Two Souls Indivisible (28 page)

It didn't matter that Marty considered herself a conservative and that she didn't vote for Carter. She considered him a caring man who wasn't one of "the good ol' boys." When he was elected president in 1976, his press secretary, Jody Powell, offered her a job in the White House. She would have taken it, but by then Porter had returned.

Marty was also noticed by Ross Perot, the wealthy Texas entrepreneur and later presidential candidate who was a fierce advocate for the POWs during the Vietnam War. He understood marketing and publicity, and in 1969 he placed ads about the prisoners in 117 newspapers. He also understood the value of their wives in generating support. He sponsored a half-hour documentary on the war that included the wife of a missing pilot, and he enlisted four other MIA wives to meet with officials of Poland, Sweden, India, and the Soviet Union. (Perot was seeking assistance for shipping food to the prisoners.)

Not long after her debut at the ABA meeting, Perot's advance men called Marty and asked her to speak at a POW rally in Atlanta. She then agreed to address a crowd in Richmond, Virginia, and was flown there on a private plane. The attention was flattering, the travel glamorous, and Perot did everything on a large scale, with all the cameras, lights, sound systems, banners, and media. But Marty's speech left her emotionally drained, and the stage-managed spectacle overwhelmed and exhausted her. Perot was also demanding, and Marty didn't want to be drawn into his whirlwind. After Richmond, she told Perot's staff that she could not attend his rallies anymore. "There are plenty of wives who don't have kids," she said.

Fears that the prisoners would be forgotten never came to pass, and Marty had a small hand in the war's most successful publicity gambit. It began in 1969 when several California college students decided to call attention to the POW cause. A local television host was wearing a bracelet bought in Vietnam that he said reminded him of the suffering the war had brought. The students adapted that idea to a POW bracelet, brass or copper, each one inscribed with a prisoner's name and shootdown date. The students were part of an organization called VIVA (Voices for a Vital America), which enlisted many of the POW wives to sell the bracelet. It became both a fashion item among teenagers and an emblem of patriotism, and Marty's celebrity made her an ideal saleswoman. Governor Carter ordered "Porter Halyburton" bracelets for all Georgia's state police officers. She received so many orders that VIVA just kept sending her boxes of the jewelry, and she kept selling them for two dollars each, piling the dollar bills into a box. After about six months, she counted the money—it was ten thousand dollars in cash. The program ultimately distributed five million bracelets.

On May 10, 1970, Marty received her first letter from Porter, which finally confirmed for her that he was alive. She cried from his opening words:

Hi Marty, I pray this finds you, Dabney, Mother and all in good health. I treasure the pictures you sent. You both look great and I am so proud of you and love you so much. I was not injured on ejection and am in good health. Are you working, teaching or what and where? Hope you have kept a diary, pictures, tapes, etc. especially of Dabney. Please send more pictures and take care of Dabney. Much love to all, Porter

After that, the letters came sporadically, sometimes several in one week, but then an entire year passed with nothing. The delays made each letter more valuable; every line was studied intently. Marty was concerned that his handwriting had changed and wondered if his left arm had been hurt, but the individual letters were simply smaller, which allowed Porter to pack more words on his six lines. He usually reassured Marty that he was healthy while asking for more pictures and for all kinds of items, including "good hard toothbrushes," "Cuticura soap," and "food like p-nut butter, honey, chocolate, fruit jam."

In a letter to Dabney on September 28, 1970, he wrote,

I know from your pictures when you were only four, how strong & beautiful you must be by now. Please understand we must be apart for a while, but someday when I come home, I promise to show you so many wonderful things in the world ... I am so proud of you. Four kisses for you. Love, Daddy.

Before Porter was shot down, Marty would have never given a speech to a room full of strangers, never attended a formal party without a male escort, and never walked into a governor's mansion or a senator's office or the Oval Office and felt comfortable in the presence of a powerful man. Now she had done all of that. She had developed self-confidence and independence, and she had never let anyone see her "cry her in her beer." Just as Porter had adjusted and grown in his life in captivity, so too had Marty. She discovered that some POW wives could not make the adjustment. In an extreme case, one woman would not let her children celebrate Christmas or their birthdays because she believed they should suffer like their father. When the other women found something to laugh about, she would say, "I wonder what our husbands are doing now."

