Tom Wilber - Dissenting POWs: From Vietnam’s Hoa Lo Prison to America Today

TOM WILBER investigates documentation regarding U.S. detainees in the Democratic Republic of Vit Nam from 1964 until 1973. His research is the source for the 2015 H Ni National Film Festival award-winning documentary, The Flower Pot Story, produced by Ngc Dng. A visiting lecturer at H Ni University in 2018, his opinion pieces have been published in Vit Nam News. Wilber represents a U.S.based nongovernmental organization that works on humanitarian projects with Vietnamese organizations.

JERRY LEMBCKE grew up in Northwest Iowa. He was drafted in 1968 and served as a chaplains assistant in Vietnam. He is the author of eight books including The Spitting Image, CNNs Tailwind Tail, and Hanoi Jane. His opinion pieces have appeared in The New York Times, Boston Globe, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. He is Associate Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, at Holy Cross College, and Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.

Tom Wilber and Jerry Lembcke

MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS

New York

Copyright 2021 by Tom Wilber and Jerry Lembcke

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data available from the publisher

ISBN paper: 978-158367-908-1

ISBN cloth: 978-158367-909-8

Cover photo courtesy of Chu Chi Thanh; from Chu Ch Thnh, Memories of the War, (Hanoi: Vietnam News Agency Publishing House, 2015).

Typeset in Minion Pro and Impact

MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS, NEW YORK

monthlyreview.org

5 4 3 2 1

Dedicated to Al Riate and Bob Chenoweth

May their persistence in conscience and inspiration to others while POWs encourage their successors in uniform to perform with comparable integrity

Former POWs Al Riate (left) and Bob Chenoweth post-release in 1974 at Los Angeles International Airport (photo provided by Bob Chenoweth)

Jerry is grateful for Tom Wilbers insight that the story of POW dissent needed to be written. His contribution to the book was accomplished with Toms patience with his own impatience with IT and Carolyn Howes help with online sourcing. Mike Yates and the Monthly Review Press team provided some best-ever editing.

Along with Jerrys appreciation for the Monthly Review team, Tom is grateful to Cora Weiss for encouragement and introductions, to Chuck Searcy for the suggestion to talk to Jerry Lembcke, and to Jerry for listening carefully for the signal within the noise. Madame Nguyn Th Bch Thy and L Huy opened doors that led to unimaginable discoveries.

O n Memorial Day 2012, President Barack Obama called for the commemoration of Vietnam War events from 1961 to 1973 with these words: Today begins the fiftieth commemoration of our war in Vietnam. The Presidents invitation inspired conferences, newspaper columns, and books recalling the 1965 landing of Marines at Danang and the campus teach-ins it spawned, the 1967 March on the Pentagon, and the 1968 My Lai Massacre. The documentary The Vietnam War, produced for public television by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick in 2017, brought interest in the war back to levels it had not had since the early postwar years.

Along with the Moratorium Days of 1969, the invasion of Cambodia and Kent State shootings of 1970, and the Christmas bombings of 1972, it is certain that interest in remembrances of the war will remain high through the fiftieth commemoration of the signing of Peace Accords in 2023, and beyond.

American prisoners of war (POWs) were made up of ground troops who were captured in South Vietnam and taken to Hanoi and pilots shot down over North Vietnam. They became critical figures in the negotiations that led to the end of the warPresident Nixon insisting that U.S. troops would not be withdrawn from the South until the POWs were released, and the communist representatives insisting that there would be no prisoner return until the United States pulled out.

Concerned Americans of all political stripes rallied in support of the welfare of the POWs and in support of their families, anxious about the whereabouts of their loved ones. The Nixon administration, responding to the growing public concern for the POWs and having campaigned on a platform of ending the war, vaulted to the front of the growing parade, seizing the POW issue and weaponizing it as a negotiation lever to delay the wars end. The public responded with patriotic and humanistic concern for POW welfare. A California student group sold metal bracelets for a couple of dollars each with the POWs name, rank, and date of capture or disappearance etched on them; five million Americans bought the bracelets and vowed to wear them until the namesake returned or was accounted for. Businessman Ross Perot, to bring attention to the POW plight, bankrolled a chartered planeload of packages and mail to the captives. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam ended up refusing the shipment for logistical reasons, but Perots effort proved to be a public relations victory, creating sympathy for the POWs and generating support for the hard line that the Nixon administration was taking in negotiations to end the war.

Women Strike for Peace (WSP), meeting with the Vietnamese Womens Union in Toronto in 1969, began a process, womens group to womens group, to transport mail between POWs and their families at home in both directions, using delegations of peace activists as couriers. The WSP group returned just before Christmas 1969 with 138 letters from 132 prisoners and a provisional list of Americans held in Hanoi. Under the name Committee of Liaison with Families of Servicemen Detained in North Vietnam, the service delivered thousands of letters by the end of the war.

After a gradual escalation in the late 1950s through 1964, the American war in Vietnam lasted nearly a decade, with massive increases beginning in 1965. The standard tour of duty for military personnel was twelve months, which meant there was a constant churn of those returning home and their newly deployed replacements. The countrys emotions were divided: pride and elation for the returnees, grief for those who would never come home, worry for the wounded, and fear for those leaving for the war zone. With the comings and goings strung out for ages, emotions were uncentered when the Peace Accords were signed in January 1973. Many of the veterans had been home for years by the wars end, and troop levels had dwindled to less than 10 percent of the 1968 peak. These factors, when coupled with the wars loss, meant that welcome-home parades and their accoutrements were not in the offingat least not until the POWs were released and returned in February and March of 1973.

Five hundred and ninety-one prisoners of war were released in the weeks following the Peace Accords that ended the war. The obscurity of the POWs imprisonment and even questions about the survival of some of them lent an air of enchantment to the figures stepping off the planes at Clark Air Force Base. With bated breath, Americans of all persuasions anticipated the stories of the POWs experience that would confirm the villainy of their captors and the strength of their own determination to return with honor, as affirmation of the goals seeded and nurtured by the Nixon administration since early 1969.