Soul deep Indivisible details an unlikely bond forged by the Vietnam War BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Two Souls Indivisible:The Friendship That Saved Two POWs in Vietnam By James S. Hirsch. Houghton-Mifflin, 274 pages, $25.
	A life of choices Bristol resident Porter Halyburton has a gravestone in his backyard, overlooking his garden. The memorial marker has the date in 1965 when he was shot down, and carved beneath that are the words: "Killed in Combat Over North Vietnam." Being given an extra lifetime has mellowed him into a soft-spoken white-haired gentleman with a reputation for being considerate. Nowadays he teaches strategy at the Naval War College in Newport. Since May he has been on a book tour up and down the East Coast with Fred Cherry, a trailblazing African-American former Air Force fighter pilot with nearly 40 medals and a formidable reputation to his credit. They have been talking about their time in the infamous "Hanoi Hilton." The prison’s official name was Hoa Lo, which means "fiery furnace" in Vietnamese, an appropriate if bleak place to forge a friendship. Their last stop on the promotional circuit was June 3 at the Providence Public Library. Before their talk, they discussed the subject of the hour. Here are some excerpts. Q: The treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib certainly isn’t comparable to what you went through, but what were your reactions to the news? Halyburton: I think both of us were dismayed, appalled that this had happened, that Americans could actually let it happen. It cast us in such a bad light. In the pictures that we saw, we didn’t see anything that we would call torture, but that’s not to say that didn’t happen . . . We are always held to higher standards than anybody else in terms of human rights and the way people are treated. So that when a mistake like this happens, we hold ourselves to a higher standard as well. So I hope that we will be judged by what we do about this mistake rather than the mistake itself. I’m sure that things are being done already to correct that. Cherry: We certainly hope that it will be dealt with objectively, and that those who are responsible will be punished according to the law. And we feel badly that it casts such negativity on our good men and women in uniform and our country. Q: Mr. Halyburton, you said that when you left the Hanoi Hilton you turned and said, "I forgive you." Would you please discuss that response? Halyburton: I think over time we had — I had, anyway — developed an intense hatred for the North Vietnamese that we were in contact with. And for communism, which could turn these people into the kind of people they were. I found that this hatred became a very effective armor that shielded us from what they were trying to do to us and with us . . . Towards the end, when we were getting ready to come home, I heard some of my friends talking about what they were going to do to get back at the Vietnamese. I realized then that they were in a prison that they had made themselves. So I was determined to not let that happen. I just said, "I’m not going to let these people adversely affect my life again." I knew I just had to let all that go . . . I’ve never held any animosity towards them since then. Q: This all was more than a quarter-century ago. Looking back, I’m wondering to what extent you consider yourselves different people because of your experiences as POWs. Halyburton: If I was to say there was one most important lesson that I learned there, it was that the course of our lives is not determined by what happens to us or what other people do to us or what fate deals us, it’s what we do with that. It’s the choices that we make, the attitude that you have. Something bad happens and you can make a choice — you can feel sorry for yourself, be a victim the rest of your life, or you can have a very different attitude and make the best of it and go on. Fred is a great example of that. He’s never been one to look backward on things. He’s always thinking: "We’re going to press on from this point forward and make the best of it." That’s had a great influence, I think, on my life. Q: Mr. Cherry, you had difficult experiences just to become a pilot. Cherry: The way I grew up and the way Porter grew up were almost like different societies. My shield, as Porter put it, was there, but more of a love shield. My parents always told me to love people, even though they wrong you. To work with love and caring and don’t try to do wrong things to make a wrong right. So I guess I had that sort of shield built in. — Bill Rodriguez

Now that home-front furor over the Vietnam War has had a quarter century to simmer down, it’s a good time for this memoir to come out. Despite its overheated title, Two Souls Indivisible: The Friendship That Saved Two POWs in Vietnam doesn’t go overboard in describing more than seven years of captivity. Exaggeration is hardly necessary when discussing such harrowing ordeals.

A poetry-writing Southern gentleman with racist beliefs is placed in a North Vietnamese jail cell with a badly injured black man and told to take care of him. The hope of their captors was that they would make each other miserable and thereby more malleable. It didn’t work out that way.

Lt. j.g. Porter Halyburton, a Navy navigator, wasn’t eligible to be a pilot since he initially failed his eye exam. For a while, he didn’t believe that Major Fred Cherry was an Air Force pilot because, among other assumptions, he thought that blacks didn’t had the depth perception to take the front seat. In turn, Cherry was mistrustful, thinking that Halyburton was a French spy thrown into his cell to gather military information.

As far as author James S. Hirsch could determine, Cherry was the only downed American captured in North Vietnam who, under torture, never conceded more than name, rank and serial number. Typical treatment was for prisoners to be suspended by arms tied behind their back until they were willing to write, at the least, a statement of apology, however hedged. Halyburton’s was: "If my country has committed war crimes and this is an illegal war, then as part of the armed forces I am guilty as well."

Cherry’s endurance became legendary among POWs. During one period, manacled hand and foot, he would bang his head against a cement wall to tap-code important information to fellow prisoners. As for fortitude, he had plenty of practice and examples, growing up poor and black in Virginia, with slave ancestors on both sides of his family. His father used to get up at 2 a.m. to walk 10 miles to a job at a fertilizer plant. To relieve the pain of a tooth yanked at home, black pepper was his only affordable remedy.

Cherry grew into an extreme example of a minority who had to develop exceptional abilities in order to not be dismissed as inferior by some in mid-20th century American society. Yet after he saved the day for another F-105 fighter pilot by nudging the man’s landing gear into locked position with a wing tip, his fellow flyers didn’t give him a round of back-slapping — they snubbed him.

His shoulder was broken when he was shot down, and his condition worsened under hack doctoring. Cherry was a basket case well past the initial 71/2 months he spent with Halyburton. The junior officer bathed him and tended to his wounds. After a botched operation, he soothed and humored a feverish Cherry, who was hallucinating about little men that were on his chest to fix the broken air conditioning in his cast. It became clear to Cherry that without his cellmate pushing for medical attention, such as it was, he certainly would die.

Although the diminutive major grows larger than life for us, Halyburton comes across as admirable in his own right, clever and resourceful. He keeps devising ways to keep their minds alive through their imaginations. He had them fantasize elaborate meals and act out movie scenes. Later, when separated from Cherry, he devised a way to play bridge with other prisoners without their confiscated cards, assigning some men to memorize the hands that others played. On the home front, Halyburton’s wife Marty — who for 16 months thought he was dead — became a key organizer of POW wives pushing Washington, eventually successfully, to make the return of the downed men a priority.

Author Hirsch, a former New York Times and Wall Street Journal reporter, got practice lionizing when he wrote the best seller Hurricane: The Miraculous Journey of Rubin Carter. Here he doesn’t have to unleash many celebratory adjectives, because he has two men whose thoughts and actions have made them more than worthy of our attention — made them admirable. Since the author adheres so tightly to the perspective of his subjects, though, the book does suffer from their limited post-war reflections on the history of the period. Even Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara has since admitted that the war was a mistake. Yet the only protesters Cherry and Halyburton seem aware of are the likes of Jane Fonda, who at the time didn’t believe they were tortured and called them "hypocrites and liars."

However one feels or felt about justifications for the Vietnam War — or our more recent invasions overseas — this book is helpful to read. If knowing our country’s perceived enemies is important, as every other newsmagazine cover story suggests, then so too is understanding those who went off to fight for us.