The Women Who Left No Man Behind

TOPICS DISCUSSED

  • America’s involvement in the Vietnam War

  • Unwavering: The Wives Who Fought to Ensure that No Man is Left Behind with Taylor Baldwin Kiland

  • Outside of Politics: Healthy Patriotism

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EPISODE RESOURCES

TRANSCRIPT

Sarah [00:00:07] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

Beth [00:00:08] And this is Beth Silvers.

Sarah [00:00:10] Thank you for joining us for Pantsuit Politics.

Beth [00:00:25] Hello. Thank you for joining us here at Pantsuit Politics. It's Beth. Sarah is on her summer sabbatical, though you will hear her voice in just a few minutes. This episode is coming out on July 4th, 2023, the 247th anniversary of America's independence from Great Britain and a birthday of sorts. I think birthdays are always good times for reflection. Here's what's going right. Here's what needs attention. Maybe most importantly, here's what we've learned. So it got us thinking with almost every major story of the last couple of years, the Afghanistan withdrawal, the Ukrainian invasion, classified document leaks, efforts to impose accountability on the executive branch even COVID and abortion. Sarah and I find ourselves returning to lessons from the Vietnam War era. And relatedly, we keep thinking about activism. What makes activism effective and necessary and impactful? So as we celebrate this July 4th, we wanted to talk with an expert about a very specific and effective form of activism that took place during the Vietnam War, led by the wives of soldiers taken as prisoners of war or designated as missing in action. Before we get to that conversation, let's orient ourselves in time and space. If you ask most Americans why we fought in the Vietnam War, you might get a pretty vague answer. In my own mind, it goes, "Something, something communism." That's not unusual. Ken Burns, the documentary filmmaker, says, "We are possessed by a desire to not know about Vietnam." So I wanted to refresh my own recollection a little bit before talking with Taylor about a largely untold story about the Vietnam War. Vietnam is a little smaller than the state of Montana. It's located in Southeast Asia, on the eastern edge of the Indochinese Peninsula, going into World War Two. It was under French colonial rule. During the war, the Japanese invaded and Ho Chi Minh, a Vietnamese national who was inspired by communist movements in China and the Soviet Union, started a movement for Vietnamese independence, opposing both the Japanese and the French.

[00:02:36] To skip ahead a lot and vastly oversimplify a very complex situation. Ho Chi Minh's forces took control of the northern part of the country when Japan withdrew, and he set up a government competing with the French colonial government. Ho Chi Minh established a base of power in Hanoi in the north, and the French colonial government in Saigon, in the south. And in 1954, we get a situation very much like the one in Korea where we had just been engaged in war. A treaty established a line dividing Vietnam into north and south and calling for elections for a unified Vietnam later. So now we have an artificial line and outside actors, the Soviet Union, China, and the United States using a civil conflict and a small nation as one stage and a much larger battle. In 1964, The New York Times described the similarities between Korea and Vietnam this way. In each case, the Communist North vowed sooner or later to liberate the south, which in turn fell under the loosely defined protection of the West. The communist offensive in Korea in 1950 was sudden and direct, while in Vietnam a decade later it was gradual and corrosive. But in each case, the attackers and the victims were initially proxies for larger powers. The United States mission in Vietnam was initially described as advisory. We committed fewer troops than in the Korean War, and our troops were not trying to take over the North or to unify Vietnam or to punish the Northern Vietnamese who were attacking South Vietnam. We were just in a defensive posture trying to frustrate the aggression of the communists in the North. Here's another quote from that 1964 New York Times piece that really landed with me, especially as I think about what we've learned from Afghanistan. The word war was avoided precisely because it had come to bear a connotation of all out effort and unconditional victory- means and ends that did not seem to suit the situation. Hence the debates, should American soldiers die in remote places for stalemate at best? Should the real plotters of aggression go unpunished? Is it practical? Indeed, is it moral to fight with less than all your might? That's the background against which women started learning from the government that their husbands who had been sent to fight in this deeply unpopular war in a poorly understood place were missing. Sarah and I were honored to talk with Taylor Baldwin Kiland, a military veteran who spent years learning about these wives and their struggle to tell their husband's stories. She writes with Judy Silverstein Gray, her co-author about their activism in Unwavering: The Wives Who Fought to Ensure That No Man is Left Behind. And our conversation with Taylor is up next.

[00:05:40] I wonder if you would start off by telling us about the experiences that inspired you to write Unwavering. I know you were raised in a Navy family, that you're a former naval officer yourself. So what is the genesis of this project for you?

