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Torture was regular and excruciating; the middle-aged former prisoners discuss it with the inspiring matter-of-factness of the unbroken. A favorite technique, "the Vietnamese rope trick," involved binding the arms behind the back and rotating them upward until the shoulders and elbows popped out of their sockets.
What sustained the prisoners in the face of isolation and torture? They were all officers and aviators, highly trained and intelligent, the cream of the American military. In extremis, they survived on two codes--the tap code and the honor code.
Nothing destroys like isolation. The men communicated--and sustained one another--by tapping through walls. The Hanoi Hilton, says ex-Air Force pilot Ron Bliss, "sounded like a den of runaway woodpeckers." The North Vietnamese never mastered the code, which laid out the alphabet on a simple 5-by-5 grid (omitting K, for which C was used). They tapped first the line, then the letter in that line. Thus the letter B would be tap...tap tap. The code flowed so fluently that the men told one another jokes; kicks on the wall meant a laugh. Every Sunday, at a coded signal, the men stood and recited the Lord's Prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance.
Almost alone among the former prisoners, Stockdale criticizes the film, which he finds "superficial" and inattentive to the deeper mysteries of fortitude and survival.
At bottom, Return with Honor is a sort of harrowing American fairy tale: shining heroes, knights of the air, fall to ground, to dark dungeon. They are tested in fire and darkness, and emerge with honor. Their suffering purifies the troubled nation that sent them to an impure battle. Or so the nation, emerging from the theater with tears in its eyes, likes to think.
The other film, Regret to Inform--made over the course of 10 years by Barbara Sonneborn in memory of her husband Jeff Gurvitz, killed in February 1968--is a lamentation, an elegy for both sides in the war (the Vietnamese called it "the American War"). Sonneborn interviewed other American widows. She journeyed to Vietnam to find the place (Khe Sanh) where her husband died. She talked with North Vietnamese and Viet Cong women. The film has about it a terrible ache of sadness, and of truth.
Return with Honor is a story about warriors' deliverance through suffering and steadfastness. Regret to Inform is a kind of beautifully made poem, a cello piece, about grief--about war seen through the eyes of women and, as Sonneborn says more brutally, about the people underneath the warriors' bombs.
What links the two films, besides the war, is this: both arrive at a destination far beyond politics. We have got that far in coming home from the longest war.
--With reporting by Ellin Martens/New York