CROAN: [00:00:00] One of our very favorite themes to explore here on the podcast is the legacy of the Vietnam generation, the various ways that our American experience today was shaped by Vietnam veterans and the people who love them. We’ve [00:00:15] talked about the use of helicopters in warfare, the use of dogs in the military, combat medicine, the VA music. All these things were defined, or at least heavily influenced by [00:00:30] the people of what I consider to be the greatest generation. Well, in this episode, we reveal yet another bead on that legacy necklace, one that I was only marginally aware of. It’s a real David and Goliath [00:00:45] story, so if you’re the kind of person who roots for the underdog, you’re in for a treat.

Taylor Kiland: [00:00:51] We say that we leave no man behind, but that really has only been the case since the Vietnam War, When we do have [00:01:00] a captive or a POW, we expend tremendous, tremendous resources to try and rescue that person. That never happened before the Vietnam War. And we have a handful of military wives [00:01:15] from the 1960s to thank for that.

CROAN: [00:01:19] That’s author Taylor Kiland. Her new book tells the amazing story of that handful of military wives who overcame tremendous odds to make missing and captured [00:01:30] service members a national conversation and changed military family policy for the generations that followed. Rthy. Stick around. From [00:01:45] the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, founders of the wall. This is echoes of the Vietnam War. I’m your host Michael Croan bringing you stories of service, sacrifice, and healing from people who still feel the impact of that conflict more [00:02:00] than 50 years later. This [00:02:15] is episode 52 unwavering. On Veterans Day 1996, Vvmf unveiled an exact [00:02:30] replica of the wall that could be packed into an 18 Wheeler and hauled to cities and towns all across America. Since then, the Wall that Heals has been displayed in nearly 700 communities throughout the nation, spreading the healing legacy of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to millions [00:02:45] of visitors. If you want to know more about this traveling exhibit and the impact it can have on a community, check out episode 15 of this podcast. The Wall That heals and the mobile education center that travels with it will be in Great Bend, Kansas, [00:03:00] May 11th through 14 and Rhinelander, Wisconsin, May 18th through 21. To see the rest of this year’s tour schedule, and to learn how you can bring the wall that heals to your town, visit eff.org.

Gary Sinise: [00:03:16] Hello, [00:03:15] I’m Gary Sinise. Nearly 3 million Americans served in Vietnam, and more than 58,000 have their names inscribed on the wall. Those that paid the ultimate price in service to America. Some [00:03:30] might ask why the Vietnam War still matters. It matters because more than 58,000 lives were cut short and their families forever changed. It matters because we should never forget how Vietnam veterans were [00:03:45] treated when they came home. A lesson learned so that our current generation of veterans are treated with respect. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, the organization that built the wall, works to ensure that future generations [00:04:00] will understand the war’s impact. I’m asking you to help keep the promise. The wall was built on. Never forget. Visit vvmf. Org to find out how you can get involved.

CROAN: [00:04:17] The [00:04:15] registry is an online community created by Vvmf that connects veterans of the Vietnam War era with each other. By signing up for the registry, you can upload and share stories and images, connect with [00:04:30] others who served during the Vietnam era, and connect your service with people you knew whose names are now on the wall. Join the community and preserve your legacy or family members by signing up today at vvmf. Org Slash registry. Taylor [00:04:45] Baldwin, Keeland and Judy Silverstein Gray, authors of multiple books, and both military veterans themselves have published a new history of America’s No Man Left Behind policy called unwavering. The [00:05:00] wives who fought to ensure no man is left behind. It’s the true story of the women who fought to make no Man Left Behind a promise that America could make and keep. Taylor Keeland joined me via zoom from her home in Alexandria, [00:05:15] Virginia. If you had to peg the themes of this book to something that is more current, maybe something that’s that’s in the news today, is there a news event that you can think of that really hooks directly [00:05:30] into the themes of your book?

