The American Veterans Center (parent organization of the World War II Veterans Committee and now, the National Vietnam Veterans Committee) began with the production of the award-winning radio documentary series, World War II Chronicles, commemorating the 50th anniversary of World War II. This program, hosted by the late, great “Voice of World War II,†Edward J. Herlihy, aired on over 500 stations nationwide between 1991 and 1995 on the Radio America network. In the years since, the American Veterans Center has produced dozens of radio documentaries and series, in an effort to bring the history of America’s veterans to the public.
The tradition of quality radio programming continues with the new series, Veterans Chronicles, hosted by Gene Pell, former NBC Pentagon Correspondent and head of Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. With Veterans Chronicles, listeners are taken to the battlefields where America’s greatest heroes were made. The series is broadcast on the Radio America network. In this issue, we print the partial transcripts of a recent episode.
On August 2, 1964, three North Vietnamese P-4 torpedo boats sped toward the destroyer USS Maddox situated in the Gulf of Tonkin. Seemingly under attack, the Maddox opened fire on the gunboats, and with the support of four F-8 Crusaders from the carrier USS Ticonderoga, sunk one of the boats and crippled another. Following this incident, and a perceived but unconfirmed attack on the Maddox and USS Turner Joy two days later, President Johnson ordered strikes against North Vietnamese PT-boat bases along the coast.
Among the pilots participating in the attack was LTJG Everett Alvarez, Jr., who was ordered to take out the PT boats located at Hon Gai. During the attack, Alvarez’s A4C Skyhawk was hit, and he was forced to bail. He would be captured by the North Vietnamese—the first American airman to be taken prisoner of war in Vietnam. From August 5, 1964 until February 12, 1973, Alvarez would be held as a POW—a period of 8 ½ years.
LCDR Alvarez recently appeared on Veterans Chronicles to talk about his experiences in Vietnam. Filling in for host Gene Pell was Taylor Kiland, co-author of Open Doors: Vietnam POWs Thirty Years Later. Ms. Kiland is Vice President of Marketing and Communications at the U.S. Navy Memorial.
Taylor Kiland: It’s an honor to have you on the show since you are the longest held POW held in North Vietnam; you were held for what, I believe, eight and a half years?
Everett Alvarez: That’s correct.
Kiland: Well first off could you tell me a little about your time in the military leading up to being shot down and held as a prisoner of war. What is it about the military or the Navy that attracted you to flying.
Alvarez: Well flying was always a lifelong dream for me. I enlisted in the Navy right after college. I graduated with an electrical engineering degree in 1960 from the University of Santa Clara, which was a small Jesuit school in the Bay area of California. But I had grown up in areas where there was always an airport or airplanes flying around, either military or civilian, crop dusters for example, things of that nature. That was always fascinating to me and the older I became, I think my interest really was peaked, so when I had the opportunity and I passed the physicals so I could get into the Naval aviation flight training program. I took it as an opportunity and did not have any long-term goals in mind, just the fact that here I was able to do something for a number of years, so I did. I was a Navy pilot, flying F-4 jets off of the carriers out in the middle of the Western Pacific in the summer of 1964. It seems like an eternity ago, but I just happened to be out there when things started happening in South Vietnam, at the time things were heating up. They were heating up in Laos, and so I happened to be on station off the coast of South Vietnam when we had the famous -or infamous- “Tokin Gulf†incident which led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which was the basis for President Johnson, at that time, to escalate the war and start to raise our presence in South Vietnam over the next couple of years.
As a result of that incident, we were sent on air strikes into North Vietnam and I was on a flight that was way up north near Haiphong Harbor and I unfortunately was in a position where my aircraft was hit and I lost control and soon found myself having to bail out and eject. As I came floating down, I found myself amidst many many Vietnamese militia types, so I was soon captured. I was fortunate that I survived, one of the other fellows from my ship in another type of airplane was killed, in those same strikes we had up and down the coast of North Vietnam.
Kiland: So tell me a little bit about the first two years of your captivity, because you were the first aviator shot down, you were alone for those first two years, right?
