The burden and costs of American amnesia: New book investigates ‘Dissenting POWs’
Two days after Christmas, 1970, CBS and NBC aired clips of an interview with two POWs–senior naval pilots, one who’d flown in Korea and both of whom opposed the ongoing Vietnam War. Historians estimate that 30 to 50% of POWs felt the same. Yet, while POWs loom large in American public memory of Vietnam, the very existence of these dissenting POWs has been virtually banished.
What’s been forgotten, what’s been remembered—or invented—in its place, how that happened and why it still matters as we struggle to withdraw from Afghanistan half a century later are explored in a new book, “Dissenting POWs: From Vietnam’s Hoa Lo Prison to America Today.” It’s co-authored by Tom Wilber, the son of one of the POWs interviewed on national tv, and Jerry Lembcke, a Vietnam veteran whose 1998 book “The Spitting Image” debunked and explored the origins of the widely believed myth of antiwar protesters spitting on returning veterans, and who’s written several other books debunking Vietnam War myths.
Random Lengths interviewed Lembcke about his new book, starting with a question about how the new book compares with his first foray. The interview has been edited for clarity.
Random Lengths: I want to start off by making a comparison and see if this makes sense to you. In “The Spitting Image” you examined the widely believed myth of antiwar protesters spitting on returning veterans and you said there were two ways that the memory of anti-war veterans have been repressed—first by pathologizing returning veterans and then by rewriting history to represent them as being spat upon by those whom anti-war veterans actually joined with.
“Dissenting POWs” seems to argue that the existence of antiwar POWs was repressed in more complex ways—first, by promoting the prisoner-at-war myth, grounded in early American captivity narratives; second, via the narrative of brainwashing that emerge from the Korean War; third, via the pathologizing narrative you dealt with in your book on PTSD; and fourth, the distracting fantasy of missing POWs, which you dealt with in your book, “CNN’s Tailwind Tale.” In both books, in both cases, it wasn’t just a matter of forgetting what happened, but replacing what happened with alternative narratives. Is that a fair assessment of your argument?
Jerry Lembcke: I think that’s a fair assessment, yes. Both books at some level are studies in social memory and forgetting. One of my points is that we as a people collectively we don’t just forget, but it’s that the memories that we have get pushed off screen, so to speak, by something related, but something different and oftentimes a kind of reversal of that memory that we have.
For example, the war in Vietnam was lost and in many ways the memory of the War in Vietnam has been lost by the American public, and it was displaced by the idea of the war at home—that the real war was not in Vietnam all along, the real war was at home. The real war was about liberals in Congress who had kind of emasculated American culture through the 1960s by government funding programs and so forth, and that then during the war, specifically, liberals in Congress tied one hand behind their back, not allowing us to fight the war that needs to be fought, and radicals in the streets demoralized US fighters in Vietnam and gave aid and comfort to the enemy by their opposition in the street. And surprisingly now, or at least when I started to work on these projects, that’s really what Americans remember.
Time and time again, people will come up to me and say. “Oh, you’re a Vietnam veteran. Thanks for your service. And then I’ll say something. But then they oftentimes just cut to “It was really terrible what happened to you guys when you came home.” And that just stops me. Like the fact that I’m a Vietnam veteran has to do with my homecoming experience because that’s what they know. That’s what they’ve been led to believe. That’s kind of what made the Hollywood screens in the post-Vietnam War era, and for Americans what they see on television and what they see on a movie screen is in large part what they remember.
RLN: So, let’s begin by looking at the reality that’s been obscured. You deal primarily with two groups of prominent antiwar POWs, two officers and eight enlisted men, both of whom faced legal action on their return. What distinguished the two pilots, Edison Miller and Gene Wilber?
Lembcke: Class. Class background. Both Miller and Wilber were from modest backgrounds. Wilber was born into a sharecropper farm family, worked as a farmhand on the rented family farm when he was young. Miller was orphaned as a child, grew up in Iowa. Neither of them went to college, which is interesting. They both enlisted soon out of high school in the Navy in the late 1940s, just after World War II. They worked their way up through the ranks of the Navy and they were both outstanding. Both in sort of basic physical skills but also testing very highly on mental skills and they then they may be made it on their own into officer rank, and both became high-ranking pilots.
