Two Souls Indivisible Read online

  On the evening of November 16, a guard entered his cell and rotated his wrists—the signal to roll up your belongings and get dressed. Cherry was blindfolded and put in a Jeep. He prayed that wherever he was going would be better than Heartbreak.

  He was taken a few miles southwest of Hanoi, near the village of Cu Loc, where a prison had opened two months earlier. It was the third prison used for the Americans, and as their numbers mounted, the North Vietnamese would ultimately incarcerate POWs in fifteen different camps, though some operated for less than a year.* The two main prisons, however, were Hoa Lo and Cu Loc, both of which held Americans until the end of the war.

  On the surface, the two sites could not have been more different. At Hoa Lo, one prisoner later said, "You could hear the screams of fifty years." But Cu Loc, apparently a former French film studio that still had yellowing posters, damaged reels, and abandoned auditoriums, evoked an art colony. If Hoa Lo was an entrenched hub of steel and cement, Cu Loc was the quirky suburban upstart, with ducks, chickens, and other animals roaming the grounds.

  But the interrogation, isolation, and oppression were the same. To transform Cu Loc into a prison, the Vietnamese erected brick walls in fourteen single-story buildings to create numerous cells. But the buildings were still in disrepair, their windows boarded up and their interiors filled with dirt, broken glass, insects, and rodents. Outside, separate toilet facilities were built. A wall was constructed around the perimeter of the camp, and sentry towers were installed.

  The POWs initially called the compound Camp America, and with farm animals about, designated buildings as the Barn, Chicken Coop, Pigsty, and Stable. Many of the louvered French doors had holes that allowed the guards to peer inside, but sometimes the livestock meandered by and gazed in, which gave rise to the prison's permanent name: the Zoo. As one inmate said, "It's the first kind of place where the animals come and look at the people."

  For two weeks Cherry lay alone in his cell, the only daylight or air filtered through cracks and gaps in the door and through a brick-sized air vent high on the wall. A single, naked, low-wattage light bulb hung from the ceiling and stayed on day and night.

  A small blue box with a radio speaker piped in an endless stream of propaganda as the pain from his shoulder and wrist spread through his torso. He ate little and felt too weak to move. The premonition he'd had at the Yokota Officers' Club was playing itself out. His captors had given him no reason for hope. But he had faced adversity his entire life, and he wasn't giving up. He was confident he would survive. He just didn't know how.

  5. The Independence

  On the morning of May 10, 1965, the USS Independence sounded its long, bellowing horn and shoved off from the gray coastline of Norfolk, Virginia. Its mission was to steam across the Atlantic Ocean, around South Africa, and through the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea, where it would assume duties with the U.S. Seventh Fleet in the Pacific. The attack carrier, to be gone seven months, received a patriotic farewell. Children waved American flags while a band played "Auld Lang Syne." Dignitaries toured the ship, wives and girlfriends said tearful good-byes, and Miss Norfolk, in a sleeveless white dress, white gloves, and white floral headband, smiled for photographers. The Norfolk Chamber of Commerce gave the captain a silver Goodwill Cup; the port city, proud of its naval tradition, also gave the Independence another memento—a bomb inscribed with white paint: GREETINGS FROM THE PEOPLE OF NORFOLK TO THE

  VIET CONG.

  The ship was eighty thousand tons of steel and metal, a gray, angle-decked war machine that hauled forty-five hundred men and eighty fighter jets. Such a vessel is known as "a city at sea," loaded not only with mechanics, engineers, and sailors to keep it running but also with doctors, dentists, postal clerks, printers, career counselors, legal assistants, and educators. The Independence even had a musical band composed of shipmates who had brought their instruments.

  The civic metaphor was fitting, but it hardly captured the delirious energy, the unremitting clamor, the sheer life-and-death drama of the enterprise. The jet names—the Phantom, the Intruder, the Vigilante, and the Skyhawk—conveyed the threat they posed to a distant enemy; but the planes themselves, loaded with fuel, cluster bombs, heat-seeking missiles, and 20-millimeter ammunition, could imperil their American handlers as well. A single miscue, particularly on takeoff or landing, could saturate the flight deck in a cataract of metal and flame.

