Two Souls Indivisible Page 15

  While the church was Episcopalian, the ceremony was Presbyterian, and it reflected an ethos of restraint and sobriety. The purpose of the service was more to worship God than to praise the dead. The chaplain, Will Terry, knew the Halyburtons well, and this service was one of his most challenging. Porter's death had spurred the antiwar sentiment—Davidson was, after all, a college town—and the unrest heightened everyone's emotions. Terry rewrote his "meditation" on Halyburton four or five times.

  Standing on the altar, he spoke firmly, noting that a "memorial service" was a fitting ceremony because "a memorial is something that keeps remembrance alive." Alive first, he said, "is the memory of Porter Halyburton as a friend, a husband, and a son who brought joy rather than pain," and whose memories of "tenderness, devotion, and considerateness fill our hearts with gratitude toward God, who is the origin and author of such virtues." But these memories, he said, are also jarred by tragedy—not of death, for we all must die, but from "the kind of death that comes from the insanity of war ... from the collective selfishness and callousness of man ... and in this sense we are very much participants in his death." But there is yet another memory, Terry said, which he called "the recollection of victory." It is the memory of the resurrection "that allows us to look death in the face ... This is the certitude that God has blessed Porter with. It is the victory of God, and it is our victory as His children. This does not keep our grief from being grief. The separation is real, but the reunion is also real, and this is what saves us from despair ... Our memories end not in grimness, but in the quiet joy of genuine gratitude."

  After the service, friends and relatives gathered at Katharine's house, where Porter had grown up, and was soon filled with dishes of spaghetti, baked apples, date bars, and layer cake. Katharine retained her poise, expressing pride in her son, showing little grief, and assuming a fatalistic air. As she told her friend Nancy Blackwell, "If this is the way it was meant to be, then this is the way it's meant to be." Her parents were alive but ailing, and she had to be strong for them. But her steely pose was deceiving. As a public relations professional, she knew the importance of image—her bold scarves and costume jewelry had created a cosmopolitan persona—and she did not want to show her vulnerability. Her friends, however, knew better, and understood how much her own life was vested in her son's. Divorced and remaining single, she had quit her promising newspaper career so she could tend to her parents in Davidson. What she'd had was Porter, and now he was gone. As Erskine Sproul, a photographer who worked with Katharine, said, "She was able to continue her job stoically, but her eyes were always red."

  On the night she learned that her husband had been shot down, Shirley Cherry gathered her children and told them what had happened. Her second child, Fred jr., who was ten years old, didn't understand. "What does that mean?" he asked.

  It meant leaving Japan and returning to the United States, which surprised some of Cherry's friends. Other wives in such circumstances stayed in Japan, where information was more accessible. Shirley and the children initially moved in with Fred's oldest sister, Beulah, and her husband, Melvin, in Suffolk, Virginia, for they could accommodate Fred's family. On Sundays the children would visit their grandmother in the same farmhouse where their father had once lived.

  The arrangement, however, was difficult for the youngsters, who did not respond well to Beulah's discipline. Adjusting to public school was even more difficult. While military schools were rigid, the Suffolk schools were lax, with children cursing, fighting, and ignoring their teachers. "It was a culture shock," Fred Jr. said. "I just wanted to get home, crawl under the bed, and stay there."

  Before long, Shirley and the children moved twelve miles east to Portsmouth, which coincided with alarming news for the children: their dad had not survived. "I always thought he was dead," said Cynthia, who was six when her father was shot down. "That's what Mom always said." *

  In fact, there is no evidence that Cherry's status had changed. In a letter to his mother, Leolia, five months after the shootdown, the Air Force said it knew that he had "ejected, deployed a good parachute, and was observed to land on a small hill in a slight ravine." He signaled with his radio beeper, but voice contact was never made. Whether he survived was uncertain, the letter said, but "it is reasonable to assume that he may have been taken captive, and is being detained."

  In the following three years, the Air Force continued to write to Leolia and Beulah without indicating any change in Cherry's status. The Air Force was proceeding as if he were alive. In 1968 Leolia was told that her son had been promoted from major to lieutenant colonel.

  By then, Shirley had severed her ties with Fred's family. When Beulah tried to visit the children, Shirley would not let her see them, so Beulah would park her car and watch the kids play on a basketball court.

  Shirley continued to receive money from the Air Force—according to Cynthia, $1,432 a month. They moved from an apartment in Portsmouth to a single-family house, and Shirley began dating. When Sam Morgan, an Air Force pilot who had known the Cherrys in Japan, visited Shirley in Virginia, he was struck by how much she had changed. She had lost weight, bought new clothes, and changed her hair style. "When I knew her in Japan, she was the classic Air Force wife, but when I saw her in Virginia, she had decided that Fred was gone and she was a completely different person," he said. There was another man in the house, he added, "and she was not happy to see me."