That background, that professional trajectory set them apart from their peers. All of the other pilots–as far as I know—were at least college graduates. Many of them were graduates of the military academies—Annapolis for the Navy pilots or the Air Force Academy. These schools were hard to get into. Many of these guys were from elite families and of course it’s through their political connections that they got into the schools. Which isn’t to say they weren’t smart and capable people, but they resented people like Wilber and Miller. It was a sort of “How did you guys get here? I never heard of you at the Academy. What the heck.”
Not only that, but again Wilber and Miller were very accomplished as pilots. They had done as much, maybe surpassed some of these other pilots. So, they were resented.
Cutting to another take on this, my co-author Tom Wilber and I find that the dissenting pilots like Gene Wilber and Ed Miller, they had a more empathetic identity with the Vietnamese because they can recognize—particularly being from rural backgrounds—they had some greater sympathy and empathy with the Vietnamese then did the more elite pilots.
These pilots flew off aircraft carriers if they were in the Navy or if they were Air Force, they flew off bases in Taiwan or off very large airbases in South Vietnam—very large and very well protected. They had bowling alleys, they had swimming pools, they had offices. When these guys got shot down, they had never met another Vietnamese before. Miller and Wilber did not either, but again they had this kind of class background that enabled them to make some emotional, psychological connection with these people and understand the predicament that the South Vietnamese were in.
RLN: Okay so you write that their most important exercise of dissent was through an interview with Canadian journalist Micheal Maclear, which was broadcast on NBC and CBS. Tell me about that, what was the message conveyed in that interview?
Lembcke: Maclear seemed to have been after the conditions under which the POWs were living in Vietnam. He did a kind of panoramic, silent videotaping of their rooms in which they lived—and by the way, at the time he portrayed them as rooms, not cells. And that was a real eye-opener for me. Then, when I was reading the memoirs of the POWs, by golly, even in their own memoirs, they oftentimes referred to them as rooms, not cells. How many Americans have ever known that?
McClure did this interview in December 1970 and Christmas furnishings were out, you saw that. Then he sat down with two of the pilots, Wilber and Bob Schweitzer was the other one. It was mostly about their conditions of how often we got mail from home, how often they got other things, like candy and clean underwear and things like that. The tape that he made for the CBC then was picked up by two US television networks and was broadcast on the news in the States.
RLN: Can you talk about how it was framed in the US?
Lembcke: Charles, Collingswood was one of the narrators—I think for CBS—and he really framed it as a piece of communist propaganda. He said—paraphrasing, we quote directly in the book—“What you, the viewers, are about to see is communist propaganda. And you are about to be told that our fighters now in prison in Hanoi are living in rather ordinary comfortable conditions. But we know that that is not true. But, here is what this fellow Maclear wants you to believe.” And then we see the tape and we listen to the interview and then Collingswood closes with some kind of bookend with what he started—“What you have just seen is some very clever propaganda.”
RLN: This wasn’t their only action but it was sort of, but brought them into direct conflict with the Senior Ranking Officers who set up an impromptu chain of command. What did they do to create the now familiar narrative of the hard-core holdout POW?
Lembcke: It’s a rather complicated story actually. In the first year of pilot captures, 1964, there’s not even any claim, even by these guys that they were tortured. Then later, maybe ’66, ’67, some claim they were tortured, some say they weren’t. We also know that after about 1969 nobody claims to have been tortured or at least very few. So, there’s a sort a window period.
Here’s what we think happened. Some of this comes out of Craig Howes’ book “Voices of the Vietnam POWs.” He thinks that this small group of about a half-dozen Senior Ranking Officers (SROs) felt like they had compromised their hard-coreness by giving statements to the Vietnamese, about the illegality of the war, the impropriety of the war. By the time all these younger, newer pilots began to come in, and people who been captured in the South began to move north and they began to come into the prison system, these the senior ranking officers—this very small group—begin to feel like “What if they found out that I said this or I said that, and then some of these newer guys do the same thing? And when we all get home, they say ‘Well, you know, Senior Ranking Officer John Stockdale did this? Or Jeremiah Denton did?’”
