We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jasinski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts as well. Today is
a Memorial Day, so we are going to have a special episode, a
special edition of Federalist Radio Hour, because today's show features an interview with Vietnam
prisoner of War Hal Kushner. He is commemorating his dinner with President Nixon over
at the Nixon Library this week, actually last week. We taped this episode
on May twenty fourth. You'll hear how I'll reference the dinner that he's doing
on May twenty four with the Nixon Library. But you'll also hear an incredible
story. This is one of the most fascinating and moving interviews that I can
remember ever having done, whether in a podcast or for a story. So
it's it's a way to I think, focus our minds on listening to how
stories, a way to sort of focus our minds on what's important Memorial Day,
What's what's worth remembering and appreciating. And thank you God for here in
the United States of America. So I hope you'll stick with with us through
this interview because how story is truly, truly incredible and inspirational. So stay
tuned for a special Memorial Day edition of Federalist Radio Hour with Hal Kushner.
How thank you so much for joining us. It's my pleasure and thank you
absolutely. Now did I get all of that background information correct? One thousand,
nine hundred and thirty three days in captivity. That is an incredibly long
time period. Obviously you don't need me to tell you that, but oh
my goodness, that's truly how long you were in captivity? How? Yes,
I was captured on two December nineteen sixty seven and released to American control
on sixteen March nineteen seventy three. Was five years and four months and one
thousand, nine hundred and thirty three days. That's unthinkable. Maybe we should
even just start by rewinding a little bit and having you just tell us how
a little bit about growing up in Hawaii in the shadow of the Pearl Harbor
attacks in a military family. What was it like? Well, I didn't
grow up in Hawaii. We were bombed by the Japanese on seven December and
on Christmas Day, and I was six months old, so I have no
memory of this. This is all family folklore. On Christmas Day, my
dad, who was a captain in the Army Air Corps, was deployed to
the Pacific War, and the same day the rest of the family, my
brother who was seven, who was still alive at eighty nine, and my
mom and my maternal grandfather who was visiting us for Christmas, were evacuated to
the mainland to California on a luxury liner called the Lurline, and the ship
there were about five thousand refugees on the ship that was big enough for about
two thousand, and my brother had terrible asthma and it was exacerbated, of
course by the stress of the event, and he had to have a tracheostomy
onboard ship. I often think about my poor mom, who was twenty four
years old with her father and a baby and another boy with asthma that had
to have this emergency surgery. I mean she was that was truly the greatest
generation what she had to go through. My dad went to the Pacific and
came back thirteen months later, seriously wounded and he was in the Army Navy
Hospital in Hot Springs, Arkansas for a couple of months, and then he
formed up with the ninety ninth Infantry Division and went to Europe for the rest
of the war. So I grew up not in Hawaii, but with various
relatives around the United States, in Atlanta and Chicago, and the last couple
of years in my dad's hometown of Danville, Virginia, with my paternal grandparents
and some cousins who were a generation older than I am whose men were overseas.
Also, when I think in this house there were five adults and four
kids of three different families whose men were serving overseas. We had one bathroom.
I remember that vividly because I remember my dad coming home in nineteen forty
five, and my earliest, one of my earliest memories is President Roosevelt dying
in April of forty five, and I was playing on the floor in my
grandmother's house, and I remember this big brown radio over in the corner and
everybody sitting around crying, and I asked my mom, what's happened, what's
going on, and she said, hush, the President has died. I
remember that very vividly. So one of my first memories. I was actually
going to ask how you heard but radio. That's so interesting and probably so
confusing to any young people listening to this. You think you are young people
listening to this? Good? I think so. I think so. But
that said, so, your father was in the Army Air Corps and you
go to med school end up enlisting in nineteen sixty five. Can you tell
us how, just a little bit about how your father's service, your family
service, influenced your decision to enlist in the mid sixties while you're in med
school. Yeah, well, it was not only my father's service, but
it was World War Two. You know. We grew up in World War
Two and the fires of patriotism were burning very brightly, and I think it
was imbued in US and the people of my generation, as you're supposed to
support and serve your country. And I went to college and University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, and then I went to medical school at the Medical
College of Virginia in Richmond. I was a Virginia Boy and there was a
program called the Senior Medical Student Program where one could enlist as a medical student,
get paid a first lieutenant salary the senior year in med school with essentially
no responsibilities except to make good grades. And then when we graduated, we
were commissioned a captain in the Medical Corps, and we could do a civilian
internship or a military internship, and then we owed the army three years instead
of two. And I thought it was a great deal because I was married
with a baby and was struggling financially. I had two jobs while I was
in med school, working at night, so it was a wonderful deal.
