Once the POWs were home, the Pentagon and White House handpicked a group of the highest ranking POWs -- senior officers, to travel the national media circuit, some of them telling of torture. A handwritten note from President Nixon to H.R. Haldeman says that "the POW's need to have the worst quotes of R. Clark and Fonda" to use in their TV appearances, but this information shouldn't come from the White House. [7] These media stories were allowed to become the official narrative, the universal "POW Story," giving the impression that all the men had been subjected to systematic torture -- right up to the end -- and that torture was the policy of the North Vietnamese government. The POWs who said there was no torture in their camps were never allowed access to the media.
Not that any torture is justified or that anyone who had been tortured should have been prevented from telling about it. But the Nixon White House orchestrated a distorted picture of what actually occurred.
In my anger at the torture story that was being allowed to spread; at how the entire situation was being manipulated, I made a mistake I deeply regret. I said that the POWs claiming torture were liars, hypocrites, and pawns.
I said, "I'm quite sure that there were incidents of torture " but the pilots who are saying it was the policy of the Vietnamese and that it was systematic, I believe that's a lie." [8]
What I didn't know at the time was that although there had been no torture after 1969, before then there had been systematic torture of some POWS. One of the more hawkish of them, James Stockdale, wrote in his book, In Love and War, that no more than 10 percent of the pilots received at least 90 percent of the punishment. [9] John Hubbell, in P.O.W.: A Definitive History of the American Prisoner-of-War Experience in Vietnam, agreed, and affirmed the fact that torture stopped in 1969. [10]
When the POWs came home, some who had been there longest told the press how they clogged up prison toilets and sewers, refused to come when ordered, or follow prison rules. One of the most famous, Jeremiah Denton, said, "We forced them [the guards] to be brutal to us." [11] I relay this not to minimize the hardships that the POWs endured, nor to excuse it -- but to attempt belatedly to restore a greater depth of insight into the entire POW experience with their captors.
Still, whether any torture was administered to certain, more recalcitrant POWs and not to others is unacceptable. Even though only a small percent of prisoners were tortured by U.S. soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, it wasn't right. According to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's standards, torturing prisoners to get information is justified. It isn't. Not ever. All nations must adhere to the Geneva Convention's rules of warfare.
As anyone who knew or worked with me in those years knows that my heart has always been with the soldiers. I should have been clearer that my anger back then was at the Nixon Administration. It was the administration, in its cynical determination to keep hostilities between the U.S. and Vietnam alive and to distract people from the administration's mistakes, who tried to use the POWs as pawns.
Addressing The Internet lies
By the end of the Nineties, even more grotesque torture lies began to be circulated about me over the Internet -- the ones that continue to this day.
Let me quote a former POW, Captain Mike McGrath (USN Retired), president of the POW-NAM Organization. In a letter to Roger Friedman, at the time a columnist for Fox411, on Friday, January 12, 2001 (he gave Friedman permission to make the letter public) McGrath wrote:
"Yes, the Carrigan/Driscoll/strips of paper story is an Internet hoax. It has been around since Nov 1999 or so. To the best of my knowledge none of this ever happened. This is a hoax story placed on the Internet by unknown Fonda haters. No one knows who initiated the story. I have spoken with all the parties named: Carrigan, Driscoll, et al. They all state that this particular story is a hoax and wish to disassociate their names from the false story. They never made the statements attributed to them."
In his letter, McGrath also said to Friedman that by the time I went to Hanoi in 1972, treatment of the POWs was starting to improve and that I "did not bring torture or abuse to the POWs," but that one man [Hoffman], the "senior ranking man in a room full of new guys," was tortured ("hung by his broken arm") to make him come to the meeting with me. McGrath wrote:
Why one man (name withheld by request) was picked out for torture of his broken arm is unknown"
The answer is, it never happened!
Will what I have written here stop the myths from continuing to be spread on the Internet and in mass mailings to conservative Republicans? I don't know. Some people seem to need to hate and I make a convenient lightning rod. I think the lies and distortions serve some right-wing purpose -- fundraising? Demonizing me so as to scare others from becoming out-spoken anti-war activists? Who knows? But at least here, on my blog (and in my memoirs), there is a place where people who are genuinely interested in the truth can find it.
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