So, these guys made up this fairytale, that “Boy, we really had it rough in the old days when we got here. You guys now are coming into a pretty soft situation, but we had the shit beat out of us when we came in. And yeah, to get some relief from that, by golly we said some things that we know we shouldn’t have said, but we went right back into the torture chamber. We really toughed it out.” And in a kind of finger-shaking manner, they said to these newbies, “And that’s what you guys better do. Because if you don’t forget were going to get you with charges when you come home. We’re going to charge you with collaboration. We’re going to discredit you in view of the public.”
Craig Howe uses this term that a “virtual curriculum” was constructed by these SROs that they enforced on the newer arrivees. And I think Howe uses the word to memorize, to adopt this as their story too. “Yes, I came in 1966, and boy did they beat the devil out of me.” So, what Tom Wilber and I say our book is that’s the beginning of the construction of the mythical hero POW, and that’s what comes home, that’s kind of what gets implanted in the public presentation, and that’s what sticks in the American public memory of the POWs.
RLN: So how did they respond to the McLaren interview? How did they deal with Miller and Wilber more generally?
Lembcke: By isolating them. By a kind of iron fist and velvet glove. They tried to win them over, early on—”Why don’t you join the club? We have to have solidarity here. We’ll all be better off if we stick together,” and so forth. And when that didn’t work—or it was kind of back and forth—they would ostracize them, they would badmouth them to the new arrivees, say “Stay away from Wilber and Miller” and “Don’t have anything to do with them.” So, we saw it kind of go back and forth.
Eventually they got more hard-core. Eventually there were actually threats that were made. I don’t know if they were made face-to-face directly to them, but there was a kind of license given to other hard-core people to “get Wilber and Miller if you can,” a kind of thinly veiled threat of physical accident incidents or even more. Apparently even after they got back to the states, that threat was reiterated.
RLN: There were also charges brought by Rear Admiral Stockdale. What happened with that?
Lembcke: There were charges that were that were made but then they were dismissed. Just a little bit of background the military officially decided rather early on that there would be no charges. That would be destructive to the corps, that it would involve too many other POWs being brought in as witnesses or to testify and it would not be worth the trouble. But they left the door open for some POWs to make charges against other POWs and so that’s what Stockdale did. But those charges also were dismissed a few months after they came home. And charges were also brought against eight enlisted men known as the Peace Committee.
RLN: Who were the Peace Committee in terms of their race and class background?
Lembcke: That is one of the most interesting stories in the book.
These were people who were ground troops in the south. They were Marines and Army people. they were captured in the south and then they were brought, they were detained as prisoners in the south, but slowly moved north and they landed in Hanoi in 1971, I think. As you alluded to in your introduction, other historians who looked into this—and Tom and I quote—conclude that 30 to 50% of the POWs were against the war, or we have reason to believe spoke out in some way or other express their discontent. In contrast these eight were self-identified as a Peace Committee, and then charged.
Five or six of the eight were black, Chicano, one who we dedicate the book to, Al Riate, was born on a Native American reservation in California. His mother was Native American, his father was Filipino. Only one of the eight was from a middle-class background. The other person we dedicate the book to his Bob Chenoweth was white working-class from Portland Oregon. He and Riate both joined Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda Indochina Peace Campaign after the war.
What was really interesting about the story, taking a step back, these eight all clearly identified with the Vietnamese early on. Their hearts were won over particularly by the kids. James Daly was a black Army soldier from Brooklyn and it sounds like his heart was melted when he got to Vietnam and he met these kids, as he says in his book he wrote with co-author when he got back. We quote from the book, cite the book and he very early was expressing his reservations about the war. Even beyond his opposition to the war, he realized he shouldn’t be here, and he made a big mistake by coming to Vietnam. So, we tell their stories in colorful sketches–a page or two on each of the eight, and it’s just great reading.
Now one of the eight, Abel Larry Kavanaugh, committed suicide shortly before the case was dismissed, which then cleared the way for them being the cast as mental health casualties of their years in captivity.” How did this fit into the larger framework of portraying antiwar GIs and veterans as psychologically wounded, traumatized?
Lembcke: First of all, a bit more on Kavanaugh. He was afraid that they’re going to be convicted, and he committed suicide before the charges were eventually dropped. And his suicide was a kind of trigger for a change of narrative.
