Two Souls Indivisible Page 9

  In the military, he often had to overcome others' perception of inferiority, and his cause was not helped by the dominance of white Southerners in the armed services' leadership. Cherry was the first black cadet sent for basic training to Maiden, Missouri, whose drab air base sat amid cotton fields in the Missouri Boot-heel. His flight instructors, hired as civilian contractors, refused to teach him, forcing the commander to offer a promotion to any instructor who would.

  Cherry's peers didn't treat him any better. When his flight class walked across the tarmac, the four white students walked in one line and Cherry walked by himself. But it didn't bother the new recruit; he was accustomed to segregation and only cared about being a combat pilot, not making friends. Besides, his piloting skills won the others' respect: after he was the first member of his class to fly solo, the other students walked with him.

  Later, discrimination robbed him of one of the most exciting assignments of the Cold War.

  In 1955 Cherry was stationed on Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana, where he was one of several pilots recruited by the CIA for a highly classified mission: flying the U-2, a high-altitude spy plane with sophisticated avionics and reconnaissance equipment, over the Soviet Union to photograph its military capacity.

  Cherry needed little convincing to participate in something bold, secretive, and dangerous.* The highest he had ever flown was fifty-four thousand feet, whereas the U-2 would ascend to ninety thousand feet. With several other pilots in his squadron, he was cleared for the program and awaited orders to leave the base. One day, however, he realized something had gone wrong when the other pilots were packing up without him. He called his CIA contact, who promised to find out what was going on.

  Calling back, he gave Cherry the news. "I'm sorry, but your folder has been removed from the rest," he said. "We can't keep you in the program." The CIA had nothing to do with his removal, the official said, but an Air Force lieutenant colonel, who had to approve the transfer, had pulled Cherry's folder.

  He didn't mention race, but he didn't have to—it was understood. Each personnel file includes a mug shot, so the lieutenant colonel, believing that a black officer was not fit for such a sensitive position, squashed the transfer. There was nothing Cherry could do, no one to hear his appeal. His own commander had not even been briefed on the program. So his career as a spy pilot ended before it began, though he occasionally wondered what the earth looked like from ninety thousand feet.

  Cherry had another reason to distrust Halyburton. Porter was with the Navy.

  His bias against the Navy was partly based on the rivalry between the Navy and the Air Force. From the time of the War of Independence, the Navy considered itself the service of history and tradition and viewed the Air Force, established in 1947 as an offshoot of the Army, as high-tech parvenus. According to the Navy, its airmen possessed superior skills to take off and land on a ship, but they also had many other duties onboard (like tracking ordnance) while living in cramped quarters. Air Force pilots could focus exclusively on flying and lived on roomy bases. While limited ship space forced the Navy fliers to economize on equipment and material, the Air Force could splurge on extra radios and other accessories. Halyburton was surprised to learn that Air Force pilots could jettison empty external fuel tanks for greater mobility; Navy pilots, lacking extra tanks, could not. In their dark blue with gold trim, the Navy airmen viewed Air Force apparel—a lighter blue with gray trim—as utilitarian and called the pilots "bus drivers."

  The Air Force was no less derisive of the Navy, which it considered stodgy and aristocratic. As the newest military branch, the Air Force was devoted exclusively to air power, and it believed it operated on the technological frontier. It attracted large numbers of educated engineers, scientists, and mathematicians, who made it the military's most progressive service. Not surprisingly, the Air Force integrated more rapidly than any other branch. The Navy was the slowest.

  Fred Cherry knew about the Navy's dismal record in race relations firsthand, and he wanted to tell Halyburton about his experience. In 1949, he explained, he attended Virginia Union College, one year after President Harry Truman had signed the executive order desegregating the military. "In my second year at school," he said, "I heard that if you qualified in all respects, you could go from civilian life straight into aviation cadet training. So I went to see this Navy recruiter in Portsmouth. I didn't know the Navy didn't have any black aviators. The recruiter told me to fill out this application for enlisted service. I said, 'No. I want to be a pilot.' Then he told me that the individual I would have to talk to was not in the office, and I could stop in some other day."

