Forgetting the Gulf War POW

On the evening of 16 January 1991, retired Navy Vice Admiral William Lawrence stepped up to the podium in Eisenhower Hall auditorium at West Point. Lawrence had been asked to address the Corps of Cadets. His authority for such a task was unarguable. He had a fantastic service career: he was the first man to fly twice the speed of sound, he had been superintendent of the United States Naval Academy and he had served as Deputy Chief of Naval Operations. But his introduction to the Corps of Cadets highlighted his other distinction: had spent six years as a POW in Hanoi. The officer who introduced Lawrence quoted an Army colonel and fellow-POW to confirm Lawrence's authority.Although Lawrence said nothing about captivity during his 40-minute speech on the "Emerging World Order," the first two questions from eager cadets quizzed him on his POW experience. The cadets jumped through his other career accomplishments and the subject of his speech to mine his crucial experience as a Vietnam POW. They wanted to know how Admiral Lawrence had survived; what he had learned about religion, the family, America, the Code of Conduct, literature and the self while sitting in a closet-size cell in Hanoi. On the same night that Lawrence was describing his POW experience to an eager audience, more Americans were becoming POWs in Iraq. It appeared that West Point would be assured an ample supply of guest speakers for years to come.Initial speculation about the POWs of the Gulf War made headlines when Iraqi Television released film footage of captured pilots. The media distributed and read these images in a variety of different ways. Most often the images were shown as justification for the war. A host of former Vietnam POWs including Charles Plumb, Fred Cherry, John McCain and Jim Stockdale saw the signs of physical torture on the faces of the despondent POWs: we had positive evidence of Iraqi mistreatment of American POWs. President Bush, a former Navy aviator who had been shot down himself, vowed that Sadam would never get away with it. The interpretations of these initial images drew heavily on our memory of the Vietnam POW whose forced confession and years of torture at the hands of a demonic, inscrutable and racially distinct enemy had become legend.The Americans held in Iraq seemed to be making statements against the war effort that went beyond the name, rank, date of birth and serial number descried in the Code of Conduct. In fact, the POWs were answering all the questions their captors asked on the tape. Surely after hearing the stories of POWs who resisted debilitating episodes of torture to keep from making such statements during the Vietnam War, these POWs must have been coerced in some horrible way.Former POWs were quite explicit about how Americans should interpret propaganda concerning future POWs. Just describing such a confession made former Vietnam POW Ralph Gaither ill: "Even now, my heart screams out in protest and my insides churn in anger. My ears ring with humiliation and my mind almost overwhelms me." He makes the lesson explicit for his readers: "when other wars are fought, when other men are prisoners, when other statements like this one [confessions of criminality; admissions that the war was wrong] come out of prison camps, to know, to know, to know, never to forge that those statements are brought about by the worst kind of torture." (1) The apparent distress and physical condition of the captured men on the screen confirmed our worst fears. The cover of the 4 February 1991 issue of Newsweek featured an unusually large, full face close-up of Jeffrey Zaun. The headline read, "The POWs: Torture and Torment."General H. Norman Schwarzkopf told the media after he greeted the first returned POWs: "They're all heroes." Because Schwarzkopf probably had little detailed information on POW treatment or conduct at the time, his statement seemed a little premature. But few in the media questioned this stance. …