 Good afternoon. I'm Professor John Jackson and it's my pleasure to be able to introduce our guest speaker today. While I don't want to take too much time away from him, I have been asked to take a few minutes to provide a little information about the events leading up to the capture of Porter-Highly Burton to speak briefly about the treatment of POWs in general during the Vietnam War and then I'll turn the microphone over to a man I greatly admire. First I ask each of you to think back to where you were and what you were doing on January 6th 2006. Let me spark a few memories. The last remake of King Kong starring Jack Black and Adrian Brody was in the theaters as was Brokeback Mountain, a rather unusual Western that went on to receive AID Academy Award nominations. The TV show Lost was in its second season and Super Bowl 40 was on the horizon, which would pit the Pittsburgh Steelers against the Seattle Seahawks. Nobody cared then either. January 6th of 2006 is exactly 2,675 days ago, which is the period of time that Porter spent in the prisons of North Vietnam. Seven years, three months and 26 days. It spent almost five decades since Lieutenant Junior Grade Porter-Highly Burton and his pilot, Lieutenant Commander Stan Olmstead, climbed into their F-4B Phantom fighter bomber and launched on a mission over North Vietnam. This was Porter's 75th combat mission of the war and it would prove to be his last. During a low altitude run 40 miles north of Hanoi, the plane encountered heavy ground fire and took a direct hit in the cockpit from a 37 millimeter anti-aircraft shell. Recognizing that the plane had been critically damaged and the pilot killed, Porter rejected from the stricken aircraft. He was soon captured by Vietnamese villagers and at the age of 24 became the 40th American prisoner to be taken in North Vietnam. To help visualize the events and the conditions which followed, we will display a series of drawings done by Lieutenant Commander Mike McGrath, who himself spent six years as a POW in North Vietnam. I think we'll do that. There we go. His book, Prisoner of War, was originally published in 1975 by the U.S. Naval Institute. Once Porter ejected from his stricken aircraft, he was quickly captured by local peasants and militia. Within days, he had been transported to the Wa Lo Prison. Okay, guys, you run it. My button's not working so good. Which ultimately came to be known as Hanoi Hilton. Thus began his seven-and-a-half year ordeal. Mike McGrath drew pictures of their accommodations, but more revealing is this photo of the actual cell in which he was held. The prisoners were kept in such austere conditions, often shackled in leg irons and handcuffs for weeks and months at a time. When not locked down, they were subjected to brutal treatment from abusive guards who took great pleasure in their suffering. Most vicious of all were the professional interrogators who were given pet names by the prisoners. With complete disregard for the Geneva Convention, these interrogators used various forms of punishment and physical torture to force information and statements from the POW. Many were forced to kneel on rocks and other sharp objects for hours or even days on end. By far the most common method of torture was what the POWs came to call the rope trick. They were tightly bound in painful positions, which often pulled arms out of sockets and left many permanent injuries. Punishment was routinely given for violation of camp rules. This punishment included beatings with rubber straps and countless hours in painful shackles. Communication of any kind between prisoners was forbidden, but the resourceful POWs maintained contact with one another by various methods, including written notes on scraps of stolen paper, the now famous POW device tap code, and the POW mute code, which was used when visual contact could be made. From 1964 to 1969, most prisoners were kept in solitary confinement or in very small groups, but several events, including the attempted rescue raid on the Sante prison, caused a significant improvement in their treatment. Over time, increasing pressure to improve conditions was brought to bear by the U.S. government, as well as by individuals such as Ross Perot and other organizations. The most effective of these organizations was the National League of Families of POWs and MIAs in Southeast Asia, which was founded by Sybil Stockdale, the wife of former Naval War College President James Bond Stockdale. Porter's wife, Marty, was very active in the National League as the coordinator for the 10 Southern States. Public support was shown in many ways, and many in this audience may have worn POW bracelets such as this one engraved Lieutenant Commander Porter Halliburton, 1017-65. From 1970 on, most prisoners were held in large cells in the Hanoi Hilton, each holding up to 40 prisoners. Their conditions were still meager and crowded, but far better than before. After 10 years of war and nearly five years of negotiations, the Paris Peace Accords were signed in January of 1973, and the POWs began to be released in February. Shown here is Lieutenant Commander Halliburton about to board the C-141 in Hanoi, finally on his way to freedom. The remarkable story of Porter and Air Force POW Fred Cherry was told in the book Two Souls Indivisible, the friendship that saved two POWs in Vietnam, which is now part of the Chief of Naval Operations Professional Reading Program. Dr. Halliburton served as a professor here at the Naval War College from 1979 until his retirement in 2006. He now holds a professor emeritus status. Please welcome Commander Porter Halliburton back to Spruin's Auditorium. Thank you. Thank you very much. As Mark Twain said, the reports of my death were greatly exaggerated. I think the Navy actually tried to get rid of me. I got back at him by spending over 25 years here. Here I am again. Well, about the drawings and so on that you saw, brutality was one of the central features of our experience, as was boredom in between. But I don't want to talk about that. I really want to talk about how we responded to these two things, which were so central. And I think it's always important to talk about what you learn from an experience rather than the experience itself. So that's what I want to do this afternoon. I want to break it down into groups of three. Just for convenience, there were three time periods that I can identify that were important. There were three adaptations to changing conditions. There were three reflections that I might make about that experience, and then three lessons or important things that I would draw from my experience there. So I want to start with sort of the chronological ones of three time periods. And the first one was from Everett Alvarez's first experience in 1964, up through the summer of 1966. And this, I think, was a period in which we as prisoners and Vietnamese as captors were trying to figure out one another, we were trying to figure out how do we survive in this kind of condition, and how do we obey the code of conduct, and how do we take care of one another, and how do we communicate with one another because we were forbidden to communicate with one another. And we knew that that was essential to leadership and command and morale and everything else. And so during this time was when our our greatest leaders emerged, we had a we had a saying you had to get there early to get the good deals. And it was a little difficult figuring out what those good deals were sometimes. But one of them was that people like Jim Stockdale and Jerry Denton and Robbie Reisner and others, senior officers got there early. Reisner and Stockdale were both shot down about a month before I was. And these outstanding amazing individuals were able to look at this situation to sum it up based on a lot more experience and wisdom and education than J.O.'s like me had at the time. And it was the establishment of that leadership in the very beginning and guidance about how do we how do we live up to the code of conduct at least in spirit? How do we deal with these situations? How do we communicate with one another? How do we organize for resistance? And the Vietnamese are trying to figure out Americans what what makes them tick and so on and to extract as much information as they could, which could be