Taylor Kiland: [00:05:32] There are two. If you recall, when we exited Afghanistan in 2019, it was no accident that we left no man behind. We left that country [00:05:45] with no American POWs and no missing men. We now expend tremendous resources. In fact, we have a government agency in this country with 700 professionals and an annual budget of $130 million to [00:06:00] comb the globe annually to search for all remains. And when we do have a a, a captive or a p o w, we expend tremendous, tremendous resources to try [00:06:15] and rescue that person. All you have to do is look at the case of Bowe Bergdahl, who walked off his post in Afghanistan and was captured by the Taliban. And we deployed incredible special forces resources [00:06:30] to try and find him and rescue him. And we eventually traded five hardened terrorists for him. That never happened before the Vietnam War. And we have a handful of military wives from the 1960s [00:06:45] to thank for that. We say that we leave no man behind. But that really has only been the case since the Vietnam War. And that’s what this book is about.

CROAN: [00:06:57] Do you have any sense of the scope [00:07:00] of people who were left behind in Korea, or World War two, or World War one?

Taylor Kiland: [00:07:05] Well, before Vietnam, we just left our missing. Missing. We have more than 72,000 missing men from World War two. We [00:07:15] have more than 7000 missing from the Korean War. We still have about 1500 or so missing from the conflict in Southeast Asia. And you may read in [00:07:30] local media or national media every month or so about a set of remains that are repatriated 50, 60, 75 years later. The families who received these remains, whether they come from the [00:07:45] Philippines or the South Pacific during one of our island campaigns in World War two, or Laos or Germany. These families are dumbfounded, absolutely dumbfounded [00:08:00] that their father grandfather, uncle is so many decades later being returned and repatriated. Again, that is one of the unheralded legacies of the Vietnam War that a handful [00:08:15] of of of wives in the 1960s spoke up about their missing and captive men and made the fate of the missing and captive men an absolute national priority. And families today are benefiting from their work. [00:08:30]

CROAN: [00:08:31] How did the this this particular story of military spouses become so important for you?

Taylor Kiland: [00:08:38] Well, I come from a Navy family. I’m third generation Navy. I served as a naval officer from [00:08:45] for five years. But as a child I lived on the small island community of Coronado, California. Um, part of San Diego County. And it is a tight knit military community. Even [00:09:00] to this day. And I was living there in 1973 when our POWs were released from Vietnam. I was six, and I have memories of the yellow ribbons and the homemade banners on the front [00:09:15] porches. I grew up with some of the POW and MI families that those memories left an indelible mark on me. And then in 2000, I was a volunteer for the McCain [00:09:30] for president campaign. And you may remember that many of his fellow POWs campaigned for him, and I was tasked with taking some of them to media interviews, And I knew that they were some [00:09:45] of the longest held POW in our nation’s history. But what I didn’t know was how successful they were in captivity and also post captivity. But what struck me and kind of disappointed me about some of these interviews, was [00:10:00] that the reporters only seemed to be interested in their time in captivity. They would ask questions like, what were you fed? Were you tortured? Did your wife leave you? They [00:10:15] never seemed to be interested in what happened to those men when those prison doors opened, when they got that second chance at freedom. And so that embarked me on a journey of finding out. And I wrote two books about them. And [00:10:30] then about eight years ago, one of them contacted me. His name is captain Dick Stratton. He is a quite famous P.O.W. from the Vietnam War. He’s close to 90 now. And he contacted me and he said, [00:10:45] you know, there’s been so much written and documented about our epic battle in Vietnam, but much less has been written about the work and the fight that our wives [00:11:00] waged on the home front. And I said, you know, you’re right. Where did you.

CROAN: [00:11:06] Start? What was the first thing that you needed to do to get the project moving along?