But the year of 1972 tested Marty as never before. In January, Nixon announced that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had been negotiating secretly with the North Vietnamese, briefly raising hopes that the impasse could end. But on March 30 North Vietnam launched an offensive across the demilitarized zone, and on April 15 Nixon authorized bombing near Hanoi and Haiphong. For the rest of the year, the peace talks moved in fits and starts. In the heat of a presidential election, the safe return of the prisoners was one of the few things the country could agree on, but even that issue became political. The wives themselves splintered over their support of Nixon or George McGovern, the Democratic nominee.

For her part, Marty feared that Porter would die in Vietnam if McGovern was elected, that the Democrat would sacrifice the POWs in his desire to leave the country in haste. She felt nothing but stress during the final weeks of the campaign, and for the first time felt "politicized" (though she didn't campaign). Nixon's landslide victory was comforting, and the talks between Kissinger and Le Due Tho resumed on November 20. Marty was optimistic that the Vietnamese, knowing they had to deal with Nixon, would finally reach an agreement. Instead, the talks broke off abruptly in December, and the massive "Christmas bombing" ensued.

This marked the lowest point of Marty's POW experience, a feeling shared by many of the wives. They demanded and received a meeting at the White House, where they were met by Kissinger.

Marty attended but let others ask the questions, many of them tough and bitter. As usual, Kissinger had few answers, but the frustration was palpable. At one point, he slammed his fist on the table and stood up; Marty thought he almost had tears in his eyes. "I can only tell you," he said, "that we're doing everything we can and your husbands are our top priority."

Marty believed him, but more than seven years had passed, and Porter seemed no closer to freedom than on the day he was shot down. She canceled her social plans and tried to hide her emotions from Dabney. She wanted to cry in her beer.

Beulah Watts wanted to cry as well. She knew that her youngest brother was being betrayed—not by the Communists but by his own wife.

Concerns first arose in 1967 when she and Shirley attended a meeting of POW families. At the time, Shirley was receiving Fred's combat pay of $1,432 a month, but she asked if she could have her husband declared dead for insurance purposes, even though there was no indication from the Air Force that he had been killed.
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Later that year Beulah called the Air Force, asking if she could be allowed to send her brother the one Christmas package that each POW was allowed to receive. She explained that Fred's wife did not care to send one.

In March 1968, Beulah made the first of many formal complaints to the Air Force, reporting that a man was living with Shirley. She repeated this allegation in November, but the service took no action, the policing of marital conduct not being part of its mission. Shirley, who was raising four children, was also in touch with the Air Force. She had authorized the service to deposit $200 a month from Fred's paycheck into the Uniformed Services Savings Deposit Program, which paid ten percent interest. But in October she made her first request for "emergency funds" from the account. For the duration of his captivity, she would make twenty-three such appeals, averaging $720 per request. The Air Force complied each time. When an official once raised a question about the withdrawals, Shirley met the query with "hostility." Ultimately, she withdrew eighty percent, or $16,560, of the full deposit. She cited a variety of reasons for the "emergency" money, including vacations and "cash stolen."

At the time, Shirley's boyfriend was living with her and the children in Norfolk, but the money was apparently not being used to maintain the house. According to Fred Jr. and Cynthia, they often did not have a working telephone or a running toilet. Rats ran across the kitchen floor, dirt was everywhere, and Shirley herself was often absent. "The four of us were raising ourselves," Cynthia said. But when military representatives visited the house to discuss the requests for money, Shirley would clean up, and the children would quietly stand at attention. "She was trying to get more money, so she made us look like Beaver Cleaver," Cynthia said.

Shirley still maintained that the children's father was dead. One day in December 1969, Cynthia came home from school and saw baby equipment in her mother's room.

"Who had the baby?" she asked.

"Your mother did," the boyfriend said.

Cynthia, nine years old, was shocked and devastated. "That tore our family apart," she said. Fred Jr. hated the baby's father. The fourteen-year-old had recently seen photographs of his father in his mother's closet and believed he was alive. He asked his mother why she'd had a baby.

"I'm in love and we're getting married," she said.