And another boy and I decided to do it our junior years in med school.
We drove up from Richmond to Fort Meade, Maryland, and signed the
papers and took the commission. And I knew Vietnam was going on. It
was just heating up. This is nineteen sixty five, but I thought we
should be in Vietnam, and I thought at least I could probably choose the
year I win. I was going to ask about that, actually, because
it's it's a really critical time to have enlisted at the time. Could you
tell us a little bit more about your perception of why it was important,
as you said, to enlist to serve the country and to sort of express
your patriotism with the greatest possible sacrifice that the name one can make, which
is serving the armed forces. Well, I wanted to serve my country,
you know, when you're young. First of all, it's an adventure.
Second of all, I have a sense of patriotism and duty toward my country.
I mean, even today, I believe very strongly in universal service,
not just selective service. But I think everybody should serve their country. If
we're lucky enough to be an American. It's easy enough to do two years
after high school. If you don't want to be in the military, you
can each or help the poor or chopped down trees or something that you can
do service. And I guess my parents or my grandparents taught me that.
So this was the way I could express my patriotism, serve my country,
and also help out my family financially. And I was lucky. Because this
is complicated. But when one graduates from med school, then the next year
of training is called an internship. Nowadays they call it postgraduate year one,
but it's an internship, and you are matched. You list the hospitals that
you would like to intern and apply, and the hospitals list the candidates in
the order that they would take them, so you get to match with the
highest one. And my highest one was the hospital in which I had been
born, Trippler, and I was lucky enough to be selected. So I
interned in Hawaii and in the hospital of my birth. And that was an
amazing experience because I took a mixed surgical internship, which meant I rotated among
different surgical specialties. But after two months after I did my ob gyn,
wounded gis and US Marines started pouring into our hospital from Vietnam. And they
came by air and they were still in their battle dress, bloody and muddy,
and they had little cards on them saying what their wound was and how
many sirettes of morphine they had had. They went right into our hospital and
we discharged all the dependence or the civilians from our hospital retirees, and we
filled it with the wounded gis and United States Marines. And my internship was
essentially ORTHOPEDICX. I was transferred to orthopedics and worked on orthopedics for the next
nine months, and these I learned a lot about soldiering, about leadership,
and about orthopedics. But that was secondary. The commanding general of the Fleet
Marine Force specific then was General Krulak. He was a little guy, but
I think he was about five to five, and they called him Brute Brute
Krulak and General Krulak, who wore three stars on his shoulder as lieutenant general,
went out to the airport at all hours a day and night and met
his marines. And he would walk through the hospital to see his wounded marines.
They would alive attention and he would pin their purple hearts on them.
But I mean, it was just an amazing lesson in what leadership is.
So you are deployed of Vietnam in August of nineteen sixty seven. Could you
tell us a little bit about what you were feeling when you deployed. Obviously,
you know they're the extent of the war. Everything we know now we
didn't necessarily know then. But were you frightened? What's it like to be,
you know, a young man in nineteen sixty seven headed off to Vietnam?
Oh? Well, I don't think I was frightened. There was a
sense of adventure, you know, when you're young, not very smart,
had gone through flight surgery school. I was interested in aviation, and I
went through flight surgery school, and I knew that flight surgeons in Vietnam went
together like hands and gloves, and so I knew I was going to Vietnam.
Finished my flight surgery training, I already had orders for Vietnam. My
wife and child. We're living in my hometown, dan Vulle, Virginia,
in an apartment. My parents were there. And I went to Vietnam.
