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Today, America's mothers must face the fact that their sons are killing fellow human beings and destroying foreign countries for an unjust cause, making our actions not only illegal, but immoral.... My personal participation in this war is my personal shame and tragedy. My country's immoral and illegal actions which are now culminated in the tragedy of Vietnam is America's shame. [1] : 50–1
Wilber was the son of poor tenant farmers who worked on a dairy farm. Graduating from high school in 1947, he soon enlisted in the Navy and, like Miller, joined the aviation cadet program. By 1968, he was the commanding officer of Strike Fighter Squadron 102 and flying F-4 Phantom IIs over North Vietnam. He was shot down on June 16, 1968. [1] : 41–3
During a 1970 interview with the Canadian television journalist Michael Maclear, Wilber made his sentiments about the war clear: "I think the answer of course is that the war must be ended, and it must be stopped now.... once we do that the Vietnamese can solve their own problems, I'm confident of that." [22] [1] : 48
In mid-1972, Wilber and Miller joined with six other pilots who had recently been shot down to sign a letter to the well known CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite. The letter protested the "many innocent people dying a totally needless and senseless death" in the bombings. [23] [1] : 51
The enlisted men, whose average age was around 20, were Army Private First Class James Daly, Army Sargent Bob Chenoweth, Army Private First Class King David Rayford, Marine Corporal Alfonso Riate, Army Corporal John Young, Army Lance Corporal Michael Branch, Marine Corporal Fred Elbert, and Marine Corporal Larry Kavanaugh. [24] [25] These eight men came to be known as the Peace Committee, which at various times had several more members. [26]
Daly told his story in a 1975 memoir "A Hero's Welcome", co-written with Lee Bergman. It was republished in 2000 as "Black Prisoner of War: A Conscientious Objector's Vietnam Memoir". Prior to Daly's capture, he was moved by the poverty and sadness of the Vietnamese kids, "I really felt sorry for them—skinny, torn shirts and pants, bare feet, big sad eyes just staring out at you." He could also feel the deep hatred the local people felt for him and other American soldiers. As he described it:
The truth was, if you looked to see it, hatred for the Americans seemed to be just about everywhere. At first this really bugged me, made me angry in a way. Then, as I considered how miserably these Vietnamese peasants and farmers lived, how they’d suffered through so many years of war, how their small straw hootches had been destroyed so many times, or how they’d been forced to keep on moving from one place to another, I began to understand why they felt like they did.... the Vietnamese just weren’t the monsters we’d been told they were. In the four years I’d been in Vietnam, since I first saw those poor tattered kids in Chu Lai staring up at me and begging. I’d come across a good number of the Vietnamese people. I’d seen or talked with them in the villages of the south, traveling the Ho Chi Minh Trail, as a POW, on the battlefield.... the more Vietnamese I came in contact with, the more I knew in my gut what I had believed before in my head — that the war was wrong and we had no right to be there tearing this country to pieces. [27] : 50, 63&190
Chenoweth grew up in Portland, Oregon where his dad was a telephone company technician. The family lived from paycheck to paycheck and the kids would often make extra money by picking beans and fruit at local farms. Like Daly, he identified with the Vietnamese people and was disturbed by the "racist views of most Americans towards the Vietnamese." He felt the Army's training was "the foundation of the race hatred soldiers later exhibited toward the Vietnamese." He was 21 years old and riding as a machine-gunner on a UH-1 Huey helicopter when it came under fire and crashed in a cemetery. He was quickly captured and spent the next five years as a POW. [28] [1] : 63–4
Over time in captivity, "he began to see the American effort in Vietnam as 'a war of aggression...on a massive scale.'" When asked about charges that he was a traitor, he responded, "I thought the people...running the war, the people who had gotten us into the war in the first place, those were the traitors". He felt those who were opposed to the war were the real patriots. He soon became the recognized leader of the Peace Committee. [29] [1] : 62 He studied Marxism while a POW and said, "it was the beginning of a new way of looking at the world". When asked whether he felt he had been brainwashed, he responded, maybe, "but no more so than he had been by American culture before he went to war." Upon his return home, he joined the antiwar movement and toured the country with the activists Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden. [28] [30] [1] : 74