"But you can't get married. You're married to Dad."

"Your father's dead."

"He's not dead. I saw his pictures in the closet."

Then Shirley reprimanded him for going where he didn't belong.

Beulah, who kept track of the children, notified the Air Force that Shirley was pregnant. She feared that a baby would divert resources from Fred's own children and further drain his savings. Her fears were borne out.

In late December, Shirley asked the Air Force for $500. "I just got out of the hospital from having a serious stomach operation," she wrote. "I had it done by a private doctor, since I was a little afraid, and wanted the same Doctor all the time." Shirley was entitled to free medical care at a military hospital, and the Air Force should have known that the "stomach operation" was a ruse. But it still gave Shirley her husband's money.

Beulah was outraged. In a letter to the Air Force on November 17, 1972, she wrote:

I had a talk with Mrs. Cherry soon after she had the baby. I asked why she had not used some of the "birth control pills." She told me she didn't want to use that stuff, the baby was what she wanted. She also told me she intended to marry the man. Whether she married him or not I don't know but she never gave up Col. Cherry's pay ... I don't know what the Air Force regulations are, but I don't think a woman should be entitled to her husband's pay if she is having children by another man.

Shirley used the money to help her boyfriend buy a house and a Cadillac, and she gave him some of Fred's belongings as well, including golf clubs, a brass table, and a stereo. "Everything our father owned was in his house," Fred Jr. said.

At the same time, Fred's children were getting into trouble with the law. Both boys joined gangs and were arrested for fighting; Donald was later arrested for armed robbery. "Most of the money my mother had," he later said, "was used to keep my butt out of jail." The kids were moved around to different schools, dropped out, or were suspended. About the only constant was their mother's contempt for Fred. "She tried to brainwash us that he was rotten to the core," Cynthia said. But even Shirley admitted there was one thing her husband could do: fly. "Mom always said, 'He could land a plane with a crate of eggs on the wing and not break one,'" Cynthia said.

In Hanoi, Fred despaired at the dearth of letters and packages from home. When his first letter and package from Beulah arrived in September 1970, five years had passed without any word from his family. He was the last of the early POWs to receive a letter.

Beulah's correspondence did not describe the family turmoil, but the absence of any information about his wife and children left Fred bewildered and heartsick. He began writing letters home in 1970, begging his wife and children to contact him. He wanted their love and support, but he also wanted basic items like food and toiletries. In a letter to Shirley and the children on November 20, 1970, Fred wrote:

On the occasion of Xmas I wish all of you a very "merry xmas and a Happy new year."...I want very much to see and do all the things with [the kids] that I'd dream about. I have not received a letter or package from you and the children. I don't know why, but I would be very happy to receive letters & packages from you & the kids. Send good candy, salami, cheese, potted meat, soap, toothpaste and brush, pipe tobacco, and other things in small packages or cans. Also send instant coffee. I had a badly broken shoulder and I have spent 3 months in the hospital since I have been here. I feel fine & in good spirits. Please take good care of mom. I want the kids to be good Boy Scouts like Daddy and study hard to get ready for College. I love and miss you. All my Love, Daddy

Fred received more letters from Beulah but still nothing from Shirley. He feared she had died. She had high blood pressure, and he thought the stress of being a single mother had been too great and she had suffered a heart attack. He convinced himself that he had caused his wife's death, and he would carry that guilt until he returned and learned the truth.

Fred's letters could reveal little about his treatment, as they were censored by the Vietnamese. But Beulah took them to a graphologist, who examined the handwriting and concluded that Fred's shoulder had "made him uncomfortable while writing" but that there had "been little, if any, deterioration in general health or mental stability." Those words provided some comfort, but as expectations rose in 1972 that the war would end soon, Beulah attended meetings with other POW family members at Langley Air Force Base. Taking notes on a yellow legal pad, she heard experts talk about "reverse culture shock," the need of "family [to] help him reestablish self-esteem," expected medical, emotional, psychological, and dental problems, as well as financial, legal, and career issues. Beulah heard that no U.S. military prisoner had ever been held captive for more than four years—Fred was already into year six—and no one knew when the POWs would be returning or what they would face at home. All Beulah knew was that her brother's return would be painful indeed.