And after I had been assigned to the first start in ninth Cavalry, which
was a combat unit, a real combat unit. I replaced a flight surgeon
named Carl Schanepp, who was a young doctor from Memphis, Tennessee, who
had been killed in action a few months before, and we were involved in
daily combat. After I'd been there about a month, I got a letter
of these are the days before internet and so forth. And I got a
letter from my wife telling me that she was pregnant with a due data in
April of sixty eight. So I did. My mission was to be the
medical doctor for aviators. I took care of aviators, and I knew about
aviation, and I knew about the psychology of aviation. And my job was
to play cards with these fellows, to sit with them, to drink with
them, to socialize with them, to realize when they were under too much
stress, and ground them from flying for a while, and just to be
their doctor. And also my job was I had seventeen medics in my medical
platoon. They were combat medics and they went out on operations as I did
too. And I had three sergeants who were administrators and also combat medics.
And I I was supposed to have one second lieutenant who was an administrative officer,
but I didn't have him. So I went out on operations and we
treated wounded. We had an aide station. We had two aide stations,
was essentially a sandbag tent in the forward area, and we had a quantit
hunt in the rear area where we did sitcall. We were back there.
But when soldiers were wounded in combat, they were brought back to the aide
station after being treated in the field, and I would render life and limb
saving surgery, and if they needed to be evacuated to a more advanced facility,
we would advance them to a surgical hospital by helicopter, or a field
hospital or an evacuation hospital like the one in Hawaii. Or Japan or the
States. So that was my mission, and I was really busy, very
busy all the time, always behind. I always felt like I was behind,
and I felt pressure, the pressure of being behind and not being able
to complete the whole job. That's what I felt. Kind of like I
was young then, and I remembered my college days, kind of like what
I had too much to do in college and I couldn't complete my assignments.
I'm sure you can relate to that. Oh, absolutely, Just so it's
about four months later then when you're captured by the Vietcong. After you are
deployed in August, and then on December second, you're captured by the Vietcong
in South Vietnam. Can you tell us about a little bit about how that
happened, What happened, what transpired? Yes, on thirty November nineteen sixty
seven, I flew up to July, which was north of where our forward
base was. But we had a group, we had people, I mean,
we had people in my unit spread out all over South Vietnam, pilots.
So there were a group of pilots there and I flew up there to
give them a lecture about the dangers of ninth flying and the weather was horrible,
and so I asked we were supposed to take the helicopter back to our
base of operations. And the crew was the pilot who was a dear friend
of mine, the co pilot who also was a friend the mine, and
the crew chief who I didn't know, who was a sergeant. So there
were three crew members. And I said to the pilot, I said,
this way till the weather clears, because this is terrible weather. And he
says no, He said, our mission is not so important, but we
have to get the airplane back for operations tomorrow. And that was the wrong
decision because it was just pouring rain, I mean just absolutely thunderstorms. So
we took off and I could see that we had crossed Highway One. I
could see truck lights on Highway One through the clouds, and I knew we
weren't supposed to cross it. We were about a twelve hundred feet altitude,
and I just radioed the pilot. I was in the back seat, and
I said, Steve, we just crossed Highway One. I don't think we're
supposed to and he said I don't think so he said, let me called
duck Foe. Duck Foe was another place that had an air traffic controller that
had an instrument called a transponder, which allows him to find our hellic in
the air. This is getting too complicated on trying to simplify it, but
so he called duck Foe and the operator said, I've just turned off the
trans transponder. It'll take a minute to warm up. Do you want me
to turn it on and warm up the equipment? And Steve said, Raj,
And that was the last words he ever said. And the next thing
I knew I was in a burning helicopter regaining consciousness, and the first that
was thirty November sixty seven. The first thing I realized was that I had
lost a bunch of teeth. I ran my tongue over my teeth and they
were broken and missing, and I said, is anybody alive? And I
got no answer. By the light of the fire, I could see Steve
the pilot crushed against the instrument panel, and I tried to unhook my seat
belt and when I did, I almost broke my neck. The airplane was
completely upside down, and my helmet was plugged into the ceiling of the helicopter
to the communication system. So I simply fell out of this burning helicopter.