Rayford was a Black Army GI drafted "off the Ford assembly line in Detroit." His parents had been sharecroppers in Mississippi. He was captured on July 2, 1967, in South Vietnam and spent over six years as a prisoner. [31] He was one of the early members of the Peace Committee, along with Chenoweth and Riate. [1] : 65–6
Riate was born in Sebastopol, California, the son of a Filipino dad and Native American mother who was a member of the Karuk Tribe. He moved to Los Angeles where he attended high school and took some classes at Long Beach Community College before joining the Marines in 1965. He volunteered for Vietnam where he was captured in Quảng Trị province in April 1967. While detained at the Portholes POW camp in the south of North Vietnam, he managed to escape from a work detail outside the camp. He took advantage of his Filipino-Indian dark complexion and knowledge of some Vietnamese to blend in with the local population. According to Chenoweth, he lasted for two days, but then walked into a North Vietnamese Army camp and "sat down for tea with the soldiers!" His cover was quickly blown and the prison camp guards soon arrived to take him back. By 1971, he was in Hỏa Lò Prison with the other members of the Peace Committee. [1] : 66–7
Daly wrote about Riate in his memoir. He described an April 1972 B-52 bombing raid on Hanoi, saying he was shocked the U.S. would bomb "heavily populated areas". Daly felt "so sick and ashamed and sad at what my country was doing to these Vietnamese people—that I started to cry." During the bombing, Daly noticed that Riate was over on his bed writing. It turned out to be a letter to the prison camp commander stating that Riate was willing "to do anything possible to help end the war." He was "even ready to consider joining the North Vietnamese army, if that was the only way he could help!" Soon, Chenoweth and Young asked if they could sign the letter, then "one by one" every one of the eight on the Peace Committee signed the letter. [27] : 207–8 This letter became a central element of the charges against the Peace Committee for "conspiracy against the U.S. government" once they returned home, which were quickly dropped (as discussed above). [1] : 68
Young "described himself as more middle class" than most of the other dissenters, and said he had not even heard of Vietnam before joining the military. [1] : 68 He was an Army Specialist Green Beret captured in January 1968. [32] He was badly wounded and "carried by hammock for about a month along jungle trails" until arriving at a home of the Bru ethnic group of the Montagnard people. Young described his treatment:
They brought me breakfast and supper of soup and rice balls. I was given my own private basket of potatoes and manioc. Villagers returning from the fields always made sure the basket was full.... They were gentle farmers. And I began to reexamine my thoughts about the war...realized I knew little about Vietnam or why we were there.... Before this time, I couldn't have given anyone a definition of colonialism.... Neither could I define capitalism. I had my own definition, I guess: "The American Way of Life." [33] : 210, 272
Once in a larger POW camp, he was given books to read about Southeast Asia, many written by Americans, which humanized the local people to Young. Over time he came to feel the war was wrong and agreed to make tapes expressing his protest. He also wrote letters to "president Nixon, to Congress, to GIs, and to people in his hometown." [1] : 70
Branch was from Newport, Kentucky where he was described as an "extremely poor country boy". In Vietnam, he drove a truck for the Army, where in May 1968 he was captured while walking on a road in Quảng Trị province. Young said Branch was "as much opposed to the war as I was." [34] [33] : 260 In May 1971, Branch signed a statement saying "I've joined with a group of captured servicemen who are against the war in Vietnam." It encouraged other GIs to "refuse combat or just botch up all your operations". [3] : 567–8 In July 1971, he read a statement over the National Liberation Front's Liberation Radio addressed to the American Servicemen in South Vietnam. The statement accused President Nixon of "using captured GI's as an issue to prolong the war." It went on to say that the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam had "guaranteed the release of all captured military men and civilians...at the same time as all U.S. and other foreign forces are being withdrawn from South Vietnam." [35] After the war, in 1978, Branch confirmed his antiwar stance and said, "The majority of POW's felt the same way I did but were reluctant to assist us because of possible reprisals at home." [36]