used for propaganda because we quickly realized that that was that was the deal was propaganda. They wanted us for propaganda and perhaps as bargaining chips at the end of the war, whenever that might be. And of course, we thought the war was going to be over very quickly. The most pessimistic among us during this time thought it would last for two years. The most optimistic we're thinking like next week. And of course, we're both wrong. And so this period was one of adaptation, organization and learning how to survive in this kind of environment. Well, in the summer of 1966, we bombed within the confines of Hanoi for the first time. And the Vietnamese in their frustration, decided to make a spectacle out of us captured who have done this. And so they organize this Hanoi March, which some of you have read about or knew about, in which about 60 of us who marched down the streets of Hanoi and subjected to a gauntlet of everything you can imagine. And it's one of the very, very, very few times that I thought I would lose my life. It was that bad. Their plans were to put us on trial for war crimes as a as a propaganda thing. President Johnson did say, if you do, we're going to level Hanoi with B 52s. And so they kind of backed off on that a little bit. But they did pursue a change in policy. And up to this time, treatment had been brutal, but torture was not really used on a regular basis. And after this time, the rules changed, the policy changed. And torture was used to get what they had not been able to get by coercion and in other forms of mass mistreatment and beatings and so on. And so this began a new way of life. And this is the point at which for each area and I were separated. And we both went back into solitary confinement. And I moved out to a really bad place in the country. And so this period lasted from 1965 until the end of 1969. And it was the longest period and the most difficult. And during that period, we had to devise new things, second line of resistance and how do we deal with being broken? Because first time we tortured, most of us did not think we could be broken, we had been taught that we could not be broken and we we would sacrifice our lives rather than giving in. And so the fact that this death was not an option changed everything continued suffering over an indeterminate period of time was the choice. And so we had to learn how to how to deal with that. And during during the first period, though, they used all kinds of techniques sort of experimenting with different things. And I think I was one of the experiments. I was moved from the Hanoi Hilton to another place after being told that you can move to a better place. All you have to do is talk to us and answer the questions and we'll move you to a better place. You'll be with your friends and all of that and have a great time. And or if you don't, then you will move to a worse place. And I moved to a worse place and it was worse than Hanoi Hilton. You saw a picture of the Hanoi Hilton Heartbreak Hotel, we called it. And about every two weeks or 10 days, I was presented with this ultimatum again, better place or worse place you make a choice. And each time they had a worse place. And this happened two or three times. And I wound up in a coal storage bin out at the back wall of prison, we call the zoo. And by this time, I had lost a lot of weight. I had dysentery, I think. I couldn't eat anything. And I was in some despair. My health was failing. My mental ability was failing. My will to resist was failing. I was being ground down. I didn't see how I could possibly survive this place anymore. And so I was presented with this choice once again, a better place or a worse place. And the better place sounded pretty good right then. But with a lot of prayer and the realization that I was making a very important choice, I chose not to. And their thought of the worst place as some of you know, was to move in with a with a black Air Force officer, who was senior to me by two grades, who had a lot more experience than I did. They thought that moving a young Southern white boy in with a black was going to be the last straw the worst place. And of course, he was very badly injured. And I was ordered to take care of him. They thought this was going to break both of us down. Well, it didn't. It was the best thing that could have happened to me because moving in with Fred Cherry changed my life. It turned my concerns away from my own to somebody else's to try and help him survive and save his life. And he credits me with saving his life, but he certainly saved mine in in his, his whole demeanor, his whole attitude, his patriotism, in spite of racial prejudice and discrimination and everything else. And we became fast friends. Actually, the only problem we had was this Air Force thing. But we managed to get through that. And I did. I remember talking to him one time about being shot down and conditions. And I said, Well, I guess my radio didn't work because nobody answered me. You know, we had one of these big bulky things with the battery only connected with a cord. And nobody answered me when I got on the radio. And obviously, in retrospect, none of my beepers or anything worked because nobody knew that I was shot down. And later declared killed in action. Well, I discovered that, you know, and the reason was we had one had less than one radio per aviator. And you had to draw them out of a pool. And of course, MConn conditions on the carry you couldn't test it. So it didn't work. Fred Cherry Air Force major had five radios. Three of them voice capable. So right away, you know, I said, There is a difference between the Navy and the Air Force here. I learned a lot about the Air Force. However, this next period, though, Fred and I were separated and conditions got worse for for both of us, for everyone and torture was used, as you saw, in a systematic way to get what what they couldn't get. Otherwise, and so this was a terrible time. But it all brought us together. Common suffering brings people together as long as they have a common goal and realize that they are all in it together. And I think that's what that's what happened during this time. Well, at the end of it, Ho Chi Minh died late 69. And they took that opportunity to sort of change their treatment because frankly, it wasn't working. They had been able to extract statements and make videos and so on of people talking about things and so on. But they just they didn't quite understand American culture well enough to notice the clues that were being sent, you know, when people were being photographed. So this was an example of of and sometimes there were two an example of how we could fight back, simply because the Vietnamese had no one who was educated in the United States. They didn't most of them speak English very well. And if it was, and it was not American English, so they didn't understand American humor culture, or history very well. And so you could in either written form or photographically or any other way, put bombs in there that the ordinary viewer back here, which they were trying to influence, would see was was put up, you know, one of the most famous was, of course, Jerry Denton, who was tortured horribly to agree to make a statement in front of a group. And of course, he was trying to look as confused and as as as beat up as possible, which was not hard. But he was blinking his eyes. And as you know, he was sending Morse code, blinking out the word torture. And actually, this was the first communication from Hanoi to Washington that we were being tortured. And so it was not only to sort of negate the value of this sort of statement, but it was to to convey some intelligence. And so it was these kinds of things. And during this time, Stockdale, Denton, Reisner, many others sort of set the bar for our our conduct. It wasn't that they were telling us what to do and not to do so much as they were demonstrating what to do and what not to do by and of course Stockdale got the Medal of Honor, which was greatly deserved for his willingness. But there were so many other acts that that that were so inspirational. And so we did emerge from this finally, after Ho Chi Minh conveniently died, and they reassess their program. And it hadn't been very successful and Sybil Stockdale is back