Aftermath of War : Acree on Same Wavelength With His Wife While a POW

As Marine Lt. Col. Clifford Acree struggled to sleep in his bare Iraqi prison cell, he would snap awake every 20 or 30 minutes and think about his wife back home in Oceanside, the woman he’s known and loved since high school.

When Cindy Acree talked to her 39-year-old husband Wednesday, a day after he ceased to be a prisoner of war, “he told me he could feel my love across the miles and knew I was up to something.”

“He said it was the strangest thing,” she remarked Friday at a Carlsbad press conference, “but he would wake up out of a dead sleep and just know that I was thinking about him, praying for him or doing something for him.”

Acree’s intuition was right, his wife was up to something.

After Acree was captured Jan 18 when his OV-10 Bronco was shot down while on a reconnaissance mission over southern Kuwait, Cindy Acree became a driving force behind an organization that demanded action on behalf of POWs and allied troops missing in action.

The group is the POW-MIA Liberty Alliance for Operation Desert Storm, which started an international letter-writing effort to help the prisoners and track the status of missing troops.

“Soon after he was released, he was told about our letter-writing campaign and was pleased and proud of the role I had played,” Cindy Acree said.

But now that Acree and the other prisoners are free, she has new ambitions.

She said her husband, the commanding officer of VMO-2, “has lost 25 pounds that he cannot afford to lose. He says he’s been dreaming of my cooking for 48 days . . . and I’m looking forward to fattening him up.”

Acree is on the hospital ship Mercy along with other Americans who were POWs, including Chief Warrant Officer Guy Hunter, who was flying with Acree on the unlucky mission. Both are based at Camp Pendleton.

Acree and Hunter are expected to fly into Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland on Sunday, to be met by their wives. For now, though, she knows he’s safe.

When Cindy Acree spoke to her husband Wednesday, the day after his release, “several times during our conversation he said, ‘I didn’t know if I’d every talk to you again.’ ”

The Acrees have been married two years, but they were high school and college sweethearts back in Seattle. Somehow, they went their separate ways, and Clifford married somebody else. But, after his divorce, he and Cindy found each other again.

They know each other so well--she calls her husband “my best friend”--that when Acree appeared on Iraqi television after his capture, somehow she knew through subtle, almost undefinable ways that he was trying to tell her something.

“The message I got loud and clear was he wanted to help me know he was alive and fighting,” Acree said during her first meeting reporters.

“We didn’t discuss his conditions during captivity or even the events leading up to it,” she said. “We’ll save that conversation until we’re together, and he is ready to talk about it.”

She said she survived the ordeal of her husband’s captivity by keeping busy and relying on support from friends, her Marine Corps “family” and former POWs “who took me under their wing and guided me so well.”

Her homecoming plans aren’t elaborate: “When we get together, I’m going to hug him and kiss him and not leave his side.”

Acree doubts that her husband, who left home with his unit in August, will return with any great surprises.

“As soon as he’s ready, he’ll be back in that cockpit again,” she said.