The women were still talking at Sybil’s home at 5 p.m. that evening. Sybil remembered later the “outpouring of exchange of information—who was being told what, and so forth. We agreed to meet on a regular basis as regularly as squadron wives would meet every month.”35 Structure might just save their sanity.
* * *
When Sybil and the other POW and MIA wives first received news of their husbands’ shoot-downs, some had panicked, gone numb, or taken tranquilizers to get through the awful, unending first night—or week or month or year—of this new life in limbo.
Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s 1969 work On Death and Dying was the first to study the human condition of grief from a clinical perspective. This seminal work was published five years after the Vietnam War began and soon became well-known in popular culture. As Sybil became aware of Kübler-Ross and her theories, she later realized that what she, like the other POW/MIA wives and their children, experienced was also a kind of death—the death of their normal life and existence.
In retrospect, she would define the POW/MIA wife experience using the same terms Kübler-Ross employed. Sybil observed six stages that she and the other POW/MIA wives seemed to pass through after they received word of their husbands’ shoot-downs: shock, confusion, assessment, learning, planning, and action.36 In these early days of the war, only the first two stages would apply.
The first state was shock as she herself had experienced it. Utter disbelief, denial, and, in some cases, a dissociation from reality for a time seemed to affect most of the women. This could last a few days, a few weeks, or even longer. There was often a period of self-medication among the women, with sleeping pills being the drug of choice. Sybil’s advice to wives in this scenario? “Be pessimistic: watch out for ‘all will be fine.’ Don’t count on your intuition about [your husband being] dead or alive.”37
The second stage was confusion. What was really going on? What do we know? Who can we trust? The wives were not the only ones who were confused. Very often, the Naval Intelligence “experts” who came to tell the women about their husbands’ shoot-downs had little information about the missing pilots’ whereabouts. This was an era before GPS systems, before cell phones, before Twitter and Facebook. The lack of information was compounded by the secrecy surrounding the American pilots flying bombing missions in Vietnam.
The bombings had two goals: to disrupt the North Vietnamese supply routes on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and to aid U.S. allies in North Vietnam against the Pathet Lao. The Ho Chi Minh Trail also ran through parts of Cambodia and Laos, and these countries suffered huge amounts of collateral damage among civilians. LBJ did not want Americans to know the ugly truth about the extreme loss of human life or his strategy to take out the North Vietnamese.38
Sybil’s counsel to her wives during this stage was still pessimistic, but it offered some practical advice: “Find other wives in your same situation. You will probably get no government help. Invest in a phone message machine so you can listen and answer to messages as you feel like it.” And, perhaps most important, “Don’t exhaust yourself being nice to people. Save all your strength for you, your family, and the fight ahead.”39
Sandy, Sherry, and Patsy Crayton, a young POW wife whose husband, Render, had been shot down February 7, 1966, had contacted Sybil early on, as well as the twenty-seven other San Diego POW/MIA wives, to form a “reluctant sorority.” As Sherry put it, they were an exclusive club that “no one wanted to belong to.”40 These “waiting wives” had begun to develop a sisterhood—something that went beyond their relationships with their blood families, something that often meant more to them and their children than any prayers the Navy chaplain could offer them.
At their first few meetings, they proceeded through stages one and two of their new normal. Their goal at this point was simply to get through the day without losing their sanity. No formal agreements were signed, no bylaws created, no roles assigned. But this incubation period was crucial. The women learned to trust one another, rely on one another, and communicate with one another discreetly, since they were not allowed to speak publicly about their plight.
Soon, other women joined the sorority, with several of them moving to Coronado and the surrounding area from Lemoore naval base. Their backstories were all eerily similar, taking place before these Navy wives had even met Sybil. Jenny Connell was one of these women. Her husband, James “J. J.” Connell, was lost July 15, 1966, just two weeks before his scheduled return home. A Navy A-4E Skyhawk pilot with attack squadron VA-55 aboard the USS Ranger, J.J. was flying a mission along the Red River south of Hanoi when he was shot down and taken prisoner. Petite and brunette with a wide smile, Jenny was a twenty-five-year-old stay-at-home mom with a two-year-old, James, and a three-year-old, Ruth, at the time of her husband’s shoot-down. She and J.J. had been married for only five years. Her naturally optimistic nature would help keep her and many of her fellow POW and MIA wives afloat.
