Re: New Book: Two Souls Indivisible

Date: April 25, 2004

"Bond of brothers in the Hanoi Hilton

By Stephen J. Lyons

Vietnam never strays far from our consciousness. The war, which ended more than 30 years ago, is a litmus test in presidential candidates, a dividing line in culture conflicts and has even kept Jane Fonda's name alive in American Legion halls and in bumper sticker sales long after her career stalled out. (This book will do nothing to dispel that tradition.)

The rhetoric has changed with the times, of course. Soldiers are no longer seen as "war criminals," or "hypocrites and liars," terms that Reverend Philip Berrigan and Fonda respectively used to "welcome home" 591 returning American prisoners of war in 1973. Today, as we see our troops under siege in a Middle Eastern desert instead of an Asian jungle, anti-war protesters, politicians and the media are more likely to pick apart this government's policies than the men and women who die in our wars.

In the stirring Two Souls Indivisible, James Hirsch, a former New York Times reporter and the author of Hurricane, recounts the unlikely relationship between two U.S. pilots thrown together in the same horrible North Vietnamese prison cell for just under eight months. Air Force Maj. Fred Cherry and Navy Lt. (jg) Porter Halyburton were both shot down and captured within five days in 1965. Halyburton, who is white, and Cherry, who is black, would go on to suffer more than 71/2 years in captivity in North Vietnam's Hoa Lo Prison, the notorious "Hanoi Hilton." But it was the short time they spent in each other's company that sustained them through the torture and deprivation that marked their entire imprisonment.

The North Vietnamese, who knew the United States' dismal racial history, placed the two pilots in the same cell in the hope they would tear each other apart. Interrogators had relentlessly told Cherry, a descendent of a Virginia slave, "that whites were racist, that they were colonizers, and that he had far more in common with the colored people of Asia." As one of the few black combat pilots in the Air Force, Cherry had already dealt with racism by rising above slights and discrimination, and out-achieving everyone around him. The much decorated pilot was also so loyal to his country that, Hirsch writes, Cherry "appears to be the only tortured POW who never made concessions to the enemy."

Hanoi desperately wanted to turn Cherry against his country and publicize the event worldwide. They also taunted him by asking if Martin Luther King Jr. was against the war, shouldn't Cherry be opposed, too? He refused because to give in because it would, Hirsch writes, "affirm the negative stereotypes including lack of courage and patriotism, which had long tarnished African Americans in the armed services."

Halyburton, whose family tree includes Confederate soldiers, was raised in segregated Davidson, N.C., a community steeped in the belief that blacks were limited in intelligence and ambition. "Halyburton did not endorse the violent bigotry of cross burning and bludgeoning but embraced the soft prejudice of paternalism."

Certainly Halyburton could never have foreseen the day he would defer to a black man not only in rank, but also in caretaking. Cherry was severely injured from his ejection and, at times, his life depended entirely on Halyburton's care. This reversal of traditional racial roles is at the heart of Hirsch's inspiring narrative. "... the white man was the ultimate servant to the black man, feeding him, exercising him, bathing him, sweeping the room and more." Cherry found the same compassion later on from other white POWs, who would take turns ministering to his medical needs. "He had found a more perfect America in a prison camp than he had ever found in America itself."

In turn, Halyburton said he was in awe of Cherry, whose courage became legendary in POW circles (a young adult biography would later be written about the pilot). "The task of caring for him gave a definite purpose to my immediate existence, and it was a task that I gratefully took up. In the process, I received much more from him than I was able to give."

The two were eventually separated and Halyburton was moved to an even more hellish prison: the "Briarpatch," where torture was applied with vicious regularity. Halyburton was abused for two months and eventually was forced to compose a vague confession to war crimes. He was devastated by his "confession," but in the end he exacted his own revenge: He survived.

Hirsch expands the narrative by following life on the home front for the wives and families of Cherry and Halyburton, and at the same time tracks the seeds of the POW/MIA movement.

Halyburton's wife, Marty, underwent a transformation from a shy mother of a young daughter to an outgoing national speaker and advocate for the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, an organization begun by POW James Stockdale's wife, Sybil. From her home in Georgia, Marty Halyburton also played a role in launching the successful POW bracelet program in 1969.

Cherry's wife traveled a different path. She abandoned her husband and steadfastly claimed he was dead even after there was evidence to the contrary. According to Hirsch, she took up with another man, had his child, and proceeded to raid Cherry's finances. When Cherry was finally released in 1973, he learned that less than $5,000 remained of $147,000 owed in pay and allowances.

Upon his release, his response to this information and to other bad news regarding his family, was classic Cherry. In much the same way he had dealt with his Vietnamese captors, he took it all in without emotion or anger, saying "I can handle that. I can handle that."

Stephen J. Lyons is a free-lance writer living in Monticello, Ill.

TWO SOULS INDIVISIBLE
THE FRIENDSHIP THAT SAVED TWO POWS IN VIETNAM
BY JAMES S. HIRSCH

Hardcover: 288 pages
Houghton Mifflin Co; (May 10, 2004)
ISBN: 0618273484"