RUTHFULLY YOURS

HAL KUSHNER: “I don’t think I’m any more patriotic than I was before my experience. I would gladly die for my country, and I would have then.” (N-J | Sean McNeil)

Hal Kushner always considered himself a patriotic American.

Grew up that way. Raised in Danville, Va., said the Pledge of Allegiance before school every morning, was fairly well versed in our nation’s history, knew what that flag represented.

“It was a different era; we were all very patriotic,” he says now.

What that flag meant, however, especially to him, didn’t fully hit home until he walked out of a North Vietnam shed one spring day in 1973. Someone called his name, so he went outside, and of all the images he recalls from that moment, one burned deep enough to claim permanent residence in his head and heart. It was a transport plane, a sweet chariot coming for to carry him home, away from the ungodly physical and mental anguish he had survived as a prisoner of war for more than five years. And on that plane’s far end was an iconic rectangle — no longer a mere symbol.

“I saw this big C-141, this beautiful white bird, with the American flag emblazoned on the tail. I just broke into tears; it was the most beautiful sight,” says Kushner, a longtime area ophthalmologist who, all these years later, flies his own flag in his Daytona Beach Shores backyard, on the banks of the Halifax.

“I learned a lot. I learned about the human spirit. I learned about confidence in oneself. I learned about loyalty to your country and to your friends and comrades. No task would ever be too hard again.”

Col. Hal Kushner, U.S. Army (Ret.), 1st Squadron, 9th U.S. Cavalry reunion, 1999

The shed was at an airport in Hanoi. Kushner and other Americans had just been bused there from a French-built facility in North Vietnam’s capital — the French colonialists had called it Maison Centrale; after their departure the locals renamed it Hoa Lo. Modern history books know it euphemistically as the Hanoi Hilton, a “camp” in name only. It was the miserable residence for Kushner and fellow American POWs until a peace treaty brought an end to the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War.

On March 16, 1973, the POWs were shuttled to the Hanoi airfield, where they were gathered in the shed to await the calling of their names. One by one, they left the shed, were officially welcomed to freedom by an American officer, then boarded a plane for the first leg of their merciful trip home. When Kushner heard his name called — Floyd Harold Kushner — and left the small building for an all new type of daylight, he spotted that flag on the plane’s wing, and then he spotted a welcoming American officer whose name he never recalled.

“The first thing I noticed was his breadth,” says Kushner, who had spent the past 5 1/2 years surrounded by the starved and starving, the broken and battered and, in the end, those lucky enough to be called survivors.

The thick man shook Kushner’s hand and pulled him into his clutch: “We’re glad to see you, doctor. Welcome home.”

“It was a wonderful moment,” says Kushner, who had learned, in the worst ways imaginable, a new appreciation, a new love and, literally, a new hunger and thirst for freedom. “One of my (POW) friends, Paul Galanti, a naval aviator from Richmond, said freedom to him is when you wake up and see that your bedroom door has a door knob,” says Kushner.

You would assume that a man with Kushner’s background might also have a specific everyday definition for freedom. But he’s a “big picture” guy; he took his horrible plight and mined from it little slivers of goodness. He applies it all to his view of personal freedom and, in the larger picture, independence.

First, the personal: “It’s a state of mind, and it helps define it to have lost it,” he says of freedom.

“To wake in the morning, breathing free, knowing that we can think whatever we want, speak whatever we want, travel outside the fence without bowing or asking permission.” Then the big picture: “My countrymen have no idea what it means to live in an authoritarian society where the government controls the media, the means of production and distribution, and requires each individual to subvert his or her goals to the interests of the state. War is terrible. But there are some things worse than war or the threat of war: constant fear, subjugation, slavery, loss of freedom.”

“While in basic training … they told us that as doctors, we didn’t have to worry about being captured. Doctors and nurses, they said, were not prisoners of war, they were ‘detained personnel’ under the Geneva Convention. If they treated us as prisoners, we should show our Geneva Convention cards and leave. It was supposed to be a joke, and it was pretty funny at the time.”

Kushner, 1999 reunion

Hal Kushner had graduated from the University of North Carolina, then from the Medical College of Virginia, and had designs on a career as an ear, nose and throat physician. But first, there was his Army commitment. He’d entered the Army before his senior year of medical school, which, among other things, allowed him to draw an Army salary during his senior year.

