Word: guttersen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Laird Guttersen, 52, an ebullient, bigboned retired Air Force colonel, remembers the day he "broke" as if it were yesterday. He had already watched his hands turn black "like German sausage" from tourniquet-tight binding; then ropes around his elbows were tightened until his shoulder blades slowly jammed into his spine. "At that moment," he remembers, "I would have thrown my kids into a fire to make it stop." Guttersen was on his knees and felt "psychically dirty, like I'd been swimming in a cesspool" and feared he might give up secrets about clandestine intelligence operations. He decided...
Inevitably such experiences must come home. Laird Guttersen's blood pressure was so low after three months of torture, complicated by pneumonia, that parts of him lost all feeling when he remained still more than ten minutes. At night, instead of sleeping he used to lie in a feverish trance, shifting to stay alive, timing himself by the half-hour chimes of a distant clock. "When Laird came home we couldn't sleep in the same bed at first," remembers his wife Virginia, a frail, dark-blue-eyed wife who waited. "He shifted a quarter turn every five...
...majority of the P.O.W.s, perhaps as high as 70%, in fact, did become divorce statistics. Virginia Guttersen remembers one wife who rushed out on the tarmac to embrace her husband and found she didn't recognize him at all. A fortyish woman, the new wife of a P.O.W., confides: "There are definitely two factions here, the old and the new. You can tell the new wives: young and pretty and happy and in love...
...P.O.W.s report that dealing with civilians is still a touchy business. They either gush and coo or start asking questions the P.O.W.s don't want to answer. Or are abysmally, often hilariously ignorant. Guttersen, who has now retired and is taking courses at the University of Arizona, found his young fellow students interested. "We heard you were a P.O.W.," a girl once said to him. Gutter-sen said yes. "Where?" asked the girl. "In Hanoi," said Guttersen. "Is that in Korea?" the girl asked...
...omelet-shaped pool, the P.O.W.s seem compelled to approve of the life they found at home. Nearly all of them are confused, embarrassed or annoyed by their strange hero status. Says John McCain: "It doesn't take a helluva lot of talent to get shot down." Virginia Guttersen ex plains: "To a military man, the P.O.W. is a loser, the guy who didn't complete his mission. The Government made them heroes. It was all they...