Two Souls Indivisible Read online

  Had Cherry accepted these sentiments, the racial divide between him and Halyburton would have been insurmountable. But Cherry was less concerned about his government than about this stranger in his cell. On their first full day, Halyburton wasn't acting like a racist or a French spy. His communication through the wall with other Americans perplexed him—how could a spy do that?—but Cherry still didn't believe that he was a Navy lieutenant.

  His skepticism lessened when Halyburton talked about the most obvious thing they had in common: they had both been shot down over North Vietnam. As it happened, the shootdowns occurred five days apart in roughly the same area, about forty miles north or northeast of Hanoi. "Maybe the same gunner got both of us?" Halyburton said, causing Cherry to chuckle. Each man described his encounters with the peasants and militiamen in the countryside, and the similarity of their experiences reassured both men about the identity of the other.

  Their suspicions were further dampened when they began naming the other American captives they knew. Halyburton shared these names with Knutson, who in turn named the captives he knew. This process confirmed a basic military tenet: find out who's been injured or captured so you leave no man behind. When the discussion drifted away from military matters, Halyburton mentioned several counties in his home state of North Carolina—all familiar names to Cherry, whose father had been born in North Carolina and who grew up in Virginia.

  Their forced intimacy evolved into an atmosphere of tolerance. They shared a rusty wastebucket, for example. When one was using it, the other stood in the opposite corner, his eyes averted. At least Halyburton's dysentery soon passed, making a terrible experience a bit less awful.

  Their conversation became more relaxed, and Halyburton made his first offer of assistance.

  "When did they let you bathe, wash up?" he asked.

  "Bathed! I haven't bathed since I've been in this camp."

  "Well, you should go every three or four days. I'll ask the guard."

  In the early days, Halyburton taught Cherry the tap code, a means of communication that integrated him into the society of captives while also eliminating any distrust between the two men. Halyburton had discovered the code in Heartbreak. Visiting the washroom, he saw that someone had inscribed on the wall a matrix with five rows across and five rows down, a different letter in each position, and realized it was a tap code. Most of the inmates at Heartbreak ignored it, for they could usually talk to one another, but Halyburton worried that the time would come when that wasn't possible. He wrote the matrix on the liner of a cigarette pack and became one of its most avid practitioners. Learning the code gave him a chance to exercise his mind, and it was an act of defiance against his captors—in his words, "part of the tradecraft of being a prisoner."

  To use the code, a person identified a letter by tapping out two numbers, the first giving the horizontal row number, the second, the vertical column number. A favorite message was 2–2 (G); 1–2 (B); and 4–5 (U)—GBU, an abbreviation for God Bless You, which became the universal signoff among the Americans.

  The matrix had been carved into the wall by Air Force Captain Carlyle Harris, who understood that the Americans could organize and resist only if they could communicate. When he was in survival training, an instructor had showed him the code during a coffee break, and this casual reference proved to be the lifeblood of the POWs in Vietnam. Whenever a newcomer arrived, the other prisoners' first responsibility was to teach him the code. Sometimes the Morse Code was used to explain it. Sometimes notes were slipped into rice bowls or wastebuckets. An American on the floor in one of Hoa Lo's torture rooms could find the matrix carved underneath a table with the words: "All prisoners learn this code."

  Tapping became so routine, so pervasive, that many of the POWs could click as fast as they could think. Some spent years tapping to each other without ever seeing their partner; others developed playful shortcuts. Before two POWs went to sleep, one would tap "GN" (goodnight) and the other, "ST" (sleep tight), which would prompt the first person to respond "DLTBBB" (don't let the bedbugs bite). With only twenty-five slots, the matrix had no "k," forcing tappers to substitute "c." Thus, a popular transmission was "Joan Baez succs," sent after the Vietnamese played a tape of the American antiwar activist through the cells' loudspeakers.

  The code was later adapted to different settings. A POW walking through a courtyard could use hand gestures like a third base coach to spell out words—scratching his head meant row one; touching his shoulder, column three—and other prisoners could watch from their cells. What the enemy may have thought was a nervous tic was actually a communication channel and a source of unity among the Americans.

  To teach Cherry the code, Halyburton used cigarette ash to draw the matrix on toilet paper. By now he believed that Cherry was indeed an Air Force pilot and recognized that he had to learn the code. But Cherry saw a much deeper significance in his tutorial. Having watched and listened to Halyburton's "conversations" with Knutson, he knew they used the code to transfer classified information, so Halyburton would teach it to him only if he trusted him explicitly. Moreover, Cherry had not spoken to any Americans since his capture, so learning the code was like a child's learning to talk—haltingly, he got his voice.

  He made mistakes while practicing, confusing the horizontal numbers with the vertical.

  "What the hell is that?" Halyburton asked in mock anger after Cherry tapped a message.

  "That's how you taught me," Cherry said.

  "Well, you learned it outta phase." He could needle Cherry about the error without offending him.

  Cherry could now be assimilated into the rest of the prison and take an active part in resisting the enemy. In his eyes, Halyburton's efforts were the act of a patriot. No spy would lend that type of assistance.

