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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Playing from behind
The trials and tribulations of being a female sportswriter were highlighted by last week's Samantha Stevenson-Julius Erving story.
By Steve Kettmann
[07/07/99]

And many more ...
Kids' birthday parties are out of hand. Whatever happened to cake, ice cream and pin the tail on the donkey?
By Janet Mazur
[07/06/99]

Bare, naked ladies
There's not much room to commune with your own nudity, or anyone else's, in a swimming-pool locker room full of wary onlookers.
By Jennifer New
[07/02/99]

Column
Optimistic complaints
Of course, mothers think -- and every once in a while they even complain.
By Sallie Tisdale
[07/01/99]

Postnuptial blues
After the wedding bells stopped ringing, she wanted nothing but sleep.
By Ellie Forgotson
[06/30/99]

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"Return With Honor" is simply one of the best documentaries in years. Everyone I know who has seen it feels the same way and it is getting the sorts of reviews that sound suspiciously like affectionate family members wrote them. But mostly people don't go out of their way to see documentaries, and I want to urge you to do so -- I will stake my reputation (such as it is) on the fact that it will change your life, change it a little, but forever. And it will bring you joy.

It is ostensibly about Vietnam, a full-length movie about the American pilots who were shot down over North Vietnam and their captivity, which lasted in some cases for almost nine years. It is about their torture and their torturers, the effort to survive, physically, spiritually, with their humanity intact and to return to the United States with honor -- to have looked out for each other, to have refused to divulge military secrets. But it is also about you and me and God and greatness, faith, hope and love.

All these years some of us have had heartfelt opinions about the war, that it was a bad war and we were right to protest. I still have this opinion. And all these years, most of us have felt horror and disgust toward the Vietnamese who tortured the POWs. In this movie, there are indeed heinous descriptions of the tortures inflicted. But because the American pilots portrayed in the film do not seem to hold any hatred in their hearts for their captors, I was brought to neutral, which, because my scale of antipathy started in the minus zone, is actually positive. Also, I have not been the biggest booster of former captives John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona, or James Stockdale, who was Ross Perot's befuddled running mate; and now I am humbled before both.

Anne Lamott Anne Lamott's column appears on the Mothers Who Think site every other Thursday. + Biography + Archives Satisfy your yearning for Anne Lamott at BARNES & NOBLE

Freida Lee Mock and her partner, Terry Saunders, guide us through history, weaving a tapestry of interviews with dozens of these pilots 30-some years later, and with their wives, who lived for years without knowing whether they were wives or widows. Mock and Saunders have included never-before-seen footage shot in 35 mm black and white of the men in the days immediately after capture, which the filmmakers discovered in Vietnamese government archives. There is footage of the prisons, of the men in their cells, of the propaganda tapes they were forced to participate in and which were then sent to the U.S. government and the devious ways the prisoners thought of to get the truth across. One man repeatedly blinked out the first letters of "torture" in Morse code while spouting dull assurances that they were all being treated well. Another pilot, with his hands hanging casually in his lap, is giving the bird: When the image was reproduced on the cover of Life magazine, the offending gesture had been airbrushed out, leading the pilot's little nephew to believe for years that the Vietnamese had cut off his uncle's middle fingers. "Return With Honor" documents the pilots' transformation from top gun aviators -- as one pilot says, John Wayne and Superman rolled into one -- into tenderhearted people, trying to stay alive and to take care of one another, hoping against hope to see their families again.

One pilot says early on, "I can't even stand unpleasantness, let alone torture," and this pretty much says it for me. And then he does -- endures the unendurable. He does it, this superhuman feat of endurance, in the same ordinary way the rest of us bear hardship: one day at a time, and sometimes one hour, and always with a little help from our friends.

Though separated from each other by thick walls, sometimes by empty prison cells as well, the pilots came up with brilliant ways to communicate with each other. Mostly they tapped, five or six words a minute in an ingenious code based on a grid of the alphabet, sounding, as one pilot says, "like a den of runaway woodpeckers." They swept in code, coughed in code, sneezed in code. They tapped and swept and coughed for two and three years to men they had never seen, and eventually learned to read each other's moods, to know when someone was close to madness and needed a little spiritual CPR. One pilot says, "The Vietnamese wanted to keep us from communicating so we couldn't gain strength from each other, but they couldn't."

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