And when I did, I saw the copilot on the ground, still in
the seat, and the crew chief thrown pretty far from the helicopter. The
copilot had a broken right leg, with the bones of his tibia the lower
part of his legs sticking through the nylon of his jungle boot, and the
co pilot was simply unconscious. I tried. I got back on the airplane
and tried to free steve the pilot with his knife. He had a knife
on the right side of his body, and I took the knife and tried
to cut his seat belt and I couldn't. It got too hot and it
was burning. And then I jumped off the helicopter again, and at that
point I realized that my left wrist was broken and my collarbone was broken,
and I had burned on my back and back of my legs. And then
the airplane just burned up in a big whoosh, and we had an M
sixty machine gun on board, and the round started exploding cooking off is the
term, and several of those hit me in the left back, left side
of the back of the side, and then I had Steve's knife in my
hand, and I saw the co pilots leg badly broken, so I cut
two branches of trees. We were on top of this mountain. With the
knife and with two army belts, the crew chiefs army belt and the co
pilot's army belt. I splinted his leg, which is important to the story,
and then we just waited. It was pouring rain, and the next
day, at first light, which was the first of December, we sent
the crew chief for help. We thought we knew where he was. He
never came back, and later years later, six years later, I found
out he had been shot dead and submerged in a rice paddy ten miles from
the crash site. So I sat with the copilot on the morning of December
second. He passed away. Never complained. He was a brave young Warren
officer, just from a very good family. And when he passed away,
I bound my left arm to my body with my army bell as a splint,
and I started going down the mountain. The rule is you made you
stay with the aircraft, but I stayed three days and the weather had been
terrible the whole time, and I knew the helicopters couldn't see us, so
I left. I thought I knew where I was, and I walked.
I walked down the mountain and about two or three miles and I saw a
peasant working in a rice patty and he saw me, and I had of
fatigues on you with rank and a medical core symbols captain and a cadusis.
He said, diwee box sea, diwee box sea, which means captain doctor.
And he took me about a mile away, and he gave me a
can of sweet and condensed milk, and I was eating the milk was the
first thing I'd had to eat except for rainwater, in three days. And
then he squad of fourteen VC came. He led them to me, and
that was one of the oddest events I've ever had in my life, because
I looked up and I immediately knew there were fourteen and that one was a
woman, and I knew that there were twelve weapons. I just it was
lightning. I never had an experience like that. And the squad leader said
to me in English, surrender, no kill, and he raised both his
arms over his head. My left arm was tied in my body. I
raised my right arm over my head and he shot me at point blank range,
right through the left shoulder. I mean he was about three feet from
me. And I fell away over in the bushes in the grass, and
they grabbed me and they that was two December sixty seven. They ripped off
my dog tags and I had a medallion on and my dad had given me
that had a Star of David on one side and a Saint Christopher's medal on
the other which was very precious to me. And they took that and took
my wallet and I showed him in my wallet I had a Geneva Convention card
which was white with the red cross that showed that I was a medical personnel.
And he said no pow, no pow, criminal criminal, which indicated
they didn't honor the Geneva Convention. So that was my captivity. What was
your level of physical pain like then? I would think, I mean almost
your your body almost goes numb. But to get shot then after going through
those those three days, so I don't remember paying then, I really don't
remember pain then, interesting, I don't I don't know whether a head pain
or not. I don't remember it. They took my boots and tied me
tightly in a duck wing position and marched me several miles until dark. They
put me in a cave, and then the cave a young man tied me
to a door a plank and beat me with a bamboo stick. And that
hurt. But I don't remember any pain from the shot or from the helicopter
crash. Interesting, but endorphins maybe, I don't know, you know,
But about two weeks it took a month to get to the camp that I
ended up in. But about two weeks later I was sick. My wound
was festering, it was full of maggots, my feet were lacerated. I
was really in bad shape, and I had some mental things going on.
I mean, artillery was coming in and I couldn't care less whether we got
blown up or not. I was just, you know, just kind of
staggering along. The thing that really did hurt, though I would at night,
we would walk and I couldn't see. I had no glasses. They
would strike these little homemade cigarette lighters and see some sparks and could walk a
few steps and they were behind me. I was in front, and they
were prodding me, and I couldn't see the sparks, and I would often
fall off the dikes of the rice paddy into the water and they would pull
me out by the wire that was binding my arms, and that hurt.
