Remnants of Captivity Tell Story

The collection of items on the table before me looked like discards from a yard sale. Among them: a worn pair of black sandals, a dry cake of lye soap, a nub of pencil, a scruffy cotton shirt faded gray. There was a metal coffee cup, badly nicked and dented, and a tattered notebook filled with French and Spanish language lessons in tiny handprint.

Two years ago, most of this stuff was in someone’s attic, garage or forgotten drawer. Brought together, it’s all a vivid reminder that a tumultuous time for America also produced brave souls who made us proud.

These items, now in the basement of the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda, were keepsakes brought back from Vietnam by American prisoners of war. The library will place them on public display beginning Veterans Day, Nov. 11. The exhibit will run through May of next year, to honor the 25th anniversary of the 1973 return of the POWs.

As Nixon Library exhibit registrar Deborah Wallis told me about each piece, I thought of the suffering they represented. Each remnant of captivity has a story.

The sandals were fashioned by a POW from an old rubber tire. The soap was the only cleanser available for hair and body. The pencil was a rare treasure to be carefully hidden. The shirt was the uniform of the day--every day, every month and year. The ink of the notebook’s words was produced from a combination of charcoal and saliva; its cover was fashioned from scraps of prison clothing. And the cup was a precious tool of a code of communication. Each nick and dent represents the wall-banging efforts of one isolated war prisoner desperately trying to stay in touch with another in similar isolation nearby.

These are not war souvenirs. There is an explanation why the POWs brought back these scraps from years of imprisonment. Perhaps it’s best expressed by Air Force Capt. Neil Jones of Covington, La., a POW for seven years. In the collection I saw was a toothpick shaped out of a dog bone that Jones had made and brought back.

“When you are stripped naked,” he told an acquaintance, “stripped down to your soul, you grab onto anything you can hold on to.”

I happen to be a Vietnam veteran, but that doesn’t make this collection any more meaningful to me than it would be for many of you. The war touched all of us at the time. And whatever our views, we were united when we watched more than 650 POWs finally returning home.

One young man who intently watched those releases over a six-week period was Lee Humiston, a finance accountant from Anaheim. It is Humiston, now 57 and living in Chico, that many of the former POWs have entrusted with their valuables. The Nixon Library will display part of his collection, calling it “Pieces of Freedom.”

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Finding a Home: Remember the patriotic fervor over wearing bracelets with the names of POWs on them? Humiston began collecting those bracelets years ago. He now has more than 600. Nearly two years ago, Humiston asked former POW Air Force Col. Thomas H. Kirk Jr. of Vail, Colo., for one with his name. He didn’t have one, but instead sent Humiston that old notebook of French and Spanish lessons.

Humiston’s talks with other POWs led to more items, and finally word spread throughout that close-knit fraternity of former prisoners that Humiston was someone who could be trusted.

One sent him rosary beads made from bread, string and tiny pieces of toothpaste tubing. Another sent him the bottle from the one beer he was permitted the day the North Vietnamese released him.

Included in the Nixon Library display is a mannequin wearing the homecoming uniform of the POWs on the day of their release. Its various pieces, down to the underwear, come from six different former POWs. One of Humiston’s most prized possessions is a 1967 Life magazine cover showing former POW Paul Galanti in captivity. He signed it “to Lee Humiston, a tiger who was (and is) with us in spirit.”

Humiston has agreed that the Nixon Library is an appropriate setting for his display. Richard Nixon was his hero. “Politics aside,” Humiston said, “he brought ‘em home.”

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Life & Less: I’ve seen many a journalistic blunder over the years. But as I looked at the stark photograph of a captive Paul Galanti on the Oct. 20, 1967, cover of Life magazine, I couldn’t help but wonder what bozo made the decision to ruin it. To explain:

The picture, taken by an East German photographer, shows Galanti sitting in his neat prison room under a sign in English telling him to keep it clean. His hands were folded in front of him, on orders of his captors.

But Galanti tricked them. Extending from each hand was a finger, what one might call flipping the bird. It was Galanti’s way of saying, Don’t believe any of this.

But someone decided to airbrush out the extended fingers. Humiston and Galanti assume it was someone at Life, since his communist captors didn’t take the picture. The airbrushing, of course, destroyed Galanti’s not-so-subtle message. Look closely when it’s on exhibit and you can see the interference. Just enough is unclouded that you can tell what Galanti intended. He remained in captivity another six years after that photograph was published.

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Wrap-Up: The Nixon Library display is small but powerful. My guess is it will exhaust the emotions of many who view it. It certainly had that effect on me.

Kirk’s notebook was especially chilling. Here was a group of POWs so starved for some type of intellectual stimulation--or maybe just plain entertainment--that they made their days worthwhile by learning French and Spanish from Kirk, who happened to be a linguistics specialist.

It’s likely the library will display the small book closed, for it shows Kirk’s name on the front. But I’d love to see a few of its pages displayed too. He wrote the words so tiny because paper was so precious.

A page toward the end shows Kirk’s “items for continual review” by his French students. The list includes “vocabulary, verbs, pronouns, review sentences.”

To me, these aren’t ideas for better French. They’re the weapons of a group of men fighting back with the only means at their disposal--their minds.

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Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling The Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823 or by fax to (714) 966-7711, or by e-mail to jerry.hicks@latimes.com