James Hirsch recounts one of the great friendships of the twentieth century forged in one of the most horrific settings that century produced--a North Vietnamese POW camp its inmates called the Zoo. One prisoner, Fred Cherry, was a pioneering air force pilot and the first black officer captured by the North Vietnamese. The other, a young navy flier named Porter Halyburton, was a racist southerner who doubted that a black man could even be a pilot. Their captors threw them into the same fetid cell, believing that their antipathy toward each other would break them both. But Cherry and Halyburton overcame their initial suspicions and saved each other's lives. When Halyburton first saw him, Cherry was a wreck. One arm, damaged in his plane crash, hung uselessly at his side. He hadn't bathed in weeks, and he could barely walk. In his own mind, Cherry was steeling himself for death. Halyburton was also weakening, emotionally battered from the interrogations and isolation that his sheltered life had not prepared him for. He had to learn how to endure, or he would become one of the incoherent wraiths who haunted the Zoo. Halyburton and Cherry became legendary among fellow POWs for the singular friendship that enabled them to overcome prodigious suffering and unspeakable torture. Hirsch weaves through this account a surprising, sometimes shocking view of the toll these men's captivity took on their loved ones. While Cherry's family was sundered by his absence, Halyburton's bond with his wife, Marty, endured and deepened. We see her receive the news of her husband's death, and we share her mingled elation and fear when she later learns that he is in fact alive and imprisoned. We also witness her unlikely rise to a leading role in the battle to bring the POWs home. Often inspiring, sometimes heartbreaking, Two Souls Indivisible shows how trust and hope can cheat death, and how good people can achieve greatness in hellish circumstances.

1 Better Place, Worse PlaceBetter place, worse place. Eagle slammed the notebook closed and gave the young American prisoner of war an ultimatum: talk to him and be taken to a camp where he could be with his buddies or refuse to cooperate and be taken to a place where he would suffer. Captured only a few days earlier, U.S. Navy Lieutenant (junior grade) Porter Halyburton didnt know the consequences if he continued to withhold military information. He was already locked inside North Vietnams notorious Hoa Lo Prison, dubbed the Hanoi Hilton by the Americans, a forbidding trapezoidal structure with thick outer walls topped by barbed wire and jagged glass. Years of urine, blood, and vomit permeated the rotting crevices. The food included chicken feet and bread so moldy that it had begun to ferment. Even the prisons name suggested its hellishness Hoa Lo (pronounced wa-low) means fiery furnace in Vietnamese. Whatever was worse would certainly be terrible, Halyburton thought, but still not as abhorrent as assisting the enemy. At twenty-four, Halyburton was one of the younger American POWs in Vietnam. His six-foot frame, short brown hair, and wholesome good looks fit the prototype of the dashing fighter jock, whose love of danger and combat had been immortalized in .lm and literature. But Halyburton was also introspective and artistic, the product of a small college town that had nurtured his intellectual and creative pursuits. He wrote poems, carved wooden statues, and read widely on history and culture. He was also a family man, having married his college sweetheart. The couples baby daughter was born four weeks before he left for Vietnam. He was lucky to be alive. On October 17, 1965, his F-4 Phantom jet was shot down forty miles northeast of Hanoi, killing the pilot in a fiery explosion. Halyburton, the backseat navigator, ejected without injury. Among many combat aviators, it was an article of faith that they would rather die instantly in a crash than be caught by the enemy. Halyburton believed otherwise, but he soon realized that the price of survival would be high. Immediately after his capture he was sent to Hoa Lo, where his cell, seven feet by six, had a boarded window, a single dim light bulb, and a concrete bed with leg irons. Cockroaches darted through the cells, and rats, some over a foot long, prowled the premises, lending evidence to a postwar POW study that noted, After sundown, rats and mice literally took over North Vietnam. Scribbled across the faded whitewashed walls were Vietnamese letters, but so too was something more comforting the name of an American, Ron Storz. Halyburton wasnt isolated or completely deprived; he could whisper to Americans in adjoining cells and was allowed to shower. Interrogations became a part of daily life: he was questioned by Colonel Nam, a gray-haired Vietnamese commander called Eagle for his authoritarian manner. Using passable English, he offered Halyburton the carrot or the stick. It was his c

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Excerpted from Two Souls Indivisible: The Friendship That Saved Two POWs in Vietnam by James S. Hirsch
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