It was as if the press looked at this, they got squeamish, and maybe the military got squeamish, too, and thought charging these guys as criminal—that is to say, criminalizing dissent—is kind of un-American. And criminalizing dissent in this case is not a very empathetic way to treat these guys. So, what other narratives are there out there? If we were live, a lot of listeners might be saying, “Well, if you’re not criminal, how about what if you’re psychologically needy? You did things, you’re kind of acting out.”
That was the narrative the press picked up on, which was already in play, by that meaning the larger population of Vietnam Veterans who’d been coming home for years who by 1968, 1969 were coming out against the war as veterans. They had formed Vietnam Veterans Against the War, by some accounts, they became the most effective contingent of the antiwar movement. They had been there, they had done that, they had seen it. You can’t argue with these guys, they’re saying the war is wrong.
So pro-war people and the press, the New York Times in particular, began to repackage this image of antiwar Vietnam veterans and began to—here’s the phrase, “medicalize their dissent.” They’re not criminal, certainly, but going forward somehow America is going to have to come to terms with the fact that our warriors came home as anti-warriors. So what are we going to do with these guys? You’ve already used the term, it pathologized them. That’s an empathetic way of dealing with them. It’s a sympathetic way of dealing with them. But it’s a way of bracketing their dissent.
Maybe we don’t want to legitimate what they’re saying, maybe what they’re saying is kind of cathartic. They’re saying these things as a way of dealing with their own stress, and their own trauma, but we shouldn’t really listen to as a political voice. So, with dissenting POWs let’s put them into the same into the same basket. Let’s psychologize them, psychologize their political views. And then that was kind of the end of the dissenting POW story, it kind of fades into the rest of the dissenting Vietnam Veteran story.
RLN: While the traumatized POW/veteran emerged as a narrative after the Vietnam War, the brainwashed POW preceded it, coming out of the Korean War. The specter of brainwashing was so pervasive, it even played a role in preventing POWs from playing a more crucial role in the anti-war movement. Could you lay out what was involved there?
Lembcke: First of all, brainwashing is a kind of psychologizing, too. And pilots in particular in that generation a lot of these pilots had been pilots in Korea and a lot of Americans came into the Vietnam War years really speak in the stories of the Korean War POWs who got brainwashed some of them so brainwashed that they didn’t want to come home after the war in Korea. This was really, really on the minds of the American people and it was really really on the minds of particularly pilots when they went off to war in Vietnam. We have quotes from one at least saying, “I knew if I was ever shut down and captured by golly, they would never brainwash me. That would never work on me.”
So, this was a really big deal. It was so much on their minds and it’s almost subtext then as the Vietnam War POW experience. And so these SROs, they’re constantly not only fearing that they themselves might get brainwashed, but they’re very fearful that their underlings will be brainwashed. Because, because of the class background, they really believed that these enlisted men, captured in the south, are quote-unquote “men of weak character.” I mean, why else would they not have gone to college, right? These are people with deficient character, deficient manhood, who are very vulnerable to communist propaganda.
RLN: That was interesting, but what surprised me was the degree to which brainwashing fears played a role in raising tensions between the POWs and the antiwar movement. What about that?
Lembcke: That tension came to a head in 1967, when there was a delegation of antiwar activists who went to Hanoi. The delegation was led by Tom Hayden and it included other SDS people, and Carol MacEldowney was one of them and she kept a very detailed journal that was published a couple years ago by UMass Press, and we make use of it an excellent window on what these SDS people were thinking. They went there not being sure they would meet with me any pilots, but then when they were allowed to meet pilots, their immediate thought, “Oh, are the Vietnamese letting us see pilots who have been brainwashed?” And, “How can we trust what the pilots are saying?”
They were also fearful that they might get brainwashed. And I think one of the best quotes that Tom Wilber and I have in our book is that they were afraid that if they came home to the States and reported what they really saw and what they really heard, and what they really believed, that they would be dismissed as having been brainwashed. So while they were still in Vietnam, they begin talking about, “OK, how should we deal with this? How should we how should we report this?” And that the density of that got increased by the fact that some of them thought that they were subjected to brainwashing, that the Vietnamese were trying to brainwashed them, these antiwar activists who had come would come there.
