A Celebration of Men Redeemed

IT represented, in a peculiarly American way, a ritual of resurrection. For the U.S., the war in Viet Nam had gone ambiguously: the nation's longest battle had ended in nothing like glory but in a kind of complex suspension. The nation could at least find its consolation, even its celebration, in the return of the prisoners. Here, at last, was something that the war had always denied--the sense of men redeemed, the satisfaction of something retrieved from the tragedy. The P.O.W.s' return bore a tangible finality that the war itself, even in its negotiated resolution, could never offer the U.S. Now the captured Americans, who had been closest to the mystery of the enemy, were extricated, were coming home.

For a time last week, the release of the first prisoners seemed as maddeningly tentative as the Paris talks themselves. Last-minute haggling between Saigon and the Communists delayed the move from day to day. Then at week's end the word was passed through the Pentagon: 115 of the 456 men held in North Viet Nam would be turned over in Hanoi, and 27 of the 120 Americans held in the South would be freed by the Viet Cong at Quan Loi, about 60 miles north of Saigon. As part of the bargain, the South Vietnamese would release 4,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong prisoners over a four-day period. In both North and South, the U.S. captives would be loaded aboard medical-evacuation planes for Clark Air Base in the dusty Luzon plain of the Philippines. At Clark as the release approached, the men inside the Joint Homecoming Reception Center Command Post scanned a bank of clocks reading "Hanoi," "Local," "Hawaii," "Washington D.C.," and "Zulu" --Greenwich mean time. Officers manned hot lines, and prepared to chart every movement of the prisoners from the instant of their arrival. The exercise was worthy of a major offensive, except that now the object was almost extravagantly peaceful.

The U.S. military's planning for the operation had been meticulous and even loving, in an official way. When the prisoners of war from Korea were released in 1953, they were greeted by an intimidating battery of officers, psychiatrists and reporters; this time the prisoners were to be protected. Each was assigned his own escort, a sort of aide-de-camp, counselor, valet and buddy. Many of the escorts were personal friends of the captives, the others were selected by service, age, rank and background to match their P.O.W.s as closely as possible.

The 270-bed Air Force hospital at Clark, hitherto devoted primarily to the treatment of Viet Nam War casualties, had been elaborately prepared, though in a carefully understated way. The hospital's corridors were lined with gaily colored Valentine's Day decorations and posters made by schoolchildren at the base: WELCOME HOME, WE LOVE YOU and DO YOU LAUGH INSIDE ALL OVER. The prisoners would be assigned to two-or four-man rooms, unless they require intensive care. The men would be treated as gently and gingerly as possible. The casual treatment had been planned by a battery of experts. Even former Pueblo Commander Lloyd Bucher, a veteran of North Korean jails, was among those waiting at Clark Field.

"When the prisoners came back from World War II," said one doctor at Clark, "we almost killed them with T-bone steaks, ice cream and companionship." The plan this time was to shield the captives from all fanfare and confusion as they emerged from their long limbo. Their diets would be relatively bland for the time being, although the hospital was prepared to feed rice and nuoc mam, the pungent Vietnamese fish sauce, to any man who might have become addicted to native fare. No champagne or beer toasts are likely for a while; the prisoners had at least 72 hours of medical tests to go through first. Then there would be psychiatric tests and some military debriefings, mostly to extract possible information about the fate of some of the 1,300 Americans still listed as missing in action.

Soon after their arrival, the prisoners would make a 15-minute NOK (next of kin) phone call--a joyful if sometimes eerie experience for men long out of touch with their wives, parents, children. Each "returnee" would be measured and fitted for a hand-tailored uniform. Each would be advised of the back pay and benefits he had accumulated while sitting in his Vietnamese cell. In some cases, that meant the sudden accession of modest wealth. One pilot imprisoned for nearly six years has a hefty $154,000 waiting for him, partly the result of the $5-a-day bonus granted for men who are held captive.

Some of the prisoners might require extended medical treatment at Clark, but quite a few would doubtless be ready in three or four days for the next leg of their trip back to normality--the flight to California's Travis Air Force Base. They would go on to military hospitals near their homes, and the first reunions with their families. It would be a normality that would take some getting used to. The average prisoner had been away for four years; some, like Army Major Floyd Thompson and

Navy Lieut. Commander Everett Alvarez, had been gone for more than eight. There would be a Rip Van Winkle effect, the dislocating experience of time-travel to a startlingly changed American culture (see THE ESSAY), to young brides suddenly turning 30 and remembered babies now on the verge of adolescence. To ease the cultural shock, one prisoner's wife arranged for a barber to be available any time of day or night to cut their son's long hair just before they go to see the father at the hospital on his return. Convicts at least have visiting days, have television and newspapers to describe the changing tastes of the society outside. The prisoners' homecoming might be a dazing and sometimes unnerving joy (see box, page 18). The war had wrenched them abruptly, violently, out of their lives, deposited them in an utterly alien world of defenselessness, helplessness. Their road home would be much longer than the flight from Clark to Travis.

