News-Info-Alerts

Re: POW Letters Donated

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: August 04, 2002

"Donation attests to love's resilience in time of war

BY CRISTINA RODRIGUEZ
AVALANCHE-JOURNAL

For three years, Shirley Johnson wrote letters to the government, begging officials to retrieve her husband and other prisoners of war from North Viet nam.

She kept the correspondence, including letters from the four years before she joined the League of Families in 1970, a group dedicated to writing letters to and lobbying government officials.

Friday afternoon, she donated the documents to Texas Tech's Vietnam Center, located in its Southwest Collection Building.

"I think this was instrumental in doing a little something to get him out of there," she told the center's directors.

The documents, yellowed with time and smoke damage from a near fire, were stuffed in folders in a cardboard box.

"You just don't throw that away," said Johnson, who has kept the documents since her husband, U.S. Rep. Sam John son of Plano, returned in February 1973 after living at the POW camp for seven years.

Johnson said the documents show a change in the attitudes in Washington, D.C., once Rich ard Nixon became president.

"President Johnson decided that if we didn't say anything, they would be well treated," she said. "They kept quiet and they asked us to keep quiet."

But when the wife of one POW was allowed to send letters to the families of other prisoners, the league formed and was able to lobby and send letters to government officials.

Johnson had received notice that her husband, then an Air Force major, had been shot down in his fighter jet on his 25th mission in 1966. She waited two years before she learned he was being held at a camp inside the northern Vietnamese headquarters, a camp prisoners nam ed Alcatraz.

Two years later, when she and several family members joined the league, Johnson made several trips to lobby in Washington.

During that time, she was able to send 12 letters to her husband, and she received 32 letters from him.

"It all had to say, 'They're treating us wonderfully,' while they were lying there in irons," she said.

She said the league persevered because they felt that if the prisoners had not been killed, there was a chance they would get out.

The group had between 1,500 and 2,000 members representing 450 prisoners of war, she said.

Her archives are the first League of Families documents to enter Tech's Vietnam Collection. The collection contains more than 4 million pages of documents, 50,000 photographs and slides, 2,000 maps and other artifacts.

The center has the largest archive of Vietnam related mater ials outside the government.

Johnson said she decided to donate her papers after a visit she and her husband made to the center several months ago, when she mentioned she had letters and officials expressed interest.

"(Johnson's collection) brings an important facet of the war to the archives," said Jim Reckner, director of the center.

"The Vietnam War is immensely complex. ... Part of the experience of the wives and families was the wait for years on end while husbands, fathers and sons languished in prisons through torture and suffering."

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