RLN: You write that “The coup de grâce to American memory of the POW experience was dealt by the rumors that some POWs had been left behind when the United States departed Vietnam.” How did these fantasies not only distract from the reality of POW dissent, but re-cast them as villains in some cases?
Lembcke: Back when I was talking about this earlier, I was saying that the image of the pathologized POW then bleed leads into that of other Vietnam veterans and I ended that by saying that’s kind of the end of the story, you’re reminding me that that there is another facet to this. Shortly after almost 600 POWs come home in February and March 1973, not long after that, the rumors began to circulate that not all of our POWs came home. Some of them got left behind. Where are they? Where are some of these POWs? And so that then becomes a story the press really begins to pick up on.
That continues—1973, 1983, 1993—I’m skipping way ahead here, but in in 1998, CNN broadcast a story about Operation Tailwind, a secret raid into Laos in 1970. CNN did an 18 month investigative report, and broadcast that on this raid US Special Forces used sarin nerve gas to kill GIs who had defected to the North Vietnamese.
Well, CNN soon after retracted that story as insupportable by the facts. I wrote another book about this–where does a story like this come from? And who believed it? I got a tape of the CNN broadcast and listened to this tape, and one of the supposedly eyewitnesses on this raid says, “We saw these Americans being held in this camp in Laos. We don’t know if they’re defectors or POWs.” And then at the end of this tape, Peter Arnett, legendary war correspondent who does the voiceover for the CNN broadcast, says, “How do we know, no POWs were killed on this raid?” This is 1998 and this is still out there. This is speculating that US Special Forces on this raid in 1970 or ’71 actually killed US POWs.
Now, as it turned out, and i didn’t know this I wrote when I wrote this book—my book is called “CNN’s Tailwind Tale”—but there’s this quite large conspiracist community out there that believes that not all of our POWs ever came home, and that some of them were killed on secret operations like Operation Tailwind that CNN reported. Those people are out there. They still believe this. So, the dissenters themselves then get associated with this kind of conspiratorial stuff—enemy behind the gates.
The Republican Party still runs on the idea that we lost the war in Vietnam due to betrayal on the home front. We didn’t lose to the Vietnamese, we lost to Washington insiders. Closely aligned with that imagery is these dissenting POWs, who were certainly behind the lines, they were off screen. Nobody really knows what they did, who they talked to, who they collaborated with, what kind of information that they shared. So, they’re kind of accoutrements in this larger betrayal narrative that feeds into this conspiracist narrative about POWs who supposedly never came home.
RLN: Another angle you write that “Casting POW dissenters as sadsack losers precluded their inclusion in the great American captivity narrative at the center of the nation’s founding mythology, wherein the captive hero remains a prisoner at war loyal to the commission on which he was sent,” but you note that the captivity narrative was always questionable from its beginnings. Why is that so?
Lembcke: Anthropologists study the heck out of the captivity narratives. Two things on this. One is that a lot of the European settlers in the 17th century who were who were taken captive and held as captives really didn’t need to be held as captive because they identified with the Native People. They didn’t want to come home. And the most interesting stories on that are women, the wives, the girlfriends, the women would get captured by the Indians and then they would decide that they wanted to stay. Captivity narratives were about the dangers outside the gates, the Native People or the Indians who are out there. But they were also about the “inner Indian,” the other within the collective self or even within the individual self, that kind of wanted to be outside the gates, over the fence, so to speak, and was distrustful.
So these Protestant fire and brimstone preachers were always trying to keep people inside the fences, and they would always use the danger of the Native others as a reason why you shouldn’t go out of the fence. And what anthropologists discover is that the preachers were also afraid that if people got out and really met the others on the outside, and got to know the Native People, they wouldn’t be so afraid.
We can see that this is what the SROs in Hao Lo prison in Hanoi were afraid of. They prohibited their underlings from learning the Vietnamese language. They said, “Look you take lessons in Vietnamese while you’re being held here prisoner. This is one of the things were going to charge you with for collaboration with the enemy, or giving aid and comfort to the enemy.” So they disallowed this.