here, Ross Perot is back here raising awareness about the way we were being treated and he's flying plain loads of Christmas presents and journalists and so on. Not that they ever were successful in landing there. But and so I think they realized that their cultivation of the antiwar movement, which was their objective, was in danger being split over the issue of our treatment. And so they they decided to change that. And plus they had somebody finally pointed out, you know, some of these obvious things. And they realized that we were continuing to resist almost everyone and that they were not getting what they wanted. And so they thought, Well, they better change it. So anyway, they changed their treatment. We moved into bigger groups, we began getting letters, packages from home. My wife and I corresponded by letter for the first time after five years. In the packages were vitamin pills and some other supplements and so on. The food got better. We got more time outside. Our treatment improved a great deal. Thanks to those who wore bracelets and sit letters and prayed and all of that really had an effect. So in this kind of new environment, we were able to do a lot of things we hadn't been able to do before. Some rather serious academic endeavors, physical, we were in better shape, spiritual, and so on. And so we were pretty active and you had more people, you had resources and so on. And so we had things like contests for push ups and deep knee bends and pull ups and things like that, which and I was never good at push ups or pull ups, but I did do deep knee bends. And to give you an example, my competitor would do 500 and I do 1000. And then he would do 2000 and I would do three. And he did four and I did five. And then finally we got to this level. It would take literally all night. You had to do these things. You're going, you can't stop. You need to go up and down. And he did, he did 7000. And I would have challenged him for 10. But you couldn't do more than 7000 in the period of time from the time the door closed in the evening till it opened in the morning. So I'll let him have it. Thank God I did. My knees are shot, you know. So anyway, but it was, it was fun. We, we learned to tell movies. You always had an education and entertainment officer and somebody would be assigned to tell a movie every night or they'd be poker games or whatever. And so we revived the art of storytelling because sometimes the only thing you can remember about a movie was a title. Maybe even not that, but one or two, one or two characters or something. And you had to build two hours of entertainment around that. Also, I learned, I was always interested in languages and they were very good at it. But, but I want to learn German. And so in this environment, I was able to live with some folks in New German pretty well and it learned enough that I was conducting a little introductory class to some other folks and everything. And so German was was fun. And after I came back, I want to go back to graduate school. And so I entered into undergraduate, some undergraduate courses to get back in the swing. And I talked to my advisor, I said, you know, I'd like to, I'd like to take German. I told him my experience with it and everything. And he said, why don't you take the equivalency test? And I did. I passed first year college German based on on my experience in Hanoi. Because we didn't have a dictionary and in any written stuff was temporary. And we reverted to its original purpose, which is toilet paper. And so we didn't have a good resource. But if we didn't know a German word that we needed, we just made one up, you know, in German is wonderful, because of the construction of words and so on. So a rabbit became a hip and hopper. And and a duck was a swimming quacking. And so the you know, we had these words. So I was taking German to and graduate in school. And we all speaking German and every now and then one of these Hanoi words would kind of hop out if you will. And people are wondering what the hell was that? You know, so I'd have to explain that I had these words so ingrained that that that they just happened. But it was, you know, just an example, people did all kinds of things that were amazing. Just because we we determined to stay busy. Well, there are also three adaptations in my own personal experience to this. These times and they don't really coincide with the the three time periods, but somewhat. And and the the first I would call retrospection, because there was so little to do that I spent most of my time thinking about the past, because the past was was enjoyable. That's where my friends and family were. And that's where my good memories were. And so if I could live in the past, then I could avoid the present. And a lot of times, in an interrogation, which these were more indoctrination, sometimes an interrogation, the the interrogator would be lecturing me on something, you know, and I found out if you just kind of nodded your head about every five minutes, you know, he thought you were there, but I was not I was back in North Carolina, you know, and doing doing things, I wasn't listening at all. And so, you know, my life was really a reliving of my of my past and it in the process, I relived a lot of good memories, but also realized some of the stupid things I had done some of the bad things I had done wasted time that I had wasted all over during this time. And it was painful. And I began to think, Well, how, how am I ever going to make up for this, this lost time, and these lost opportunities and the waste that had occurred. And so I began to think about, Well, what's the future going to be like? And so this next period, I would call dreams and plans, I began to think about the future, how I was going to rectify some of these things, how I was going to lead a different life, what life would be like. And I began to think about everything I was interested in everything that I thought was important. And I eventually had to make a list to keep track of these, because everybody every time I'd meet a new person that we talk about things that would be new information. So I had a list of 77 different categories of interest. And I could go through these things alphabetically, and stop on one and pull that mental folder out and look at the information and, and revise it or think about it and stick it back in there and move on. There's art, aviation, automobiles and just went on right through through the alphabet. And so I was really living in the future, in order to escape from a very painful present. Well, at some time, and this was a gradual time, I think, I began to live in the present, because by now, things had gotten better, we had adjusted to our conditions, we for many of us the time of torture was over, we did not have to deal with that constant threat. And so we found that the present in our adjustment to it was okay. That we could lead meaningful lives through our activities and through each other as family. And all of these guys became family, even though I knew it lived with a very small percentage of them. But every time you moved in with somebody new, you went through the list and we all memorized lists of who was there. And I had a list of 350 names memorized alphabetically, chronologically by shoot down by airplane type by rank and service, physical location, if we knew it, go through those lists every day, every day. And so in the in collecting information about these people and hearing stories about them, they became real people that were part of our of our family. And so we were not just an organization. We became a family. And I think we found that, as Victor Franco says, that you can find meaning in the very worst of circumstances. And sometimes that's where you really discover it. Because suffering is the most powerful way of discovering the meaning in your life. And I'm not talking about the big meaning in life. I'm talking about everyday life, what you do every day. And so I think that we realized that we realized that we had, we had a meaningful life. I want to one of the things I did to stay busy, I was an English major in college. And so I was to write stories and songs and poetry. And the first poem that I wrote, I want to read it to you, it was during the early, the early times called winter crypt. How