In spring 1964, I was 15 years old and a high school freshman in El Sobrante, California. My father, Chief Damage Controlman Bill Allen, was assigned to Port Security Station Alameda but was spending the bulk of his time supervising the loading of explosives on Vietnam-bound vessels at Port Chicago and Concord, California. It was a contentious time in our household as my older brother, a senior in high school, was being drawn into the growing antiwar movement in the Bay Area. In addition, my dad, then an E-7—the highest enlisted rating at that time—knew promotion to warrant officer likely would result in a transfer to supervise explosives offloading in Vietnam. He had entered the Coast Guard following Pearl Harbor and later deployed on the USCGC Kukui (WAK-186) to build a Loran A station in the Philippines at the end of the Korean War. Ultimately, he opted out of his third war and retired, and we moved to Arizona.
On the other side of the world, Army Captain Jim Thompson became what is recorded as Vietnam’s first prisoner of war on 16 March 1964. He would not be released until March 1973, after nine years of isolation, torture, and starvation. On 5 August, Navy Lieutenant (j.g.) Everett Alvarez Jr. became the first pilot to be shot down and captured. He suffered the same brutal captivity. He was released more than eight years later in February 1973 as part of Operation Homecoming, following the Paris Peace Accords. By the end of March 1973, 591 American prisoners had returned home.
In the nine years from 1964 to 1973, I graduated high school and the Coast Guard Academy, was assigned to my first floating unit, the USCGC Androscoggin (WHEC-68), and then served as a search-and-rescue controller at the Greater Antilles Section in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Following my tour in San Juan, I commanded Loran Station Lampang, Thailand. The Coast Guard operated two Loran stations in Vietnam (Tan My and Con Son), staffed and operated by civilian contract employees after the U.S. military withdrawal in 1973, and three stations in Thailand (Sattahip, Lampang, and Udorn) staffed by active-duty Coast Guard personnel.
When the North Vietnamese Army drove south in 1975, the station at Tan My, near the Demilitarized Zone, was evacuated. The advance of those military forces culminated in the fall of Saigon and the evacuation of the U.S. embassy. Personnel at the Loran Station on Con Son Island were evacuated hours before the embassy fell. We ceased operations at Lampang and shipped equipment back to the United States.
Two recent books caused me to remember and reflect on those years. The first, Reflections on Captivity: A Tapestry of Stories by a Vietnam War POW, is a highly personal account by Porter Halyburton, a Navy radar intercept officer who was shot down over North Vietnam in 1965 and spent more than seven years as a prisoner of war. It is a collection of stories and vignettes that provide a glimpse into the unimaginable hardship endured by the POWs. It also is a lesson in reflection and reconciliation, a process that allows humans to “move on” and create their own new “art of the possible” after extraordinary, devastating events and experiences.
Early in his captivity, Halyburton was thought to have been killed in action. It was nearly a year and a half before his family learned he was alive and after his tombstone had been placed in the family burial plot. In his epilogue he writes, “I hope that I have been able to convey some of the how and the why of this, but the most powerful thing I am left with is a deep sense of gratitude and a desire to pass these lessons along to others.” Pretty profound stuff given his experience. Also remarkable is the resilience of his wife, Marty. In the first package Porter received from home in 1969 was a photo of Marty and their oldest daughter, Dabney. In the photo, Dabney is four years old. Porter had last seen her when she was five days old. Now approaching their 60th anniversary, Porter and Marty have three grown children and a grandson.
Not all POW stories ended so happily. There was tremendous strain on spouses who lived for years without knowing whether they would see their husbands again. Some marriages did not survive, and not all returning POWs were able to reconcile their experience with their home life and future. But through this ordeal, a group of spouses was brought together by common tragedy and common cause, and they refused to believe there was nothing they could do.
Last fall I was asked to read a manuscript written by former Navy public affairs officer Taylor Baldwin Kiland and retired Coast Guard Chief Public Affairs Specialist Judy Silverstein Gray. Unwavering: The Wives Who Fought to Ensure No Man Is Left Behind is an extraordinary piece of journalism and truth telling. It is a compelling compilation of the heroic and hard-nosed actions by the wives of POWs who fought military and government bureaucracy and longstanding stereotypes of who military wives are and how they should behave. Most important, it profiles resilient, unrelenting, fearless women who faced down the most senior military and political leaders to earn meetings in 1969 at the Paris Peace talks and forced the return of their husbands into the political calculus that ended the war. Each has her own story, linked to her imprisoned husband. Each had to reconcile the impact of her husband’s captivity on their relationship and future. There are both inspiring and heartwarming stories and heartbreaking outcomes.
It was impossible to read the excruciating detail of Porter Halyburton’s captivity and wonder in awe at his personal journey of reconciliation without recalling Unwavering. It caused me to reflect on my own journey from 1964 to 1975. I lost my older brother to a heroin overdose in 1970 that devastated our family and left me angry and bitter for years. I was nearly killed in a fire on my first ship in 1971. But it was not until I was placed in command of an isolated Loran station in northern Thailand in 1974 that I began to reflect on what I had experienced. Reflections on Captivity and Unwavering created emotional bookends for a period I am still in many ways reconciling. I am the better for having read both books.
The learning continues.