Alvarez: I was alone for thirteen months—totally alone, before I made contact with the others. When I was first captured about a week later I was brought down to Hanoi and I was the first resident of the Hanoi Hilton, which was the name we gave it later on. It was basically an old French-built fortress-like prison the Vietnamese used for criminals. I’ll tell you they had a lot of them. I used to look through a crack in my door and I could look out into the courtyard and see them bringing them in droves in chains. Sometimes in the middle of the night they would be processing through and they really didn’t treat them very well. There was a section back there for a while where you could actually hear them beating the prisoners with a whip or whatever it was.
Kiland: Do you think they were petty criminals?
Alvarez: I asked an interpreter once, I had the occasion to ask who these people were and he said that every society has its murderers, its thieves, its rapists. Thinking back on what I used to hear and how they treated them, I think… well we are civilized, I mean we don’t do those kinds of things to people, and again look what they did to us for propaganda purposes. That’s just something that’s not right morally to do. War is war and we find ourselves doing things that I thought normally men are not capable of, that’s just reality.
Kiland: You know those first thirteen months by yourself must have been lonely. I’m surprised you didn’t reach any level of despair, so many of the POWs I’ve talked to have said that the camaraderie, even if it was only being able to communicate through a wall, was what got them through the experience. Those first thirteen months most of American society really did not even know we had a POW over there and you had no colleagues.
Alvarez: Well, it was a tough go, it was not easy. Having to go through the process of understanding just what you are in was a very interesting experience, you might say. I found myself at a point where you talk about despair, you talk about panic, you talk about frustration—all combined—and you wonder if … you have no idea, you are totally bewildered. And so I think what helped me was a sense that I was able to sit down and realize that in order to get by on a day-to-day basis I was going to have to put the thought of my family, my wife at the time, of my friends, just out of my mind. I was in this cell—it was the here and now. I was going to deal with it, deal with the tribulations of it and go day by day and see how it goes, and I prayed a lot. I had an awful lot of time in which I just…it was just prayer. Conversation as I would call it. But I found that it gave me a lot of re-assurance in order to cope with what was coming next, and I finally realized that I really had little control over the situation and realized that if they were going to do the worst, if they were going to kill me, then I felt I was ready to accept whatever happened in my own inner self, you might say. Once I did that it was a lot easier then to deal with on a day-to-day basis.
Kiland: You were at peace with yourself?
Alvarez: I was at peace with myself in the sense that I had prepared myself mentally and physically as much as I could. Once I came to that realization, I called it a maturing process, then I was able to deal with things day-to-day and the time went by. It was not comforting in the sense that some of these conditions we were living in were very bad. And then I recall about six months after I was shot down, I heard a commotion outside and a few days later I heard that they had shot down another American pilot. A few days after that I see all this commotion outside and then I realize they are bringing another person in, and then from there it began. Another person, and then another person. I never saw them but I could hear the commotion and I could hear the trucks pull in and hear the guards and pretty soon I started hearing signs of communication and that’s when it all started to feel a lot better. At 13 months and eight days later when they took me out of my cell and put me in a jeep with three other fellas and we went to this other prison about 40 miles outside of Hanoi up in the hills, at first there were about 13 of us who were shot down out there. We talked to each other, we communicated, I learned to tap code, things like that. I felt like I was on Coney Island on a sunny summer afternoon. It was just all these people talking and here I was back in the groove again. Still locked up, still in solitary but…
Kiland: You had buddies.
Alvarez: I had friends and that made a big difference.
Kieland: I bet some of them are still your best friends.
Alvarez: Oh we have lost a number of them, but some are still very good friends. And then later on we were cellmates and we would spend a lot of time together. To this day they are still good friends. It’s like a fraternity in that sense.
Kiland: Many of the POWs have told me that on some of their lowest days, when they felt the most depressed or desperate, the would look at you and they would say “You know, he’s been here “x†more years or “x†more months than I have been, if he can do it, I can do it.
Alvarez: It’s a good thing they didn’t know how crazy I was. I’ve heard that a lot and maybe it was helpful to them. We all had to stick together. That was a lesson we all learned from the very first. It was only when we were going to come out of that whole experience as a group, a togetherness, united in not only our goals but what we found out is the shared values that we have as aviators, as Air Force and Navy pilots. Most of us came from small towns around the country. Most of us came from churchgoing families, most of us came from middle America and so these were top-notch people, like they are today some of my best friends.