can I describe the way that I feel as if the stream I was crossing had suddenly frozen and locked my ankles in an icy grip, immobilizing that once fluid force and die with it. And we have nothing to do but wait until the fall. And of course, as I hope you understand, we figured out that we had a lot more to do than simply wait. And that it was going to be a long time. Vietnamese were fond of telling us this war is going to last five, 10, 20 years or longer. And of course, we dismissed that as just an attempt to make us depressed. Well, after I've been there for five years, I figured maybe they had something there. And so we began to take note of that. And I guess to, to figure out, okay, if this last 20 years or longer, what's our lives going to be like here? And so I think we began to realize that what we had was an American culture, not just an organization, but a culture. And we had every aspect of culture except for the obvious of our, of our real families. And so I think that at the end, when I was first shot down, I was thinking I was shot down October, I was hoping to be out my Christmas because I just couldn't imagine being there for Christmas. And then it was summer, I couldn't imagine being there for summer. And yet we were time after time. So my progression in that process wound up at the end, I said, you know, I'm prepared to stay here another 10 years if I have to, because I know we can lead a meaningful life. If I never get out of here, I think we can lead meaningful lives in this existence. Well, it didn't work out that way. So didn't have to do that. But I want to read another poem written quite a bit later, after a lot of this, which I think, if you'll note the, the difference between the two, this is called Reflections on Captivity. How can I measure the loss of my dimensions as I lie spread across this crass expanse of time? Bitter years devoid of latitude or luster, my duty days of trial and decision, orbit pages turned, but page is not forgotten. Those countless hours of aimless retrospection, regret, restraint, and introspection, the strange monotony of unrewarded hopes, unconquered hopes, amidst my unborn tears have tempered the metal of my structure and filled the empty spaces of my soul. Well, what did we learn from all of this? These are things that still guide my life today. So they were not just relevant then but are now and I think they're the most important things. The first is balanced activity. I tried to fill every day with mental, physical, and spiritual activity. And the physical included some relaxation, but for the rest of it, we exercised every day that we could. Back in the 60s, some of you may remember isometrics in which you can exercise using one muscle against another. And we found that even if you were in leg irons and handcuffs, you could still do isometrics and you could stay in shape and you can have physical activity. And if you were not, then there were all kinds of things that you could do used to in that little cell that you saw in Heartbreak Hotel, I could walk five miles a day. If I wasn't locked down in the irons three steps in one direction and three steps back, back and forth, back and forth. But it was a dedication to stay in this as good a shape mentally, physically and spiritually as we could. And so that is something that's guided my life ever since. Well, the second is God's great gift to us of free will. And I think we all learned that the course of our lives, no matter where, when or what the circumstances are, is determined by the choices that we make, it's not by the circumstances, it's not by what you have or don't have. It is the choices that you make in regard to what your circumstances are. And I think back on that one decision that I made about Fred Cherry about worst place or a better place. You know, if I've made a different choice, my life, I wouldn't be here today. And my life would be entirely different. Because it would change the course of my life. And of course, we all make bad choices, but we still have the we have the freedom to make those choices. And so I think that this is this has guided my life as well. And I have 1000 examples of choices that were made there that that determine people's lives. There was a story, the first large group that I moved in with, there were nine of us. And of course, this gave us great opportunity for organization within one cell. We had a CO and XO ops boss, education guy maintenance in every I think there was one guy left over for the men. But anyway, everybody had a job. And there were all kinds of things that we could do then with this group of people, you know, we had a movie every night. And we decided that we wanted to play cards. And of course, we didn't have any cards. And the Vietnamese wouldn't give us any, any games or anything. We had no paper, pencil, we had paper, which toilet paper, precious stuff. And so we sacrificed some of that and glued some up together with rice glue and cut it up into little cards like that and used cigarette ashes and brick dust to make the make the numbers and the suits and 200 deck of cards. And some people played solitaire and some people played poker. And I knew something about bridge. My mother had been a master player, and I played a lot in college. And so I was the only one. And so people want to play bridge and we had nine people, one guy didn't want to play, but that was great. Because now we had two tables, we could play contract bridge and all of that. And so we were getting pretty good and so on. And we had a hiding place for these things. And one day the door opened unexpectedly, while we had them out and we didn't get them hidden and Vietnamese found them and they came charging in got all the head shed there and put us all in leg irons and took the cards and tore them up little pieces and then burn them and then threw them in the can and, you know, and took half everything we had and then on the way out, they rubbed salt in the wound by saying, you are forbidden to play cards. Well, they just destroyed our cards. How were we going to do that? They took a toilet paper, we couldn't make any more cards. And then we decided to play cards without the cards. And so we play bridge memory bridge, we call it. So having nine people was perfect. It wouldn't have worked otherwise. So one guy who didn't play became a dealer. And his job was to divide the deck up into four piles of 13 to memorize each pile. This took him a while. And then he had to teach each pile to a memory bank, the other four. And that took a while and they had to memorize it and they had to be sure they had it right. And then once that was done, then the players the other four could consult with their memory bank behind and bid and play and whatever. And then the dealer became the umpire, you know, God plays the ace of spades. I don't have that. So this was laborious as hell. But it was an act of defiance, because they told us we couldn't do it. And we did it anyway. And it made us feel empowered because we had made a choice that would never have occurred under any other circumstances. And so there's so many instances of this kind of thing happening that people made choices that just determined their lives. It was amazing. And so that's the kind of thing that has stuck with me ever since. Well, I mentioned Victor Frankl. If you haven't read Victor Frankl, read it. He was in Auschwitz in World War Two. He was a psychotherapist who wrote a book about his experiences in Auschwitz and about his theory of psychotherapy, which is called logotherapy. And it really he says man's most basic need is to discover the meaning in one's life. And if you are frustrated in that you turn to other things that may not be as meaningful, power, pleasure, all kinds of other things. And you're in the end still frustrated because you haven't found a true meaning in your life. And so he's that therapeutically. I had never read Frankl when I was there, but I certainly did afterwards and explained so much that we all search for a meaningful life through our professions and our families and our daily activities and everything. And Frankl said, you know, you can you can discover this meaning by by doing a deed or experiencing a value or through suffering. And he said suffering is the most powerful way. And so and he said