Overhead, huge glass chandeliers hover like Cobra gunships in a white tropical sun. The Los Angeles Marriott Hotel ballroom is a sea of white military formal wear, pink and blue evening dresses, candles and carnations over red carpeting. Nelson Riddle's orchestra swings into What Kind of Fool Am I? as Sammy Davis Jr. hails "our mutual friend" Richard Nixon, then reflects on the song: "I don't think anyone in this room has to re-examine their lives."
This is the fifth-year reunion of U.S. prisoners of war returned from Viet Nam. The guests and their wives have flown into Los Angeles on "space available" air flights and are camped gratis in 300 Marriott Hotel rooms for a weekend of caucusing and quiet carousal. Asked again and again by reporters and well-wishers, the P.O.W.s insist that they are here only for fun, not politics. Yes, we're doing just fine, most of them say. "We're all back in the mainstream," silver-haired Navy Captain Howard Rutledge beams. "We've been to the worst place in the world. Every place else is a step up."
You only sense the pain and isolation of the men in defiant yet oddly downcast expressions, in hushed stories told in hotel rooms, in wistful asides about other men's wives who remained faithful. Yet through the weekend, anger and a tinge of self-pity take nothing away from their evident pride and courage.
"This hand," bespectacled George Day, 53, is saying Saturday morning as he gestures at a half-closed fist, the right one, attached to a misshapen forearm. Day, now a wealthy Florida lawyer, was an Air Force major, a downed Phantom pilot. In 1967 a crowd of Vietnamese villagers watched as a rope was tied around his elbows and tightened with a foot jammed into his back. A ferret-faced man the P.O.W.s nicknamed "the Rodent," seized Day's right arm and twisted until the cracked bones broke through the flesh. The bone, gaping from Day's arm like a jagged tooth, remained untreated for four months—until Day's half-dead cellmate, Navy Lieut. Commander John McCain, another torture victim, regained consciousness sufficiently to fashion, out of his own bandages and a stray bamboo stick, a cast for Day.
"You can see what a lousy job I did," grins McCain, a sassy, prematurely white-haired Navy career man sitting on a soft couch in the glittering Middle American chic of the Marriott's split-level lobby. McCain spent 42 months in solitary confinement, partly because his father, Admiral John McCain, happened to be Navy Commander in Chief for the Pacific. "Until the day I went down, I lived under my father's shadow," McCain explains. "Incarceration relieved me of that burden—he couldn't affect my future there."