The first group to be released included eight American civilians, seven of whom had been working in Viet Nam for the Agency for International Development. Highest-ranking among them was Foreign Service Officer Douglas Kent Ramsey, 38, who was ambushed and captured while driving in a Jeep in Hau Nghia province in 1966.

Some in the first batch of returnees had acquired a certain celebrity while in captivity. One was Lieut. Commander Everett Alvarez Jr., 35, of San Jose, Calif. Shot down over North Viet Nam on Aug. 5, 1964, he was the North's longest-held captive and became a leader of the prisoners during the long ordeal. His homecoming was destined to be less joyous than he might have hoped. His wife Tangee, whom he married in 1963, got a Mexican divorce in 1970 and remarried. Meantime, his sister Delia became a bitter critic of the war. "It is very important that Everett is coming home," Delia said after learning that he was in the first group. "But so many others are still missing, and the war still goes on."

Also in the group was Air Force Ace Pilot James Robinson ("Robbie") Risner, 47. Winner of the Air Force Cross for heroism in 1965, he appeared on TIME's cover that year as an exemplar of America's fighting men. A few months later, he ejected from his crippled F-105 near Thanh Hoa in North Viet Nam and was captured. He was a colonel then, but would discover this week that he had been promoted to brigadier general.

Navy Captain James Bond Stockdale, one of the highest-ranking Navy P.O.W.s, was also coming out with the first group. After he was shot down in 1965, his wife Sybil, mother of their four sons, became a founder and national coordinator of the National League of Families of P.O.W.s/M.I.A.s.

Lieut. Commander William M. Tschudy, 37, also among the first out of the prisons, was a navigator-bombardier on an A-6 fighter-bomber from the carrier Independence shot down on July 18, 1965. His wife Janie and eight-year-old son Michael would be waiting for him when he arrived at Portsmouth, Va., along with his parents. One added satisfaction: Tschudy's A-6 commander, Navy Captain Jeremiah Denton, was also among the first released and would be coming home to Virginia with him.

Gold Pass. Air Force Colonel Lawrence Guarinox would be coming out nearly eight years after his capture. He appeared on a British TV film in 1966, stating that he was a prisoner of war and not a war criminal, as the North Vietnamese claimed. Air Force Sergeant Arthur Black, declared missing in September of 1965, was also among the first. So was Air Force Major Murphy Neal Jones, who was taken in 1966 after he bailed out of his F-105. He was paraded through the streets of Hanoi for public inspection and mocked as "Johnson's Peace Disturber" because his knees were knocking together at the time. Another coming home was Air Force Major Glendon Perkins, captured in 1966.

The nation greeted the release with an honest and appropriate pleasure, but also with a few inevitable touches of somewhat exaggerated sentimentality. Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn was quick to offer each returnee a gold lifetime pass to any major-league game. The Ford Motor Co. wanted to give each of the prisoners a new car. There were sure to be other offers, and Pentagon officers sometimes found themselves squirming a bit at the spectacle. President Nixon struck the right note when he said, "This is a time that we should not grandstand it; we should not exploit it."

There were too many individual dramas, too many complex emotions involved. If it was a war without heroes, many Americans were intent upon making the prisoners fill the role. There was valor there, of course, but there was also simple luck. The prisoners' return was shadowed by the 1,300 men still missing. Moreover, many were professional soldiers. Many had been shot down while they were delivering 500-lb. bombs on unseen victims at the touch of a button. They had obeyed orders, dealt in death and presumably understood the odds and consequences. That they survived--while 45,937 other Americans died--was cause enough for quiet, personal celebration, but not, it may be, for public statues or halftime Super Bowl rhetoric.

No one, of course, would minimize their ordeal. In the weeks ahead, the prisoners' stories will emerge, and they doubtless will be tales of suffering and endurance, bravery, boredom and perhaps sometimes weakness. Only a few of the 35 men previously freed have described what life was like in the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese camps.