After graduation, he interned at Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu — on June 30, 1940, he was born at that very hospital, the son of Jean Kushner and her Army Air Corps husband, Robert. Hal was deployed to Vietnam in August 1967, as a flight surgeon for the 1st Squadron, 9th U.S. Cavalry, 1st Air Cavalry Division. If you’re a movie buff, you’ll recall the 1st/9th from “Apocalypse Now.” To hear Kushner tell it, his squadron commander, Col. Bob Nevins, may have been part of the inspiration behind the “Col. Kilgore” character made famous by Robert Duval.

“Col. Nevins never said, ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning,'” says Kushner. “But he did fly his helicopter with a Stetson hat on, and he did fly it while drinking coffee with a 1st Cav mug — in combat.”

“The next thing I knew, I was recovering from unconsciousness in a burning helicopter which seemed to be upside down. I tried to unbuckle my seat belt and couldn’t use my left arm. I finally managed to get unbuckled and immediately dropped and almost broke my neck.” Kushner, 1999 reunion

Kushner’s work with the 1st Cavalry came to a crashing halt after just three-plus months, on Nov. 30, 1967. Kushner never learned the details of the helicopter crash, though he thinks it was due to horrible weather his four-man crew encountered after leaving the South Vietnamese city of Chu Lai, where, ironically, Kushner had spoken to troops about the dangers of night flying. The Viet Cong later insisted the helicopter was shot down.

Kushner was the only one of the four men to survive the crash. One died instantly, another was killed while hiking for potential help, the third died three days after the crash while huddled with Kushner under makeshift shelter.

With storm clouds so low and thick and persistent, Kushner knew he’d never be spotted by friendly aircraft, so he hobbled away in hope of a miracle. The crash had left him with his own physical misery: a broken left wrist and collarbone, burns on his hands and rear, seven lost upper teeth, and a bullet through the left shoulder/neck area that got him when some M60 rounds were hit by the flames lapping at the downed chopper.

An amazing and dramatic turn of events began when Kushner hobbled toward a Vietnamese man working a rice paddy. The man took in the injured Army doctor, sat him down and gave him a can of something Kushner remembers as the best pudding imaginable.

“On a scale of 1 to 10, it was a 10,” recalls Kushner, who speaks of his past ordeal in an undramatic, conversational tone, the way one might recall an old middle-school field trip. “It was wonderful. I hadn’t eaten in four days. I’d been drinking rain water — wringing out my fatigue jacket for rain water. So it was really good; it was sweet.”

As Kushner ate, the farmer disappeared, and within minutes returned with more than a dozen Viet Cong. The former med-school student, turned intern, turned flight surgeon, was now a prisoner of war. He was unable to raise both hands in surrender because he’d strapped his injured left arm to his torso, and a shaky VC soldier unloaded a shot through his left shoulder, very close to where the M60 round had gone through him at the crash site.

“He was as scared as I was, and as nervous as I was,” Kushner says of the gunman. “He was young, and he just shot me. He wasn’t very experienced.

“I remember that very clearly; it was vivid. He shot me right above where the machine-gun bullets hit me. Right above it. I had a hole in my shoulder this big (he makes a circle with his thumb and forefinger the size of a silver dollar). It took eight months to heal, but it healed. I couldn’t believe it healed.”

Part of the healing process, unfortunately, came courtesy of an appointed Vietnamese woman with a fire-heated rifle-cleaning rod. She gave Kushner a bamboo stick to clinch between his jaws.

“It killed the maggots,” Kushner says. “Heated it up in a fire and went right through the hole. It hurt like a son-of-a-bitch. It really hurt.”

That horrendous stretch of misery was just a prelude to a 5 1/2-year stint as a POW, first in bamboo-lined cages in the muddy jungles of South Vietnam, later in the infamous Hanoi Hilton in North Vietnam, which, as bad as it was, was actually an improvement over the cages in the jungle.

The shock of those first days after the helicopter crash gave way to monotonous dread — days, weeks, months and years of simply trying to survive while so many around Kushner withered away and died, usually in the arms of the flight surgeon who had been desperately trying to keep them alive.

“An English-speaking Vietnamese officer came with a portable tape recorder and asked me to make a statement against the war. I told him I would rather die than speak against my country. He said words which were unforgettable, and if I ever write a book, will be the title. He said, ‘You will find that dying is very easy. Living … living is the difficult thing.’ We slept on one large pallet of bamboo. So the sick vomited and defecated and urinated on the bed and his neighbor. For the first two years, we had no shoes, clothes, mosquito nets or blankets. We nursed each other and helped each other, but we also fought and bickered. The best and the worst come out.”