And then I got sick. I mean I was just had fever and malaria
and everything. They took me to a field hospital where they were wounded lying
around in hammocks and people with amputations, and this female nurse lay me through
pine on a log, on a split log, and heated up an AK
forty seven cleaning rod until it was red hot and rammed it through and through
through my wound, which was through and through in my left shoulder, and
that really hurt. It sizzled and it did it killed all the maggots and
caught her eyes the wound. But that really really hurt, and I can
feel that now. And she gave me an asper and a single aspirin tablet
and putting a cure chrome on it. And at that point I thought,
what else didn't they do to me? But I was to find out.
So that was that was my captivity. So I want to I want to
say one thing though, Yeah, if I may, It took a month
to reach my camp, and it was it was really tough. But there
was one time when, as I said, we slept in the daytime and
marched at night. And we were getting ready to march one dusk and we
got up and this old man came over. We would buy a river.
This old man came over and tried to pull my fatigue jacket off, and
it was muddy and bloody and full of puss and maggots and everything, and
I was holding onto it. I didn't have any clothes. I had a
raggedy undershirt on under it. And the guards made me give it to him,
and I went, oh my god, I'm gonna be naked in this
thing. And this old man took my fatigue jacket and he took it down
to the river and he washed it and he dried it with charcoal. And
then he came back and I had all these leeches on my legs, My
pasts were burned off. I had all leeches and stuff on me. He
came back and he burned the leeches off of me with a cigarette, and
he gave me my jacket bat which was still damp, but it had been
washed. And that was It was like a an island of kindness and just
a sea of cruelty. And I will never forget that, old man,
So I wanted to bring that up. That's incredible. And what did you
know over the course of those one nine hundred and thirty three days, it
was just an unthinkable number. What did daily life look like for you?
And how does the time pass in under those circumstances. Well, we went
to the first camp, and during end the first camp, twenty seven Americans
eventually came through the camp. Five or release ten died. Daily life considered
consisted of getting up very early in the morning. We cooked our own rice.
They gave us some months ration of rice at a time, which we
divided, which turned out usually to be about two coffee cups a day of
rice may per man, sometimes three in the rainy season, it was two
or less, which was four months. And we got a little bit of
this stuff they called nook mom, which is a fish sauce. A little
bit of that a month and that's it. And then we could supplement our
diet with whatever we could find, which wasn't much. And ten people died
of essential starvation and protein deficiency and malaria, and we did we for wood,
We cooked with wood. We built hooches, We did slave labor.
We carried rice for them. We built bomb shelters for the them. We
built hootoos and carried elephant grass for them. That was essentially our daily life.
We went to bed. There was no electricity, of course, or
plumbing. We were in the jungle. We went to bed when it got
dark. We got up with at four o'clock in the morning to cook rice.
We cooked twice a day, and they taught us how to build ovens
of mud so that and chimneys underground so that the smoke and the fire could
not be seen by aeroplanes. So it was rough. It was really rough,
and most of the time we had no food, no clothing, no
shoes, no blankets, very little medicine, hardly any medicine. I taught
our people to fake malaria so that to fake chills and fever so we could
get quinine when they would give it to us, and hoard it so we
did get sick, we could take it. And we had some rusty razor
blades. I mean, we never shaved, we never cut our hair,
we never had anything. We were barefoot for over two years. When Hoti
men died, the treatment improved a little bit. They gave us sandals,
and they gave us a pair of black pajamas, and we had once in
a while get a little soap. We would bathe in the river, which
was cold. We were in the mountains. It was really it was rough.
It was it was tough, and it was so tough that we tried
to kill the camp commander's cat and eat it and got severely punished for that.
We did manage to get the cat killed, but didn't get to eat
it, and so we were like we were there in the jungle for three
and a half years. We had ten deaths. There were twelve survivors and
by the way, West German nurses were captured, three female, two male.