Taylor Kiland: [00:11:12] We wanted to show a cross-section of [00:11:15] experiences, reactions and activism. Quite honestly, some of the women became very active and some of the women did not. So Judy and I spent a full 2 to 3 years tracking down various, [00:11:30] um, POW and Mia wives to ensure that we had a really interesting mix of women with different experiences. Some are P.O.W. wives whose husbands came home. Some are Mia [00:11:45] wives whose husband’s remains were never found. Some are Mia wives whose husband’s remains were recovered ten years later, 20 years later. One [00:12:00] character is a fiance, and you know fiance is in the military, have no status. So unless you’re actually married, you’re not given any information. You’re not given your husband’s [00:12:15] salary. I mean, your fiancee’s salary. I mean, you have no status. So we wanted to see what her experience was like. We had some women who remarried, some who didn’t. We had one woman who never, ever believed that her husband was dead [00:12:30] and fed into the conspiracy theories that we left men behind in Vietnam and Laos, and she committed suicide in 1990. We include Carroll McCain, John McCain’s first wife, [00:12:45] who had a very unique experience during the war. Not only was her husband a POW and she had three young children, but she was in a devastating car accident in 1969, almost lost [00:13:00] her life, and then almost lost her leg and was severely, severely disabled. So once.

CROAN: [00:13:07] You sort of narrowed down the lenses through which you wanted to explore this topic, were there any surprises early.

Taylor Kiland: [00:13:13] On? I [00:13:15] think what surprised me was the number of restrictions that were placed on these women. Remember, this was the early 1960s when the social mores and values of the 1950s were still pretty [00:13:30] much intact. It wasn’t until the late 60s that you started seeing the roles of women really changing. So 1964 65, when we started really engaging in Vietnam and had troops there and had missing men and POWs. [00:13:45] Women were still relegated to just a few professions nurses, secretaries, teachers, flight attendants or stewardesses as they were called. [00:14:00] And once they got married and had children, a lot of those jobs were not available to them. Women could not get a mortgage or a car without their husband’s [00:14:15] permission, without his signature or their father’s. The birth control was available, but many doctors would not prescribe it to married women without their husbands permission, and some doctors wouldn’t prescribe it to [00:14:30] single women at all. For military women. For military wives. I’m sorry. The restrictions were even more stringent. These women had to abide by the protocols and [00:14:45] the rules that their husbands lived under. I remember my mother, who was a Navy wife, reminding me that, you know, the Navy has always said if they didn’t put [00:15:00] it in your seabag, they didn’t want you to have it.

Taylor Kiland: [00:15:04] And what she was saying is that the military doesn’t issue you a wife or children. They issue you uniforms and they issue you weapons, but [00:15:15] they don’t issue you a family. So her point was that the military family was not a priority for the military until the Vietnam War, but I had really forgotten a lot of that. So if you think [00:15:30] about that as the background for when we start losing men in Vietnam. And of course, my book focuses on not the ones who are being lost on the front lines, but the ones who are missing and those who are captured and held as POWs in North [00:15:45] Vietnam. The military told these women, you must remain quiet. You must not talk to anyone about the plight of your husband. You should not talk to the media. You should not tell your neighbors. You [00:16:00] should not tell anyone. And as one of them said to me. How do you live like that? How do you live like that? Yeah.

CROAN: [00:16:06] I’ve talked to a lot of people who had missing or P.O.W. fathers, and they all say the same thing. Taylor and I always just thought [00:16:15] that that was some sort of self-imposed silence. It sounds like it wasn’t self-imposed.

Taylor Kiland: [00:16:21] No, it was policy. It was policy. Now, in the defense of the State Department, they were attempting to negotiate [00:16:30] through back channel. And we know about the Paris Peace Accords, but the North Vietnamese were winning the battle of propaganda. I mean, they were using the antiwar activists who were their spokespeople saying, we’ve [00:16:45] gone to visit these men in captivity. They’re being treated well. We have no reason, no reason to disbelieve what the North Vietnamese are saying to us. Well, the women knew they were being told by intelligence officials [00:17:00] in the Pentagon, we have reason to believe that your men are being mistreated, that they are being tortured, that they are being put in solitary confinement. There were several wives. And one of them in our book, Sybil Stockdale, um, actually [00:17:15] exchanged coded letters with her husband in captivity, where he revealed that there was widespread torture, there was widespread mistreatment, and there was solitary confinement for months on end. So [00:17:30] the wives started questioning, why won’t the government speak out about the abuses? Because it’s in violations of the Geneva Conventions, and Vietnam was a signatory to the Geneva Conventions. She got so frustrated [00:17:45] that she decided to go public herself. And she gave the first wife interview in October of 1968 to the San Diego Union. At this point, her husband had been in captivity [00:18:00] for three years. She gave a lengthy interview to the San Diego Union. At the time, it was owned by Copley News Service, a syndicated news service. So I believe that article appeared not just in San Diego, but in newspapers [00:18:15] around the country.