  Even in a two-person cell, a chain of command was essential.

  In every military organization, a command structure ensures accountability and discipline: you follow your senior officer or you're gone. In a POW camp, the structure provides a cohesive front against the enemy and reassures the prisoner of his military status. The Code of Conduct specifies that a POW must adhere to senior authority, which increases the chance of survival for himself and his cohorts.

  In Vietnam, the POWs decided one chain of command should exist for all the services, not separate lines for each branch. Seniority was determined by rank at the time of shootdown, though promotions while in captivity were also considered. Sometimes the Vietnamese tried to undermine the command structure by segregating the senior officers or identifying a junior officer as "room responsible," but prisoners found other ways to communicate to preserve the chain. As long as communication was possible, each cell, each cell block, and each prison had an inviolable chain of command.

  Once Halyburton accepted that Cherry was a major, that made him the cell's junior officer by two ranks. He privately noted the oddness of that arrangement, but Cherry's accommodating style—he didn't boss or bully or even give orders—eliminated any real concern. Cherry led by example and provided guidance instead. During a joint interrogation at Christmastime, for example, the Vietnamese offered the men candy and extra cigarettes. Halyburton looked at Cherry, who nodded, and Halyburton knew he could accept. It was a small gesture, perhaps imperceptible to the enemy, but still a significant departure from Halyburton's past.

  Halyburton grew up in Davidson, North Carolina, a small college town where front doors were never locked and a peeping Tom signaled a virtual crime wave. Only twenty miles from Charlotte—the lousy roads made it a long twenty miles—Davidson considered its isolation part of its charm. It took snobbish pride in being an intellectual redoubt in the Carolina Piedmont, a hamlet of inquiry amid large oak trees, blooming azaleas, and crickets. Poetry readings, foreign films, international musicians, and renowned ministers were all part of campus life, and during Porter's teenage years, Robert Frost, Ogden Nash, Carl Sandburg, Isaac Stern, Louis Armstrong, and Dorothy Thompson passed through town.


  The influence of the college probably made Davidson more racially tolerant than most of North Carolina, but it still resisted desegregation and civil rights. To Porter, overt signs of racism abounded. His friends called Brazilian nuts "nigger toes," and adults used racial epithets. He saw a merchant use a cigarette to burn a black youth he suspected of mischief. On Halloween, he and his friends were allowed to visit only those houses owned by whites. The black barber would cut the hair only of white patrons; his customers would have gone elsewhere if he had used his scissors on the head of a black man. In 1955, when Porter was fourteen, the town newspaper ran a front-page editorial outlining its opposition to integration, citing the Negroes' alleged stunted intellectual development, their propensity for crime, and their loose morals. "Many white persons believe that morals among their own race are lax enough without exposing their children to an even more primitive view of sex habits," the Gazette said.

  While such views may have reflected the attitudes of many Davidsonians, they were not held by Porter's family, whose decency and decorum produced a different kind of racism—less hateful but in some ways more insidious.

  Porter lived with his mother and grandparents. His parents had divorced when he was very young, and he neither saw nor spoke to his father. His principal role model (and his namesake) was his grandfather William Porter, a short, stout figure whose progressive ideas sometimes caused him trouble. In 1921 Davidson College hired him as a biology professor, but after he taught evolution, he was reassigned to the geology department. Passionate about self-improvement, he read the Bible in Urdu, worked complicated crossword puzzles called anacrostics, and watched television without the sound. "If I ever lose my hearing," he explained, "I'll be able to read lips."

  William Porter employed a black domestic for many years and treated her kindly, paying for her and her sister to attend beauty and nursing school. Each Christmas their elderly father would come to the house for his gift; one year when he came to the back porch, Porter said, "You can come to the front door and get it." He would never have felt obliged to give school funds or a holiday gift to poor whites, who, he believed, could earn their money through hard work. Blacks were different. They needed help, and it was the responsibility of good whites to provide it.

  To young Porter, his grandfather, as well as the entire community, reinforced the idea that blacks were limited. Whites held jobs that required creativity and intelligence—professors, writers, doctors. Blacks worked as janitors, postal clerks, cooks, garbage collectors, and yardmen. Their labor was indispensable to the functioning of any town, so they should be treated respectfully—but not equally. In his own house, blacks could enter through the front door, but they were not allowed to use the same bathrooms.

  Halyburton, through his segregated high school, college, and military training, paid little attention to the civil rights movement or to its increasingly strident protests. The marches, the sit-ins, the freedom rides: they happened in the South but were not of his world. In his poems and other writing, Halyburton showed his sensitivity to many things—his friends, his family, the seasons, the environment, his own emotions. But on race, he was comfortable with the status quo. His attitudes were reaffirmed on the Independence, where white officers flew magnificent jets while enlisted blacks washed clothes, fixed meals, and tightened screws. Halyburton did not endorse the violent bigotry of cross burning and bludgeoning but embraced the soft prejudice of paternalism. He was proud of what he considered his grandfather's racial beneficence, yet ignorant of his own condescension.