Three of them died within two months and they moved them to North Vietnam
early. They were in an organization called the Knights of Malta, which is
a Red Cross type neutral organization. They were there to just help everybody and
they were having a picnic outside of Denang, which wasn't very bright, and
there were five Caucasians in the vietcag who didn't speak German or English. Picked
them up because they were Caucasoid, and by the time they got them to
our camp, which was less than a month, one had died. In
another month two more died, so then they couldn't release them. I think
that's my own interpretation of what happened. I was just ask how cut off
from the outside world is that's interesting? People as people must have come in,
maybe you heard bits and pieces of what had happened since you were capturing,
but you know they made as people came in, we heard like we
heard about the moon landing. There was gonna happen wow. And a fellow
named jose anzel Duo who was captured in nineteen seventy told us about the moon
landing. I couldn't believe it, and of course the Vietnamese only told us
bad stuff. Martin Luther King assassinated, Bobby Kennedy assassinated. My son was
born in April of sixty eight. I never knew he was born, never
knew he was a son, never knew anything until very shortly before his fifth
birthday. What did your family know about your status? So they know they
thought I'd been captured because when they found the body of the co pilot,
they said he had been professionally splinted and assumed I had done it. Remember
I told you I put splints on him, and they assumed I had done
it, and thus I was not dead, not seriously hurt, but I
was pretty seriously hurt. And then they didn't hear again about me until November
sixty nine when three men were released and they heard that I was alive.
And then they didn't hear again until shortly before we went home. But I
found out I'd like to get this out there too. Yeah, my wife
at the time, we were subsequently divorced and she passed away. But my
wife at the time tried to send me medical equipment through the Cambodian embassy so
that I could take care of other people. And the Army, which they
say is a cold place, tried hundreds of times to send me medical equipment,
which is in some Swedish or Swiss or neutral embassy somewhere or in North
Vietnam. And the Army, the US Army sent me hundreds of pairs of
glasses through neutral embassies, none of which I ever received. So I don't
think the Army is as cold to place as some people would think. But
in February of nineteen seventy one, after twelve people had died, I'm sorry.
After ten people had died in twelve were living. They decided to move
us to North Vietnam, and they divided us into two groups, six and
six fast and slow. I was in the fast group and we walked most
of the way to North. We walked to North Vietnam to a railroad terminus
called then Vnh and it was nine hundred kilometers which is five hundred and forty
miles. It took us fifty seven days and they put us on the train
and then and we went to Hanoi on the train one hundred and eighty miles
and it took like eighteen hours on the train. And the slow group took
one hundred and eighty days and we got to North Vietnam. We got the
sixth Fast got to North Vietnam in April of seventy one, so the trek
took from February to April. And we were put in a prison in Hanoi
called we called it the Plantation. It was called the Citadel, and it
was a cell and I hardly remember the first months I was in there because
I had malaria so badly. I remember they weighed me one of that was
the only time I was weighed, and I weighed forty four kilo, which
is like one hundred pounds one hundred six pounds or something, and eventually ended
up in a cell with five other officers. Were six people in a cell.
They divided me from my group who were all enlisted, and I lived
with six officers. We were in a cell. The cell had wooden palettes.
We got fed twice a day identical meals of what they called pumpkin soup.
It was really melon soup, thin melon soup, a little piece of
bread there was about three inches long, two cups of hot water. That
was it. And we got no letters, no books, no communication,
no nothing. And we listened to propaganda radio and they played anti war music
on the speaker, and there was a light bulb on twenty four to seven,
and when people like Jane Fonda or Pete Seeger came to North Vietnam,
they spoke to us over the speakers over the camp radio, and that was
it. We got out like twice a week to bathe in a well and
we had a latrine bucket. We had a bucket in the room that was
a latrine, and one man got out once a day just to go empty
the bucket and a cess put a cess pit and bring it back. And
we rotated that. And then finally in December seventy two, Operation Lineback or
two BE fifty two's bombed the smith of Reens out of Hanoi, and I
think they bombed for eleven days. And then they moved us to the Hanoi
Hilton, which was only a short truck rode away. They put blindfolds and
shackles on us and wrote us around for four hours at night. Of course,
we lifted our blindfolds and we could see we weren't going anywhere. They
rode us around and then took us to the Hilton and they opened the camp
up then and we all got to see each other. Before that, we
were in our cell. We couldn't speak to anyone out of the cell,
and if you did, if you tried to, you got beaten or tortured.
And we had in the plantation we had a senior ranking officer, his
name was Lieutenant Colonel Ted Guy, who was Air Force, and he tried
to We had a code that we could tapple the wall and transmit information,
and he tried very hard to lead us by that tap code through the walls,
and every time he got caught, he got tortured, and they would
put him on the radio and he would tell us to cooperate and collaborate and
to stop talking. But you could tell by his inflection and his poor grammar,
and he was an educated man that he was being forced tortured to say
it, and he would say little sarcastic things. And Colonel Guy was just
a hell of a person. We called him Moses. He was really inspirational
and he led us. So we stayed in the Hilton until the war was
over. Peaceful Signed January twenty seven, seventy three, I was released.