  He went back three more times, he told Halyburton, and each time was told the commander was out. The fourth time, Cherry said, "I saw this door creeping closed. I knew he was there and had been there every time before. I just sort of exploded. I kicked the door open. He thought I was coming across the desk. I said a few choice words to him. They were rather obscene. Then I told him I didn't want any part of his Navy."

  From that day on, Cherry believed the Navy was "a bastion of racism," though he hadn't met another Navy man until Halyburton walked into his cell. Now he began to revise his judgment and recognize that progress had been made. Halyburton was embarrassed and tried to apologize for the Navy. "I can't believe the recruiter would treat you that way," he said. He knew that Cherry still resented his service but was glad he didn't bear that grudge against him.

  Common ground was easy to find. Baseball, for example. The prisoners weren't fans of the major leagues, but each had played as a kid, Cherry in a cow pasture and Halyburton on a sandlot. Each knew the social order of the South and the very different circumstances of his upbringing. But baseball was safe, and their stories—of running, catching, and hitting a ball in the sunshine of their youth—were easy to embrace. They could also share war stories, tales that offered action and suspense while not forcing either man to disclose much of himself personally. But Cherry was feeling more comfortable with his cellmate, so when he described a daring airborne rescue effort, he ended the story with a painful twist.

  In the waning days of the Korean War, Cherry and another pilot, both flying F-84Gs, were attempting to land on a base at Teague, but the other jet's nose gear didn't lock. "I called the tower and pulled up beside him," Cherry told Halyburton. "They cleared the traffic pattern but he was getting low on fuel. He tried his emergency gear lock, but that didn't work. The gear was still loose, so I told him to give me a ten-degree bank and hold steady. I was going to see if I could knock it down, and he said, 'Okay.'"

  Cherry acknowledged that the idea was risky—others might call it outrageous. He wanted to use his wing tip to nudge the landing gear into a locked position, but beneath the wing of each plane were the fuel tanks. The quirky angle would also force Cherry to fly "uncoordinated"—in effect, without the usual navigational tools that ensured precise flying.

  Nonetheless, at three thousand feet the impaired F-84G went into a slight bank, and Cherry slid right beneath him, steadied his aircraft, and kissed the landing gear locked. "It was dangerous," Cherry said, "because if his fuel tank bumped my plane, it would rupture and catch fire. If I touched him anyplace other than where 1 touched him, it would have been disastrous."

  Halyburton asked where he'd learned such a move.

  "I'd never heard of anyone doing that before," Cherry said, "but I felt if he could hold the aircraft steady, I could do it."

  That wasn't the end of the story. Back on the base, Cherry went to the officers' club for a drink, eager to share his daring exploit. But he was never given a chance. Instead, he sat alone while a group of white officers fraternized among themselves. "They never said a thing," Cherry said.

  But it was also the mindset of the military; it had been integrated in 1948 but not purged of its entrenched bigotry. While blacks had fought with distinction in American wars since the Revolution, they had often been ignored in official accounts or simply denigrated
as unfit. In an influential 1925 report, the Army War College drew on racist anthropological studies to determine that blacks, with their "smaller cranium, lighter brain, [and] cowardly and immoral character," were lower on the evolutionary scale than whites, and they should be relegated to "special status" in the Army.

  Integrated troops posed a threat by leaving open the possibility that a black officer would command white enlisted men. Even in the face of urgent manpower needs during World War II, maintaining the racial hierarchy was imperative—a point made by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson in his private diary: "Leadership is not embedded in the Negro race ... Colored troops do very well under white officers but every time we try to lift them a little beyond what they can do, disaster and confusion follow." President Truman's decision to integrate the armed services defied the country's military leaders, including George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower, who had opposed such a move after World War II.