Navy Commander Charles Klusmann, 39, was the first American serviceman to be captured in Laos, where the Communists say they still hold seven military prisoners. Klusmann, shot down on a reconnaissance mission in June 1964, was held for 3 1/2 months before he escaped. His experience, though brief, may have been typical of treatment in the earlier stages of the war. After he was captured, Klusmann was marched through villages for the populace to gawk at and scorn. Last week in Atlanta, where he testified before a Governors' committee on veterans' benefits, Klusmann observed: "Returning prisoners really shouldn't be put in parades because they have already had a lot of people just coming out to look at them like animals."

For two months, then, Klusmann was kept in a single room, allowed out only occasionally to bathe in a stream. He suffered from dysentery and other diseases brought on by a diet that included rats and dogmeat stew. "Your physical state just deteriorates," he said. "I lost 40 pounds." Eventually he slipped into a period of languor: "You get detached from reality. You wonder, is this all a dream? They keep telling you that you were killed when you were shot down and that is what your family was told."

Navy Lieut. Norris Charles, 27, was shot down in 1971, and spent 8 1/2 months in a North Vietnamese camp before he and two other flyers were released last September. Although released prisoners have been commanded not to discuss life in the camps until all the men are freed, Charles offered some glimpses of the experience in a newspaper interview. He had expected to be beaten by villagers, but he found them oddly kind and curious about him. "Some of them would come in and feel my hair, my Afro," he said, "and the kids would come in and give me cigarettes." The girls giggled when he was ordered to remove his flight suit and revealed that he was wearing red drawers.

Charles was taken blindfolded to a prison in Hanoi, installed in a room about 15 by 15 ft., furnished with two desks and a wooden plank bed with a boarded-up window. There he was to spend the first 36 days in solitary confinement. He was immediately issued personal supplies--a cup, toothpaste, tooth brush, shirts, trousers, blankets, a teapot. The food was opulent enough by P.O.W. standards--sweet milk and half a loaf of bread in the morning, thick potato or cabbage soup for lunch, along with soybean cakes, or fish cakes, and sometimes a ration of pork. Later in the day a third meal was served.

When he was allowed to talk with his fellow prisoners, Charles said, they discussed the war and their hopes for a quick end to it. "The old guys," he said, "who had been there for many years, called that feeling 'new guy optimism.' Every time a new guy gets shot down, he comes in and says the war is going to be over in six months." Charles and the others were permitted regular exercise periods, eventually received playing cards and chess sets. "They told us if there was anything we wanted, they would bring it in," Charles said. If isolation and mistreatment were part of the others' stories, Charles and his companions at least had some amenities. "I was able to keep up pretty well with what was happening in the world," he told TIME's Leo Janos last week, "by reading English-language editions of Russian and Chinese newspapers."

Air Force Colonel Norris M. Overly, 43, told a bleaker story of the five months he spent in the "Hanoi Hilton" and other North Vietnamese camps. He and his fellow prisoners were about 30 lbs. underweight, he said, because of a thin diet of watery soup and bread. During his confinement, said Overly, each tiny cell was equipped with a loudspeaker that broadcast "endless hours of propaganda." "We were not treated as prisoners of war," Overly noted. "We were treated as criminals." Regulations posted in the cells began "The criminal will..."

Until all of the U.S. prisoners are out and have told their stories, it is difficult to compare their plight with that of other captives in other wars. No one yet knows how many died in the Communist camps--just as no one can say how many Communists may have died in such South Vietnamese prisons as Con Son, with its famous "tiger cages." P.O.W.s have never fared especially well in any war, except perhaps for some in World War I's Grand Illusion, the classic movie that chronicles the remnants of chivalry in an otherwise brutal conflict. In the American Revolution, for example, thousands died in British captivity. In Civil War camps like Andersonville, Americans treated other Americans far worse than some foreign enemies have. In Korea, an astonishing 63% of American prisoners --6,451 men--died in enemy hands; the P.O.W.s there endured long frozen marches, wholesale torture tactics and a cruelly systematic program of brainwashing.

The Viet Nam P.O.W.s are in many ways an anomaly. From the start, they were relatively few. Most of them were officers and professional soldiers; they were not the hordes of trench-fighting enlisted men who have often suffered a massive barbarity. In contrast to other wars, Viet Nam's intricacies turned the prisoners into a political and diplomatic as well as a military issue, and their treatment by the enemy seems to have fluctuated, generally for the better, as they assumed their extraordinary symbolic importance.

