A little more than a year ago, the North Koreans detained Chief Warrant Officer Bobby Hall, the lone survivor of a stray helicopter sortie across the Korean border for, as President Bill Clinton put it, “too long.” Just this past summer. Air Force Captain Scott O’Grady narrowly escaped being the first American prisoner of war (POW) of the Bosnian conflict. These recent experiences remind Americans of other sensational and troubling POW episodes—“brainwashing” American POWs during the Korean War, the torture of Vietnam POWs, the ordeal of hostages in Iraq and Lebanon, and videos of captured pilots during the Gulf War—and have shown us yet again that POWs and hostages can be potent weapons in an age when virtually anyone with a video camera can make world news.
Modern American culture has amplified and capitalized on POW images with a series of films such as “The Manchurian Candidate,” a hit television series (“Hogan’s Heroes”), and MIA films like “Rambo,” but POWs and hostages always have appealed to Americans. When Europeans first arrived on these shores, Puritan ministers demonized native Americans and valorized their own beliefs by using and remaking stories of white captives such as Mary Rowlandson and Mercy Short. Puritan captivity stories became popular again during the American Revolution, when residents of Boston, New York, and other British-held cities and towns identified with these earlier captive Americans; indeed, Americans saw their entire fledgling nation as a hostage of the British.
During the 19th century, Indian captivity stories from the frontier fascinated and aroused a nation bent on expansion and the extermination of native Americans. In each case, these entertaining tales appealed to popular anxieties about and provided expedient justifications for conflict. In short, captivities had entertained frightened Americans for centuries before the headline “America Held Hostage” made Ted Koppel famous.
Consider that little more than two years ago Chief Warrant Officer Michael Durant, captured during U.S. operations in Somalia, appeared on the covers of Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, and Time all in the same week, a feat of notoriety surpassing that of politicians and pop stars. Durant’s face may not have launched a thousand ships, but it did help change U.S. policy overnight and create an astonishingly quick consensus on a complete U.S. withdrawal from Somalia.
Also recall that during the Vietnam War POWs became the key issue at the Paris peace talks, and according to author Ben Schemmer, the entire war effort after the Son Tay Raid in 1969 was about getting a few hundred American captives back. More than 20 years after the peace agreement, Americans are still running a tab on that same effort by pursuing MIA cases.
We have grown to expect presidential attention for POW prizes. In 1973, President Richard Nixon orchestrated an unprecedented and lavish POW homecoming, at least partly in an attempt to siphon attention from the deepening Watergate scandal. The Jimmy Carter administration lost a good measure of popular support because it allowed the United States as a nation to be metaphorically “held hostage” in Iran. And according to former Secretary of State George Shultz, Ronald Reagan became so obsessed with hostages in Lebanon that he engineered the second most notorious political scandal of our generation to secure their release and his election.
More recently, the image of Gulf War POWs strengthened U.S. resolve to fight a ground war with Iraq, even though the injuries shown on haunting POW videos turned out to have resulted less from mistreatment than from violent ejections from stricken aircraft. During that same war, CNN correspondent Bob Simon had trouble convincing his Iraqi captors that he was a journalist. At one point his interrogator asked, “Did you dream you were Rambo?” Perhaps no episode could at once demonstrate the resonance and the consequence of America’s long romance with the captive.
At this point, it is important to remember that other cultures do not venerate captives to the extent the United States does. Some nations consider surrender under any circumstance an act of cowardice. Americans are, therefore, self-conscious about rewarding captivity: the U.S. Congress debated for years before approving the rather humble POW Medal during the 1980s.
Despite this self-consciousness, however, POWs and hostages always draw an audience. Bobby Hall returned to an America that made a ritual of providing rousing returns for POWs and hostages during the 1970s and 1980s. The special knowledge, the life-changing realizations promised by captivity stories are irresistible, even if such claims aren’t always examined closely.
Potential adversaries know Rambo. They also know that nothing can captivate our public attention and political will like one American held hostage, particularly if that American is an officer. And they know from watching reruns of Ted Koppel that no U.S. politician can exhort Americans at home or in captivity to be patient while 24-hour television news broadcasting ticks off every agonizing minute an American soldier remains a captive.