  On takeoff, a jet taxis onto a catapult track as crewmen race about, signaling with their scarred hands, ducking under moving wings, and looking for cover. The fighter engine wails as a deck officer in a yellow shirt waves his right index finger over his head. The pilot salutes from the cockpit and the deck officer drops his hand. The aircraft screams down the catapult, red flames spewing from its afterburners and steam billowing from the track. It accelerates to more than 100 mph in 250 feet. Just as it reaches the edge of the ship, its nose tilts up, and the machine is flung toward the sky. A jet that fails to reach sufficient speed crashes into the ocean.

  The blast from takeoff can knock crewmen to the ground; anyone not working on the plane tucks his hands under his armpits to protect them from the heat. As the last jet takes off—planes can launch, day or night, every thirty seconds from four different catapults—crewmen turn around and find the first aircraft of an incoming mission. In seconds, it hits the deck and accelerates, trying to hook one of four "arrest wires" stretched across the ground. (Accelerating, though seemingly counterintuitive, gives the plane speed to take off again if it misses the cables.) Once hooked, the wire pulls taut and stops the jet; if it breaks, it snaps across the deck and can cut through a crewman like a weed-eater. And if the plane fails to stop after it engages the wire, without enough speed to become airborne, it will slam into a barricade or tumble helplessly into the ocean.

  The Independence suffered two violent accidents on its Pacific cruise. On July 20 a Vigilante jet, returning from a reconnaissance flight, broke its arrest wire, could not stop, and dribbled off the carrier ninety feet into the sea. Two aviators were killed. Later, a tank on a Phantom ruptured on takeoff, spraying the flight deck with four thousand pounds of fuel—which was then ignited by the plane's afterburner. Roaring flames devoured the next plane in line and spread into a compartment belowdeck. Sixteen men suffered burns or injuries; no one was killed. The Phantom flew safely to shore.

  If the flight deck represented organized tumult, then frenetic clatter buffeted the rest of the ship. Helicopters whirled above while squealing elevators lifted jets from their hangar bays to the deck. Carts drove bombs and missiles through the ship. Rock music blared in the cafeteria and bunkrooms, where men slept in three-decker cots, the gray nozzle of an air conditioner humming from above. Doors clanked. Pipes groaned. Chains crashed. Twenty feet beneath the water line lay a metallic jungle of valves and gauges that jeered and squeaked. Then there was the steam—the hissing vapor that whipped the planes down the catapults, cleaned the clothes and dishes, and powered the engines at 30 knots across the sea. At night, taps was broadcast throughout the ship.

  It was Navy Ensign Porter Alexander Halyburton's first cruise, and not one he had envisioned. He had thought his first trip might be to the Mediterranean, whose exotic ports—Naples, Barcelona, Beirut, Malta, Genoa—would have been romantic rendezvous for him and his wife, Marty (a nickname for Martha). But Halyburton volunteered for the Independence. He had been a Navy officer for only fifteen months and decided he should do as he'd been trained: fly in the back seat of a fighter jet as an RIO, a radar intercept officer, responsible for navigating flights and identifying targets.

  Halyburton was no warmonger. Known as Haly, he was interested in literature, poetry, and prayer as befit a gentleman warrior, giving him what one friend called "a rich inner life." Another friend thought it was easier to envision him covering a war as a journalist than fighting in one as an airman. In fact, Halyburton had no intention of making the Navy his career. Years earlier he had rejected a coveted appointment to t
he U.S. Naval Academy because he could not abide its rigid way of life. Instead, he attended Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina, his hometown, and in 1963 graduated with a degree in English.

  He considered becoming a journalist or, enjoying the camaraderie of academic life, perhaps working as a college fund-raiser. He thought he needed to go to graduate school, but uncertain about his career and pressed for money, he could not justify the cost of an advanced degree. The military was not so much an option as an inevitability. He assumed he would be drafted, for the United States, responding to Cold War tensions (the Berlin crisis, the Cuban missile crisis), foreign brushfires (Laos, Vietnam), and international commitments (NATO, South Korea, japan), desperately needed conscripts. Halyburton preempted his draft notice and volunteered, hoping to receive a better assignment as an officer.

