The Cold War (58 page)

By March 1971 the North Vietnamese had begun returning letters addressed to men whose names were not included on the official POW list released to Senator Edward M. Kennedy in December 1970. Stamped
KUONG NGUOI NAHAN TRÁLAI
(“this person unknown”), my returned letters seemed more official than any information I had received from American sources about Frank. The Defense Department suggested that North Vietnam was reinforcing its contention that the list was complete and final, but insisted that our government would not accept letter or package returns as evidence of the
fate of MIAs. Frank Sieverts, an assistant to the secretary of state, maintained that the men's status would not be changed without concrete proof.

My wait for news about Frank continued, and remaining in Paris was more comfortable than returning home. I was relieved to be anonymous, free from people who asked about my husband's status:

“Have you heard anything yet?”

“No.”

“Guess you never will, huh? Bless your heart. It's such a pity.”

Though well intentioned, such remarks—sometimes coming from the mouths of complete strangers—always left me fighting back tears. I was also tired of the either/or stance that everyone seemed to insist upon when discussing the war. Simultaneously caring about my husband's return and wanting our troops to withdraw did not seem incongruous to me. I was amazed by how angry hawks could become when I refused to denounce the North Vietnamese, and by how upset doves became when I wouldn't criticize the men who were fighting.

But I had begun to realize that Frank might not return, and I began editing his diary for publication—an act I had not attempted earlier because I believed he would use it himself, as the basis for the novel. Publishing his diary now seemed my responsibility. Editing his writings in 1972, I thought I had achieved some catharsis at last. I hoped that writing its prologue had also provided me with closure. When the book was published in the fall of 1973, I returned to the United States to push its sales—and discovered that the public who had once seemed so eager to know about the war had become largely apathetic. They did not want to be reminded of our national defeat.

Almost a year after the return of the 591 POWs in early 1973, I left Paris for San Francisco. Feeling that I had done all I could to ascertain Frank's fate, I hoped the government would assume responsibility for finding him. After all, it had promised to bring him home when the war was over.

Once the war ended, however, public interest in the MIA issue also ended. After the prisoners returned, leadership of the National League of Families shifted from wives to other family members of MIAs. E. H. Mills, the father of Lieutenant Commander James Mills (shot down on September 21, 1966), became the director in 1973, and he was succeeded by his daughter Ann Mills Griffiths. Her long reign has produced various critics and at least one splinter group, directed by Dolores Alfond, who insists that Griffiths has responded less
to the needs of the families than to those of the government. Many MIA family members now echo my earlier suspicions that the league is basically a government organization. (During the Nixon administration, its long-distance telephone bill was paid out of White House funds.) In February 1991, Colonel Millard Peck, a highly decorated veteran, quit his post as chief of the POW/ MIA unit of the Defense Intelligence Agency, contending that the official government “mind-set to debunk” evidence of live MIAs was encouraged by Griffiths, whom he described as “adamantly opposed to any initiative to actually get to the heart of the problem.” He accused Griffiths of sabotaging POW/MIA investigations. (It is worth noting that the League of Families helped sponsor an MIA/POW website that blamed the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry for what the League saw as the abandonment of American soldiers when Kerry helped to reestablish trade with Vietnam. The League also had connections with the Swift Boat Veterans Against Kerry.)

During the mid-1970s the league did little to slow down the speed with which the government began perfunctorily changing MIA status to “presumed finding of death” (PFOD). In December 1976 a House panel determined, later with President Carter's agreement, that no live MIAs remained in Southeast Asia. In March 1977 a presidential commission traveled to Hanoi and subsequently agreed with a House select committee that the Vietnamese were acting in good faith to “repatriate” the remains of all American MIAs. The government provided wives and family members with no explanation for these decisions. Because they were made by our government, we were expected to assume they were trustworthy.

These announcements only confirmed my suspicions that Frank had been used as a pawn. I became convinced that our government would make no more real efforts to recover him—alive or dead. And I realized how powerless I remained.

