I was waiting on the tarmac at Glenview Naval Air Station when they arrived on a cold night in March 50 years ago. The American former prisoners of war had been released from North Vietnam. Now they were on their way to the Great Lakes Naval Hospital to be reunited with their families and begin their recovery from years of brutal captivity.
The arrival was part of Operation Homecoming, the return of 591 American prisoners of war following the Paris Peace Accords that ended U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. In February 1973, The POWs were flown from Hanoi to an Air Force base in the Philippines, and from there to military hospitals close to their homes across the U.S.
They were coming home to a country that had turned against the war they fought. I had returned from overseas six years earlier to anti-war protests in Chicago and demonstrators at the gate of the naval base. When I began looking for a civilian job one recruiter advised me not to tell prospective employers I had served in Vietnam. On reserve duty in the Pentagon I was instructed to wear civilian clothing because servicemen in uniform were being hassled on the streets of Washington.
Plans to repatriate the POWs had been under way for several years. The National League of POW/MIA Families was organized in 1970 to call attention to the mistreatment of POWs in North Vietnam. The Defense Department organized a careful process to recover the POWs, restore them to health and reunite them with their families. The date of the POWs’ release was unknown but contingency plans took shape during the peace negotiations.
Early in 1973 the public affairs office at the Great Lakes Naval Base asked my Chicago reserve unit for volunteers to staff a media relations center when the POWs returned. Undated orders allowed the Navy to recall us to temporary active duty on 24 hours’ notice. Our bags were packed when release of the POWs in Hanoi set the plan in motion.
Our mission was to facilitate news media coverage of the arrival but shield the POWs from interviews and reporters’ shouted questions. When the airplane carrying the POWs arrived at Glenview we kept the unhappy reporters behind a barrier.
Compared to major installations such as Travis Air Force Base in California, only a handful of POWs came to Glenview and Great Lakes. Their arrival followed a standard pattern. Each man, in full uniform, stepped off the aircraft, was greeted by the local commander, walked up to a microphone to say a few words and then greeted his family before being driven to the Great Lakes hospital.
They all said pretty much the same thing, thanking the President and the American people and expressing their patriotism. The reporters were disappointed and a little suspicious. Were the POWs following orders that told them what to say? We replied that we knew of no restrictions on what the POWs could say but explained that these guys were all Navy and Air Force aviators who belonged to an elite group: carefully screened, highly trained and intensely loyal to their units. It was no surprise that their statements were similar. We learned later that the POWs had created their own command structure while in captivity and decided among themselves what they were going to say when they were released.
Back at the Great Lakes hospital, we continued to field media queries about how the POWs were doing. One of our reservists, George Wendt (father of the Cheers actor), got on the phone and reached out to local businesses to make the POWs’ stay a little easier. He persuaded a furniture dealer to deliver a reclining chair to the hospital room of each POW (and I think the POWs got to take the chairs home, too). An auto dealer gave each POW family the use of a new car during their stay in the area.
The warm welcome of the POWs by the Nixon administration, including inviting them to the biggest-ever White House dinner, was a step toward healing the divisions of the Vietnam War. Recognition was slower in coming for Vietnam veterans in general. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial opened in Washington in 1982. And in 1986, I finally got to attend a welcome parade for Vietnam veterans in Chicago.