We were released in groups, and I was released March sixteen, and Colonel
Guy was in my release group and they took us to the airport the day
before we released. They led a Swedish Red Cross guy in. That was
the only time we ever saw a Red Cross person the day before release,
and they took us to the airport and a bus and in the airport,
Colonel Guy lined us all up. We had They had given us these release
suits. It was a windbreaker, a little short sleeved shirt, a pair
of blue pants and a pair of cheap leather shoes and a little bag like
an overnight bag of jim bag, a wallbag. Colonel Guy lined us all
up and he said on every man to hold his a wall bag in his
left hand. I want you to turn your shirt tail in. I want
you to zip your unzip your windbreaker one third of the way down. And
when you walk out, I want you to walk out with dignity and honor
and like soldiers. He had been captured just as long as I had,
five and a half years. And it was the most powerful speech I've ever
heard in my life. And it didn't work out that way they called out
individually, but it was. It was really a powerful reminder, and I'll
never get over it. What was it like seeing your family? What was
it like learning about everything that had happened while you were in captivity and sort
of catching up to life outside captivity, readjusting to normal life. What was
that much trouble when they put us on an airplane. I when I walked
out, and you know, I was greeted by this UH Air Force brigadier
general. And I saw this guy there and he actually had meat on him,
He had breadth, he was thick, and he had a beautiful tunic
was emblazing with real ribbons. And I went out and I saluted him.
After all, this was a military courtesy, had been denied us for over
five years. And he said, he said, welcome home, Major Kushner.
And I'd been promoted. I didn't even know it. And he shook
hands. He returned to salute. He shook hands with me, and then
he hugged me, and he was crying, and so was I. And
then they put me on this one forty one airplane and they gave each man
a folder and it was individually tailored and told us what had happened, you
know, if your parents were still alive, if your wife was still married
to you, who had won the World Series, the Super Bowls, things
like that. And so we read these folders, and we got on this
airplane and they had a soda fountain on it and they would give you ice
cream soda if you wanted it or whatever. And I think they were passing
out cigars. And they had these beautiful flight nurses. All the flight nurses
were, you know, like sixty tall, and they were gorgeous, and
I'm sure they were selected. And we went to the Philippines, and then
the Philippines we were allowed to call our families. It was set up,
there was an appointment, so I called my family. I talked to my
wife, my children, my dad and mom, and they kept us in
the Philippines for about three days. Then we stopped in Hawaii for a day,
and then they flew us to a hospital closest to our home of record,
which if my case was Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, because my home of
record was Danville, Virginia, and I was in the hospital there when I
got off the helicopter. There my parents and my wife and children were there,
and that was very personal, and there are some things I cared not
to say about that, meeting my wife for the first time, but with
my children, it was wonderful. Mown parents, and then my wife and
I grew together. We got divorced eleven years later, probably unrelated and who
knows to that experience, I don't know. Certainly changed us both, but
I didn't. People doctors from all over the country wrote me and sent me
letters and books, and there everybody was just so wonderful. You know.
We hear a lot about how the veterans were treated when they came home in
Vietnam, I certainly didn't have that experience. My hometown gave me a car
and I would go out to my I was in in and out of the
hospital for four months. I had four surgeries. I would go out to
my mailbox at home. It would be stuffed full of stakes, with no
note or anything. It was just a wonderful experience that I could never ever
be grateful enough for. And so after four months, my children who had
been raised for the who my parents had helped raise them a lot, and
they were my children. My son Michael was five, my daughter Tony Jean
was nine and a half. She's fifty nine and a half now, and
Michael is fifty five now. But they were very very close to my parents.
And so when I got out of the hospital and it was time to
go to my next duty station in July of seventy three, they didn't really
you know, my son started crying. I said, why are you crying?