The navy changed Frank's status to PFOD on October 31, 1977. The telegram arrived at my door in Oakland along with a group of young trick-or-treaters. The following year Frank's family and I held a memorial service for him at the National Cemetery in Wilmington, North Carolina. By 1978 the Pentagon had declared all MIAs to be PFODs, except for Colonel Charles E. Shelton of the air force, who remains listed as a POW for symbolic reasons. His wife took her own life in October 1990. She left no explanation, but friends suggest that her suicide is a result of battling about POW/MIA issues for over twenty years. To me, her action seems as symbolic as her husband's status.

In 1983, President Reagan announced that the MIAs were a high priority for his administration. He sent delegations to Vietnam, and 150 sets of remains were identified and returned. The military's Joint Casualty Resolution Center at Barbers Point in Hawaii, established in the 1970s, increased its efforts to recover remains and make identifications. In 1985, Vietnam turned over the remains of another five persons believed to be MIAs; in 1988 the first joint American-Vietnamese team uncovered two more sets of MIA remains.

But no one had asked me for additional information about Frank, and by the time another twelve silent years had gone by, I felt sure that I would never know his exact whereabouts. Consequently, I was unprepared for the telephone call I received from the navy in December 1989 asking me if I “happened to have” a copy of my husband's dental X rays.

“No … Why?”

“Well … uh … we have a piece of a jawbone and some teeth that we think may have belonged to him.”

My anger at the unfeeling language obscured my initial shock. How could this stranger choose his words so carelessly, ignoring their possible effect upon me? But his tone of voice indicated that he was not so unfeeling as his choice of words implied. He explained that Frank was only one of several men who were being considered as the possible source for a box of remains that the North Vietnamese had turned over to American authorities in June. I suggested that he contact my husband's family. Then, as I had during the previous twentythree years, I tried to remain calm as I confronted this latest unexpected reminder of Frank and of my own irretrievable loss.

On January 22, 1990, exactly twenty-four years from the day I married Frank, the navy notified me that the remains had been positively identified as his. (The bones included those of the torso, legs, and a part of the lower jawbone that seemed to be broken. No bones were available from the rest of the face and head or the feet and hands.) If I regarded the pathologists' reports as “inconclusive,” I would have the “option” to arrange for someone else to review the paperwork and remains to provide “quality assurance” of this decision.

A few days later, members of Frank's family and I met with military officials to review their evidence. They explained that the government research group had reached their decision based on a combination of evidence. First they looked for the names of all of the men who were listed as having disappeared in the area of Dien Chau district, Nghe Tinh province, the area from which the bones had been recovered. Using a section of the pelvic bone to determine the
age of the person at death, they were able to narrow the possibilities even more. By measuring the torso and leg bones, they could estimate the person's height. Because of the prominent muscle insertion in the bones, the pathologists were certain that the person had had an unusually muscular build. Frank's medical records show that he had a forty-two-inch chest, a thirty-one-inch waist, and a twenty-two-inch thigh and could military-press two hundred pounds; he had begun lifting weights when he was in high school, an activity that he had continued. Using information from the computer database of missing persons' dental records, the researchers narrowed the possibilities to three men. And while they were able to obtain dental X rays on all of the men except Frank, none of the X rays fitted the dental work remaining on the lower jawbone. Although no X rays of Frank's teeth were available, the dental charts showing his fillings and earlier extractions matched those of the jawbone. So he filled the description in every possible way, as did no one else who had disappeared within a fifty-mile radius of the site.

With the recounting of each explanation, I was asked if I wanted to see photographs of the bones or medical records substantiating each claim. At first I could only respond, “I don't know yet. Wait a minute, and I'll let you know.” Then I would tell myself that I had to look or continue to doubt their judgment. Each decision to look at the evidence became a little easier, and I managed to get through the afternoon without embarrassing any of us by becoming hysterical. Frank's family told me later that if I had not agreed to look at the photographs, they would have done so; they also felt we needed to look to be able to know.

At first I did wonder if the remains were really Frank's. But because I had put no pressure on our government since the early 1970s, its decision to assign them to him, rather than to the husband of a more insistent wife, seems to serve no ulterior purpose. The government had nothing to gain by returning Frank's remains, which made its analysis more convincing to me. I can imagine no other motivation. Frank and I were just lucky.

