Reporter Tracy Wood and the American POWs at the Hanoi Hilton

Tracy Wood at release of the last American POWs from the Hoa Lo Prison. She attended two releases. Walter Cronkite is second from left. 

Courtesy of Tracy Wood. 

Some of the prisoners were standing at the iron-barred windows of their cells, while others were outside. Tracy couldn't yet see their faces, but "something in their posture made me uneasy," she wrote. "They were only a few days away from freedom, and I'd expected them to be energized." They weren't Both the POWs and the reporters had been forbidden to communicate before the release was final. When Tracy and the other two reporters tried to whisper to the prisoners, they received no response. There had been rumors of torture, of forced statements, but the journalists didn't know the details. As she watched the prisoners, she was "nagged by something terribly wrong."

Suddenly, she understood what it was:

They had no identity.

Even from a reasonable distance, I can identify friends, including those in the military, by the way they walk and hold their shoulders, their general posture.

These men had no posture.

Or they had the same posture.

They were unidentifiable, taller and shorter, darker and lighter versions of the same man. Their faces had the same lack of expression; they walked the same, stood the same. 

No one stuck out in the crowd. 

Only long practice could have caused that total loss of individuality--practice and a deathly need to be obscure...

This was primitive survival.


From "Tracy Wood: 'They're the Story'" from Courageous Women of the Vietnam War.