Kiland: So let’s jump forward a little bit. When the Paris Peace Accords were signed and you’re told that you are going to be released, did it sink in immediately or did you disbelieve it? At that point you’d been there more than eight years.
Alvarez: Almost eight and a half by that time. When the bombing finally stopped in North Vietnam and Hanoi, the B-52s stopped coming and the bombings by the Navy, the A-6s and the F-4s during the day and B-52s at night, it was just constant. And when it stopped we knew it was over. I mean you could tell by the attitude of the guards, and the Vietnamese, that they were defeated, they were tired and they wanted it over with. But we had had so many ups and downs over the years that it was anticlimactic in a way that we became hardened and cynical after all these years and this time, we sort of said, “Well we know its over, but I’ll believe it as far as our release goes, when I see it,†and then when they came and took our prison clothing and gave us trousers and a shirt, shoes and a jacket and a little bag and told us we were going to be leaving the next day, we said, “Ok, this is really it, but you know what? We’ll believe it when I actually get out here.†That attitude just hung there, until the moment we walked across that line and then onto the airplane. And when I got on the airplane, I said, “I don’t care what happens cause there is no way they are going to get me off this airplane.†You figure the peace talks could have broken down, and they would stop the flight or whatever. But once we got under the U.S. control it was somewhat melancholy. I remember as we were taking off there was a lot of joy and cheering. I didn’t jump for joy and I didn’t cheer, and neither did Bob Shoemaker who was the second guy shot down. He and I were sitting together and we sort of looked at each other and we said, “Well, we made it.†We congratulated each other, but it was sort of anticlimactic and melancholy in a way. I remember thinking that it had been so long and I had no idea what I was going to face when I got home. I knew that my wife was no longer there so I was not looking forward to being reunited with a wife. I had no idea what my family had gone through except I’d learned that they had been active, my mother and my sister were active in the anti-war movement, which was counter to my beliefs; I felt didn’t really help our cause.
Kiland: Your wife had divorced you.
Alvarez: Well that’s true, so I really had no sense of what it was that I was coming back to, plus the fact that we were somewhat still, you know, having been there and still listening to that propaganda. You really didn’t know about the feelings of the county toward us; of the positive feelings. All we ever heard was the negative things about us, about the war, and so when we stepped off the airplane, what we were told by the State Department folks there as we were about to land in the Philippines, that there was going to be a lot of military top brass there, lots of media, and lots of people to meet us. I remember thinking “Why? What would they all be there for?†Cause you never thought of the positive side of the country, and so it was quite a surprise to see the reception and all of a sudden, its sort of like you blacked out all of the propaganda that we’d been hearing for years and years, about the negative ness, the hostility of the American public towards the war and on and on. Here we were, and it was totally different. So I understand it was a very disturbed time in the country all those years, but still, you never realized the positive part of it. People coming up to you by the hundreds and hundreds.
So we got off the airplane and onto the bus, got back to the hospital where they had it cordoned off to everybody except doctors and nurses. Air Force nurses, lots of them. And here I was single again. I could think, it was somewhat of an eye-opener. But the reality was that the it took awhile, things sort of began to sink in terms of what it was like, what we were facing. When we came back to the States, and reunited with the family back it didn’t take that long really to start picking up where you left off.
Kiland: What surprised you the most culturally about the U.S. when you returned? You’d been gone from 1964 to 1973. I mean the country had experienced tremendous social changes at that time.
Alvarez: Well you got to see in terms of the society. The culture had changed tremendously, especially the young people. You said, “What the heck happened?†But it was something that I think was going to happen anyway at that time while we were in Vietnam. And I think Vietnam just accelerated the change and enhanced the change, it was an excuse for many people and we are still suffering for this. It still is I think, something as a country that we need to think about in terms of our generations face in terms of where we are all going. I think it’s a big question.
Kiland: So within a few months of returning you met your current wife?
Alvarez: I met my wife, and we were married in the fall, I resumed my Naval career.
