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Viet Nam's P.O.W.s have survived better as official patriots and readjusted to civilian life more successfully than some of their Korean War predecessors, perhaps because most of them, before the fall, were trained pilots and college-educated military career men. Most agree that their time of torture and isolation taught them much about self-reliance and the importance of thinking small. Navy Lieut. (j.g.) Joe Mobley, 36, a thin, balding man who greeted his friends on the first morning of the reunion wearing reverse-heel Earth Shoes and dungarees, still acutely remembers what seem like almost microscopic moments of prisoner austerity. "Your senses become keener," he explains. "You can feel the effect of an aspirin. You can smell a bar of Dial soap at 400 yards."
Laird Guttersen, 52, an ebullient, bigboned retired Air Force colonel, remembers the day he "broke" as if it were yesterday. He had already watched his hands turn black "like German sausage" from tourniquet-tight binding; then ropes around his elbows were tightened until his shoulder blades slowly jammed into his spine. "At that moment," he remembers, "I would have thrown my kids into a fire to make it stop." Guttersen was on his knees and felt "psychically dirty, like I'd been swimming in a cesspool" and feared he might give up secrets about clandestine intelligence operations. He decided to try to kill himself by running headfirst at the blood-spattered torture room wall. Then a guard hit him and sent him flying at the wall, where he saw KEEP THE FAITH, BABY scratched in the mud and blood. Soon after that, his captors began demanding antiwar statements rather than military secrets.
Inevitably such experiences must come home. Laird Guttersen's blood pressure was so low after three months of torture, complicated by pneumonia, that parts of him lost all feeling when he remained still more than ten minutes. At night, instead of sleeping he used to lie in a feverish trance, shifting to stay alive, timing himself by the half-hour chimes of a distant clock. "When Laird came home we couldn't sleep in the same bed at first," remembers his wife Virginia, a frail, dark-blue-eyed wife who waited. "He shifted a quarter turn every five to ten minutes."
Andrea Rander's husband Donald, then an Army sergeant first class, was captured in Hue during Tet 1968 and taken to Hanoi. She raised their children alone for five years. A few weeks before he returned, a reporter interviewed her at home in Maryland. The reporter left uneventfully, then the telephone rang. "I forgot one question," she remembers him saying. "Do you have any boyfriends, and are you planning to divorce your husband?" Andrea Rander is a petite black woman. Standing beside her husband at a reception sponsored by Braniff Airlines, she glares angrily at me, yet another reporter. "I wanted to see that reporter many times after that," she explodes. "I wanted to say, 'Hey, look at us — we're making it!' " Rander watches proudly and adds: "We said, we're not going to become a statistic."