Laughs, Hugs, Tears--and Plenty of Stories

He was known among his cellmates as the storyteller and he had plenty of tales to recall on Monday night.

Retired Air Force Col. James F. Young of Westminster was shot down over North Vietnam, just a few miles from the Laotian border, on July 6, 1966. The reconnaissance pilot was captured and remained imprisoned until Feb. 15, 1973. That was 2,414 days, and you can bet he was counting. The youngest of his three daughters was 15 months old when he left for Vietnam. She was 8 years old when he returned.

She’s grown now. And so has he.

Young, 68, and 173 other former prisoners of war in Vietnam met at the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace on Monday night. It was said to be the largest gathering of its kind since 1973 when they met at a state dinner at the White House. They laughed. They embraced. They cried. But mostly, they told stories to rapt listeners.

One of those listeners was Anneliese Young. She leaned in and listened intently as her husband told a reporter about the worst of his times in Vietnam. “I’m learning things today I’ve never heard before,” she said, sounding every bit amazed.

She had her own story to tell.

During her husband’s long captivity, she had three children to raise on her own. Only occasionally was her husband permitted to send her letters--16 in all in nearly seven years. The worst single year, she said, was 1970. She received not a word from him that year. “That was the year I was too sick to write,” Young said. “No one could ever really say what was the matter with me.” She thought he had died.

He almost did, of course. As did all of his bunkmates at the “Zoo,” their name for the spillover prison in Hanoi where they were housed for five years.

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For at least one day on Monday, their laughter proved the antidote for the pain and torture they all had endured back then.

It is a brotherhood the rest of us can never fully understand and can only marvel at from a distance. They are bonded for life by a brand of bad times most of us know little of.

“If you ever have to be a prisoner of war, you want Jim Young in your cell,” said Cole Black of San Diego.

Ray Merritt of Marysville, Calif., teased, “It would take Jim five hours to tell a two-hour movie, but we loved it.”

Needed it, in fact.

Young’s story began when he ejected from his burning plane onto a mountainside, his leg broken in three places. It took 30 minutes for mountain villagers to reach him. For three days he was passed by bamboo stretcher from village to village. He received limited medical care. Eventually, he was handed over to a North Vietnamese official known to all POWs as The Masher.

The Masher tortured Young so severely with electric wires that Young said “the excruciating pain cut to the bone. It left my hands completely useless for a long time.”

After a stint at the Hanoi Hilton, Young’s next stop was the Zoo. He would be the first American POW Cole Black laid eyes on at the Zoo.

Young can still recall the horrid condition of Black’s face, thanks to fresh beatings he’d received from the enemy.

It didn’t take long for Young to take on a leadership role with his cellmates. They looked to him for inspiration. For strength. For humor.

At one point, he even took to teaching them German. It was strictly to kill time, but when you’re a POW time is a sworn enemy.

“I was Jim’s scribe,” Merritt said. “I’d take down his lessons on tiny pieces of paper. Once a week those of us in Jim’s class were to speak nothing but German. We called it the Day of Silence, because we knew so little.”

There were beatings, of course. Then more beatings. They didn’t ebb until North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh died in 1969. Then, just before Valentine’s Day in 1973, word spread that they would soon be released.

Young brought back only his coffee cup. Black’s only souvenir: the last sheet of toilet paper. That’s a bit of an inside joke among POWs. It seems one of the marks of being a good POW cellmate, in Black’s words, was “ someone who was sparing with the toilet paper . . . . We’d get one sheet per week, and you always hoped your cellmate was someone who didn’t always need his share.

“And Jim was pretty good.”

That’s the way it went on Monday, one memory spilling out upon the other, most of them bad, very bad, but some good.

Scanning the Nixon library, they laughed when they spotted a display of POW uniforms, the dark and light maroon striped pajamas that Young wore, and the gray outfit that Black was issued. Young smiled at a replica of his own coffee cup. Black explained some of the items to other visitors.

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“The most important possession of any POW was the mosquito netting,” Black said. “You needed it for the mosquitoes, but also for the rats.”

“The rats were huge,” Young piped in.

Today, the Youngs and the Merritts and the Blacks look around and marvel at the friendships they have formed, forged in a way few friendships have.

“Jim knew me better than my own wife,” Merritt said. “We didn’t have anything else to do but share our inner thoughts.”

Black’s wife, Karen, is the attorney for the Youngs. Black is executor of Young’s will. Young wants to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

“They say there’s only room to bury us there standing upright,” Young said. “Cole has promised to find a way to have me buried lying down.”

Jokes aside, there were a few moments Monday when the gaiety dissolved into a somber silence. They all sat solemnly as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger talked about White House efforts to secure their release. When Kissinger talked about the important role played by POW wives, Young stole a glance at Anneliese.

It was a moment--and a night--to remember.

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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 e-mail to jerry.hicks@latimes.com