Taylor Kiland [00:05:52] Well, I spent half my childhood on the small island community of Coronado, California, which is in San Diego. It's a very tight knit military, mostly Navy community. And I was six years old in 1973 when the prisoners of war from Vietnam returned. So I have very vivid memories of the yellow ribbons on the trees and the homemade Welcome Home banners. I grew up with several of the P.O.W. in my families. So that experience left a very indelible mark on me, and I was encouraged to work with the P.O.Ws in 2000, when I volunteered for the McCain for President campaign. And I met a number of the former P.O.Ws and their spouses, and was struck by the fact that this still is the longest held group of P.O.Ws in our nation's history. And they went through experiences that few families in our nation have gone through. And that set me on a journey of writing several books about this small cohort of combat veterans, one that are still the longest held, one of the most professionally successful. And this latest book, I was encouraged to write by one of the P.O.Ws who said nothing really has been written about the groundbreaking work that our wives did during the war. And so, eight years ago I started researching what they did. And the result is this book that I have co-authored with a friend of mine, Judy Silverstein Gray, who is also a veteran. She's a Coast Guard veteran, so she brought kind of a journalistic background to it. I brought more of a history buff background to it.

Sarah [00:07:39] So take us back to that time in the Vietnam War and the initial approach of these military wives and what they were being instructed to do by the government and how this all sort of began.

Taylor Kiland [00:07:52] So if you think back to 1965, what these women, what their lives were like, they really could only be stewardesses, as they were called then, or teachers or nurses. And once they got married and had children, those jobs were not available to them anymore. They lived under a pretty strict protocol being military wives, and they could not get a credit card, they could not get a mortgage, they could not get a car without their husbands or their fathers signature. So there was a lot of restrictions placed on these women at that time. And when their men went off to fight in Vietnam, most of them had never heard of Vietnam. It's a little tiny country in Southeast Asia. No one thought that this little skirmish would last very long. And when we started bombing North Vietnam in '65 and landed troops there in '65 men started getting captured and started going missing. And the wives were told, in theory, very certain terms. The wives were told, you must not tell anyone about what has happened to your husband. One wife told me, "I was told I couldn't even tell my neighbors or my family members that my husband is missing in Vietnam." Initially, they obeyed the edict from the government between '65 and '68. They stayed quiet, but they watched more and more men get shot down. They watched more and more men disappear and go missing. And there was no accountability from the North Vietnamese. There were intelligence that the government was receiving that these men were being tortured, that they were in solitary confinement. And the US government refused to publicly rebuke the North Vietnamese. They preferred to work behind the scenes through diplomatic channels. Earlier in the Cold War, that had worked to get men held behind enemy lines released. But after three years, the women realized that the strategy of the government wasn't working and they started giving media interviews. They started knocking on the doors of Congress. They started writing letters to the editor. They started speaking to Rotary Clubs, Kiwanis, churches, any group that would listen to them.

[00:10:26] But it wasn't until Nixon became president in 1968, late '68, that they started getting traction. They started getting the help of national media. They started getting the help of congressmen and senators. They started getting help from businessmen named Ross Perot. He elevated them and amplified their megaphone. They started getting traction. And all of a sudden Nixon said, well, how many of these women are there out there and how influential are they? So between '68 and '72, you couldn't open a newspaper without seeing something about a missing man. It became one of the few issues of the war that all Americans could rally around. You may remember or even probably have seen the black and white POW/MIA flag that flies above every post office, every federal building, the White House, the Capitol, the Pentagon. That was the creation of these wives. You may remember or know about the POW/MIA bracelets, which also was started by a group of of these women and some college coeds, as they were called at the time. It made the fate of these men personal. More than 5 million of these bracelets were sold during the war. Frank Sinatra wore one. Sonny and Cher wore one. Vice president wore one. Ronald Reagan wore one- he was a governor at the time. So the fate of these missing and captive men became a national priority, such that when they were released in 1973, their homecoming was a national celebration. You all may remember getting up in the middle of the night to watch the royal wedding of Kate and William. Millions of Americans got up in the middle of the night to watch the P.O.Ws return. Their first stop was Clark Airbase in the Philippines. And all three networks carried the homecoming live. They got a White House dinner. They got Major League Baseball lifetime passes. They were celebrated as heroes. They were one of the few groups that really were celebrated as heroes after the Vietnam War.

Beth [00:12:50] Was there a tipping point from the moment that these women started speaking out to them really getting that traction? Or was it persistence and just the cumulative effect of these efforts that started to take root?

Taylor Kiland [00:13:04] I would say yes and yes. There was a tipping point, and that is when the Nixon's new secretary of defense, Melvin Laird, who was a congressman from Wisconsin, he became the secretary of defense in January of '69, and he had met with several of the women when he was a congressman on Capitol Hill, and he was convinced that they were being ignored. And so, he decided that instead of the keep quiet policy that the government had enforced over the last few years, that he was going to launch a go public campaign and he was going to enlist the women to be part of this campaign. So their persistence got his attention. But his [inaudible] 180 degree change in policy really, really was the tipping point. All of a sudden, the floodgates opened and they used advertising and bumper stickers. The women traveled around the world. They went to Paris to meet with the North Vietnamese. They went to Laos. They went and met with the Pope. They went to Moscow. They went to Romania. But the difference, I think, was the Nixon administration and their change in policy.