  To be sure, Shirley was hardly the only POW wife to start a relationship with another man. As one wife told the New York Times in 1972, "I don't want to live as if I were dead." Another woman said, "A lot decided to stay faithful until they met a man who was attractive." The stress on the wives caused many marital breakups. At the end of the war, the Pentagon said that 39 of the 420 returning married prisoners, or 9.2 percent, "have either gotten or were getting divorces." Ten years later, U.S. News & World Report said that at least ninety couples, or 21 percent, had divorced. But those numbers represent all married prisoners, including those caught toward the end of the war; the rate for the early shootdowns was higher. Few breakups, however, were so one-sidedly bitter and gratuitously hateful as the Cherrys'.

  According to Cynthia, her mother seemed to take pride in telling others what her final words to Fred were: "She said the last thing she ever told him was, 'I hope you get shot down.' And then he got shot down."

  Fred's mother suffered a stroke the same year he was captured. Until then, the seventy-eight-year-old had remained spry, still raising chickens, canning fruits, singing out the Lord's name, and threatening malefactors with her .38 revolver. But the stroke slowed her down, and the news of her son was almost more than she could bear. "It was like someone had knocked the wind out of her," said Evelyn Brown, a granddaughter. "She didn't display her emotions and she didn't cry, but you knew from her expression that she was torn up inside."

  But as long as Fred was missing in action, she could hope he was alive, and that hope sustained her. She was more confident than anyone else in the family. Each day, surrounded by photographs of Fred in his uniform, she sat in her chair with her head down. She would look up if someone spoke to her; otherwise, people assumed she was praying. Before meals she would say a blessing: "Lord, please take care of my baby, and let me live to see him come home." She did not allow herself to believe otherwise. "He'll be back," she said. "I may not be alive to see it, but he'll be back."

  Beulah was now the family matriarch and the principal contact for the Air Force. For three years there was little news, and any information was either misleading or unnerving. In March 1967, the Air Force wrote to Beulah that an American rabbi and minister had visited two unnamed American POWs in North Vietnam, and the pilots "were said to be in reasonably good spirits and receiving adequate medical treatment." But later that month, the Air Force wrote that "increased pressure is quite possibly being brought to bear on our personnel being held captive ... to force them to make unfavorable statements against their country." There was no indicati
on about what type of pressure or how it was applied—nor, for that matter, any new evidence on whether Fred was dead or alive.

  The American National Red Cross took packages to the POWs, so Beulah sent some to her brother, hoping that he was in fact a prisoner. But she was less confident than her mother. Typically buoyant and chatty, Beulah was now often quiet, detached. Friends and relatives picked times to talk with her about Fred, re-counting the good times and laughing at his antics.

  There were, most famously, his low flights over the community. When he was stationed at Dover, he loved to take detours and buzz the houses in his old neighborhood. Sometimes he would alert his family and friends to "the show," and everyone would stand out in the yard and wait until someone would finally hear a distant rumble. It got louder and louder and soon muffled the screams of the children. Necks would strain, and then this streak of metal would roar right above the treetops, smoke blowing out its rear and spectators gleefully diving for cover. The plane would climb, swoop, twirl, and dive, then peel away and disappear.

  Fred loved to impress Beulah. One time, when he was about to land at nearby Langley Air Force Base, he instructed the radio control tower to call his sister.

  "Mrs. Watts, your brother is coming in."

  "When is he coming?" she asked.

  Right on cue, Fred buzzed her roof and rattled the house. "He's here!" she cried, throwing the telephone in the air and running to the window to catch a glimpse.

  On another occasion, Beulah took Fred to Langley and was allowed to go up to the control tower to watch her brother in an F-105. At dusk, with the afterburners glowing, Fred waved as he taxied by. He was going to Mobile, Alabama, which at normal flight speed would take an hour and a half. But that evening he flew at supersonic speed, or about 900 mph, which is forbidden across the continental United States, but it allowed Cherry to reach Mobile in an hour. Landing, he jumped out of the plane, raced to a telephone, and called Beulah, who had just returned from the air base.

  "What's wrong?" she asked. "Are you back at Langley?"

  "No, I'm in Mobile, Alabama," he said proudly.

  She was stunned but pleased that no barrier—sound or racial—could impede her baby brother.

  These memories, shared with friends and family, made Beulah smile and would lift her spirits, but then she would grow silent, the pain returning to her eyes. Everyone knew it was time to stop talking.

  11. "Unspeakable Agony of the Soul"

  Fred Cherry and Porter Halyburton were separated for the rest of their captivity, but their time together had prepared them for the hardships to come. As the enemy's purges intensified, both men suffered the worst treatment of their imprisonment. But their friendship remained a source of inspiration, giving each man additional incentive to resist and endure. Neither Cherry nor Halyburton wanted to let the other down, to negate what had passed between them. As Cherry said, "After all Haly had done for me, I wasn't about to disappoint him."