you can discover a meaningful life in the worst of circumstances. And I think there are many, many examples of that look at Helen Keller. Of course, she didn't do it by herself when we all need help in discovering this. So that's the that that was a choice that that you make is to is to is how you face your suffering and what you learn from that. So three lessons are what I call important things. One is communications. Because communications are central to everything that we did. Without it, we would have been isolated individuals. And that's exactly what the Vietnamese wanted. Because you know, as an isolated individual, you're much more susceptible to lies to propaganda. If you have no one to count on for for the truth, or just to talk about it, you know, they're probably people that could convince each of you as individuals over a long enough period of time that the world was flat. Simply because you don't have the resources to counter these very convincing arguments about it. But of course, I would have no chance to convince this group of that. And so to divide and conquer was their modus. And so we knew that there was strength and unity. And so it was our communications that through most of this brought us together in a sense of unity in the last prison that we were in. After the Sante raid, it brought us all back into one place. And we call that camp unity. Because for the first time we were physically all there. But certainly we had been together through our communication all along. And I after I was separated from Fred, Fred Cherry, I moved out to a really bad place out in the country, the bar patch, back into solitary confinement, he almost almost isolation, I could only tap on the wall with one one guy. And the punishment, they read out new punishment for communicating at all. And that was two days of heavy punishment. Leg irons, handcuffs in a foxhole for 60 days with a cover on. You got out 10 minutes a day to use a bucket and eat one meal. So this was a graphic illustration of how important it was to the Vietnamese to keep us from simply tapping through the wall, because that was that was endangered their program. So I could only tap to one guy, Marine Corps, major F4 pilot, how he done. And we were in handcuffs behind our back all day. And so the only way I could tap was to back up to the wall and tap with the end of my finger very quietly. Because I sure didn't want to get in that foxhole. And at first it was about how to and this is when all the torture started. And so he's my only, only guy I could communicate with. And so we're talking about what happens and what do we do next and all of that. And then we began to talk about our careers mine very short is pretty much longer and what our families were like and what we like to do. And we began to try and tell a joke every day. This is a grim period of time. And and then we began to do all kinds of things talk about baseball and sports and all kinds of things and how we now got to be pretty good friends. Matter of fact, we had even decided to torture ourselves and talk about food, because it was it was such a element of our lives at that time. And so we came up with this scheme that one day it would be how he's turned to come up with a menu for the day. So he would tap over what we were having for breakfast and then for lunch and dinner and cocktails and hors d'oeuvres and whole smear, you know, and then the next day it would be my turn to do the same. But and then so in the evening where there were no lights there is pitch dark. So lying there, it gave me something to do come up with something besides steak and potatoes, you know, baking an eggs for breakfast. And so it gave us something to do. Well, somewhere along there, I realized I had no idea what how he done looked like. I'd never seen him. We never saw any other prisoners at all, because the shutters were always closed, and you never got outside never went anywhere except to interrogation. And so I asked him, I said, I tapped, I said, Howie, what do you look like anyway? He said, you know, John Wayne? So yeah, I know John Wayne. He said, well, a lot like that. Okay, so I took all that information that I had about how he and I put this mental image, you know, six to broad shoulders, narrow hips, good looking guy, marine, you know, fit. So I carried that information around with me for another five years or so. There weren't too many Marines there. So I never ran into anybody who knew how he done. I told lots of stories about him. And at the very end, when they're just getting ready to release us, they were in this big, the big part of the Hanoi Hilton, which we call camp unity. And they did something they had never done before. They let a group of we're in groups of about 40 out into this courtyard. And then they opened the door to another cell and here comes another 40 people out. Some of them I had lived with some I knew some I knew by sight and some I had never seen before. And this guy comes walking up to me. And he is short and bald, and not real good looking. And he duck out his hand. He said, Hi, I'm Howie done. I said, Howie, you son of a bitch, you, you lied to me. He said, I know, but it was such great fun knowing the image that you had of me all this time. Well, I loved Howie. I love that story. But the point of it is that in the instant he said, Howie done, he went from being a complete stranger to being one of my best friends in all the world, just because numbers one to five. So that's the power of that communication. We have so many methods of communication today. I think we have too many we have information overload. Our job is is filtering out the garbage, getting the message through letting the right information through. We had just the opposite problem in Vietnam. But the importance of communication today is just as strong. It's how we build our families, our communities, our businesses, our professions, everything depends on communication. Now, Stockdale was a senior naval officer there. Robbie Rossner was a senior officer for many years until the Navy Air Force started flying some O sixes. And they were the overall SROs. But the operational SRO, senior ranking officer was the most senior guy you could communicate with because it could not be any on the site leadership without the communications. And so that's why you had so many so called junior officers were filling these leadership roles, you know, because they were the most senior within that little com group within a building, you know, and these were go threes and maybe oh fours. But for the most part, they were the JOS. And you were operating on the guidance from from these heavy hitters, but they were, they were hard to get in touch with. Even though we could sometimes. So communication was was so important. It was the lifeblood of our whole existence. Well, the other thing I'm thinking about was humor. As I said, Howie and I tried to tell a joke every day if we could. You had to laugh at yourself, you know, your circumstances in order to make it better. I had some very interesting friends there. One guy from Louisiana, anybody from Louisiana here? You probably know what a coon ass is in the rest of you can ask him what a coon ass is. But it's one of those Cajun Creole kind of things anyway, unusual guy. And one of the things the coon ass would say when things got really bad. He'd say just remember it's always darkest before it's totally black. Just put things in perspective, you know, and interject a little humor. My friend, Irv Williams, he said, Well, you know, we bitching about something. He said, Well, can't take a joke. He shouldn't have joined. The story, though, that I remember the most was about my friend, Mike Christian. Mike Christian was a former enlisted. He was a six being and he was a little rough around the edges and no nonsense kind of guy and Mike and I had a great friendship and we did a lot of things together. I learned so much from Mike and but he he I tended to try and be more of a diplomat. You know, don't don't piss him off deliberately because you're going to get enough stuff. Normally, you don't want any extra. But a lot of people thought getting extra was a good deal. But I didn't. But he liked it that way. And so he wound up with all the crappy little things they had to do and and so