Three months later, Jenny heard about Debby Burns, also a Lemoore Navy wife, whose husband, Doug, had been shot down on June 30. Blond, beautiful Debby was also a stay-at-home mom, with three children: Scott, age seven, Steve, six, and Linda, three. Jenny went to “call” on her. “I recall Debby saying she was shocked that I could laugh and joke. She was still in a raw and vulnerable state.”41
It would not be long before Debby was in Jenny’s position, comforting yet another Navy wife in Lemoore. She remembered: “I was still in Lemoore & in our little cul-de-sac of 6 boxy Navy ‘houses,’ 3 of the men were shot down! Paul Galanti, Mike McGrath, & Doug. When Mike was shot down I heard Marlene [his wife] scream so I ran over & gave her some of the ‘Librium’ they had given me the night I was told about Doug.”42
Jenny also met Karen Butler at Lemoore. Karen was a vivacious registered nurse whose husband, Phillip Neal Butler, had been shot down on April 14, 1965. She got a knock on her door at six thirty one morning and opened it to see two men in Navy uniforms. She was told he was missing, presumably killed. But she was soon called by a hysterical friend who informed Karen that her husband’s photo had just appeared on the Today show—he was now listed as captured.43 Karen had one daughter, two-year-old Diane, who had been born just one month prior to her husband’s shoot-down.44
Jenny, Karen, and Debby would soon meet Sybil and be brought into the POW/MIA wife fold, which was becoming more regional than local as more and more Navy pilots fell from the Vietnamese skies. Sybil recalled that they did not differentiate between POW wives and MIA wives: both were welcome. “Our meetings weren’t sad, sober-faced affairs, but frank and open-hearted exchanges about feelings and information. We always drank wine and laughed. We knew some of our behavior might seem ghoulish to others, but among ourselves we felt free to do and say whatever we felt. Being together gave us all strength.”45
An undercurrent of female subversion was also floating in the crisp California air. Sybil and her San Diego–area POW wife friends Karen and Jenny were aware of the rising feminist movement and books like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963. Friedan’s book outlined “the problem that has no name.” She vividly described for her readers a malady prevalent at the time among suburban housewives: “As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even herself the silent question—is this all?”46
Though most POW/MIA wives would never be feminists à la Friedan, some would take a page from Mystique—ditching the “problem that has no name” for activism, in response not to a husband’s indifference but to their own government’s maddening neglect. Prejudice against women in general was an intrinsic part of the fabric of American culture. Women had so often been treated as second-class citizens that most military wives barely noticed and did not often complain.
But when their gender started to affect the outcome of their husbands’ fates as prisoners or
missing in Vietnam, a revolution slowly began to simmer, bubbling just under the surface among POW/MIA wives. It would be a long, slow burn, but eventually it would hit a boiling point.
* * *
A few days after the Navy wives’ first meeting at her home, Sybil coded her first letter per Boroughs’s instructions. She was terrified and almost physically ill at the thought that she literally had her husband’s life in her hands. Twice, she rode her bike to the post office and returned home again without mailing the letter. She knew the North Vietnamese would kill Jim if they somehow figured out the letter was coded. Even so, she knew he would want her to take the risk. She and Boroughs had worked references into the letter that Jim would know to be flat-out lies. In this first letter, Sybil wrote about Jim’s mother flying out to see her and the boys, taking a taxi, and swimming in the ocean—none of which were things she would ever do. “All your Mom needs is a good soak,” she wrote. A Polaroid photo was also included in the letter, showing a woman who resembled Jim’s mother; the idea was that these false statements would clue Jim in to soaking the photo, inside of which a CIA specialist had inserted a secret message.
