Reminder of Vietnam Stays on Hand

Douglas Condit was with Ann Curley when she graduated from high school. He was there when she got married; there when she gave birth.

That Curley has never met Captain Condit--and has little hope she ever will--is now beside the point.

For more than 20 years she’s worn a bracelet engraved with the name of the pilot and the date he was shot down over Vietnam. So Curley feels not only that she knows the man on her wrist, but that he’s a part of her.

And even as this country’s collective memory of the war gradually fades into television and film images, Curley and thousands of others still wear thin metal bracelets bearing the name of an American prisoner of war or soldier who is missing in action, hoping, they say, that they can make themselves and others remember that not all of the war’s loose ends have been tied up.

People involved with the POW-MIA cause have different recollections of when the bracelets first appeared. Some say they wore them in the late 1960s, when the U.S. government changed its position of asking families to keep the issue quiet.

But Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove), a pilot in the Vietnam War, traces the origin of the flat bracelets with names on them to Feb. 7, 1970. Then the host of a new Los Angeles television show, Dornan was already wearing a cylindrical bracelet made by Montagnard tribes-people when the wives of American POWs appeared on his show. After the show, he said, a 16-year-old girl came up to him in the audience and asked about the bracelet. The two ideas fused.

Originally distributed by an organization called Victory in Vietnam Assn., the bracelets became a sign of one’s alignment in the country’s widening hawk or dove domestic battles. Soon, however, the now-defunct organization changed its name to Voices in Vital America and, according to people familiar with the cause, the bracelets eventually became less politicized, with concern for the fate of the men who were missing overshadowing the political issues of why they were in Vietnam to begin with.

Dornan said that VIVA sold 10,000 of the bracelets in 1970, 350,000 in 1971 and 3 million in 1972. More than 10 million were in circulation during the last days of the war, he said.

Various factions of the POW cause still make and sell POW watches, bumper stickers and Christmas ornaments. And over the years numerous causes right and left, including the National Organization for Women, Right to Life groups and the Save Soviet Jewry Committee, have adopted name bracelets as a symbol. Dornan wears bracelets stamped with the names of hostages in Beirut and the names of Soviet dissidents.

But it is the original POW/MIA bracelet that has endured as a symbol, second in recognizability only to religious emblems such as the cross or Star of David, according to the Library of Congress, Dornan said.

The first bracelets were nickel-plated. Later ones were made of stainless steel.

Many of those sold now--for $3.50 to $5--are red steel, though some people have them custom-made in sterling silver or gold.

And with 2,382 POWs and MIAs still unaccounted for, the four or more current distributors of the bracelets still sell “hundreds each day,” according to a spokesperson for the D.C.-based National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, which--along with at least one other organization--receives support from the sales.

Judy Taber of Los Angeles has been wearing a bracelet bearing the name of her brother, a Navy flier who disappeared on a nighttime mission over Vietnam on Sept. 21, 1966, since they became available.

Since then, Taber and her sister, Ann Griffiths, who is the executive director of the league, have worn out several bracelets apiece. But Taber continues replacing hers, and wears it wherever she goes and whatever she does.

At least once a day the metal band on her wrist will somehow trigger a small neurological chain reaction, momentarily flooding her memory with the image of her brother. She remembers when they were students at Berkeley together, before he went to war, she said.

She remembers him teaching her to drive in his little Morris Minor car and “how we giggled and laughed about me rolling backwards down the Berkeley hills.”

Since the ‘70s, Taber figures that she’s distributed about 500 bracelets with her brother’s name on them, to people she meets in restaurants, to students who attend the talks she gives or to whomever notices the name on her wrist and inquires.

Stephanie Edwards got the band she now wears only two years ago, when the family of POW Sgt. James M. Ray appeared on her television talk show. Years earlier, she’d worn a bracelet adorned with the name of a young man she went to school with in Kenyon, Minn., who had been shot down in Vietnam. Eventually she gave it away.

So the one she wears now is a symbol of both men, and she rarely takes it off, she said. “I think about those two men every day. I make myself wear it whether it works with the ensemble I’m wearing or not,” she said. “It keeps me more attentive to the efforts being made to negotiate (for the release of living POWs or the return of their remains). It also reminds me to put them in my prayers.”

For Curley, who now works for a Vietnam veterans’ organization in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., the bracelet serves a similar function.

“I didn’t feel as strongly about (the POW issue) until I had my son,” she said. Now she thinks of the mothers who have been waiting 20 years to find out what happened to their children.

“Now I thank God it’s not my son’s name on the bracelet,” she said.