And he said, why am I cry? And I'm leaving my Grandpa
Bob, and so, you know, I was like an intruder into his
life, a new guy. And my daughter remembered me. She was three
and a half when I had left, but my son didn't, and so
that was an adjustment. And the wife she had, she had, I
think she changed more than I did. Actually, Women's Live happened, all
this stuff happened, She got involved in the politics of it. She enjoyed
not the fact that I was gone, but she enjoyed being on television,
and she second did George McGovern's nomination, and she enjoyed traveling, and so
she had a different When I went to Vietnam, she wanted four kids,
a station wagon and a white pick of tense, And when I came home,
that's not what she wanted. So it was very different. The culture
was totally different. I watched television in the hospital and I I couldn't believe
the language on television. You know. I left when Asie and Herod were
sleeping in separate bids, and when I came back it was different. It
was they had R rated movies. Yeah. I was actually going to ask
about that next, because you were talking earlier about the attitude that so many
people in the country had as young men like yourself were enlisting in Vietnam,
about service, about small our republican service and patriotism and some changes happened really
quickly. It sounds like actually while you were in captivity. But absolutely it
was a huge cultural change in so many aspects and dress, in speech,
in habits, in attitude toward their government. And it has persisted to this
day, I think, much to the detriment of our country. Yeah,
I was going to say, I mean, if you fast forward to now,
it's it's it's even more accelerated the rapid changes that have happened, although
still you know, within a couple of generations time. And so looking back
and I agree with you completely, what is that? What is that?
What is that? Like? I mean, looking looking at the military today,
how hard it is for them to recruit. Why do you think that
is? I think people have a different attitude towards their country. And there's
been just such uphevil with this COVID thing, you know, and people were
just who were getting checks and getting money. Nobody's working. People have trouble
finding staffing and restaurants. And I'm still working. I have a medical office
and we have you know, it's not as steady though as it used to
be. There's just been this tremendous social change. I hope these things go
in cycles. You know. You read about the roaring on a in the
time before War One and the Civil War, and then things kind of the
pendulum swings back, and I hope that it will there will be a reaction
to it. I wish we would impose the draft again. I think we
should. As I said before, I believe in universal service. And when
you celebrate Memorial Day with all of these experiences and memories, what does it
mean to you? Oh my god, what a question I think a Memorial
Day. I'm writing a talk now that I'm giving the keynote speech at Gettysburg
National Cemetery or Memorial Day, and I am writing that talk now, and
I think of Memorial Day with first of all, great sadness and a great
sense of loss, not only the loss of our young people, young soldiers
who died in wars, but the contributions they these millions could have made to
our country had they lived. And so I think we've lost on two counts,
lost the youth, and lost the men, the older men or women
they would have become, and their contributions because they were a remarkable breed.
How Kusher, is there anything else you think people should know about about your
experience about the country, about how things have changed. As we wrap up
this episode, No, I think we covered it. I think I talked
too much and didn't let you talk about No, no, no, you
got me going. I was on the truely hang on every word because you
have lived a remarkable life and you've given back so much too. You've done
medical missions. I have to imagine that is inspired by your own experience too.
Well. Quite frankly, I have done medical missions all over the world
and been to Africa a couple of times, India three times, Dominican Republic,
Haiti, Peru, and Turkey, and they're very fulfilling for the person
doing that. For me is extremely fulfilling. It's really it's wonderful to help
people who really is when it's very helpful to me. I think I gave
more than the than what I gave on those medical missions. And you're you're
out at the Nixon Library, if I'm understanding it correctly right now, in
preparation for some of their Memorial Day recognitions this week. Right, well,
it's not Memorial Day. It's a recreation of the dinner that President Nixon gave
to welcome home the prisoners of War on May twenty fifth, nineteen seventy three.
I've been to be around Memorial that's actually the time of wars out there
exactly exactly, So that'll be tonight, and I am right now sitting in
my hotel room getting ready to get my tuxedo out to go to that amazing
Hal Kushner. Thank you so much for joining us, Emily. Thank you
you're a very good interviewer, and I hope I didn't talk too much.
No, it was wonderful and fascinating and we appreciate it immensely. Thank you
so much. Thank you. Bye bye. Now you've been listening to another
edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jasinski, culture editor here at
the Federalist. We will be back soon with more. Until then, be
lovers of freedom and anxious for the frame.