If Jim soaked the photo, he would find a note explaining that the letter had been written on a kind of “invisible carbon” paper that could be used to write his own veiled responses back to America. By writing firmly but not enough to indent the page underneath, Jim could leave invisible messages literally between the lines of his letters home. The CIA could then reveal the hidden messages. This carbon paper could be used multiple times.47 It all sounded like something James Bond’s gadget master Q would come up with. Now all that the Qs at Langley needed was for their James Bond—Stockdale—to figure out their ruse.
Finally, Sybil gathered up her resolve and thrust the letter into the outgoing mail box. “When I finally heard the letter drop to the bottom of the box I thought, ‘for better or for worse, it’s done now. Please God, let it be for better.’”48
As it turned out, Sybil was not the only one coding letters for “Uncle Bob.” Sybil strongly suspected that others in her San Diego group with POW husbands, like Lorraine Shumaker, were doing the same. She would be correct about Lorraine and others, like Debby and Jenny, who would also work with Boroughs as time went on.49
The West Coast ladies were not alone in engaging in spycraft for Naval Intelligence. Uncle Bob had more “Jane Bonds” on the East Coast. Jane Denton and Janie Tschudy were two of the earliest ones in Virginia Beach to participate in the coding. Though Jane and Janie were both coding for Bob, they almost never talked to each other about it. Janie remembered, “It was ingrained in us to be so careful … I trusted Jane implicitly, as she did me, but you felt you were being too risky” if you talked about the coding to anyone else.50
As they began their engagement in covert intelligence work, the women grew even more skeptical of the State Department and the Navy’s generic communications. These women were already realizing that a cover-up was being employed to give the higher-ups room to negotiate with the Communists.
When Jane and the other POW/MIA wives received a form letter from Admiral B. J. Semmes, the head of naval personnel, in March of 1967, they had to be completely disgusted. The letter belatedly suggested guidelines for the POW/MIA families about how to write to the prisoners, urging them, above all, to “try to be cheerful.” Wives should write about sports, entertainment, and family activities and avoid any discussion of the prisoner’s situation, accounts of other losses, the U.S. government’s position on Vietnam, or foreign affairs in general.
The letter then stated that recently published statements from American POWs Nels Tanner and Dick Stratton that the North Vietnamese were using coercion and drugs were likely false. The State Department still clung to its party line: “The prisoners are treated humanely, are well-fed by Vietnamese standards, and receive medical treatment commensurate with the Vietnamese capability.”51 This statement rang false to the women: they knew that American prisoners of war during the Korean War had suffered from terrible torture and starvation: 43 percent of them had died in captivity. Many of these POWs had even instructed the women’s husbands in SERE school before they deployed to Vietnam. Based on this data, the American government’s assumptions seemed worse than placating to the wives. Statistics didn’t lie. The U.S. government and military, however, might.
As one MIA wife noted, “There weren’t any ‘how to’ books to give us direction, no other role models we knew how to emulate.”52 Perhaps some of the women then turned to their protocol guides out of desperation. The Navy Wife, The Air Force Wife, The Army Wife, The Marine Wife—these books had been their go-to manuals, dispensing advice on every issue they might encounter as a military wife. But when the POW and MIA wives desperately searched in the index for entries on “prisoners of war” and “missing,” their dog-eared guides were blank. They might as well have made a bonfire with those books, adding their government’s letters on top. Instinct and common sense were rapidly taking the place of protocol among the wives. Over their communal cups of coffee in the morning and their potluck dinners at night, the women finally began to air their discontent.
The State Department had had its turn with quiet diplomacy and failed. It was time now for the women to take the controls and organize in earnest.
