Ernie Brace did not come to Vietnam as a young innocent or even as a member of the armed forces. He was there working for USAID, a clandestine outfit with CIA connections.  USAID’s primary mission was to help Lao and Thai Special Forces enlist the support of the local mountain tribes in fighting the Communists. Ernie would fly in weapons, food and occasionally Lao and Thai government officials who were trying to establish authority in the remote hill country of Laos.

Ernie had been one of the most decorated pilots of the Korean War and was in line to make Major at age twenty-nine (a remarkable accomplishment) when, in 1961, his charmed life came to what he calls “an abrupt and sensational end.”  The story made the front pages of all the major U.S. newspapers: the Marine war hero accused of bailing out of a properly functioning aircraft in order to fake his own death and desert his wife and family. Ernie was later acquitted in federal court, but the Marine Corps, dissatisfied with the verdict, court-martialed him.

So, when Ernie Brace was captured by the Viet Cong on a remote airstrip in Laos in 1965, the U.S. government denied any knowledge of his existence and refused to help negotiate his freedom. For the first three-and-a-half years of his imprisonment, he lived in a three-by-four foot bamboo cage, chained to the ground by a steel collar fastened around his neck. His only moments of freedom came from his three escape attempts, the last of which earned him a week buried up to his neck in a pit.

In his book, A Code to Keep, Ernie briefly describes a typical night spent in captivity.

"As soon as I know the guard has settled down in his thatch-covered shelter about fifteen feet from the side of my cage, I scoot back up to take the tension off my neck. I’ve given up untying my hands at night. There’s no feeling below my wrists anyway. My clothes stink of urine and the results of diarrhea when I can’t get my trousers down to shit through the slats of my bamboo bed. I’m cold, wet, and miserable. At times I  want to die, and at other times I know I’ll get out of this alive. Right now all I want    to do is sleep…"

After more than five years of solitary confinement in the jungles of Laos, he was transferred to the same prison in Hanoi, North Vietnam, that housed future Arizona senator and Republican presidential candidate John McCain.  The two communicated by tapping out a type of Morse code on the walls of their cells.  They never met face-to-face during their shared captivity, but they became close friends.  McCain later called Ernie a “true American hero” and credits him with being the greatest positive influence in his life.

Seven years, ten months, and seven days after his capture in Laos, Ernie Brace was released (thanks, according to him, in large part to the efforts of Richard Nixon), the longest-held civilian prisoner of the Vietnam War.  In the spring of 1973, he returned to a world so changed that it took him more than a year to adjust.  The recovery, he says, has taken a lifetime.

When I first came to Hellgate Press, I never imagined that my work would directly challenge my feelings about war in general, or Vietnam in particular. Neither did I think that I would have the opportunity to learn valuable lessons from men who had lived through something I so actively tried to avoid.

Ernie Brace’s story taught me that even in the most impossible, most terrifying circumstances, there can be hope.   It also offered a lesson about faith, not necessarily faith in God or creed, but of faith in the ability to persevere and to trust in the decisions one has made.  I am in awe of his capacity to understand and forgive those who tortured and abandoned him. He once told me he found it easy to forgive his captors once he was able to forgive himself.

Sam Brantley’s story is also a lesson about faith but in a different way. He writes of how war eats away at a man’s inner sense of self; how it twists and distorts right and wrong, ultimately stealing away faith in oneself. Yet, his survival suggests that despite the overwhelming horror of war, sometimes there is just enough light and goodness to allow for recovery.

I still believe I did the right thing in protesting the Vietnam War, which was, I remain convinced, a horrific mistake from the outset.  I believed then and now that it was my patriotic duty to try to end the war and bring the troops home through any political means available.   But, while my concern for getting everyone back safely was genuine and certainly one of the primary motivations behind my actions, I must admit that fear of having to go to war myself was a close second. I don’t think I could have survived the way Ernie and Sam did, or the way any of the authors I have worked with did. I have never shown that level of courage in my life.  But then, I’ve never been in a situation that called for it.  These men know something about themselves that I never will.

Today there is a manuscript on my desk from a young Marine lance corporal currently serving in Iraq. Like several others I have received in the last few months, it focuses primarily on the adrenaline rush of the fighting itself and on the rightness of the military action. I suspect it will be years, perhaps even decades, before we start to see stories about this current war that are as deep and moving as these Vietnam memoirs I have been privileged to publish.  I hope I’m still doing this work when those manuscripts appear. I know there are more lessons to be learned.

HARLEY PATRICK is a senior editor at Hellgate Press.  He is a 2000 graduate of the University of Oregon’s literary nonfiction program.