Re: Pals Were POWs for 7 Years

Date: May 20, 2004

"Pals were POWs - for 7 years

By Christopher Cox

Friendship sometimes blooms in the unlikeliest places, under the most unbearable circumstances.

     When Porter Halyburton wouldn't break, his North Vietnamese captors threw the young Navy aviator into The Zoo, a filthy prison on the outskirts of Hanoi, and ordered him to care for a wounded American.

     In the dimly lighted cell, the North Carolinian could discern a thin, unkempt prisoner with severe leg and arm wounds. The Air Force officer, a Virginian, had also been downed by enemy fire in October 1965. That's where Halyburton's similarities to Fred Cherry ended.

     ``The Vietnamese motive was, I'm black and Southern,'' said Cherry, now 76, of Silver Spring, Md. ``Porter is white and Southern. For him to have to take care of a black man - and I outranked him - they didn't think that was going to work at all.

     ``They thought they could probably get both of us to turn,'' added Cherry. ``That definitely did not happen.''

     What did happen, a deep friendship formed in extremis, is the subject of ``Two Souls Indivisible'' (Houghton Mifflin, $25), a new book by Needham author James S. Hirsch.

     ``They're great role models,'' said Hirsch, a former reporter who also wrote ``Hurricane,'' a biography of boxer Rubin Carter.

     How does one survive more than 2,700 days in a fetid prison with poor food, frequent torture and indifferent medical treatment? Vietnamese medics even poured gasoline over Cherry's wounds.

     ``It really was a time where necessity was a mother of a lot of invention and creativity,'' said Halyburton, 63, who teaches at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. The POWs played invisible card games, communicated via a tap code and refused to collaborate with the enemy.

      ``The esprit de corps and camaraderie we had was unmatchable,'' said Cherry, a pioneering Air Force pilot whose portrait hangs in the Pentagon. ``It's still going on today. We're a very tight group.''

     Having a cellmate ``was literally an answer to a prayer,'' said Halyburton. It allowed the F-4 Phantom navigator to focus his energy on something useful; nursing the F-105 Thunderchief fighter jock also put his own problems in perspective.

      Initially the men believed their captivity would last only a few months. But freedom didn't come until Feb. 12, 1973.

     After Halyburton was originally declared killed in action (the premature tombstone now rests in his Bristol, R.I., back yard), his wife, Marty, became a leading advocate on the POW/MIA issue. But Cherry's marriage collapsed. His wife told their children he had died, cleaned out his life savings and bore a child by another man.

     ``When you're deprived of everything, as we were for all those years, we became so much more appreciative of our country and what it offers and the rights of others,'' said Cherry, now president of an IT consulting firm.     

  Although both men were disturbed by the images of prisoner abuse in Iraq, Halyburton said, ``The pictures I've seen didn't depict what Fred and I and others would call torture. It was certainly humiliation and degradation, and it was inexcusable.

     ``Apologies have been made and people are going to be punished,'' he added. ``There aren't many countries in the world where that would happen. Certainly it wouldn't have happened in Vietnam.''

( James S. Hirsch will hold a talk and book-signing with Porter Halyburton tonight at 7 at Needham Public Library, 1139 Highland Ave., Needham. Call 781-455-7559. )
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