“I asked if I could buy them, and they said ‘no, but we’ll tell you who made them,’” Marty says.
Marty commissioned a Vietnamese furniture maker to craft the close cousins that now rest near her dining room table in Greensboro.
The Halyburtons choose to appreciate the beauty of life, and the richness of a place half-way around the world that came to define their time together in many unexpected ways. That conscious decision has guided their lives and shaped a history that very nearly didn’t happen.
They sit down to tell a story they have told many times, but the memories still stir emotion. Porter speaks softly, a counterbalance to Marty’s matter-of-fact energy. Both have a command of Vietnam’s history and their place in it, and each fill in gaps in the other’s telling.
The Vietnam Years
When naval aviator Porter Halyburton deployed for Vietnam, he left behind his young wife and five-day-old daughter, Dabney.
A year and a half after his plane was shot down over North Vietnam, Porter sat in a filthy cell shared with another American prisoner of war, and learned that he was supposedly dead.
Five years later, Marty Halyburton’s postman left her empty house holding a letter addressed to
“Mrs. Marty Halyburton, USA.” For two months Marty had been waiting for that letter, sent by way of Swedish politician Olof Palme. The postman knew she had been expecting an important letter. He tracked her down in a Big Apple grocery store in Decatur, Georgia, where he tapped her on the shoulder in the produce aisle, exclaiming, “I have your letter! I have your letter!”
The precious letter, written in her husband’s own hand, confirmed that Porter was alive.
In the years between Porter’s capture and the confirmation of his status as a POW, Marty received two visits from Navy administrators bearing news.
The first time they knocked on her door, they reported that Porter had been killed in action.
Porter’s plane crashed and exploded into a karst ridge 40 miles northeast of Hanoi on Oct. 17, 1965. No parachutes were sighted, and no radio contact made.
A year and a half later, well after Marty held a memorial service and the tombstone was placed in the family cemetery, six men visited with news that they had reason to believe Porter was a prisoner of war.
“I had convinced myself Porter was better off dead than to have been captured,” she says. “Now I would have to live with terrible uncertainty and worry about him for what would be another six years.”
Initially, she was told to keep the news private and share it only with family and close friends. She escaped to St. Simons Island, Georgia, where she had lived with Porter and where few would know her as she picked up the pieces of this strange new life as a POW wife.
The government went public several weeks later and Marty’s new situation became reality when Porter’s picture flashed across the screen as the subject of the top story on that night’s NBC Huntley-Brinkley Report.
“For months after learning Porter was a POW, I talked to government officials daily,” she says. They gave her Sybil Stockdale’s phone number and address.
After the shock abated, she contacted Sybil and got involved with the National League.
“I now had a group of wives and families who shared my predicament and we had a job to do. Our primary focus was to publicize the plight of the POWs and missing in action and to seek humane treatment for those held captive,” she says. “North Vietnam and the Viet Cong did not acknowledge holding but a few prisoners, so most families did not know if their loved ones were dead or alive.”
The families working on behalf of the POW/MIA strove to spread information. They talked to Rotary Clubs, churches and civic organizations, and wrote letters to foreign governments.
“We knew there were POWs in North Vietnam like Porter, who the North Vietnamese had not acknowledged holding,” she says. “They were not allowing them to write letters as they should have been able to do under the Geneva Convention.”
Five years would pass before Porter’s name came out on a list of POWs and he was allowed to write the first of 14 six-line notes Marty would receive.
Instead, the North Vietnamese allowed senior officers like Jim Stockdale to write letters, mainly as a propaganda maneuver to give the impression that they were acting in accordance with international law.
Sometimes, though, those letters contained code that revealed valuable information to the U.S. government.
Naval Intelligence enlisted Sybil Stockdale to send covert letters to her husband. The coded letters penned by the Stockdales and other POW husbands and wives provided news of prison conditions, torture, and the names of American POWs being held at the Hanoi Hilton and other prison facilities.
Inside the prison, the men communicated using tap code, a code with ancient Greek origins. Porter’s name finally made it out by way of an enlisted man named Doug Hegdahl, who’d been ordered by his superior officers in the Hanoi Hilton to take early release—he had memorized 250 of the other prisoners’ and missing mens’ names. Doug called Marty 15 minutes after his plane touched down in the United States.
As Marty became more involved with the National League, she faced a choice.
“One of the big struggles was balancing my POW activism with being a single parent and trying to pursue a normal life for my daughter and me,” she says.
The first speech she gave was supposed to be to a local Rotary Club. A month out, as Marty thought about what she wanted to say in her allotted 10 minutes, she received a call—the speaker that evening had cancelled, and could she fill in?
The host organization turned out to be the national convention of the American Bar Association, not a local Rotary Club.
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Hidden History: The Story of the Indomitable Wives and Families Who Fought to Bring POW/MIA Loved Ones Home - Davidson News
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