Kushner, 1999 reunion

After three years in the jungle prison camps, 12 of 27 original American prisoners remained. Five had been released, 10 had died. Nine of those, according to Kushner, “died in my arms after a lingering, terrible illness.”

Dying prisoners were often brought to Kushner’s attention, but with staggering odds set against the doctor and his pitiful medical means (among his few tools was a rusty blade he used to lance boils), he could do little more than comfort the doomed.

It was survival in its rawest form.

“The worst thing I ever ate … I found a dead bird on the trail that had its breast eaten out by an animal. I ate that,” says Kushner, whose 5-foot-8 frame carried 165 pounds when he arrived in Vietnam, then dropped to 88 pounds at its most frail.

In February 1971, there was good news for the 12 survivors: They were leaving the jungle for a more conventional prison in North Vietnam. The bad news: They’d get there, mostly, on foot.

Kushner was held in an old French prison in Hanoi, known as “the Plantation,” until the Christmas bombing of 1972 destroyed the city. For the final few months of his incarceration, he was moved to “the Hilton,” where conditions remained terrible, but yes, better than the makeshift jungle camps of the South. It was there that word began dribbling out regarding a peace treaty, and there that Kushner and others (including the Hilton’s most famous occupant, John McCain, son of a high-profile American admiral) were finally turned over to American control.

“Most of us could understand enough Vietnamese to understand the radio,” says Kushner. “The guards had portable radios, and there was a lot of buzz about it. Then one of the guards told us that the peace treaty had been initialed.”

In those last couple of months before release, Kushner and fellow prisoners were “fattened up” a bit — a PR move by the captors. A little more food went a long way: Kushner went from 88 pounds at his arrival in Hanoi (“They weighed all of us when we got there,” he says) to 127 pounds when he was handed over to the Americans.

The prisoners were released in groups, on different days. On March 16, 1973, it was Kushner’s turn. First to a Hanoi air field. Then on a C-141 and off to the Philippines, where they’d receive medical treatment before the final journey home. When the former prisoners were gathered at a hospital in the Philippines, Kushner heard someone yelling his name from a crowd of onlookers — it was coming from an Air Force captain named Michael Cude, a former classmate at the University of North Carolina.

“He and his wife had snuck into the hospital,” says Kushner.

In a group photo of all the former prisoners, Kushner is wearing a splashy smoking jacket, a jacket he’d given Cude six years earlier. Cude had “re-gifted” the jacket to Kushner, and not only that, but later in the hospital cafeteria, where he visited with Kushner, Cude smuggled in something that has come to symbolize American life at its most carefree: A pitcher of margaritas.

“We sat there and drank it,” says Kushner. “He also gave me his class ring from Chapel Hill. I didn’t have mine. He gave me his. I told him I’d keep it for 10 years and send it back to him. I wore it for 10 years and sent it back.”

The next stop was Hawaii, where Kushner would receive emergency sinus and dental care. But first, after landing, there was a commitment to fulfill. Even at 3 a.m.

“I had sworn that the moment we landed on American soil, I was gonna sing ‘America the Beautiful’,” recalls Kushner. “So when we landed, I said I wanted to sing.”

In the scrapbook pieced together by Kushner’s daughter, Toni Jean, there’s an old newspaper photo of the group sing-along. Kushner is dead-center, head thrown back dramatically, bellowing in song. It was the type of group patriotism that had been denied them for a very long time.

“One kid was a Catholic,” Kushner recalls of his POW time. “The Marines issued a ‘missal,’ a prayer book. He had one. Inside, it had a picture of an American flag and the words to the ‘Star Spangled Banner.’ The Vietnamese tore those two pages out.”

During captivity, when the Fourth of July came, everyone knew because the prisoners made sure to keep track of days and dates. They also knew to keep relatively quiet about it.

“In the jungle, we acknowledged that it was the Fourth of July, and we quietly wished everybody a happy Fourth of July,” says Kushner. “And we sang patriotic songs, quietly. In North Vietnam (at the Plantation and Hilton) we were more aware of it, but there was absolutely no celebration.

“We sang songs and wished everybody a happy Fourth. We did that all the time. We remembered our country; that was really a big deal. We talked about our country a lot.”