Why? I write it’s the same thing with the captivity narratives. It might be Craig Howe who uses the term “the white gook.” They were afraid of the white gook. They were afraid of the inner Vietnamese kind of surfacing, and these people, their underlings, again particularly these men captured in the south, these men of “weak character” they will begin to think, “Hmmm. What’s wrong with these Vietnamese people anyway? I kinda like them. I kinda like their ways.”
I just want to say a bit more here. Bob Chenoweth tells us about his stay as a captive and Al Riate. They lived with the Vietnamese in the south as captives rather freely. They went out gathering food unguarded sometimes. And they went out to villagers near the camp where they were being held. They would go to other villages where food was donated to them for them, the prisoners, as well as the cadre who were running the camp. They kinda lived a Vietnamese lifestyle. My reading on it is that they kinda liked it.
Bob Chenoweth tells this great story about Al Riate who walked away one day and walked into it a North Vietnamese artillery camp. Riate had learned a little Vietnamese and he walked in and sat down and had tea with the North Vietnamese, who then by the end of the day, took him back to his camp. But it comes off as just totally, totally innocent.
RLN: In the last chapter you write about specific examples of those is continued in the spirit of the dissenting POWs you talk about one of those examples and how they relate back to the Vietnam POW experience?
Lembcke: The most dramatic one is Chuck Searcy a Vietnam veteran who goes back to Vietnam and founds an organization to find landmines and unexploded ordnance in Quang Tri Province near the former DMZ [demilitarized zone] where – years after the war, peasant farmers are still being wounded and killed when they hit these unexploded ordinances. He starts this organization which trains the Vietnamese to do this work as well, to find these things and detonate them safely. He’s been written up in the New York Times, and become a celebrated figure. I’m not sure he identifies so much with the POW dissenters as kind of with the broader antiwar veteran dissent.
RLN: At the end of your introduction you write, “The banishment of POW dissent from memory leaves a void in American political culture where new generations of uniformed war resisters will look for role models, and civilian activists will look for allies in their efforts to end U.S. wars of aggression. Filling that void is the mission of this book.” But isn’t there also a need for military and political leaders to learn something as well? After 20 years in Afghanistan doesn’t our own establishment, at some level, realize there’s got to be a better way?
Lembcke: Sure they do. My own thoughts on that is that we need to find a different way of exercising our economic and cultural assets internationally, a post-imperialist life for America. We need to find a way of making peace with the rest of the world, living in peace with the rest of the world, and the antiwar veterans are a way of doing that, of taking a leadership role in that.
One of the things I hope our book does is cause other people who’ve been in the military to identify with the POW dissenters. My hope, frankly, is that some other of the people who were POWs in Vietnam and who were among that 30 and 50% who expressed in some way or another opposition to the war, while they were, but then went silent when we got home. I hope some of them will see this book and say, “God, I’m 85 years old. You know I really think that I should say I was part of this too, and I really should have spoken out before and I’m glad to speak out now.” Even if only one would do that it would be a huge help. Of course, it would be an even greater help if they lent their voices and told us something that we don’t know about what went on. That would be just a huge, huge service to us.
RLN: Finally, what’s the most important question I haven’t asked? And what’s the answer?
Lembcke: I have a good answer to that. There was a film that came out in 2006, called “Sir! No Sir!” a great film, it was a great inspiration to the current generation of people in the military, to young people. It’s been shown thousand times on college campuses. I know because I get invited to college campuses, I’m in the film as the author of my book “The Spitting Image.” So I put I get dragged along with the film to talk about talk about the film and the veterans’ antiwar movement.
But why are there why are there no dissenting POWs in this film? Why is that part of the G.I. and veteran antiwar movement not told in the film? It’s a question that i want to ask filmmaker David Zeiger, if in the making of “Sir! No Sir” did he come across this story? Did anybody ever say to him, “What about this chapter of it” and I would also like to ask of you other historians, other people in antiwar work, when the war was still going on and after 1967 when the Tom Hayden group came back, what happened to that information? Did it not find its way into the antiwar movement? And what was the level of awareness within the antiwar movement that there were these guys in lockup in Hanoi who were speaking out against the war?
There’s a whole bunch of questions there. Of course, had you asked me, the answer would be, “I don’t know.” But those are all things that I do want to know.