While Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl is getting readjusted to life after the Taliban, let us snap a salute to James Stockdale, George “Bud” Day, Jeremiah Denton and Nick Rowe.
They’re gone now, and our country has many heroes — but their courage as enemy-held prisoners in Vietnam will be talked about until the end of war.
Stockdale was awarded the Medal of Honor for his leadership of the American prisoners held in the Communist dungeon known as the Hanoi Hilton.
The medal, America’s highest, is normally given for courage displayed in a single instant — charging a machine gun, say, or diving on a grenade to save one’s buddies.
What was so astounding about Stockdale’s medal is that it was for valor displayed over and over during his 7½ years as a POW. He invented the code by which the prisoners communicated. He was beaten and tortured. His arms were pulled from their sockets, his back broken. He kept resisting.
Told he would be filmed for propaganda, he slit his scalp. When his captors put a hat on him to disguise the wound, he picked up a wooden stool and beat his face to an unrecognizable pulp.
His Medal of Honor citation says that because of his resistance the enemy backed off from harassing the other prisoners.
Bud Day was known by his Air Force call sign, “Misty.” He was the only prisoner who actually escaped from North Vietnam. He was barefoot and badly injured from bailing out of his Navy jet and from beatings when he was first held. But he made it into South Vietnam before being captured close to our lines.
Day spent 5½ years resisting while in captivity. Once, when he and several other prisoners were holding a prohibited prayer meeting, gun-toting guards burst in. One pointed a gun at Day’s forehead. Day started singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The other prisoners joined in. The guard flinched.
What if Hollywood made a movie about that?
Yet it would be hard to top the actual film of Jeremiah Denton.
It was made by the enemy in 1966, the year after he was shot down over Vietnam. He’d been forced to participate in a “press conference,” at which he was filmed being interviewed by a Japanese reporter.
It’s one of the most famous film clips in history. One can see Denton in the grainy footage on YouTube. Dressed in pajamas, Denton shuffles into the room, bows and takes a seat. He is recorded as stating in English that he gets “adequate food” and “adequate clothing” and “medical care when I require it.”
Focus, though, on Denton’s eyes. He keeps blinking. Is it exhaustion? An old tic? The camera lights? Just awkwardness? It turns out that the crafty commander is blinking out in Morse code a one-word message: T-O-R-T-U-R-E.
The United States archive calls it the “first clear confirmation” that “American POWs were, in fact, being tortured.”
Nick Rowe was an army officer who, like Bergdahl, was held by the enemy for five years.
Rowe spent his time in a cage in one of the most God-forsaken swamps on the planet, the U Minh Forest in the Mekong Delta of South Vietnam. Rowe never lost faith. He eventually overpowered his guards and made it to freedom.
All these exemplars went on to do great things after their captivity. Rowe is the officer credited with writing the doctrine of Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape that is now part of the training for those of our GIs who take on the most dangerous missions.
Denton became a US senator, and Day returned to active duty.
What we will learn in the coming weeks about Bergdahl is not yet clear. All the more reason to remember our greatest of heroes. They’re not always honored.
When Stockdale ran for vice president on Ross Perot’s ticket in 1992, he opened a debate by saying, “Who am I? Why am I here?” The press mocked him mercilessly.
It’s part of the injustice of war, I suppose.
We can take comfort, I wrote when Stockdale died in 2005, in the fact that generations, even centuries from now, when the individuals who belittled his words are forgotten in the dusts of history, Americans will know exactly who James Stockdale was and exactly why he was here.