Frank appears to have died in the crash of his plane. The fragmentation of the bones and the broken jaw make this explanation the likeliest. The bones were encrusted with dirt, since Vietnamese bury the dead directly in the ground without a coffin and then, approximately three years later, after the flesh has rotted away, dig up the bones and place them in a smaller grave. This process also partly accounts for the missing smaller bones. When this ritual was explained to me, it was described as something the Vietnamese do because of
their “superstitions” about the dead. I couldn't help thinking that we characterize our own practices in such matters, really no more civilized, as “respect for the dead.”

I was touched that the Vietnamese had gone to such trouble to bury someone who had been bombing their country. Their humane customs are partly responsible for my having Frank's remains for reburial. And I was beginning to discover how grateful I was.

Frank's was one of ten sets of MIA remains identified and returned to the U.S. mainland for interment in 1990. (As of 2004, the DOD has recovered theremains of more than 400 MIAs.) They were shipped to Travis Air Force Base and in late February brought home to North Carolina, where our families held a private, quiet interment in the National Cemetery in Wilmington. Knowing the whereabouts of Frank's remains has helped me begin a healing process I was helpless to effect earlier. Unconsciously, I had been unable to forgive myself for “deserting” him, for failing to negotiate the labyrinth of government policies and foreign terrains. My earlier insistence that his final whereabouts did not matter had been dishonest. I had been diminishing the importance of what I could not change. Now I can draw comfort from envisioning his grave site, from having a specific physical location that automatically comes to mind when I think of him. His flesh had already become part of Vietnam, but his bones no longer lie—like those of Thomas Hardy's Drummer Hodge—un-coffined and unmarked beneath “foreign constellations.”

GEOFFREY NORMAN

Actual American participation in the Vietnamese War lasted close to a decade, and as long as that national trauma continued, no aspect of it earned more dispiriting attention than the plight of the POWs in North Vietnamese prisons. Most of what the public knew came through propaganda photographs of downed airmen, who often used their moment of worldwide notoriety to send covert messages. They would paste “Merry Christmas” posters to a wall, holding them with their middle fingers; make a series of exaggerated bows to their captors, as if brainwashed; or blink the word “torture” in Morse code for Communist movie cameramen. They were, in fact, tortured and, in some cases, murdered. The majority were downed pilots, whom the North Vietnamese described as criminals, treating them as such. Later, when the Communists recognized how much value U.S. negotiators attached to the POWs, they began to consider them as hostages, pawns in an excruciating diplomatic chess game that went on for four and a half years. To give them up would have meant giving up North Vietnam's most potent bargaining chip.

The number of POWs was long open to debate. In 1969 the North Vietnamese admitted to holding only fifty-nine. That fall, in a gesture to one of the American peace delegations that regularly visited Hanoi, the North Vietnamese released a seaman named Douglas Hegdahl, an ammunition handler who had been blown overboard by a gun concussion two years earlier. What his captors didn't know was that Hegdahl had memorized the names and ranks of all the POWs he had encountered in a prison nicknamed the Plantation: His mnemonic device was to set them to the tune of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” His superiors ordered
him to seek amnesty. Now the Defense Department knew there were at least 250 men still alive.

Late in the 1980s, fifteen-odd years after the last POW had returned home, the writer Geoffrey Norman interviewed many of them. Some had been imprisoned for five or six years; one, eight and a half. It was the longest time Americans had ever been held during a war. What Norman learned, and what he later described in a remarkable little book,
Bouncing Back,
was anything but dispiriting. If, as Ernest Hemingway is supposed to have said, guts can be defined as grace under pressure, then theirs is a story of heroism beyond measure. To be sure, these men belonged to a combat elite. Their average age was thirty-two, and most were career officers, air force captains or navy lieutenants, and college graduates, some of whom were working toward advanced degrees that they had been forced to interrupt for war service. They had taken special training in survival and captivity. The highest-ranking officers established and maintained a strict code of discipline and solidarity among the POWs that their captors tried, with little success, to break down with torture, long periods of isolation, and psychological abuse. Mostly, though, the POWs survived by learning to fill years of empty hours with improvised mental and physical activity, trying as best they could to salvage a youth that seemed to be slipping away.