  Cherry's slight at the officers' club reminded him of his second-class status. While he received glowing press coverage for his heroics, the incident was a sad postscript that he had carried with him for many years but had told to few people. In fact, he rarely volunteered stories about any of the discrimination he experienced, believing that complaints were useless and preferring the stoicism urged by his parents.

  But he saw something different in Halyburton—a white man who would understand. Halyburton's relative youth seemed to give him an open-mindedness and sensitivity that he had not often seen in white Southerners. He appeared to know the difference between right and wrong. "He was more genuine," Cherry recalled.

  Of course, in an earlier time Halyburton could have been one of the white officers who ignored Cherry, but he was now forced to reconsider his racial assumptions. He had been impressed by Cherry's travels—Japan, Thailand, Germany—and by his breadth of experience and piloting skills, his rescue of the F-84G being the most conspicuous example. Fred Cherry was unlike any black man he ever knew or heard of, yet his snub at the officers' club sent a powerful message: Cherry was in the military, but that didn't mean the military was truly integrated.

  Their common problems drew them closer. To begin with, they were cold. While the temperature rarely dropped below freezing, the high humidity created a penetrating chill. Cherry and Halyburton each had one thin blanket, which was too short to cover them while sleeping unless they lay in a fetal position. They discussed this problem at length, analyzing the exact position that would maximize the blanket's coverage of the body. Compounding the problem was the concrete floor, which intensified the cold against their bare feet. They noticed that other prisoners were wearing shower shoes, and they wondered why they didn't have any. Their anger at the enemy spilled over into envy of the other POWs—and it was one more issue that linked them.

  Their contempt for the Vietnamese sometimes fueled resistance. When a guard entered the cell, for example, he required them to show their subservience by standing and bowing their heads. One snarky guard was nicknamed "McGoo"; his squinty eyes evoked the visually challenged cartoon character. While most guards accepted a slight nod of the head, McGoo made it clear that that was not enough.

  "Bow!" he yelled.

  The Americans stood but didn't bow.

  "Bow!" he repeated.

  They nodded slightly, so McGoo walked over and slapped the heads of both men.

  "Bow!" he said.

  Their heads bobbed, but they would not bow.

  There were more commands and more slaps, but the prisoners never complied, and the frustrated McGoo eventually left. Individually, Cherry and Halyburton had balked before, but together they pushed their resistance further.

  To demoralize the POWs, the prison officials installed the same kind of loudspeakers in their cells that the government used to disseminate propaganda in the countryside. There, multikilowatt boxes were set up in hamlets that didn't even have water or sewage—indoctrination took precedence. Inside the prison cells, the green boxes typically delivered two broadcasts a day from the "Voice of Vietnam," one intended for a general English-speaking audience and one for the GIs in the South. For two hours a day, the audio barrage was made worse by its blaring volume, what one POW described as "two decibels above the threshold of pain." The content included tributes to Ho Chi Minh on his birthday and long tutorials on Vietnam's history, including one frequent segment on its victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu. Some broadcasts were designed to mock the Americans. At the Zoo, one played a violin rendition of "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," a reminder of the inmates' fiery ejections.

  Halyburton and Cherry tried to glean some facts from the distortions. The broadcasts often specified how many U.S. aircraft had been shot down, but the two Americans, using information from other prisoners, estimated that the true number was probably one-tenth of the announced figure. The men laughed at some of the more outlandish statements and derided the mispronunciations—the city of Tucson, Arizona, for example, was pronounced "Tuck Sun."

  But other news was more difficult to discount. Finding the names in Stars and Stripes, an announcer would recite a list of American casualties, described as "comrades who gave their lives in a needless, illegal war," with a violin dirge in the background. Once, the announcer named a Marine drill sergeant who had instructed Halyburton as an air cadet in Pensacola, Florida. The news of his death, exploited by the enemy, was disturbing, but over the years Halyburton and Cherry were even more enraged by the broadcast of antiwar statements from Joan Baez, Stokely Carmichael, and Ramsey Clark.