Elbert, who was born on August 9, 1947, came from Brentwood, New York. [37] Daly described him as coming "from a well-to-do family". [27] : 210 He enlisted in the Marines in 1966 and was "on a recon mission along the Ho Chi Minh trail" when he was captured on August 16, 1968. [38] The New York Times reported that he was captured "the day after the Marines reported him as absent without leave". [39] According to one of the other prisoners, "he was considered the strangest POW in our entire group." [33] : 231 He reportedly made a radio broadcast for the National Liberation Front where he said he had "crossed over to the side of the Liberation Forces." [1] : 71
Kavanaugh was born on January 13, 1949, and lived in Denver, Colorado with his wife and daughter. [40] [1] : 72 He was captured near Phu Bai in South Vietnam in April 1968 "after having been inadvertently left behind" by his unit. He was Chicano and a very religious Catholic. "He insisted that he absolutely opposed the war, that he was opposed to all violence and the taking of life." [3] : 533 On June 27, 1973, while back home in Denver with his wife and child, he committed suicide. Young felt that Kavanaugh had done it for the Peace Committee, "what he did was an attempt, I think, to take the pressure from us and put it on the military. He gave his life for us." [33] : 338 Kavanaugh's wife Sandra blamed it on the military: "The North Vietnamese kept him alive for five years, and then his own country killed him," she said. "I blame Colonel Guy [the SRO who brought charges against the Peace Committee] and the Pentagon for his death." [27] : 260 Six days after his suicide, all the charges were dropped against the other members of the Peace Committee. [1] : 73
Most of the dissenters discussed in the book, including the two officers, were from lower class, modest backgrounds, which was in contrast to the SROs who mostly came from more privileged upbringings and prestigious colleges. The authors analyze these class differences among the POWs and suggest "that the tensions between POWs were rooted in the disparate socioeconomic backgrounds of the antagonists." [41] Most of the dissenters were enlisted men who had "less stake in the outcome of the war than did officers whose military and political careers hinged on the success of their missions". These economic and class differences were also used against the rebels. The authors show how the fact that a number of the "rebels were from poor or broken families" was used to bolster the narrative discussed above that they were maladjusted and of weaker character. And they argue this "was a way to dismiss the authenticity of their political views". [1] : 12–3, 32–3 The authors also point out that similar discrediting tactics were used against the GI and veteran dissent against the war. Starting in 1972 with a New York Times article headlined "Postwar Shock Besets Ex-GIs" which used inflammatory phrases like "mental health disaster" and "emotional illness", the press began "a steady beat of stories about soldiers home from Vietnam with psychological derangements." [1] : 101 Similarly, with the POWs:
The Kavanaugh suicide, fortuitous for the military and political elites wanting to see the war in a rearview mirror, shifted the paradigm from 'bad' to 'mad', form villain to victim, and displaced from social memory the image of warriors, including some POWs, who turned against their war. [1] : 75
Two Vietnamese translations of this book have been published. On January 9, 2023, Book Hunter Lyceum released Tù Binh Bất Đồng Chính Kiến – Từ Nhà tù Hỏa Lò đến nước Mỹ hôm nay, or Dissent Prisoners – From Hoa Lo Prison to America Today. [42] The other edition was published by Thế Giới Publishers, which translates as The World Publishing House. This is a Vietnamese academic edition of the book with appendices. It is titled Tù binh Mỹ vì hoà bình: Cuộc chiến trong lòng nước Mỹ, or American Prisoners for Peace: The War Within America. [43]