CROAN: [00:18:16] For listeners who might not be familiar with the name Stockdale, uh, do you want to talk a little bit about him?

Taylor Kiland: [00:18:22] Sure. So Vice Admiral James Stockdale was a Navy commander at the time. In 64, he [00:18:30] was a carrier air group commander, and so he was the most one of the most senior POWs in captivity. And he earned the Medal of Honor while in captivity for, um, actually, his resistance efforts [00:18:45] and his ability to get the torture to stop while in captivity. Um, by virtue of his rank, his wife was also sort of the most senior wife that opened the floodgates for the women to get active. That was in the fall of 68. [00:19:00] Mhm. The government got behind the effort in May of 69. So when Nixon became president in January of 69, on the eve of his inauguration, [00:19:15] Sybil Stockdale and her tribe of ladies POW and Mia wives deluged the white House with thousands of telegrams. She called it a telegram in kind of a little take on sit ins that were really [00:19:30] popular at the time. Yeah. And the Nixon administration took notice. They really took notice. They I think they I found evidence in the Nixon library that they were they responded to each and every telegram and they said, wow, how many are there [00:19:45] of these ladies? And Nixon’s appointee for the role of secretary of defense was a man named Melvin Laird. Melvin Laird was a congressman from Wisconsin who [00:20:00] became secretary of defense in January of 69. When he was in Congress, he had met with some of the wives who by this point were walking the halls of Congress, writing the media.

Taylor Kiland: [00:20:11] I mean, they were doing anything they could, but they weren’t getting a whole lot of traction [00:20:15] with leadership. Melvin Laird took note, and he said, I think these women and the the plight of our missing and captive men in the Vietnam War have become what he called the unmentionables. And he said, I think we need to put [00:20:30] North Vietnam on report. I think they need to be tried in the court of public opinion. And so he tasked his staff with collecting all of the intelligence they could about the treatment of the men. [00:20:45] And there was quite a lot that had just been sitting in file cabinets for years, because the the government’s position up until 69 was we’re not going to talk about this publicly. And so he had [00:21:00] a press conference in May. He said, I’m going to I’m going to go public. State Department was not happy with him. The white House was not happy with him. Kissinger said, I really don’t want you to do this. I think it’s going to affect our negotiations in Paris. Melvin [00:21:15] Laird said, by God, we’re going to go public. And he held a press conference and he laid out all of the facts, all of the intelligence pictures that he and his staff had collected, or those three letter agencies had collected on the black market [00:21:30] that demonstrated how mistreated these men were. And that was the start of what became called the go Public campaign and the Nixon administration, with Melvin Laird as the point man, basically [00:21:45] enlisted the women as their best advocates and best surrogates for this campaign.

Taylor Kiland: [00:21:53] You know, Nixon gave his silent majority speech in November of 69. I [00:22:00] think he had these women in mind as his most important silent majority. And he was going to make sure that they were silent no more. And so this go public campaign was massive. It involved Ross Perot, it involved [00:22:15] national media tours. These women were on television, all the national television shows in New York. Several of them went to Paris and had a meeting with the North Vietnamese. Several of the women went around the world and met with world leaders, [00:22:30] including the Pope. Several of them went up to New York and met with the United Nations. They met with the Teamsters unions. They went everywhere. But the best thing that they did that got traction with the national, with [00:22:45] the national public, were two things that they did. They worked with a campus organization to create these bracelets. I have one on now, which I know we’re a podcast, so people can’t see it, [00:23:00] but a group of campus students created this wildly popular campaign of selling bracelets, little aluminum and copper cuffs that sold for a couple dollars a piece, and [00:23:15] each one of them had the name of a captive or missing man. More than 5 million of them were sold. And for the first time, the issue of the missing and captive men became [00:23:30] personal.

