Vietnam POWs to be honored 50 years after Nixon celebrated them with historic banquet

From The New York Post

 

It was — and still is — the biggest banquet in White House history.

In a tent on the South Lawn on May 24 in 1973, 1,600 people gathered to honor 591 prisoners of war who had finally been released from Vietnam.

On Wednesday dozens of the survivors of the 591 will be honored again at a reenactment of the meal at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California.

Fifty years ago, a long nightmare had finally ended for the POWs who were held for up to eight years, tortured, beaten, starved, and used as propaganda pawns by the Communist regime.

The dinner was hosted by President Nixon, a brief relief from the unfolding national nightmare of Watergate, and was itself a rare moment of unity during the slow end of a war which had divided the nation.

 

 

The reenactment Wednesday will be so exacting that the menu and table centerpieces will be the same as in 1973.

Not present of course will be the celebrities the Nixon White House brought to the reception: comedian Bob Hope emceed and the POWs and their families mingled with John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Phyllis Diller, and Sammy Davis Jr.

Many at the dinner then, and now, were survivors of the Hanoi Hilton, the prison infamous for its torture.

 

 

 

Its most famous inmate was John McCain, then the Navy pilot son of the supreme commander in the Pacific, Admiral John McCain Jr., and later the Republican senator from Arizona and presidential candidate.

A smaller number of the POWs had been held in jungle camps with horrendous death rates.

But on February 12, 1973, Nixon signed the Paris peace deal to end the war, and the next month Operation Homecoming began.

 

 

 

By April 1, nearly 600 POWs had been returned, and US combat troops had finally left Vietnam.

The war was effectively over, although it was not until 1975 that the evacuation of Saigon marked its humiliating end.

The Nixon Library is not planning any more similar reunions after this week’s, reflecting the inevitable thinning of the ranks of the veterans.

 

 

But the dinner in Yorba Linda will be a chance to honor the survivors while it is still possible — and reflect on their stories of heroism.

The Post spoke to five former POWs, the oldest 91, the youngest 75, about their experiences.

 

 

“THEY DIED IN MY ARMS.” FLIGHT SURGEON’S HELL IN PRISON CAMP

Army Flight Surgeon Hal Kushner was on the way to deliver urgent medical care on November 30, 1967, when his Huey helicopter smashed into a mountain.

Knocked unconscious, Kushner woke to see the pilot crushed against the instrument panel, and after clambering from the wreckage with his collarbone and left wrist broken, he saw the rest of the crew strewn across the ground.

 

 

 

Then an M-16 machine gun on the helicopter exploded, bullets hitting him in the back and shoulder.

The crew chief went for help, leaving Kushner with the co-pilot, who took 3 days to die.

Alone, Kushner walked several miles and encountered a peasant in a rice paddy.

The man gave him milk — and turned him over to the Viet Cong.

“The leader shot me through my left shoulder,” said Kushner, who showed the man his medic’s card. The man said: “No POW. Criminal.”

They tied him to a door, and beat him with a bamboo rod. His ordeal had just begun.

 

 

 

First he was held in jungle prison camps.

He and the other prisoners were beaten, starved, shackled, and made to perform slave labor.

One man was so severely beaten he died of his wounds after two weeks of suffering.

There were 27 other Americans, 10 of whom died, and 5 West German nurses, of whom just 2 survived.

“Most of them died in my arms,” Kushner said.

From late December 1972 until March 1973, he was in the Hanoi Hilton.

There, Kushner saw a Life magazine containing a picture of his father playing with his son, Michael — whose existence he had been unaware of. “My wife had been pregnant when I left and we didn’t know it.”

After he returned, he met Michael for the first time one week before the boy’s fifth birthday. “One time, he said, ‘Dad, I’m not used to you yet.’”

 

 

 

Today Kushner, 81, a retired ophthalmologist living in Daytona Beach, Fla., enjoys a close relationship with Michael.

His daughter, Toni Jean was 3 and a half when he left and remembered him when he returned, so “resuming a normal relationship was easier.”

Kushner feels strongly that the way U.S. history is taught lacks rigor. “Vietnam rates a paragraph in most history books,” he said. “Don’t get me started.”

But he does his part: he will be the keynote speaker at Gettysburg National Cemetery on Memorial Day.

