In Los Angeles: Prisoners of War

By James Willwerth

Overhead, huge glass chandeliers hover like Cobra gunships in a white tropical sun. The Los Angeles Marriott Hotel ballroom is a sea of white military formal wear, pink and blue evening dresses, candles and carnations over red carpeting. Nelson Riddle's orchestra swings into What Kind of Fool Am I? as Sammy Davis Jr. hails "our mutual friend" Richard Nixon, then reflects on the song: "I don't think anyone in this room has to re-examine their lives."

This is the fifth-year reunion of U.S. prisoners of war returned from Viet Nam. The guests and their wives have flown into Los Angeles on "space available" air flights and are camped gratis in 300 Marriott Hotel rooms for a weekend of caucusing and quiet carousal. Asked again and again by reporters and well-wishers, the P.O.W.s insist that they are here only for fun, not politics. Yes, we're doing just fine, most of them say. "We're all back in the mainstream," silver-haired Navy Captain Howard Rutledge beams. "We've been to the worst place in the world. Every place else is a step up."

You only sense the pain and isolation of the men in defiant yet oddly downcast expressions, in hushed stories told in hotel rooms, in wistful asides about other men's wives who remained faithful. Yet through the weekend, anger and a tinge of self-pity take nothing away from their evident pride and courage.

"This hand," bespectacled George Day, 53, is saying Saturday morning as he gestures at a half-closed fist, the right one, attached to a misshapen forearm. Day, now a wealthy Florida lawyer, was an Air Force major, a downed Phantom pilot. In 1967 a crowd of Vietnamese villagers watched as a rope was tied around his elbows and tightened with a foot jammed into his back. A ferret-faced man the P.O.W.s nicknamed "the Rodent," seized Day's right arm and twisted until the cracked bones broke through the flesh. The bone, gaping from Day's arm like a jagged tooth, remained untreated for four months--until Day's half-dead cellmate, Navy Lieut. Commander John McCain, another torture victim, regained consciousness sufficiently to fashion, out of his own bandages and a stray bamboo stick, a cast for Day.

"You can see what a lousy job I did," grins McCain, a sassy, prematurely white-haired Navy career man sitting on a soft couch in the glittering Middle American chic of the Marriott's split-level lobby. McCain spent 42 months in solitary confinement, partly because his father, Admiral John McCain, happened to be Navy Commander in Chief for the Pacific. "Until the day I went down, I lived under my father's shadow," McCain explains. "Incarceration relieved me of that burden--he couldn't affect my future there."

Viet Nam's P.O.W.s have survived better as official patriots and readjusted to civilian life more successfully than some of their Korean War predecessors, perhaps because most of them, before the fall, were trained pilots and college-educated military career men. Most agree that their time of torture and isolation taught them much about self-reliance and the importance of thinking small. Navy Lieut. (j.g.) Joe Mobley, 36, a thin, balding man who greeted his friends on the first morning of the reunion wearing reverse-heel Earth Shoes and dungarees, still acutely remembers what seem like almost microscopic moments of prisoner austerity. "Your senses become keener," he explains. "You can feel the effect of an aspirin. You can smell a bar of Dial soap at 400 yards."

Laird Guttersen, 52, an ebullient, bigboned retired Air Force colonel, remembers the day he "broke" as if it were yesterday. He had already watched his hands turn black "like German sausage" from tourniquet-tight binding; then ropes around his elbows were tightened until his shoulder blades slowly jammed into his spine. "At that moment," he remembers, "I would have thrown my kids into a fire to make it stop." Guttersen was on his knees and felt "psychically dirty, like I'd been swimming in a cesspool" and feared he might give up secrets about clandestine intelligence operations. He decided to try to kill himself by running headfirst at the blood-spattered torture room wall. Then a guard hit him and sent him flying at the wall, where he saw KEEP THE FAITH, BABY scratched in the mud and blood. Soon after that, his captors began demanding antiwar statements rather than military secrets.

Inevitably such experiences must come home. Laird Guttersen's blood pressure was so low after three months of torture, complicated by pneumonia, that parts of him lost all feeling when he remained still more than ten minutes. At night, instead of sleeping he used to lie in a feverish trance, shifting to stay alive, timing himself by the half-hour chimes of a distant clock. "When Laird came home we couldn't sleep in the same bed at first," remembers his wife Virginia, a frail, dark-blue-eyed wife who waited. "He shifted a quarter turn every five to ten minutes."

Andrea Rander's husband Donald, then an Army sergeant first class, was captured in Hue during Tet 1968 and taken to Hanoi. She raised their children alone for five years. A few weeks before he returned, a reporter interviewed her at home in Maryland. The reporter left uneventfully, then the telephone rang. "I forgot one question," she remembers him saying. "Do you have any boyfriends, and are you planning to divorce your husband?" Andrea Rander is a petite black woman. Standing beside her husband at a reception sponsored by Braniff Airlines, she glares angrily at me, yet another reporter. "I wanted to see that reporter many times after that," she explodes. "I wanted to say, 'Hey, look at us -- we're making it!' " Rander watches proudly and adds: "We said, we're not going to become a statistic."

A majority of the P.O.W.s, perhaps as high as 70%, in fact, did become divorce statistics. Virginia Guttersen remembers one wife who rushed out on the tarmac to embrace her husband and found she didn't recognize him at all. A fortyish woman, the new wife of a P.O.W., confides: "There are definitely two factions here, the old and the new. You can tell the new wives: young and pretty and happy and in love."

The P.O.W.s report that dealing with civilians is still a touchy business. They either gush and coo or start asking questions the P.O.W.s don't want to answer. Or are abysmally, often hilariously ignorant. Guttersen, who has now retired and is taking courses at the University of Arizona, found his young fellow students interested. "We heard you were a P.O.W.," a girl once said to him. Gutter-sen said yes. "Where?" asked the girl. "In Hanoi," said Guttersen. "Is that in Korea?" the girl asked.

It is a difficult thing to contemplate the likelihood that one spent five years be ing tortured for nothing. As they cluster together around the Marriott's eight bars and omelet-shaped pool, the P.O.W.s seem compelled to approve of the life they found at home. Nearly all of them are confused, embarrassed or annoyed by their strange hero status. Says John McCain: "It doesn't take a helluva lot of talent to get shot down." Virginia Guttersen ex plains: "To a military man, the P.O.W. is a loser, the guy who didn't complete his mission. The Government made them heroes. It was all they had."

Sunday night: 300 "heroes" and their wives, old and new, are winding down the weekend. They have stood and cheered as Ronald Reagan declared that Americans should "never again" go to war "unless we intend to win." Magicians and stand-up comics have sought to amuse. A press release has been circulated announcing that California Governor Jerry Brown will get the "Benedict Arnold Citizenship Award" for appointing ex-antiwar Activist Tom Hayden to the state's new solar energy panel. And now Tony Bennett is closing the show with a sad, silky version of Autumn Leaves. Off to the side, watching them, one begins to sense in some measure what they have endured, and still endure. They perfectly illustrate some lines from John le Carre's The Looking Glass War: "Nothing ever bridged the gulf between the man who went and the man who stayed behind."

--James Willwerth

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