Taylor Kiland: [00:23:31] People who bought women and men. But women and men wore these bracelets. But I find more women wore them than men. All of a sudden they kind of adopted this man as their own. And you still [00:23:45] hear stories today of people who return the bracelet. They find out that their POW, you know, came home and led a happy and successful life. And a woman will find this in her jewelry box and say, gosh, I want to return it to him. So you still [00:24:00] hear about these reunions today? So that was the first thing they did that really galvanized the public. I mean, Frank Sinatra wore one of these bracelets. Sonny and Cher. Ronald Reagan wore one of these bracelets. It was a wildly popular campaign. The second [00:24:15] the second campaign they did that was very popular and enduring. Today is the POW mia flag. Mhm. They wanted a symbol, a logo for their organization. They actually created a national organization called the National League of Families [00:24:30] which still exists today. Mhm. And so they created this flag. Sadly they didn’t trademark it. So they never made any money on it. And of course today that flag which flies [00:24:45] over every federal building in the country and every post office, you can’t drive five miles in this country without seeing one of those flags. That is a symbol of the leave no man behind policy. That is really a priority for [00:25:00] our country today, but it is a priority because the women made it so.

CROAN: [00:25:06] You’ve mentioned, you know, Frank Sinatra and the Pope. I’m curious about the path from, I mean, once [00:25:15] you expose the issue to light and oxygen and it becomes part of the national consciousness, there’s still a ways to go before it becomes policy, I would think.

Taylor Kiland: [00:25:26] Absolutely. And, you know, a full third of the book talks [00:25:30] about the post-war efforts that these families, especially the Mia families, um, under undertook to keep the fate of the missing men in the forefront of [00:25:45] the public eye. And they will tell you, the women who are still involved in this organization, that when Reagan came into office in 1980, he made it a national priority. And I believe that is because he became [00:26:00] engaged in the issue during the war. I told you he wore a bracelet. He wore Steve Hansen’s bracelet. And his wife is is in our book. Um, and he became a tireless advocate for the POWs during the war and afterwards. And so [00:26:15] the families, when they lobbied him, when he came into office, he made the fate of the missing an absolute priority.

CROAN: [00:26:23] What do military wives today take for granted that that they actually have this [00:26:30] group of women to thank?

Taylor Kiland: [00:26:32] Right. So it’s interesting because, you know, I mentioned that my mom said if the Navy didn’t issue it to you in your seabag that, you know, you weren’t supposed to have it. Um, she joked about it, but [00:26:45] not really. After the war, when we experienced a drawdown after the Vietnam War. And we had, you know, inflation [00:27:00] was at an all time high. You remember gas prices in the 70s? Um, military had a hard time retaining, uh, sailors and soldiers and airmen, and one of the retention issues that they identified was [00:27:15] the unhappiness of military families, that they weren’t given a priority, that there was no good child care, that there wasn’t good support network for the families when the service member deployed. So they decided [00:27:30] to formalize military family policy and make it a priority. And the woman that they recruited to lead that policy was Alice Stratton. Alice Stratton’s husband was captain Dick Stratton, one of the most [00:27:45] famous POWs in Vietnam. Alice was a career social worker who, by her own account, was shy and retiring. Social workers are, you know, used to listening, not talking. And she [00:28:00] was also very active in the campaign during the war. She continued to study, uh, military families after she got a masters. I believe in military family policy, which I didn’t know existed in the 70s, but it did.

