he could hear the gentle, rhythmic breathing of his wife as she slept.

All through the years, Jerry had known Terry would remain faithful and continue raising their children. Eight years to be apart from family is a long time. Jerry admitted to himself that even though they had been through deep waters, there might be deep waters ahead. But he knew God would be with them.

Jerry glanced back out over the streets of Washington. The rain had stopped, and the first few scattered rays of dawn could be seen breaking in the eastern sky. He knew the POW experience would forever define his life. But Jerry prayed, Looking back, God, I can see the trace of your hand all through those years. You never left me. You always gave me just enough light to continue on.