  The treatment of Cherry was always complicated by race. The Vietnamese thought they could demoralize and divide the Americans—and minorities were the ideal target. If African Americans were denied civil rights in their own country, why should they fight and die for that country in Vietnam?

  This message was delivered in many ways. In 1965 Hanoi played a tape of Clarence Adams, a black former Army sergeant from Memphis, ridiculing the United States. Adams had been taken prisoner during the Korean War and refused repatriation because of racism back home. In 1966 the civil rights activist Diane Nash Bevel visited Hanoi and saw a movie about Ho Chi Minh, which said he had visited Harlem in his youth and had "resented the exploitation of Negroes in the United States." Bevel, in a broadcast to her "black brothers" in South Vietnam, said, "The Vietnam War is a colonialist war. If you fight in it, you are fighting Asian brothers who are determined to prevent their country from becoming owned and managed by racist capitalist white men."

  The following year, the Viet Cong released two black POWs, Army Sergeants Edward Johnson and James Jackson, along with a statement expressing "solidarity and support for the just struggle of the U.S. Negroes ... for basic national rights." The Viet Cong also dropped propaganda leaflets on National Route 13, a major highway in Bing Long Province, urging black soldiers to join the enemy.

  The Vietnamese correctly anticipated that black Americans would turn against the war much earlier than whites; opposition stemmed not just from militant leaders like Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X but from mainstream black men as well. The most prominent voice belonged to Martin Luther King, Jr., who concluded that Vietnam was needlessly destroying lives, white and black, American and Vietnamese, while undermining domestic programs for the poor. He was also angry that his government would sacrifice blood and treasure to protect the rights of the Vietnamese but not do the same for its own citizens. "We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society," he said in a speech in New York on April 4, 1967,

  and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit.

  There is little evidence, however, that the antiwar statements from civil rights leaders or other racially motivated propaganda affected significant numbers of African American soldiers. While they were conscious of race, only rarely did that awareness translate into sympathy for an enemy that was otherwise trying to kill them.

  That was why the North Vietnamese believed that Fred Cherry, a decorated combat pilot, a career serviceman, and the highest-ranking black POW, was so valuable—and why they used every means possible, including torture, to extract a statement from him. His credentials would carry weight with African Americans in the battlefield as well as on the streets back home. If Cherry denounced his government for pursuing a morally bankrupt foreign policy, if he urged black soldiers to fight for economic and social justice instead, or if he instructed African Americans in the United States to reject the war, Hanoi would claim its greatest propaganda victory. It would release him with great fanfare, broadcast his views on radio and television, and make him a hero in developing and socialist countries. If Martin Luther King, Jr., opposed the war, then why wouldn't Fred Cherry?

  But Cherry was a military officer who believed in his country and its war aims in Vietnam. Even in the face of torture, he would not repudiate America. Doing so would affirm the negative stereotypes, including lack of courage and patriotism, that had long tarnished African Americans in the armed services.

  "I know how some white Americans feel about blacks," he said years later. "If I do one little thing wrong, they're going to multiply that and you'll hear the same old thing: blacks aren't capable of doing this or that, they can't stand up under pressure, and they're not loyal to their country, which is the damnedest thing I've ever heard. Well, it wasn't going to happen on my watch. I was fighting for twenty-three million black folks. That was my battle."

  ***

  Halyburton's battle was more traditional but no less powerful: he was fighting to uphold the Code of Conduct for U.S. armed forces.

  The code itself was written by the Department of Defense in 1955 amid rising concerns, even hysteria, over the conduct of the American POWs in Korea. Studies described massive collaboration by American prisoners with the enemy, their failure to resist Communist propaganda, indoctrination, and even brainwashing. In short, the American fighting man, when captured, was soft—some scholars blamed domineering mothers—and the military had to move quickly to fortify its troops.

  These claims were at times exaggerated and often contemptible, destroying the reputations of so many servicemen who endured disease, hypothermia, starvation, and torture.
But during the McCarthy era, virtually any hint of weakness against communism escalated into a national crisis, particularly if centered on the military. Thus, the armed services organized programs to prepare their men for captivity in the next war, and standards of behavior were set forth in the Code of Conduct. All servicemen—and women—learned the code in the classroom, and its lessons were reinforced by posters on bulletin boards and office walls.

  Its most controversial statement centered on what information a captured serviceman could disclose to the enemy. According to the code, he is "bound to give only name, rank, service number, and date of birth." It was, to some scholars, a guideline for behavior, not an absolute dictum. But the Navy, to Halyburton's dismay, interpreted it literally.

  A year before he was shot down, Halyburton was sent to survival school, another by-product of the Korean experience. In a simulated war game, he was set loose in the woods, captured by the "enemy," placed in mock prisons, and even abused. He was shoved into a footlocker, forced to kneel on pencils (like a knife in the knees), slapped around, berated, and humiliated. It was all designed to break him down, to induce him to disclose any information besides the "big four" of the code. In one training scenario, Halyburton was told he had a chest wound that needed a blood transfusion.