Sarah [00:14:21] So what did that organization look like? How did they start from just talking, I'm assuming, to one another to meeting with the pope? That's a long journey.

Taylor Kiland [00:14:32] It is a long journey. And as you probably know, there was no Internet. There was no email. They had telegrams, and they had letters, and they had landline telephones- the black and white rotary phone on the wall that you may remember, either your mom or grandmom have grown up with one of those. The government would not share lists of who the other women were, but because they were part of a military network, it was sort of the game of telephone where they called two people and somebody else called two people. One woman in particular, a wife of a senior P.O.W., her name was Sybil Stockdale, she started assembling these ladies in October of '66 around her kitchen table and they decided to meet monthly because it was therapeutic for them. It didn't really have a goal in mind except to commiserate. But they started realizing that there were power in numbers. And Sybil was the first wife to give a newspaper interview. She gave it to the San Diego Union in October of '68. It was syndicated. It opened the floodgates. All of a sudden, she started getting phone calls from all over the country from women who were wives of missing or captive men who had been suffering alone, who'd been suffering in silence. And all of a sudden, they realized that there was some power in their numbers. And they incorporated and they met with media and they said, we have a national organization. Media took notice.

Beth [00:16:34] You talked about some of the allies that they found in media, in Ross Perot, whose name I did not expect to come up in this conversation in the Nixon administration. Were there obstacles? Were there groups trying to shut these women down or keep them silent as this campaign went on?

Taylor Kiland [00:16:49] Yes, there were a group of anti-war activists. Ironically, they were also women. Women like Cora Weiss and Madeleine Duclos, who had very strong convictions about the Vietnam War. And these women were very critical of the P.O.W. and M.I.A. Wives. They were very critical of the men who had become captive. These anti-war activists went to Hanoi and met with the North Vietnamese and strategized as to how to help the North Vietnamese and decided that these women, these anti-war activists, would be the conduit for mail. And so mail to and from the families and the men in captivity could only be delivered via these group of anti-war activists. Cora Weiss and her colleagues were just as vocal, were just as much in the media as the women were. It was ironic to me that many of these fellow Americans, because they were really on opposite sides of the issue over the war, could not work together. I found that very interesting. And I often wondered if they had just kind of sat down at the table and realized that maybe they had more in common than they realized. That they both wanted the war to end. They both wanted the men to come home and be accounted for. But, instead, the anti-war activists really hindered the women's progress.

Sarah [00:18:31] So we know some of the obvious short term consequences with regards to the Vietnam War, but I think you speak really well to some of the long term effects. It didn't just end with the Vietnam War. What did these women's organizing efforts, public awareness efforts, change about all war efforts?

Taylor Kiland [00:18:49] Well, we have a longstanding principle in our country that we leave no man behind. You've probably heard that. But that hasn't always been the case. I mean, we have 72,000 missing men from World War Two. We have more than 7000 missing from the Korean War. Before the Vietnam War, our missing were just left missing. The government did the best they could to recover remains, and they just unilaterally declared everybody else dead. That was the policy. That changed after Vietnam at the insistence of these families. Consequently, we can still tolerate casualties in war, but we will not tolerate and cannot tolerate missing men or P.O.Ws. All you have to do is look at the case of Bowe Bergdahl, who was a young soldier who walked off his post in Afghanistan in 2009. We expended tremendous resources to try and find him, and we traded five hardened terrorists from Guantanamo Bay for his release. That would not have happened prior to Vietnam. And I draw a direct correlation back to the work that these women set in motion.

Beth [00:20:04] What surprised you most in your research for this book?

Taylor Kiland [00:20:08] I guess what surprised me most was the obstacles that these women faced and some of the obstacles were put in place by fellow Americans. Like I said, many of these women, they couldn't get a credit card or a mortgage or a car before 1974 without a man's signature. I have one scene in the book where one MIA wife tries to she saved up money and she goes to try and get a house. And the head of the VA tells her, "I can't help you. You can't prove to me that you're a wife, so I can't give you VA benefits and you can't prove to me that you're a widow. So I can't give you your widow's benefits. You're in a gray area." I have another scene in the book where one of the MIA wives stood up at a Santa Monica Community College and is giving a speech about her missing husband and how she would like the North Vietnamese to tell her whether she's a wife or a widow. And the students in the audience start throwing rotten tomatoes, soda cans, apples at her on the stage, and they yell at her and they say, "Your husband got what he deserved."

