REBEL

10. Prisoners: 1967

Rebel 200 Prisoners: 1967 In Hanoi, an emissary of the National Liberation Front passed me a welcome message: The NLF was ready to release several American prisoners held in the South as a “gesture of goodwill to the American people.” This, however, was not so simple. “We do not want to hand over the prisoners to the American government , which doesn’t recognize us,” Nguyen Thi Binh had already told me in Bratislava. She was the de facto foreign minister of the NLF. To me, she looked like a Vietnamese Mona Lisa. U.S. negotiators at the Paris peace talks, where she signed the peace accords next to Henry Kissinger, later called her a “harpie.” “We would like to release the prisoners in your hands, to Americans who stand for peace,” she had said in her low-keyed voice. “It could be arranged through Cambodia.” I felt uncomfortable with the whole subject of American prisoners, having met twice with captured pilots in Hanoi. When Staughton Lynd, Herbert Aptheker, and I met a single POW in December 1965, it was only after anguished debate. I felt, according to my 1965 notes, that “decency compelled us to leave the man in peace and not humiliate him further.” Staughton argued persuasively that it was humanitarian to see the prisoner, while not publicly announcing his name, and pass a message to his family. The Vietnamese, on the other hand, regarded the captured pilots as marauders who were attacking and killing their people; shooting them down was a matter of deep national pride. But they sought to show that they treated the pilots “humanely.” I felt it was remarkable that the Americans were not killed immediately by villagers when they were parachuted into the areas they had so recently bombed. (Imagine the fate of a MIG pilot captured in Times Square after bombing Manhattan). 10. 10. 201 But how could one define “humane treatment,” and how could one communicate honestly through an interview under the eyes of guards? The Vietnamese wanted to seat the American prisoner on a chair lower than ours and film the meeting, conditions which we successfully opposed . Finally, in spite of extreme reservations, we went ahead and spent an hour with the American. The discussion with him began nervously, but we eventually relaxed and felt that a humanitarian purpose was served. The pilot had been in captivity for four months, having been shot down on his first mission, he said. We talked about our families, and he expressed a terrible loneliness for his children, who were just at the age, he said, “when they are forming opinions.” He said that he knew little about the war and regretted not having paid more attention. While he told us that his treatment was better than he expected, he noted it was “no bed of roses,” using American jargon. We couldn’t tell if he was passing us a message with this phrase. At any rate, we were successful in later communicating to his wife and children that he was alive, which they did not know. We agreed not to publish his name. On this trip five years later, our delegation had met with Douglas Hegdahl, a hapless twenty-one-year-old sailor from South Dakota who apparently fell off his ship and was rescued/captured by North Vietnamese crews in April 1967. An American youth about Vivian’s age, Hegdahl was considered more a pawn than a pirate by the Vietnamese , and he claimed to have no opinions about the war. As far as we could tell, Hegdahl was treated adequately, and we were given a short tape recording to send home to his wife. Of greater concern were two other POWs we met, Elmo Baker, a badly injured, thirty-five-year-old Air Force major, and his cellmate, Captain Lawrence Carrigan, both shot down in August-about three months before our arrival. We met them across a green-and-maize table, under the unexpected lights of Japanese television, in what might have been the camp known later as the Hanoi Hilton, a worn compound within the capital proper. We were extremely nervous about meeting Americans under these auspices, a feeling that was reinforced by the cast on Baker’s rib cage and his severely broken thigh. He could stand stood only with the help of a crutch. “Don’t say anything to upset him,” our friend Oanh said, on the advice of a Vietnamese doctor. Baker, a Missouri native, seemed anxious, but...