Kiland: What was it like flying again?
Alvarez: It was like riding a bicycle. Remember you get back on a bike, you just pick right up and go. Even driving a car, getting a license, I’m glad they didn’t ask me to do a parking test because I don’t know if I would have passed that one. You know just to get in the car and drive again was dejavu all over again. But then it was time to think about careers and the future. To look back at it we were still very young; I was 35 when I came out of it. I had married, I had a family, I had a lot of years and so you have such a thirst for hitting the books again and the academics and things of that nature so I went back to postgraduate school, got a postgraduate degree, I went to another school here on the east coast on program management for the Department of Defense. I served the last four years as a program manager and then while I was there I started going to law school at night. I tell people that I was trying to understand what the people here in Washington are talking about. I’ve never practiced but I am still a member of the D.C. bar. I started a consulting business after serving Reagan administration for six years.
Kiland: Tell us what you did in the Reagan administration.
Alvarez: For the first year and a half I was the deputy at the Peace Corps. Then I was asked to take the number two job at the Veterans Administration before it became a cabinet position. I spent four years as the deputy number two. I’ll tell you it was a…all of these jobs, everything I did when I came, since I came home from Vietnam has been a growth. My wife and I and my family we have grown. Professionally and personally. I think of the opportunities that I had and I took them. I met Governor Reagan when he was governor and then became president and getting into the political scene, and then got into the business side, I started a successful business for awhile. I met Governor Reagan when I came home from Vietnam. Of course, he was very interested in the POWs. At the time he actually entertained all of them, he brought them to his home a couple times for various social functions. And I was fortunate I was able to go anytime there was something going on. I got to know him and his staff at the time, fairly well. So years later when I was retired from the Navy, and he was elected in president, I had the opportunity to join the administration. And I think that it was quite the experience in a sense that all the jobs I had since I’ve been in Washington, as a political appointee, the politics and other positions I’ve had, various administrations, on various committees or boards and other things, have been really wonderful experiences in a sense that you really get to meet a lot of wonderful people. You get to meet a lot of people from both sides of the aisle, you see the dynamics back and forth, of how this town works politically and then as a small businessman starting a business and dealing with the federal government, it’s a different exposure and so I’ve been fortunate that I’ve been able to be successful in these areas as I went through those jobs. So from that aspect, I consider myself most fortunate as I look back. I hardly have any time to look back but when I do, I think back to the guys I was with in the Hanoi Hilton and some of them didn’t come back. I think of the people that I knew, during the war, who never had the opportunities. I thank God how fortunate I am and how it’s been a good life.
Kiland: Tell us about some of the work you have done for your former POWS and veterans as a group. You have been a tireless advocate both in your political appointments and also volunteer positions.
Alvarez: Well when I was a deputy in the VA, the number two person there, we were able to expand the storefront operations and veterans counseling centers around the country for the Vietnam veterans giving them easier access to help and so that was quite a very interesting and gratifying effort. I have kept track of the individuals that I knew and I have tracked a lot of them and their physical problems in terms of coming to the VA for help, I want to make sure that they get looked at, and given the treatment they deserve. And the thing about it, was that there were so many, who needed the kind of treatment that they deserved. We have a huge system in the VA. The VA was an experience where there is never, never enough money to satisfy all their needs, and never will be given the way things are, so you just try to do the best for the most and then on the other side, I found myself in a position where I was able to do things because I enjoyed the respect of veterans around the country everywhere I went and so I was able to, I think able to accomplish some things that would have been more difficult had I not had the unfortunate experience of being a prisoner of war. So all of that enters into the equation.
Kiland: Well we would like to thank you Mr. Alvarez for coming in today and spending some time and reflecting which is not always an easy thing to do. But you have a very inspirational story.
Alvarez: It’s not really hard to reflect these days. The more you do it, the more natural it becomes I think. It was hard at first. Especially when I first wrote my book, Chained Eagle, in 1986 after I left the VA. And I started to put my thoughts down and I had a co-writer. I will tell you it was tough. It came out in 1988 and was somewhat cathartic. So I appreciate your invitation to chat about these things.