 

 

“IF WE CAME HOME BITTER WE WOULD STILL BE CAPTIVES,” SAYS PILOT

On November 7, 1967, Lt. Leon “Lee” Ellis was on a mission to bomb the Ho Chi Minh trail, the network of pathways used by the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong, when his F-4C Phantom was brought down.

Surrounded by local militia he was stripped of his flight suit, vest, gun, knife, and boots, blindfolded and paraded from village to village.

 

 

 

Sensing he was approaching a ditch and certain they were planning to kill him, he raised his blindfold and turned.

“I was going to make sure I looked in their eyes.”

But he was only kicked in the rear, to the amusement of his captors.

His initial treatment was fortunate because “a good man” led the local militia.

 

 

But treatment at the Hanoi Hilton was far worse.

Ellis was made to kneel on concrete for 18 hours and punched and kicked until he agreed to fill out a three-page biography. “I felt so worthless when I got back to my cell.”

Ellis admired the men who found creative ways to express defiance. “One guy said, ‘President Horses–t Minh says’ over camp radio.

“Most of the time they didn’t catch the subterfuge because they didn’t know anything about our culture.”

 

 

 

In October 1969, conditions in the Hanoi Hilton improved, partly after the North Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh’s death, and partly because outrage about the POWs was growing back home. Their captors put the men in large cells together.

“Having roommates who know everything good or bad about you, you can’t pretend. We talked about our guilt, our shame, our anger,” he said.

 

 

Ellis, now 79, of Dawsonville, Georgia, credits Nixon with making the POWs’ safe return an absolute condition of ending the war.

“I think most POWs believe that it was President Nixon’s determination to get us out that brought us home,” he said.

Ellis believes the support the POWs gave each other helped them to rebound better after they came home.

 

 

 

“We knew that if we came home bitter, we would still be in handcuffs and leg irons,” said Ellis.

“We released that, and now [many of us] are close to Vietnamese people in the US and in Vietnam. We don’t like Communism, but we care about their people.”

 

 

“I WAS CHAINED LIKE A ZOO ANIMAL AND PUT IN A TIGER CAGE”

Ken Wallingford will never forget the tiger cages.

“It was like something from medieval times,” recalled Wallingford, 75, of Austin, Texas.

Arranged in a circle inside a bamboo fence with a guard in the center, the cages were to become grim homes for Wallingford and six other American soldiers from April 1972 to February 1973.

 

 

 

Wallingford, an Army infantryman, served two tours, first as a sniper, then as an advisor to the South Vietnamese Army during the Tet Offensive.

A sergeant, he was leading a 5-man team when they and the South Vietnamese unit with them were overrun by the North Vietnamese on April 5, 1972.

Seeing “bodies like ants all over the place,” Wallingford prayed, “God, get me out of here alive.”

After two of Wallingford’s team members were killed, he and two others were captured.

Held at gunpoint, injured in 17 places, Wallingford was held up by his friend Ed Carlson as they were marched to the camp in Cambodia.

“They put me in this cage by myself. I had to bend down to get into it. I couldn’t stand because it was five feet high,” he said.

 

 

“They put a chain around my ankle and locked it to the cage. It made me feel like an animal that is chained in a zoo. But I was thankful to be alive.”

If he wanted to go out, he had to ask permission from “a teenager with an AK-47.”

Bathing was once every two weeks.

The food he was served was a pitiful excuse for a meal: rice and tiny pieces of pork fat, dinner: “one sixteenth of an inch of meat, with hair on it, and a vegetable.”

But when cobras and vipers crawled near his cage and soldiers killed them, he realized he was being kept alive “as a bargaining chip.”

 

 

 

Repatriated February 12 1973, he, Carlson, and the others were flown to a military hospital where they were “fed so well we got sick” — he had gone from 188 to 148 pounds — then to San Antonio, Texas, where he was reunited with his parents on Valentine’s Day.

Coming home, Wallingford wanted to put the war behind him, but felt a duty to share his story.

“I felt it was my obligation to share my story because school books don’t cover much of Vietnam,” he said.

“I was one of the younger POWs, glad to be free. The heroes are those who died on foreign soil serving our country.”

 

 

“A NURSE GAVE ME ICE AND A BEER. I PRAYED HE WOULDN’T BE KILLED.”

Bombing a bridge in North Vietnam, US Air Force Captain James Quincy Collins Jr.’s F-105 Thunderchief was shot down in September 1965 by the Viet Cong.