  He had never thought about being an aviator until his senior year in college, when a former fraternity brother told him about his experience flying a McDonnell F-4 Phantom, an extremely fast (Mach 2), maneuverable aircraft with sophisticated electronics that enhanced its radar intercept and bombing capabilities. That sounded exciting to someone who grew up in a town that didn't even have an elevator. In the Navy, Halyburton could travel around the world on great ships, learn how to pilot high-tech aircraft, and avoid sleeping in a pup tent.

  Halyburton was also a product of the South, where Confederate generals were revered, the martial spirit was celebrated, and young men were taught that serving their country in combat was noble. As a boy, he watched the Davidson College ROTC band, color guard, and honor drill march through town. His mother told him about a cousin, a World War II Navy corpsman, who was killed during the invasion of Okinawa while caring for a wounded Marine and was rewarded with a Congressional Medal of Honor. That impressed young Porter.

  His naval flight training did not go exactly as planned. He wanted to be a pilot, but he failed an eye exam because his eyes were tired from his college finals. He passed the test on a second try, but by the time the paperwork cleared, he had begun training as a flight officer and saw no reason to retrain as a pilot. An RIO used geometric guidelines to map out where his pilot dropped bombs and fired missiles, a kind of mathematics puzzle that Halyburton enjoyed. He also assumed his military career would be short. In February 1964 he was commissioned as an officer, receiving his shoulder boards with one gold stripe. When he left Norfolk in May 1965, he was obligated to serve twenty-six more months—ample time to return and take a Mediterranean cruise. He knew that many seamen back home feared the Vietnam War would be over before they had an opportunity to fight. For now, he was grateful to get at least one chance at combat.

  Halyburton was awestruck by the Independence, where he was part of the VF 84 Squadron (the V stood for "fixed wing"; the F for "fighter"). The ship hauled more people than the population of Davidson and seemed to offer more diversions, sponsoring boxing matches, basketball games, skeet shooting, and variety shows. While Davidson's movie theater had burned down in the 1950s, the Independence showed a different film almost every night. Halyburton, who as the designated "popcorn officer" ensured that munchies were available, wrote to Marty about The Sound of Music and West Side Story, neglecting to mention the more popular pornographic flicks.

  At twenty-four, Halyburton was one of the youngest officers onboard, and while he was proud to be part of a complex, powerful enterprise, he had quibbles with life at sea. The odor of jet fuel seemed always to permeate his clothes and hair, the omnipresent steam created an acrid smell, and the food was lousy. As he told Marty on tape, "The kitchen ran out of eggs, so breakfast doesn't hold much appeal to me. Lunches have been pretty bad, and dinners have been edible but nothing tremendous." Alcohol was forbidden, but Halyburton, like most officers, kept a fifth of gin and a fifth of Scotch in his footlocker.

  He found refuge, if not exactly quiet, in his relatively spacious stateroom, where he lived with a lieutenant. (Most junior officers were quartered in crowded, six-person bunkrooms, but for some reason he was given better accommodations.) He kept a diary ("Feel the urge & need to write again. Imagine a poet-artist-RIO"), worked on some of his poetry, and read Ayn Rand and Wind from the Carolinas, a historical adventure novel. He recited inspirational passages from a small black vinyl book that his mother had given him. The typewritten letters did not always strike the narrow page evenly, but the slants and smudges brought a human touch to lofty truths.

  Tho all seems chaos now and

  Night prevails

  Upon earth's wreck-strewn

  Shores and blighted plains

  Yet always after winter's

  Cruel gales

  Comes April with her

  Iridescent rains...

  These things shall pass, the

  Wounding things of time,

  And comfort to sustain is

  Found in prayer.

  Mankind is blest by lives

  Pure and sublime,

  The far reflection of the

  Love we bear.

  The hardest part of the cruise was the long separation from home. His daughter, Dabney, was born four weeks before he left, and Porter had seen her for only five days. Onboard, he heard plenty of stories about troubled marriages. The military life, with constant uprooting, long absences, and mediocre pay, was brutal on families, and Halyburton did not want to see his undermined.