Some have wondered why North Korea delayed releasing Bobby Hall. The answer is the same now as when Mohammed Farrah Aideed kept Michael Durant, as when Iran took its hostages, and as when North Vietnam held American POWs: public attention. The key issue is not whether this will happen again, but how to avoid such a dilemma in the future.
No one begrudges a returned captive a rousing welcome or the subsequent media attention, but the paradox of this reception must be clearly understood: the more vigorously we welcome or scrutinize former captives, the more likely it is that other Americans will suffer their fate. When we look at Bobby Hall, the real question should not be why anyone would want to keep an American captive, but how to disarm this sad, accessible, and potent weapon that almost anyone might fashion from America’s self-indulgent pride, fear, and sympathy.
The fallout from Hall’s return also is significant. Not only did politicians and press focus on the problem of Hall’s release, but pundits after the fact wanted alternately to praise and blame Hall. Both of these courses remain intensely problematic.
The best example of this reaction appeared in a syndicated column published shortly after Hall’s return. David Hackworth, former Army officer, author, and Newsweek correspondent, wrote a scathing editorial indicting the conduct of POWs of the recent past. His thesis is familiar: “the conduct of Hall, Durant, Zaun, and other POWs since Vietnam proves that the Code has become more about lip service than standing proud”; recent changes to the Code have made “caving in more acceptable.” Above all, Hackworth predicts that unless the Code is “reinforced, from | corporal to chairman ... we can expect a rerun of the Korean War disgraces somewhere down the bloody track.”
Apparently Hackworth missed the cogent articles on the Code published in Proceedings and other military journals. For example, in the March 1991 Proceedings, Vice Admirals James Stockdale and William Lawrence argued strongly against the “big four and nothing more” during the Gulf War. (See “POWs: Silence Is Not Golden,” pp. 29-30; and “A Former POW,” interview with Admiral Lawrence, pp. 30-31.) This is particularly appropriate to point out since a part of Stockdale’s experience is the only real captivity episode used for evidence in Hackworth’s “Stop Insulting the Heroes Who Stood Tall.”
Of course, an examination of POW conduct misses the real point. What has fueled the inflated image of American prowess and ridiculous expectations of POW conduct has not been military policy, former POWs, or the press; the U.S. movie industry has done the damage. POW films have provided America and the world with a dignity battalion of superheroes who can resist absolutely anything and escape unassisted. Even a generally well- meaning former officer like Hackworth was duped and attempted to use Hollywood history as grounds for public policy. Fortunately, intelligent leadership throughout the armed forces has kept such logic from prevailing.
But all this does not alleviate the most pressing problem: the force of the POW image on public policy. Hackworth boasted about the great reception his article received, but his logic was drawn from popular culture, not POW experience. He entertains his readers with movie plots rather than actual experiences—hence the popular response. And his polemic contains a veiled argument concerning a slip in the national character, a populist theme these days. Substantially his claims are footless or, at best, hypothetical.
POW situations have changed as much since the Korean War as they did between the world wars. Information-age technology has amplified the immediacy and importance of the POW image by exposing American sensitivities: anyone who watches a random string of B-movies will see the captivity theme and can learn how to exploit it.
Here emerges the true, if unintended, importance of Hackworth’s reaction. Colonel Hackworth, his experience and position aside, expresses gut-level public understandings and reactions, which can be volatile in a crisis. The American POW is a potent weapon because the POW image is fashioned from such an anticipated response.
The true danger of POW information is not what might be used for military advantage but that which has political consequence. Modifying or strictly enforcing the Code would treat the wrong issue and be more destructive to our institutions than the captivities themselves. The original Code primarily was concerned not with revealing military secrets but instead with preventing POWs from incriminating or otherwise harming other POWs. The Code was never intended to goad a captive into needless confrontations or complete silence, as Hackworth suggests.
And the danger remains. In the future, an adversary might even create a site on the World Wide Web for access to images of the POW, information on his or her condition, or interactive contact; consequently, the pressure to act quickly in times of crisis will be even greater. Pursuing the red herring of POW conduct will only deepen the predicaments created when someone decides to exploit an American captive. The real problem remains the responses in culture and the media that make our leaders and policymakers prisoners themselves in times of crisis.