Taylor Kiland: [00:28:14] She got a master’s [00:28:15] in that, and she started getting noticed by the senior leadership in the military because of her knowledge of the needs of military families and of course, because of her own experience. [00:28:30] And she was appointed in 1985 to be the first deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for family matters, family policy, essentially. So she was the secretary of the Navy’s eyes and ears out in the fleet, helping [00:28:45] him understand what families need. She was instrumental in establishing what’s called the the Navy’s Family Service Centers. There’s a family service center named after her. She was instrumental in recognizing [00:29:00] the plight of single parents in the military. They had really been ignored until then. She was really, really lauded for her work in the in the area of family policies. And I, [00:29:15] I would I would say in my opinion that the work that women like Alice Stratton started in the Vietnam War and of course, continued until the mid 80s, really alerted [00:29:30] and educated the military that if the service member’s family is happy, the service member is going to be happy, and that the military family serves as much as the military service [00:29:45] member does.

CROAN: [00:29:46] Yeah. Yeah. What other things would you like our listeners to know about your book?

Taylor Kiland: [00:29:55] Anyone who has an interest in I. This [00:30:00] sounds so cliche. Women’s empowerment stories would would enjoy this, but we’re also finding that men are enjoying it because it it shows them, you know, the epic home front battle that was going on while they were fighting in Vietnam? [00:30:15]

CROAN: [00:30:16] Yeah. Most of the time when you when we have conversations with people about what was going on at home, it focuses on protests.

Taylor Kiland: [00:30:24] Right. Right. And think about think about the noise that these women [00:30:30] had to rise above at home. They had the antiwar protests. They had Watergate, they had civil rights movements. They had cultural changes like.

CROAN: [00:30:42] Just women’s liberation and.

Taylor Kiland: [00:30:44] Liberation. [00:30:45] Yeah. I mean, all of this was happening at home. And these women with very little tools in their toolbox except the ability to make phone calls on their landline. Right. They had one phone in the house. Mhm. Which was [00:31:00] attached to the wall.

CROAN: [00:31:01] In the kitchen.

Taylor Kiland: [00:31:02] In the kitchen. And if you’re lucky, it had a really long cord so that you could cook at the same time, pull it around the kitchen while you’re cooking and you put it on your on your on your shoulder. Right. That was that was one [00:31:15] tool. The other tool they had was stationery and a pen to send letters they didn’t have, you know, I mean, none of the tools that we have today when we are interested [00:31:30] in mounting any sort of an advocacy or marketing or promotional campaign and think about all of the din that they had, the cacophony of things that were going on that they had to rise above and actually, you know, get a megaphone and [00:31:45] be louder. And they were successful at that. Yeah. They was.

CROAN: [00:31:49] I’m so glad you brought that up. We’re not talking about women who just drove awareness or public perception. We’re talking about women who changed military policy.

Taylor Kiland: [00:31:59] Changed [00:32:00] military Policy and made the fate of literally 591 men an absolute national priority. I mean, this is the fate of 591 men a tiny, tiny, tiny [00:32:15] fraction of the casualties of the 58,000 casualties in the, what, 2.1 million who served in Vietnam where they celebrated? No. This tiny, tiny fraction of men were celebrated because the women made them that important.

CROAN: [00:32:31] The [00:32:30] book is unwavering. The wives who fought to ensure no man is left behind. And while it’s a work of nonfiction, it reads like a novel, just really great, gripping storytelling. You can find it everywhere. Books are sold and [00:32:45] at unwavering book.com. We’ll be back in two weeks with more stories of service, sacrifice, and healing. See you then.

MUSIC: [00:32:58] Hey, wake [00:33:00] up in the morning and I’m ready to go. Don’t contemplate, don’t hesitate. Just feel it and go. I know that if you do it, you can be the best. Know that if you do it, you can be the best. Don’t let anybody tell you you ain’t got what it takes. Cause the truth [00:33:15] is, everybody here on earth makes mistakes. And I know that if you do it, you can be the best. Know that if you do it, you can beat the rest. I believe in [00:33:30] me. I believe in me. I believe in me. I believe in me. I believe in me. I believe in [00:33:45] me. I believe in me. I believe in me.

Full Interview with Taylor Kiland