The book was positively received by a number of reviewers. Lester Andrist, from the University of Maryland, wrote in the International Journal of Comparative Sociology that "Dissenting POW's is an important contribution to the subfields of historical sociology and the sociology of war". He also noted that "the book is clearly written for a general audience, and for this reason, it would make a fantastic addition to an undergraduate course on historical methods or one surveying the Vietnam War." [44] CovertAction Magazine called it a "myth-shattering book" and praised it for restoring "these forgotten POW dissenters to their rightful—and honored—place among the large and diverse Vietnam generation of dissidents, draft resisters, oppositional GIs, veteran activists, deserters, and all those who supported them." [45] John Clarke, in Counterfire calls Dissenting POWs "an important work that is appearing at a time when it is badly needed." [46] Paul Benedikt Glatz, writing for H-Soz-Kult, the German online information and communication platform for historians, said the book "rediscovers the story" of the American POWs in Vietnam. Calling it a "remarkable book" and "an exemplary study of history and memory", he said it "will inspire new directions in research and debate." [47]
Hỏa Lò Prison was a prison in Hanoi originally used by the French colonists in Indochina for political prisoners, and later by North Vietnam for U.S. prisoners of war during the Vietnam War. During this later period, it was known to American POWs as the "Hanoi Hilton". Following Operation Homecoming, the prison was used to incarcerate Vietnamese dissidents and other political prisoners, including the poet Nguyễn Chí Thiện. The prison was demolished during the 1990s, although its gatehouse remains a museum.
James Bond Stockdale was a United States Navy vice admiral and aviator who was awarded the Medal of Honor in the Vietnam War, during which he was a prisoner of war for over seven years.
Floyd James "Jim" Thompson was a United States Army colonel. He was one of the longest-held American prisoners of war, spending nearly nine years in captivity in the forests and mountains of South Vietnam, Laos, and North Vietnam during the Vietnam War.
Jeremiah Andrew Denton Jr. was an American politician and military officer who served as a U.S. Senator representing Alabama from 1981 to 1987. He was the first Republican to be popularly elected to a Senate seat in Alabama. Denton was previously a United States Navy rear admiral and naval aviator taken captive during the Vietnam War.
Brigadier General James Robinson "Robbie" Risner was a fighter pilot in the United States Air Force, and a senior leader among U.S. prisoners of war during the Vietnam War.
George Thomas Coker is a retired United States Navy commander who was awarded the Navy Cross for extraordinary heroism as a prisoner of war (POW) during the Vietnam War. An Eagle Scout, he is noted for his devotion to Scouting.
The Hanoi Hilton is a 1987 war film which focuses on the experiences of U.S. prisoners of war who were held in the infamous Hoa Lo Prison in Hanoi during the 1960s and 1970s and the story is told from their perspectives. It was directed by Lionel Chetwynd, and stars Michael Moriarty, Ken Wright and Paul Le Mat. Music was done by Jimmy Webb.
Nguyễn Chí Thiện was a North Vietnamese dissident, activist and poet who spent a total of twenty-seven years as a political prisoner of the communist regimes of both North Vietnam and of post-1975 Vietnam, before being released and allowed to join the large Overseas Vietnamese community in the United States.
Operation Homecoming was the return of 591 American prisoners of war (POWs) held by North Vietnam following the Paris Peace Accords that ended U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
John Arthur Dramesi was a United States Air Force (USAF) colonel who was held as a prisoner of war from 2 April 1967 to 4 March 1973 in both Hoa Lo Prison, known as "The Hanoi Hilton", and Cu Loc Prison, "The Zoo", during the Vietnam War.
Lawrence Nicholas "Larry" Guarino was a United States Air Force officer, and veteran of three wars. Shot down on his 50th combat mission, he spent more than eight years as a prisoner of war (POW) during the Vietnam War and earned the Air Force Cross.
John Heaphy "Jack" Fellowes was a U.S. Navy captain, pilot who became a prisoner of war (POW) during the Vietnam War. He was known as "Happy Jack" because of his infectious sense of humor, which he maintained even while a POW. He was awarded the Silver Star for his "conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity" while a POW, credited with "contributed significantly toward the eventual abandonment of harsh treatment by the North Vietnamese".