on. But he he's that was that was his way of doing things. And that was fine. We lived in this group of nine that I described, where we play bridge. And there was an escape that was planned from our compound from our prison. And we had participated in that by we went up in the overhead worked a barbed wire loose from the hole in the ceiling and could look over the wall and scope out the landscape there. That's where these guys, two guys were going to go on a rainy Saturday night. It was pretty well planned about how they were going to get out of the prison and so on. And we understood that it was pretty well planned as to what they were going to do then. But unfortunately, they, they were caught. They went on a rainy Saturday night were caught early Sunday morning because they just stuck out, you know, in Hanoi, amidst thousands and thousands of Vietnamese. And these were Americans, even though they had some some disguises, where you can imagine the Vietnamese reaction to this, it was just amazed. And they determined to find out everything that they possibly could about this escape. And so they used a technique that they had used to discover what was going on in the prison. We call it a calm purge communication purge. And what they would do is take one person from every cell block. And they would put them in different rooms, they would ask them all the same questions. Who's a senior guy? How do you communicate? What orders has he given? What are your escape plans and so on? Well, the first time that they that they did that, they, they, they learned some things. After that, we always had a cover story. Okay, you can tell them what they already know. They know who's the senior guy. They know we tap on the walls, you know, all of this, you can tell them what they already know. And if everybody sticks to the same cover story, then they figure they've gotten to the truth, you know, just like, you know, you're interrogating terrorists, you can't rely on what one terrorist tells you under interrogation, you have to, you have to verify that with other sources. And so we figured, okay, if they verified it by everybody having the same answer, then they would stop thinking they had arrived at the truth. And then that way we could protect what was really important, which they didn't know. And that worked pretty well. But in this case, we had no cover stories. And so they use that technique. And I remember about three o'clock in the morning, they, they, they came and opened the door and they pointed at Mike, they gave him the signal to roll up his stuff, we know he's moving out. And this was probably going to be a comfort. And I had to, I had two very powerful emotions in a short period of time. One was and they pointed at Mike, because I knew they're going to point at somebody. They pointed at Mike. And it was this huge sense of relief that it wasn't me, because I knew what lay in lay ahead for whoever it was. And then the second was when when he was being let out, he looked back at us and just kind of looked at us for a second. It was a great sense of regret that it wasn't me, but Mike was going to go through this. And anyway, it was just it was a terrible time. We could hear these guys screaming in the night and this lasted for weeks. And we knew that they were extracting information from them because they'd come back and put us in leg irons or punish us for things that we had done in preparation for this escape attempt and everything. And you remember in one of the pictures that John introduced there was a method of torture called the rope trick. So we knew that they were using the things that they had used all along to get this information. And so finally it was over. And they came again and unlocked the door and push Mike inside with this little bundle of stuff. And he had lost a lot of weight. He looked like hell. He really had been hammered. And I know somebody we all gathered around him. And as soon as the door was closed, somebody said, Mike, where you been? What happened? And he looked up and with a little grin on his face said, Oh, I got tied up and couldn't get away. And that changed everything that changed everything. It just sent a message that I made it I'm here. I'm not a victim. I'm not a hero. I just survived and I made it. And we're gonna press on. And it changed the whole atmosphere. And I thought my God, that is a powerful leadership trait is humor used at the right time. So I was convinced, you know, that humor is an essential part of leadership. And it was what I think helped get us through some of the most difficult times. Well, the last thing is forgiveness. And at the very end, in spite of improved treatment over this last couple of years, we still had retained the hatred that we felt for the Vietnamese, the people for communism that enslaved them and others throughout the world. And hatred, I think, had become a useful thing. It had become armor. It had become a shield against every attempt by the Vietnamese to convince us of the truth of what they were saying, or the justice of their cause, or it protected us from all of this. We hated them. We didn't believe anything they said unless it was verified. And we came up with a, you know, a fudge factor. If they said they shot down 10 airplanes, we figured they got one, you know, so they exaggerated things by 10. And so this hatred was a useful thing. Well, at the very end, you know, we had been thinking a lot about the future. I had my list of 77 things and so on, but they didn't relate to the first few days that we were going to be home and people start talking about what are you going to be doing the first couple of days, you know, when you're when you're home. And this is this is what I was thinking about. This is the first picture that I got of my wife and my my baby. She's about five in this picture. She was five days old when I last saw her. So this is what I had been dreaming about and thinking about all that time. And that's what the first few days were going to be occupied with. Well, I heard these two guys sitting close by talking about what they were going to do to get back at the Vietnamese. In the first couple of days that they're home, they're going to launch a program of revenge to get back at them for everything they had done for us. And I suddenly realized that this hatred had such a grip that that's that was the choice that they were making the first days of freedom to be spent that way. And I had made a vow that they were never ever going to adversely affect my life again. And I realized that I couldn't carry that hatred with me if I was going to do that. And so when we finally marched out the gates of the Hanoi Hilton to get on the bus to go out to the airport to get on the 141s to come home, I just turned around to that building and I said, I forgive you. And all of that hatred fell away that armor fell away. And I walked out of two prisons that day. And so that act of freedom, that act of forgiveness was the most liberating thing I've done ever in my life. And it guides my life today. At the time was not a Christian act, it was a act of self preservation. And since then, I have as a Christian forgiven everyone connected with that war. Well, except for two people, but I don't hate them. It's just that I cannot really bring myself to fully forgive them. But it doesn't interfere with my life at all. And so that's okay. Well, I I've done things in threes, but I have not read but two poems. So I'd like to close with one more, which is coincidentally called the three of us. Yesterday on meeting you, hoping without knowing you, knowing without asking you, loving without telling you, the young and misty two of us sharing each the best of us, accepting to the worst of us. And we so good for both of us. And as for me, the faulty one, the wild and hungry, needy one to spend my life in search of one and finding you the perfect one. And so we shared our pastel days, our soft and glowing magic days, and you a child within those days, and then our few but perfect days. Now two of you to wait for me to love to hope to pray for me. And I still feel you part of me, though you and she so far from me. The future still so bright for us, for you, for me, for three of us. And she the best of each of us will fill the lives of both of us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Dr. Have you hadn't? You get me every time you do that last poem, Porter. Dr. Halliburton has agreed to take a few questions for us. So what we'd like to do is ask you if you have a question to come forward to these two microphones, not to the ones at your seat. So does anyone have a first question? Please come to the microphone. And if not, I'll kick one off. And second, I'll let the Admiral kick one off. I just want to lose my voice. Thank you. Two years at Swast. You are our best speaker. And now two years at the college, you remain. Thank you very much. I can't resist though. 