News-Info-Alerts

Re: Exhibit Honors SEA POWs

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: September 28, 2002

"Exhibit honors Vietnam POWs
 
Focus is on prisoners’ lives after release  

ASSOCIATED PRESS

CORONADO, Calif., Sept. 20 —  They are pictured cooking, laughing, seated with their pets, standing with their wives. The photographs of 30 former Vietnam war POWs portray a comforting normalcy, though their common history is anything but. Most hold no anger or bitterness.
   
‘There’s no such thing as a bad day when you have a door knob on the inside of the door.’

— PAUL EDWARD GALANTI former POW      

 “THERE’S NO SUCH THING as a bad day when you have a door knob on the inside of the door,” says former Navy Cmdr. Paul Edward Galanti, one of the POWs pictured and profiled in “Open Doors: Vietnam POWs Thirty Years Later” at the Coronado Museum of History and Art.

       Galanti, who spent six and a half years as a POW, will speak aboard the USS Ronald Reagan in Newport News, Va., on Friday for National POW-MIA Recognition Day — the same day the exhibit goes on display aboard the USS Boxer in San Diego ahead of its national tour this winter.

       “Always remember: No matter how bad you think you’ve got it, somebody has it worse,” Galanti says. He recalls that during low periods of his captivity, he’d think of Navy pilot Everett Alvarez Jr., another man featured in the exhibit, who spent eight and a half years as a POW.

       “Sometimes at night when I used to sit there and feel sorry for myself I’d think about Ed. He’d been in there 22 months longer than I had.”

       The exhibit was created by Taylor Baldwin Kiland, a writer and former Navy lieutenant who became intrigued by the lives of several former POWs she met while volunteering for Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign. She realized she knew a good deal about the adversity POWs faced in captivity but little about how they had fared afterward.

       “You never hear anything about what they’ve done with their lives,” Kiland says. “I thought, I bet there are some good life lessons from them.”
       
‘STARK TERROR’

       Along with childhood friend and photographer Jamie Howren Quinn, Kiland spent 18 months traveling across the country to interview and photograph 30 Vietnam POWs, one for each year since most prisoners in Vietnam were released.

       Their subjects were chosen from all branches of the military. Some were war buddies of Kiland’s father, a Navy man. Others were supporters of McCain, the country’s most well-known POW, who spent six and a half years in captivity.

       “I realized they don’t want pity in any shape or form,” Quinn says. “These people were very inspiring. They reinforced the fact that life is very precious, and the need to live it to the fullest.”

       Take Navy pilot Capt. Charles Everett “Ev” Southwick. Shot down over Than Hoa, Vietnam, in May 1967, he spent six years in various prisons, including the infamous “Hanoi Hilton.”

       “It’s the sort of experience you cannot describe in sound bites,” he says. “It wasn’t too pretty, let’s put it that way.”

       He describes the first three years as “stark terror,” when prisoners were often bound with ropes while their limbs were slowly wrenched from their bodies in an effort to get them to denounce the United States’ war effort. Other POWs in the exhibit were forced to stand for four to five weeks with their arms over their heads. Retired Marine Lt. Col. Orson Swindle, the current federal trade commissioner, was lashed on a stool for days.
       
NO TIME FOR BITTERNESS

       Southwick says the last three years of captivity were a maddening stretch of boredom. He was freed in March 1973 — 2,122 days after being shot down — and took a job in the Navy’s Office of Legislative Affairs, where he lobbied Congress. It was a job he loved, but not everything went smoothly. Southwick divorced three times.


Still, the 70-year-old says he has no time for bitterness. Retired and living in San Diego, he spends his time fishing and playing an old ukulele, with which he’s photographed for the exhibit.

       “We’re just normal people like everybody else,” he says. “People say ’I never could have done that.’ Well yes, you could do that. You don’t know what you can do until you’re faced with it.”

       Air Force Col. William Beekman, who spent a year as a POW, also returned home in 1973 to resume a military career, but was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Active duty proved too physically demanding so he started a medical testing company, which he turned into a multimillion dollar enterprise that he recently sold.

       Now retired, the Dayton, Ohio, resident has taken up swimming despite his deteriorating medical condition. In his profile, Beekman says he wants to compete in the 200-meter freestyle at his local YMCA.

       “When you’ve been through the worst, you feel you can do anything,” Beekman says. His picture in the exhibit shows him leaning on a cane, and smiling widely.

© 2002 Associated Press"