The Alcatraz Gang was a group of eleven American prisoners of war (POW) held separately in Hanoi, North Vietnam during the Vietnam War because of their particular resistance to their North-Vietnamese military captors. These eleven POWs were: George Thomas Coker, USN; Jeremiah Denton, USN; Harry Jenkins, USN; Sam Johnson, USAF; George McKnight, USAF; James Mulligan, USN; Howard Rutledge, USN; Robert Shumaker, USN; James Stockdale, USN; Ron Storz, USAF; and Nels Tanner, USN.
Robert Harper Shumaker is a retired rear admiral and naval aviator in the United States Navy. He spent eight years and one day as a prisoner of war (POW) in North Vietnam. He notably coined the term "Hanoi Hilton” for the notorious Hỏa Lò Prison.
The Hanoi March was a propaganda event held on July 6, 1966, involving U.S. prisoners of war during the Vietnam War. During the march, members of the North Vietnamese Army paraded 52 American POWs through the streets of Hanoi before tens of thousands of North Vietnamese civilians. The march soon deteriorated into near riot conditions, with North Vietnamese civilians beating the POWs along the 2 miles (3.2 km) route and their guards largely unable to control the melee.
Hubert E. Buchanan is a former United States Air Force captain and fighter pilot in the Vietnam War who was shot down, captured, and spent 2,362 days as a prisoner of war in Hanoi and surrounding areas. He was one of the first American POWs to return to Vietnam after the war, and visited the man credited with his capture.
Members of the United States armed forces were held as prisoners of war (POWs) in significant numbers during the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1973. Unlike U.S. service members captured in World War II and the Korean War, who were mostly enlisted troops, the overwhelming majority of Vietnam-era POWs were officers, most of them Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps airmen; a relatively small number of Army enlisted personnel were also captured, as well as one enlisted Navy seaman, Petty Officer Doug Hegdahl, who fell overboard from a naval vessel. Most U.S. prisoners were captured and held in North Vietnam by the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN); a much smaller number were captured in the south and held by the Việt Cộng (VC). A handful of U.S. civilians were also held captive during the war.
Hayden James Lockhart is a retired United States Air Force officer who is best known for being the first U.S. Air Force pilot to be shot down in North Vietnam.
Waging Peace in Vietnam: U.S. Soldiers and Veterans Who Opposed the War is a non-fiction book edited by Ron Carver, David Cortright, and Barbara Doherty. It was published in September 2019 by New Village Press and is distributed by New York University Press. In March 2023 a Vietnamese language edition of the book was launched at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Ronald E. Storz was a United States Air Force pilot and recipient of the Air Force Cross who died in captivity as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War.
P.O.W. was more a paean, a salute to valor, than an authoritative history.
During the war, POWs in Hanoi prisons endeavoured to maintain a registry of captive Americans; they concluded that at least 766 POWs entered the system.
Dissent had been a fact of life inside the walls of Hoa Lo for at least two years before the POWs release....
At least eight of the enlisted men scheduled to return early tomorrow from Hanoi are known to be bitter critics of the Vietnam war
No charges are now pending against any of the 566 returned prisoners of war
A former prisoner of war who has been threatened with court‐martial for his behavior in captivity, said tonight that the "pressure of conscience and morality" made him change his mind on the war while in captivity.
The Pentagon's health chief said today that all returned Vietnam War prisoners would be counseled and watched for five years to avoid the high violent death rates among former American P.O.W.'s after World War II and the Korean War.
when he found out that he was to be put on show before an international crew of reporters, he slit his scalp with a razor. So they treated the cut and stuffed a hat on his head. In response, he grabbed a stool and beat himself on the face till he was a mess.
We now had twelve members and had taken over the last four rooms in the building
At that time, Chenoweth was the leader, if you were to think of anyone that way. All of us looked up to him, and there was never any question about his sincerity, involvement, or understanding of the PC goals.
he was active in the anti-war movement after his release in 1973