No Charges. The Korean experience set off a crisis of conscience in the U.S.--a debate that now seems almost quaint. Only 21 out of the 10,218 American captives became turncoats; 192 of the returnees were thought to be collaborators. Yet the episode caused speculation that America's youth had turned physically soft and morally flaccid, a somewhat exaggerated idea considering the suffering involved. The experience led President Dwight Eisenhower to promulgate his six-point Code of Conduct for P.O.W.s, pledging prisoners to keep faith with comrades and country during captivity. Among other things, it said: "I will make no oral or written statements disloyal to my country and its allies or harmful to their cause."

There might yet be recriminations regarding the conduct of today's returning prisoners. Some instances of personal betrayal might eventually surface. But the military was in a distinctly forgiving mood regarding the antiwar broadcasts and statements that some prisoners made during their confinement. The Pentagon announced last week that no charges would be brought against the men for such performances. If the Administration planned to hold draft resisters to the letter of the law, granting no amnesty, it had evidently decided that the prisoners have already suffered enough.

So, too, have their families. Each made its own accommodations--women learned to live with the experience of being neither wives nor widows, and of being both fathers and mothers. Some of them have achieved over the years an independence and autonomy that might even make it difficult for their husbands when they are reunited.

Most of the wives displayed an extraordinary strength, even though the war deprived many of them of the early years of their marriages. Lorraine Shumaker was a 21-year-old, married for a year, with an infant son, when her husband Robert, a Navy jet pilot, left for duty in Indochina. Now, eight years later, he would be coming home in the first group of prisoners, to their house in La Jolla, Calif. His eight-year-old son Grant, who has no memory of his father, planned to install himself in a cardboard carton and pop out as a jack-in-the-box surprise when his father walks in the door. Sorting through her husband's clothes the other day in preparation for his homecoming, Lorraine Shumaker reflected: "The styles tell the story: Ivy League suits with those thin lapels, pencil-thin ties, button-down collars on his shirts. I didn't have the heart to throw the stuff out. I sent it to the cleaners instead."

Marty Halyburton waited in Atlanta for her husband Porter, a Navy Lieut. Commander who has been a prisoner since 1965. She was flooded with mail --as were other P.O.W. wives--from people wearing Halyburton's P.O.W. bracelet in a program started in the summer of 1970 by VIVA (Voices In Vital America). "When he left," she said, "I was just a 23-year-old bride, and I followed Porter everywhere." In the past seven years, she has learned to manage for herself--moving three times, buying and selling two cars, raising their daughter Dabney. At week's end, Marty learned that her husband was also among the first group released. She was waiting to tell him, among other things, about the strange looks she was getting at a Baptist-nursery-school parents' meeting. Finally, one mother demanded to know why her husband was in jail. Dabney, it turned out, had told her little classmates that her father was a "prisoner."

In Wellfleet, Mass., Carol North and her four daughters prepared for the homecoming of the man they had not seen for 6 1/2 years. For three years after Air Force Lieut. Colonel Kenneth North was shot down, the family did not even know he was alive.

Amy, now eleven, remembers about her father only that "he's got blue eyes and used to tickle me." Says Carol North: "There's no use kidding ourselves, I'm sure Ken has changed. I can see from his letters that he has grown more introspective." She also worries that the enormous changes in her daughters may be difficult for him to handle. "The girls have grown from obedient little children to thinking young adults," she says. "Ken's coming home to kids who are going to question and challenge him. He's going to want his pristine girls home at 10."

The most painful waiting was done by those 1,300 families whose men are not on the lists, who are still missing in action. In Puyallup, Wash., Mrs. Emma Hagerman remains convinced that her husband, Air Force Colonel Robert Hagerman, is alive somewhere in Indochina, even though he has been missing for nearly six years. "One day I was feeling depressed," she said last week, "and I remembered that if you want a message, you should open the Bible and put your ringer on a verse." She opened the book to Jeremiah, which she had never read before. The text said: "And they shall come again from the land of the enemy." If Hagerman does not appear during the 60-day release period, his wife is thinking of getting a visa and, armed with his photograph, questioning the people around Bac Ninh, where Hagerman's F-105 went down.

For such families, the bitterness of Viet Nam would go on. For those whose men were on the list of 562 P.O.W.s to be released, it was nearly over. In a Baltimore suburb, Andrea Rander and her two daughters were all set for Army Sergeant First Class Donald Rander, a prisoner since 1968. He was not in the first group, but they expected him soon. To welcome him home, Andrea planned to give back to her husband the wedding ring he had left behind for safekeeping five years ago. When he got out of Valley Forge General Hospital, she would fix him his favorite meal of roast duck, beer and chocolate cake. His daughter Page, 6, would formally present him with her homecoming gift: a small Rip Van Winkle doll with a red wig, inscribed: "I'm Ready for You."

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