  One time, Halyburton heard a recording of US. Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska, who said that Americans who had been killed in Vietnam "have not died for their country ... but have been mistakenly sacrificed as part of an inherited folly." Like virtually all of the prisoners, Halyburton despised the protesters—the actors, the college students, the hippies—but he held the politicians in particular contempt. He believed they provided comfort to the enemy, weakened America's will to win the war, and prolonged their imprisonment.

  The Vietnamese reveled in these taped denunciations, which provided the very propaganda that the POWs resisted under mistreatment or torture. Once, Cherry was in leg stocks, tied to a bed, when he heard Jane Fonda accuse the POWs of cowardice for bombing children at night. Outraged, he "tried to tear his irons from the wall."

  In the early days of December, the cold remained their worst problem, but their hunger was also acute. Food was precious, and each man's response to the meager offerings became an important—though unspoken—subplot in their relationship.

  Twice a day, guards left bowls of food, usually soup, greens, and bread, outside their door. Halyburton would bring them in and serve Cherry, who would devour his meal with his one good arm. One day Halyburton noticed that one bowl had considerably more food than the other. Though Cherry was more emaciated, Halyburton, also famished, took the larger serving for himself. But when they finished eating, he felt terrible. He didn't say anything but vowed that from then on he would let Cherry select his own meal. Day after day, meal after meal, Halyburton brought in the two bowls and placed them before Cherry. Sometimes Cherry took the larger portion; other times, the smaller. Halyburton concluded that only he was focused on who got more food, that such judgments were irrelevant to his cellmate. He admired Cherry's apparent indifference to such petty concerns.

  Cherry, in fact, found Halyburton's handling of the food admirable. He was mindful of the portions but did not want to take more than he deserved. What was more, he appreciated that Halyburton gave him first choice, and he also noticed that Halyburton would not eat until he had finished, just in case he needed more food. On several occasions, the Vietnamese, trying to energize Cherry, left piles of sugar, which could be spread on bread and were considered a delicacy. Halyburton could have taken them for himself, but he never did.

  While Halyburton was directly contributing to Cherry's physical well-being, Cherry was having his own effect on Halyburton. Until they met, Halyburton had
been interested only in how he was going to survive. As a junior officer, he was low in the chain of command, so he knew he would not be a central figure in the prisoners' resistance. He felt sorry for himself, but Cherry's example began to shake him from his self-pity. Cherry was in far worse shape than he—his shoulder was in severe pain—yet he never complained. Halyburton could not lament his own plight when his roommate seemed to bear his own suffering with so much pride and determination.

  Cherry's example prodded Halyburton to try to do more for the Americans' collective resistance. Using the tap code, he asked Knutson the names of all the prisoners he knew so that he could memorize them. He wanted to reach other POWs as well, ask them who they knew had been captured, and keep a running tally in his head. (Other Americans were doing the same thing.) This gave Halyburton a chance to use his mind and stem the boredom, but it was also critical to ensure that, once freed, no one was left behind. Thus, Halyburton committed himself to memorizing every name, an assignment that became increasingly difficult as the years passed and the numbers swelled. (In December 1965 fewer than sixty-five Americans had been captured in the North.)

  Halyburton had already met a handful of prisoners at Heartbreak, and now Knutson tapped him other names, sorting them by date of shootdown. "Everett Alvarez ... Robert Shumaker ... Carlyle Harris..." Halyburton later learned the names alphabetically, then by rank and service, and even by cell. He was no longer in his F-4, but he had rejoined the war effort.

  One thing that Cherry and Halyburton shared—indeed, a central part of their time together—was their love of cigarettes. Before they were captured, Halyburton smoked a pack of Winstons a day while Cherry plowed through three packs of Camels. In prison, they were limited to three cigarettes a day, distributed one at a time. It was, according to Halyburton, "the one big event of the day—or actually, three events."