  Until Halyburton met Fred Cherry, he had never deferred to the judgment of a black man. Even more unusual was his handling of all the domestic chores.

  Because he could use both hands, he could help Cherry as an orderly would help a patient. The guards had given them a whiskbroom, so each day Halyburton swept the floor. He picked up the bowls of food left outside the door. He emptied their wastebucket. He hung up Cherry's mosquito net at night and lit his cigarettes. The men were permitted to shave once a week, using cold water and old blades, but Halyburton began to demand from the turnkey that Cherry be allowed to shower.

  Halyburton was mindful of their reversed roles—a white man doing chores for a black man—but he didn't care. The tasks gave him something to do and relieved the boredom. His efforts, however, made a deeper impression on Cherry, whose own experience had not anticipated a living arrangement with Halyburton.

  Born in 1928, Fred Cherry was raised on a small farm outside Suffolk, Virginia, a region known for a massive swamp that covered 400,000 acres across the coastal plain of Virginia and North Carolina. It was known as the Great Dismal, a name that evoked the harsh conditions of the region's black families and the sense that they were at the mercy of forces beyond their control: segregation, disenfranchisement, unemployment, poverty, disease. Most black men had to rely on their backs to squeak out a living. They spent their days planting, weeding, and picking corn, potatoes, or cotton. In 1930 only nineteen percent of rural black families in the Lower Tidewater owned their own land; the rest were tenants or laborers. Those who didn't farm worked in peanut factories, iron foundries, lumber mills, or a naval shipyard. Few if any went to college, and many did not finish high school because classes overlapped the harvest season.

  The youngest of eight children, Fred was a small, wiry boy whose penchant for jumping, running, and scurrying about led others to say he had a lot of pep—so they called him Pepper. Like many rural blacks in the South, the Cherrys adhered to the philosophy of Booker T. Washington, the former Virginia slave whose response to white supremacy had been interracial cooperation, the encouragement of thrift and business among blacks, and the acquisition of land. In 1881 Washington founded the Tuskegee Institute, its mission to train the "head, heart, and hand" of students who would then elevate the race culturally, socially, and economically. Progress would come not from dissent or confrontation but from self-improvement and accommodation. There were few alternatives. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the impoverished, agrarian South, with its history of black servitude and subjugation, was no arena in which to demand meaningful civil rights. The status quo would not survive; but long after the civil rights movement had roiled the South, the ethos of that earlier milieu—achievement through hard work, compromise, and accommodation—would continue to define Fred Cherry.

  His mother, Leolia, rarely talked about race, but she did warn him about one of the great taboos of the South. "If you ever say the wrong thing to a white girl," she said, "you're dead." Fred had plenty of reminders of "blacks' place" in society. White children rode buses to school; Fred and his friends walked two and a half miles to theirs. Fred lived near a white family, the Gregorys, and whenever his mother sent him to borrow sugar or butter, she reminded him to address the adults by their last names preceded by "Mister" or "Miss." But Fred noticed that the Gregory children called his parents "Leolia" and "john."

  Other examples of racism were not so subtle. Fred was once riding his bicycle with his older brother James along a two-lane country road. A car with two white teenagers pulled alongside; one reached out and knocked James on the back of the head, spilling him to the ground. The teens drove away, laughing.

  Both James and Fred were furious, but their mother urged them to forget the incident. "James is all right," she said. "He's not hurt, so don't worry about it. You don't know who it was, so you can't mention it to their parents." Fred wasn't happy about it, but he realized his mother was probably correct—blind vengeance would be counterproductive. He also learned something else: to succeed in a white world, he would have to be a little bit tougher than everyone else, maybe a lot tougher. He remembered something his father had always told him: "Some things you can change and some things you just got to put up with. It's up to you to figure out which is which."

  Racism didn't change after Fred became an Air Force officer. By leaving his insular black farming community, he encountered a more overt bigotry.

  After ser
ving in the Korean War, Cherry returned to the United States and, assigned to a new base, drove his family across the country. Though he often wore his well-pressed uniform off the base—dress blues or khakis, a silver bar on his collar—restaurants and motels routinely denied him service. But he never complained. And when traveling with white companions, he would decline their invitations to diners that he knew did not accept blacks, for he did not want to make a scene. He knew that confrontation of any kind could jeopardize him.

  Housing was another problem. In 1957, when he was assigned to the Dover Air Base in Dover, Delaware, the town's black residential section had no vacancies, so his wife, Shirley, and their two sons initially lived with his family in Suffolk, Virginia. Cherry lived on the base until a "colored apartment" became available. Dover's segregation was even more unseemly in its public hospital, where Shirley gave birth to their first daughter, Debbie. The segregated wing and nursery were anticipated. Not expected was the unwillingness of the white nurses to bathe or change the baby; they just gave her to Shirley wet or dirty. Shirley complained to Fred, who demanded that his child be treated properly. When he returned the next day and saw that the neglect had continued, he finally lost his temper, cursing the nurses and telling his wife, "We're leaving!" He grabbed the baby, and as the three of them headed for the door, a nurse yelled, "You have to check her out." Fred shouted back, "The hell with you—we're gone!"