Villagers “threw [him] into the back of a Jeep.”

He remembers the agony, soiling himself on the bumpy ride, then a Hanoi hospital where he glimpsed surgical instruments covered in flies before passing out.

Coming to, he couldn’t move his arms, which had begun to rot and stink. “It’s lucky I didn’t lose them,” he said.

 

 

 

Incapacitated, he begged a Vietnamese nurse for ice.

The man, who fed and bathed him, said “No!”

But the next day, the man entered his room, locked the door, “looked around like he’s casing the joint,” opened his shirt, and withdrew a cup of ice, which he fed Collins.

“Then I asked for beer. He says, ‘Beer? No!’”

But soon the man brought Collins a cold bottle of beer and held it to his mouth to drink.

Collins never saw the nurse again, and never forgot his mercy.

 

 

 

“He probably could’ve been killed for that. I said a lot of prayers that nothing bad happened to him.”

Collins spent the next seven and a half years as a POW, including in the Hanoi Hilton, where he “was in solitary confinement more times than I had hands and feet.”

But Collins formed a choir in the prison camp in 1967, and performed at the welcome home dinner held at the White House by President Nixon, where he got to perform “The POW Hymn.”

 

 

 

Not everything about coming home was joyful.

“I didn’t have any specific information that my wife wouldn’t be waiting for me, but she wasn’t,” he said.

Instead of being greeted by her, he received a letter stating that “the boys are excited about seeing you again … but we are not going to be living together anymore.”

 

 

 

Collins spent the first several years after his return “speaking at patriotic events.”

Now 91, he is remarried to Katherine, and when they go to the dinner from Charlotte, North Carolina, his thoughts will not focus on himself.

“We are going to be thinking a lot about those guys who aren’t there.”

 

 

“THEY’D TAKE YOU TO THE POINT YOU WANTED TO DIE.”

Marine Pilot Orson Swindle flew 204 missions before his F-8E Crusader was shot down on November 11, 1966.

Locals threw him into a pit and “did everything they could to humiliate me.”

The second day, “They pinned my forearms between my shoulder blades, bound me with ropes, hoisted me up and beat the living hell out of me.”

Then he was marched to Hanoi.

 

 

 

Those first hours of treatment were repeated over and over again for the next six-and-a-half years.

“The Communists wouldn’t kill you — they saw us as valuable trading chips — but they’d take you to the point you wanted to die,” he said.

But he and the others found a way to communicate, tapping out messages in code through walls to each other.

“When we were beaten and tortured, thrown back in our cell, we would say in code: ‘Good night. God bless you. We’ll talk tomorrow.’ It was like someone holding your hand.

“Some could do better than others resisting pain, but all we asked of each other is do the best you can.”

 

 

One of his tactics was to give “names,” the commodity demanded by the torturers: he handed over his high school football teammates, knowing they were safe at home.

John McCain was a cell mate and friend.

“John was strong, a good resister, and funny,” said Swindle.

Of their captors, Swindle says, “We totally hated them. We would just stare at them. That unnerved them.”

 

 

 

Swindle said the unpopularity of the Vietnam War at home did not chill their welcome.

His hometown of Camilla, Georgia held a parade for him where Swindle saw members of his high school football team.

“By the way, don’t you guys ever go to Vietnam, because they may be looking for you!” he told them.

Return was sweet. “It was horrifying to be a POW, years of deprivation, pain, suffering, and loneliness,” said Swindle. “You’re in a cell alone, thinking about your family, alone. Then, to be welcomed, what joy.”

 

 

But some men encountered surprises. “We came home to happiness for the most part but great uncertainty and some real tragedy,” he said. “Some men had broken marriages, some had lost family … the suffering didn’t necessarily stop with us getting home.”

He remembers the 1973 dinner fondly.

He felt “honored shaking President Nixon’s hand” and happy to see the men he had been with at the Hanoi Hilton, but disappointed not to be seated with them. Attending this year’s reunion gala will be bittersweet, in part because many friends are gone.

“There were about 600 of us, and now many are gone,” said Swindle, now 86, of Denver, Colorado. “I’m glad it’s the last big reunion; it is difficult.”

This entry was written by Heather Robinson and posted on May 25, 2023 at 6:38 pm and filed under Features. permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Keywords: . Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. */?>