Six
NEW GIRL VILLAGE
BY 1967, POW AND MIA wives had become more comfortable running the show at home and in public. Changing fashions reflected their newfound independence. The bouffant lacquered hair, heavy makeup, hose, and tweed skirt suits of the early 1960s now seemed dated. Hippie culture blossomed, with “butterfly bohemians” and a more natural (and frequently bra-less) look. During 1967’s “Summer of Love,” flower children flocked to the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco to smoke pot, experience “free love,” and protest the Vietnam War.
Musical happenings like the Monterey Pop Festival sprang up everywhere like magic mushrooms, the psychedelic drugs favored by the hippie crowd.1 In November of 1967, Jann Wenner published his first issue of Rolling Stone magazine, which covered both the music and the politics of the day.2 Wenner later explained the central role of late-sixties music festivals like Monterey: “I think we felt we were all at the center of something special. As casual, informal and irresponsible as it was, it had a higher purpose … it was evangelical.”3
Blond, long-haired Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, exotic-looking, brunette actress Ali MacGraw, and sexy, raven-haired Grace Slick of the band Jefferson Airplane were among the female pop icons of the era.4 Their photos appeared often in Rolling Stone, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar, illuminating an updated “New Look” for the late 1960s. “Standards for fashion and physical appearance underwent a drastic makeover. Clothes became more comfortable, colorful and dramatic.”5 Miss America, once the icon of apple-pie American femininity, was now considered hopelessly bourgeois. In her stead, folk singer Judy Collins, with her long, straight hair, was the ideal. Exotic socialite Talitha Getty (married to playboy oil heir John Paul Getty Jr.), who sported elaborately patterned caftans and dangling earrings sourced from the bazaars of Marrakesh, was the epitome of laid-back cool. Talitha became a muse of French couturier Yves Saint Laurent, who translated her allure into bohemian luxe gowns on the runway.
In 1966, Saint Laurent again “broke ground when he proposed that women wear trousers with suits, such as his ‘Le Smoking’ tuxedo-style outfit.” This was still seen as shocking and inappropriate by many. Even as late as 1969, Representative Charlotte T. Reid would incite a frenzy (mostly among her male colleagues) when “she showed up in Congress wearing a pantsuit, the first time a woman had worn pants there.”6
This late-sixties iteration of the New Woman was sophisticated, internationally aware, and outspoken even in the halls of Congress. Her clothes signaled that she was not going to accept the status quo, the party line, or men telling her what to do. Instead, she might venture into political activism, public service, or a music fes
tival with impunity. And, best of all, a woman could finally be comfortable while she took on the world, whether in a caftan or in pants.
Conservative military wives in their forties, like Sybil and Jane, were not as quick to adopt such radical sartorial changes as the younger wives in their twenties and thirties. West Coast wives like Jenny, Debby, Karen, and Patsy arguably took more chances with their fashion choices than more conservative East Coast wives, like Jane, Janie, and Dot McDaniel. But whether you were on the East or West Coast, whether you skewed younger or older, it was impossible to ignore the sweeping cultural changes taking place. The clothes, music, and movies of the time reflected the struggles taking place both domestically and abroad. The Vietnam War was always at the epicenter of these debates.
POW/MIA wives had begun to ditch their prim suits and pearls for Pucci shifts and plastic beads. They would soon begin to storm Washington in attempts not only to reform the ineffective policies of stuffy pinstriped government officials, but also to reject the veil of silence forced on them by the current and previous administrations.
* * *
In early 1967, information regarding the POWs coming from the American government remained scarce. The International Red Cross was not allowed to inspect prisoner-of-war camps: its usual role as an intermediary in wartime conflict had been neutralized. Soon into the conflict, they were completely shut out by the Communists in North Vietnam. In the past, the IRC had overseen mail delivery to and from the early prisoners of war in the camps.7
But as the conflict continued, this avenue also seemed to be narrowing, with less and less correspondence getting through to the prisoners’ families in the United States. POW wives were getting more and more desperate for information and reassurance of their husbands’ health and safety. The American government was having little to no success in its efforts to obtain clear lines of communication in and out of the prison camps.
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