77 files, art, aviation, automobiles. So what's your favorite work of art, your favorite aircraft and your favorite car? Well, my favorite aircraft was the F4, even though it let me down one time. But it did have a Martin Baker seat. And you know, I think, you know, I survived because of the grace of God, the Martin Baker seat and whoever the guy was, it packed my parachute. So I have it was really my only experience in aviation. And so the F4 is my favorite. My favorite automobile is a is a 44 deluxe business coupe, older than I am. I've never had one, but I always dream about it. And someday maybe I will. But that would be my favorite automobile. Favorite work of art, that's very difficult. I would say Michelangelo's David, perhaps most magnificent. But there are so many. And I think art, you know, has always inspired my life. And we see, we see so many different things that we would never see if we were not looking through the artist's eyes. And so it's hard to say what the favorite, what the favorite is. But I would say David, yes. Good afternoon, sir, Lieutenant Commander Matt Loverink, United States Navy. I went to the University of Minnesota and Captain Arvin Chauncey was one of our CEOs. Arvin Chauncey? Oh, Chauncey, yeah. Yeah, he's for those of you who don't know, he spent just under seven years in captivity. And he would come to the campus every year and give a brief. And he would explain many funny stories like you. But one of the things that bothered him the most was what he felt was betrayed trust by America, either through media stories, or visits, or that would let out secrets like what the finger actually meant. Did that, did that affect your experience also? And if so, how did you overcome it? I think it did. It had, it had a great effect. Because I know that I and a lot of us there, if you're being pressured to make a statement, that is almost identical to to what some senator or congressman is saying in Congress about the war. And yet we were, you know, they were they were pressuring us to make the same kind of statement. I think it was very disappointing to know that fellow Americans would side with the enemy. For whatever reason, you know, I think we understood that there were some people who were conscientious objectors, there were some people that just refused to go that, you know, paid the price and there were others who were cowardly left the country, you know, or punctured their eardrums or any other ruse to get out of serving and so on. And I think that was a great, great disappointment that Americans would behave that way, and so on. Of course, the most egregious was with Jane Fonda's visit there. She's one of the ones that I can't really forgive. And so yeah, it had an effect. And so we knew the effect that that any statements that we might make, you know, denouncing the war, and we as credible spokesman, you know, that that we had to avoid that at all costs, you know, because that would further further their objective to build this antiwar movement, for example, but it was so clear to us that that was how they were going to win the war, that militarily they were never going to beat us. As all of you know, they didn't never want to make a battle. But to them, that was irrelevant, you know, that if they could hang on long enough, they would wear down the American public support. They knew our center of gravity, and it was our support for the war. And it worked. And so it was so disappointing. And so more than disappointing, that Americans seem to be on the other side of that, you know, that they were lengthening the war, that they were, they thought they were helping to end the war, when in fact they would not, they were lengthening the war. That answer your question? Yeah. Porter, most of the people that you were fellow prisoners were officers. But I think we have at least one case, and Doug Hagdahl, who was an illicit member. Can you tell me what his experience was as a prisoner and how he did? Right. Well, Doug, Doug was a, he was an enlisted guy, I think he was 19 years old, he was on the cruiser Canberra, and somehow fell off at night, whether he was sleeping or, or what, I don't I don't know that there's some mystery about that. But he wound up in the water, and nobody knew he was there. So the Canberra steams away, and he floats around out there until some Vietnamese fishermen pick him up. And they turn him over to the military, and military brings him to Hanoi. And of course, he's not really part of our group, because our group was really like the German system, Stalag, there's Stalags, and then there was Stalag Luft, which was for air, people that fell out of the air. And so we were in essentially a Stalag Luft, and Doug was not. And so, but he, he wound up there. And they figured they would use him for propaganda. He, he tried to convince them that he was just this dumb, uneducated 19 year old seaman that didn't know anything. And they happened to put him in with another Navy guy named Dick Stratton, who was up here in Newport for many years. And Dick was a controversial type, but he was a great leader, I thought. And he lived with, with, with Doug, and he taught him all these member, the memorization of the names. At that time, there were about 250, 250 names. And so he taught Doug all these 250 names. He discovered that Doug had this amazing memory. When he got there, he could recite the Gettysburg address, forward and backwards. So he had that kind of almost photographic memory. And so Dick pumped him full of every scrap of information about what was going on in the prisons, because Doug had never been tortured or really mistreated. And they were going to, to release him early. And the first time they asked him, if you wanted to go home early, he said, no, I'm going to stay here with everybody else, not going home early. And so he missed the first group of three, there were 12 total that chose to come home early. Dick Stratton ordered him to accept this early release, simply because the information that he had. And Doug reluctantly accepted that order, and was released early in the second group. And Doug had go because of the knowledge that he had. First of all, they were detailed information about the methods of torture, about the methods of resistance, about the methods of communication, about organization, about everything that was going on. And this is the first intelligence that came out of Vietnam about what things were really like. Plus he had 250 names. Now, he rattled off these names. 