“I have had a busy medical practice down in Florida and have been remarkably successful. I am active in my community in a number of ways and despite being drenched with Agent Orange a number of times, and having some organs removed, have enjoyed great health. So I was lucky, very lucky, and I’m so thankful for that. I feel so fortunate to have survived and flourished when so many braver, stronger and better-trained men did not.”

Kushner, 1999 reunion

Those five-plus years, from the summer of ’67 to the winter of early ’73, are remembered vividly by Kushner. And without bitterness. While one could be excused for harboring lingering effects, Kushner shows no hints of residual trauma or anguish. He remains a practicing ophthalmologist, plays tennis two or three days a week, and lives an active social life.

“I think that most of the people who have PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) … I think they have premorbid personalities,” he says. “It’s not only the trauma that does it, it’s the way they were before. It’s very difficult to get through life without some bumps in the road, without some tragedy, without some loss. I had one. I’ve never been bitter. I’ve just been fortunate that I got back. I feel very lucky, very fortunate.

“I’ve never had a flashback, never had a nightmare. I think about some things sometimes, about some of the men who died in my arms. I think about some of the young people who lost their lives. It’s emotional for me to think about it. I think that’s normal. But I also think about my dad. I get emotional about him, too. And my mom.”

Though it wasn’t the preferred manner in which to gather an education, Kushner learned a lot during captivity. In terms of how nations wage war, he became aware of propaganda as an effective tool. Prisoners were routinely forced to sign documents and admit to atrocities, and tortured if they refused. The physical pain, however, was only part of it, Kushner says.

“The American people, when I went in, were very much behind the war,” he says. “After I’d been in Hanoi about a year, year and a half, they took us out and hung a bed sheet and showed us a movie.”

The movie contained a lot of clips of student protests back home, with the long hair on men and mini-skirts on women telling of a huge cultural change in America. But eventually the movie cut to the well-publicized scene of a former soldier and future senator, John Kerry, testifying before a congressional committee.

“In his fatigue jacket, testifying, telling everyone that we were war criminals, that we cut ears off, that we did this and we did that,” Kushner says. “You know, that really hurt me. I never forgot that.”

Kushner loves to tell a story that exemplifies the America and Americans he learned about, in detail, during his jungle captivity. It happened during his captors’ celebration of the Vietnamese New Year (Tet). The Viet Cong had killed a water buffalo and had invited some of Vietnamese indigenous highlanders (the Montagnard) to share their feast.

“They would throw us the parts they didn’t want, like the lips and eyes,” says Kushner, who shared a bamboo-lined jungle pen with fellow Americans. Someone, in a rare burst of holiday generosity, had also tossed the Americans a bag of candy.

Among the Montagnard, there was an obvious misfit. “He was afflicted in some way; the Montagnard shunned him and the Vietnamese shunned him,” says Kushner.

“He wandered down to our camp. There were 13 of us at this time. They had given us about 30 pieces of candy, like peppermint. The American prisoners decided, ‘Let’s share our candy with this guy.’ We were starving; we were absolutely starving. You know, it’s very easy to give people something if you have a lot. We had nothing, but we counted this guy in and we divided the candy and gave him a share.”

Kindness, Kushner is quick to point out, wasn’t necessarily a one-way street. It may have been a lone favor during his captivity, and it may have come very early, but it’s burned into his memory. It happened shortly after his capture, as he was marched through rice paddies and jungles on his way to a bamboo-bordered hell.

“We stopped at this camp, and this one old Vietnamese man came up,” says Kushner. “He washed my fatigue jacket. I was hurting; I was really sick. My fatigue jacket was caked with blood and mud and everything. He took it and washed it in the river. Dried it over a fire and gave it back to me.

“It was an act of extraordinary kindness. Just extraordinary.”

The Fourth of July is a big and meaningful day for Hal Kushner, and not just for the obvious reasons. He insists it would be just as big a deal if he hadn’t been through his POW years. But those years changed him, as they would anyone. In the end, Kushner let that hell change him in productive ways.

“I know what the experience did for me: It made me acutely aware that I needed to know my nation’s history, and I have learned that,” he says. “I vowed to learn our history. I was fairly well versed in our history, but not in any great depth like I am now.

“I love my country. July the Fourth is a huge day; I wish it were emphasized more in schools. The ‘Western Canon,’ Shakespeare and Milton and so forth … we have subsumed to this globalization thing, which I think is wrong. I’m an American exceptionalist, very much an American exceptionalist. But I don’t think I’m any more patriotic than I was before my experience. I would gladly die for my country, and I would have then.”