  He and Marty had met in college and had been married for only a year and a half. The pair cut a striking figure on the dance floor: Porter, with long, powerful strides, twirling his petite bride; Marty, her short blond hair flipped over the top of her head, smiling and laughing. On their first anniversary, Porter gave her a bottle of Estee Lauder perfume; she gave him an apron with his name on it. He read her passages from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." She called him "Julius," because when he walked out of the shower, his hair flopped over his forehead like Julius Caesar's.

  She wasn't keen about his joining the Navy and flying jet fighters; surely there were safer ways to make a living. But she knew she couldn't talk him out of it and never really tried. Her perspective changed when Porter was in flight training in Key West and the spouses were allowed to visit a carrier. For the first time, Marty heard the roar of the engines and saw how the planes were "shot out of the catapult like a cannon." She was surrounded by the exhaust, the flames, the smoke; the din was constant and the crewmen ran about everywhere. She felt the quaking of the deck when the jets landed, and she saw the arrest wires stopping these great machines on a dime. She realized the entire operation was connected, communal—it was the most exciting thing she'd ever seen in her life. When they got home, she told Porter, "Now I understand why you want to do this."

  6. "No Chutes Observed"

  Halyburton considered himself fortunate in one respect. For most of his missions, he flew with Lieutenant Commander Stanley Olmstead, whose good looks, humble roots, and aeronautical savvy seemed lifted from a military recruitment catalogue. He was six-feet-one, with curly blond hair, blue eyes, and an easy smile. He was raised on a farm in Marshall, Oklahoma, and in the 1950s entered the Navy, where he excelled as a guided missile pilot and a test pilot and was also invited to join the Navy's elite Blue Angels. His dream, however, was to become an astronaut, which was not unrealistic, for many of the astronauts had been military test pilots. Vietnam would be his first time in combat, but he was eager to continue his education, enter the Apollo program, and fly to the moon.

  Halyburton was initially wary of the thirty-one-year-old officer. Previously, Olmstead had piloted a single-seat F-8, but now he had to fly with Halyburton, a junior navigation officer—literally a backseat driver. Many lieutenant commanders would resent such an arrangement. A picture of the two men, wearing flight suits on the carrier's deck, reveals the contrast between them: Halyburton, his head tilted, his weight back, his arms pressed against his stomach, appears reticent, tentative; Olmstead, his chin out, his hands on his waist, exudes confidence and maturity.

  Nevert
heless, the pair worked well together. Olmstead sought advice from Halyburton, relied on his judgment, and made him feel like part of a team. Soon a friendship developed. For each flight, when one of them botched a radio transmission, he owed his partner a beer. They kept a running tally; Porter almost always owed Stan a drink or two.

  The Independence was initially based off the coast of South Vietnam, and on July 1, 1965, Halyburton boarded the back seat of his F-4 Phantom for his first combat mission. Their task was to support the ground troops against the Communist insurgents, and Olmstead fired high-velocity Zuni rockets at the Viet Cong, destroying eleven huts. They had two more missions the following day. Within a week, the ship steamed north to launch flights over North Vietnam, and Halyburton flew almost daily for five and a half weeks. At first he found the bombing runs exciting. Many were at night, requiring them to use flares before launching the explosives. They attacked bridges, trucks, and boats, dropped napalm, fired sidewinder missiles, and took reconnaissance photographs. Halyburton liked the action, a pace he maintained on-board as the assistant weapons officer, which required him to be ondeck when ordnance was loaded. His unit packed more than a million pounds of bombs, missiles, and ammunition during his time at sea.

  In August he had a two-week break in Japan. Marty, home with the baby, couldn't visit, and the respite only heightened Porter's homesickness. "I confess I broke down and cried a little bit the other night," he told her on tape. "I couldn't stand being in a beautiful place like this without you." He then returned to the flight line, and by the end of the month he was promoted from ensign to lieutenant j.g.; he would soon receive his first air medal. But by then doubts about the operation had set in. Mirroring Cherry's sentiments, he was frustrated by the petty targets, using million-dollar aircraft to drop bombs on the Viet Cong's water buffalo.