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98 Chapter Three Years of Darkness: Narratives by and about American Prisoners of theVietnamWar . . . a welcome stranger. An enemy to be sure, but a man from out of the sky, a man of great accomplishment and from an advanced society. —POW Larry Guarino, in A P.O.W.’s Story I used to tell myself, when we were over there, that if I ever got home, I wasn’t going to say one word about it. . . . It was going to be like the blue sky behind you—wasted air space. But you know what? . . . I am a sonofabitch if sometimes I don’t miss it. —Unnamed POW, quoted in Bouncing Back R epublican partisans deployed a savvy strategic weapon against the Democratic candidate John Kerry in the 2004 presidential campaign when they launched a “Swift Boat Veterans and POWs for Truth” media blitz that lethally attacked the decorated Vietnam combat veteran– turned–antiwar activist. In television ads and a documentary film titled Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal, Vietnam veterans and prisoners of war—including such prominent POW heroes and memoirists as Robinson Risner and George Day—denounced Kerry’s 1971 testimony to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and his leadership of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. For these George W. Bush loyalists, the antiwar movement prolonged the war (and therefore the POWs’ imprisonment) by emboldening the North Vietnamese—a familiar argument, of course—and the movement was in turn fortified by the support of antiwar veterans, who, the conservatives clearly believe, were particularly culpable quislings. John Kerry, proclaimed George “Bud” Day, a POW and Medal of Honor winner, was “the Benedict Arnold of 1971.”1 The vitriol directed against John Kerry because of his efforts thirty-odd years ago to expose the horrors and misprision of the Vietnam War demonstrates that the passions and controversies about America’s presence in Ryan.indb 98 Ryan.indb 98 8/22/2008 3:11:50 PM 8/22/2008 3:11:50 PM narratives by and about american prisoners 99 Vietnam that roiled the United States during the war years have not abated. And the prominence of the former prisoners of the Vietnam War in the successful 2004 effort to deflect the Democrats’ challenge to the incumbent president testifies to the iconic stature of the only acknowledged heroes of the Vietnam War more than thirty years after their triumphant repatriation from North Vietnam. The Arizona senator and presidential candidate John McCain—whose Faith of My Fathers is one of the most recent additions to a sizable collection of personal testimonies about the Vietnam War, the POW memoir—has, for example, nurtured a reputation as a resolute, ethical , independent national Republican leader based largely on his endurance of five and a half years as a grudging guest at Hanoi’s notorious Hoa Lo prison, the turn-of-the-century French-built internment camp, christened the “Hanoi Hilton” by its American residents, that was the primary “home” for Americans captured in the North during the Vietnam War. Of all the complex, intriguing issues that continually remind us of the persistent relevance of the Vietnam War in our present lives—parallels with the current Iraq War, distrust of government, U.S. economic relations with Vietnam, Vietnamese refugees, and on and on—perhaps none has, in the decades since the end of that lost war, loomed larger in the American psyche than the POW/MIA phenomenon. As Elliott Gruner writes about the American POWs held in Vietnam until 1973, “their plight proved to be one of the few issues that might solidify American sentiment about the Vietnam War. . . . Their plight had a metonymic quality: their suffering stood for the suffering of a nation through an uncertain war guided by unreliable and frustrating forces Americans did not understand. In contrast , the POW problem was simple: get them back!” (13–14). And once the POWs came home, in the spring of 1973, another, more protracted struggle began: the unceasing efforts of the families and advocates of the alleged POWs or Missing in Action to discover the fate of their fathers and sons who did not return from Vietnam. The subtitle of Dorothy McDaniel’s 1991 memoir, After the Hero’s Welcome: A POW Wife’s Story of the Battle against a New Enemy, which recounts POW Eugene (Red) McDaniel’s efforts “now, as proof has emerged that POWs still languish in Asian prisons,” to reveal alleged government subterfuge about the dirty secret of the Vietnam War...

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