15 minutes after he landed in the United States, he was on the phone to my wife saying, your husband is alive and it's okay. And that was the first confirmation she had had other than simply my name had gotten out. There's an interesting story behind that. I have time. My wife thought I was dead for a year and a half. And so she's living in Atlanta. And all of a sudden she gets a call from somebody in the Navy or State Department, asking some questions, you know, how are you doing? You got remarried? Things like that. Can we come by and see you? She says yes. And so about six people arriving. And they are very nervous and everything. And she just out of the blue said, just relax, I know you're here to tell me that my husband's alive. So they said, Well, that's right. But all they had was a name that they'd gotten out and they couldn't tell her how or anything. And so she and the wife of my pilot who was killed had become very good friends. And they used to go to Washington regularly. And Marty was head of the 10 Southern States and for the National League. And so they went to Washington. So they went up there one time and they met with, I don't know, Hague, I think was at the time. And we're asking, how is it? You know that Porter is alive and Stan is not. Because his status was still KIA. And so they take, they take her one way and Marty the other way and they go into a room and there are about six guys there. And this guy has a briefing book and they're explaining to her that they can't tell her because of the source. And one by one, these guys got to go to the bathroom, make a phone call, whatever leave. And so they leave her with the briefing book and she's smart girl. And so she figured out supposed to read this. So she did and she reads this report, which a lot of it was blanked out, but it essentially said there was an intelligent source, you know, of Vietnamese spy who had brought my name out. And that was it, the only name. So that was what she believed. That's what I believed when I came home and I said, how did you, how were you first told I was alive? And so she told me that story. And I said, okay, but that sounds a little funny. You know, Vietnamese spy, why would he just send out my name and all of that. So anyway, some of you have read Jim Stockdale's book in love and war, Jim and Sybil Stockdale's book in love and war. And I had read that. And I had, I was actually irritated at CAG. Because he had revealed this, I thought brilliant way of communicating that Sybil and her cake up had come up with Intel guy. And it was this in this invisible carbon paper. And so CAG gets up. He gets a letter he was one who was allowed to write because of his notoriety. And they wanted to give the impression that everybody was writing when it was just, you know, a very small percentage of people who were. And so he gets a letter, it's got a picture in it. And the letter says, here, I've sent you a picture of your Aunt Margaret. We took her to the beach recently because she loves water. He didn't have an Aunt Margaret and didn't know who this person was. And so he being a bright guy as well, figured out the two and soaked the picture in water. And it came apart. And inside were two pieces of paper. One of them was very small little list of instructions. And the other was this invisible ink carbon paper. And so the instructions were, and they knew at the time that the guys who were writing, were writing on a full sized piece of paper. When we started writing, many years later, it was on this little six line kind of postcard thing. And so they to avoid the appearance of censorship of our mail, they only allowed that you'd write a rough draft and you could only talk about family and health, or whatever. And they would censor out what they wanted. And then you wrote a smooth draft. So fortunately, he wrote his rough draft and they came back and had censored it. And so he's going to write a smooth draft and he put the paper, the carbon paper over the written part and can now write a clandestine message. The part that I had missed when I first read this was what he put in that clandestine message. And it was the first 40 names of POWs that were there. Yes, who was number 40? So CAG, Stogdale was the spy. And he didn't really realize that I guess that the impact that that had on three of us because when when I they announced that I was alive, it was with two others, Rob Duremus and Bill Frank. And they had been declared killed as well. And so the three of us were on that list, both of them shot down before I was. So anyway, that that's my spy story. Yes, ma'am. Lieutenant Commander Laughlin, did you read Klausowitz in German? And who is your favorite theorist on war? I did not read Klausowitz in German. My German was strictly conversational. And not very good at that. But my favorite theorist is Klausowitz. I mean, I Klausowitz, I think is the central theorist, even today. Am I not right? I mean, he was so perceptive about everything. The conditions changed, obviously, but Klausowitz still nailed it about the relationship of strategy and policy about things that can go wrong about friction about everything. So Klausowitz, as a general theorist of war, understanding the nature of war, I don't think anybody has equal that. Sir, Good afternoon, sir. Colonel Johnson, United States Marine Corps. First of all, thank you very much for your presentation. I find it very inspiring. I think most everyone here did. Quick question. Did you read or have you read Unbroken? I have and have you had a chance to meet Lou Zamperini and what were your thoughts? I have not had a chance to meet him. I would love to meet him. I had great, great admiration for him. I even discounting his prison experience 47 days at sea, eating sharks and stuff. It was pretty incredible. No, he was an amazing, amazing guy. Good afternoon, sir. Commander Drew McGinley, United States Navy. You spoke a bit about the necessity of humor, just in leadership in general and certainly in difficult, difficult circumstances. I was wondering if you could provide any examples? If you have any jokes, maybe about Jane Fonda or one of your other favorite targets? Most of most prison humor is not repeatable. And no, there was one. We sat over there and we knew that our families were getting our paychecks and all of this. And so the kind of the description was what wears a fur coat, drives a Cadillac convertible and weighs 300 pounds, appeal of his wife. Fortunately, that turned out not to be true. Probably last question, Porter. Can you explain how you came to have a gravestone? Where it is today? And how do you feel about it? Well, you know, I went back to my hometown of Davidson, North Carolina, where I grew up. And they had a big celebration. They blocked off the street, had a keg of beer, first time. And as I was greeting or people were greeting me, old family friend came up and he had been the director of the funeral home. And so we chat for a minute and he said, by the way, I have something of yours. I said, Oh, what's that? And he said, you're your gravestone, gravestone. Well, while I was gone, my mother died, my grandparents died that I had grown up with these three people. And they had been buried in the family plot. And my mother unbeknownst to me, obviously, had commissioned this and had put it in our family plot. And then when she died, and my grandparents died, by that time, they knew I was alive. And so they he took the tombstone up and kept it in his garage. And he's now asking me what I want to do with it. I said, Well, you know, I haven't given that a lot of thought. But I do have a Navy owes me a shipment from North Carolina. And so I'll have the movers come by and pick it up. And we were living in Atlanta at the time. And and so they did. And I can remember when they delivered this thing, they delivered this load of stuff. And about nine o'clock one morning, a van pulls up and I'm in the shower and my wife goes down. And she said, You better come down here and deal with these guys. I think they're drunk. And so I, I walked out and they saw me the eyes got really big. And this is you don't want it's on this dome. They didn't want anything to do with it. Anyway, so we had them haul it back in the back and it sat in the woods for a while and then it moved it down by the garden. And then, you know, we moved up here and I've lugged it up here and it stayed in storage for a while. And then I built a grape arbor in front of a croquet court. And we put it there. And great sense of great conversation piece, you know, cocktail. Nothing else work. Go out and look at the stone. So I've dragged it back to North Carolina. And it sits in sits at home in Greensboro. And I think I figured out, you know, what the hell is going to happen when I really die? I mean, there's going to be some confusion here, right? So I think I know what I'm going to do with it. I'm going to will it to the main maritime main military, main military museum up in, up in Maine. And this is something that was started by an Air Force guy who started collecting POW bracelets and then people began giving him other stuff. And it's just ballooned into this huge project. And so I figured that that and I've given him a lot of artifacts, in addition to the ones that are over here in the museum. And so I think that's the appropriate place for it with a plaque of explanation. Border. Thank you very much for your presentation. And thanks for your service to the United States. Thank you.