Sarah [00:21:16] Oh, my God.

Taylor Kiland [00:21:18] I mean, fellow Americans put so many obstacles in their place, in their way, and yet they continued to work. They continue to persist. They finally got some incredible, incredible traction with President Nixon. You could make the argument (and some have) that he used the wives in his strategy to to win the war or to end the war because he put them on display and said we can't end the war until we get these 591 men home and we get an accounting for the thousand that are missing. But the obstacles that were in their way by fellow Americans was really mind blowing to me.

Sarah [00:22:07] I think the reality they existed in before and how shocking it is to us is just a testament to how hard they worked and how much they changed. That reality, it's in direct proportion to how hard they work. And I thank you so much for doing this research and telling this history and committing these women's stories to paper, because when their work just becomes sort of the air we breathe and they've changed so much and we just take it for granted, it's even more important to tell that history. So thank you so much.

Taylor Kiland [00:22:38] You're welcome. I think younger generations don't really have an appreciation as how many restrictions there were on women in those days, and especially women who were living in the military world.

Beth [00:22:52] I would love to ask you one more question before we go. Sarah and I talk a lot about what a healthy patriotism looks like. And there's a lot of darkness when you are doing research around the Vietnam War in particular, but any chapter of our history. I would love to hear what you think about given that you have military experience and military family, and then have looked at this story from so many angles. What could we learn here about a healthy version of patriotism?

Taylor Kiland [00:23:18] The one lesson that we have learned from the Vietnam War is to separate out the war from the warrior. We may disagree with the war or the reasons we go to war, but we no longer blame the warrior for that war. All of these men and their families said, "We went to war because our country asked us to. We were over there because our country asked us to." They may be volunteers. They may be drafted--

Sarah [00:23:48] So you can say, "Or required us to."

Taylor Kiland [00:23:50] Or required us to. Exactly. And that, to me, is what I do think that is a healthy sense of patriotism. People reflexively say thank you for your service, but that is a lesson that we learned from Vietnam. And it is, in my opinion, one of the only lessons we learned from Vietnam.

Beth [00:24:08] Well, thank you so much for spending time with us and shedding light on these stories, as Sarah said, and helping us think a little bit more about our relationship with our country.

Taylor Kiland [00:24:17] Thank you. Thank you for having me both.

Beth [00:24:27] I was really moved by our discussion with Taylor, and I'll be thinking about her perspective on separating the warrior from the war for a long time. Before we go, I want to just spend a minute continuing our birthday stock-take. As we turn 247, we are not actively engaged in a war and that is remarkable. For more than 90% of our country's history, we've been at war. We've never gone a full decade without a war. We've only made it five years without a war once from 1935 to 1940. So on this birthday, although we still have members of our military and National Guard deployed all over Earth on consequential and perilous missions, I'm very grateful that we aren't at war. I'm grateful for other things. The rate of murders is falling-- still too high, but it's moving in the right direction. The economy is also moving in the right direction. In May, wages grew faster than prices for the first time since March 2021. We don't all feel that economic news evenly, but it's meaningful. And then I think about our standing in the world. We're the third most populous country, we have more than 320 million people and lots of space for those 320 million people. We are the fourth largest country in the world by land area. Spreading our population over all that land makes us only the 180th most densely populated country in the world. And I think about that every time we talk about immigration and refugees and climate change, and also about energy and housing and some of the unique challenges it presents. We have the largest GDP in the world. The Human Freedom Index ranks us 17th, not where we want to be, but still all things considered, rather live in this country at this time than almost anywhere else on earth at almost any time in human history.

[00:26:20] I don't rattle off the positives to overlook our great challenges and our failures. With our vast fortunes we create (in the words of a minister I met in DC a few years ago) obscene poverty and pornographic wealth. We have plenty of space for newcomers, but we too often treat them as a dangerous other. We are too violent. We have been too comfortable in the world taking advantage of the physical earth and our neighbors to grave effect. Many of us have lost confidence in each other. We struggle with what stories to tell about ourselves. We struggle with how to take responsibility for our failures and still have a sense of pride in who we are. I rattle off the positives not to mask these struggles, but to say that on this 247th birthday, I know that we have more than everything we need to meet our struggles. A baseball metaphor feels right. We don't bat a thousand, but we keep stepping up to the plate and our batting average is pretty good. We both have a storied career already, and I think our best days are ahead of us. Thank you for being here. I hope you'll come back on Friday. I'm so excited. My friend Brian is going to be here to talk about the headlines with me. And one of my favorite podcasters is joining me for a little music and politics mash up. Rob Harvilla will be here. If you don't know him, you're going to love him. And if you do you know him, I hope you're as excited as I am. Until then, have the best 4th of July available to you.

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