One of the all-time-good-guy-bad-asses has left the building

Rear Admiral Jeremiah Denton Jr., one of the longest-held prisoners-of-war during the Vietnam War, died yesterday. He was 89. While America in my opinion is now less well off, this actually is a personal post.

Adm. Denton was Commander Denton when I met his family. It was January 1966, I was 5 years old and he was already a POW. At the time, nobody was wearing the POW bracelets that became popular later -- there just weren't that many POWs yet -- so I never had a bracelet with his name on it. I wore one later, when they came out in the late '60s, but I can't remember whose name was on it. I wish I had had a Denton bracelet.

I never met Adm. Denton. He was a POW when we moved to Virginia Beach, and he was still a POW when we moved away. He was still a POW when we moved back to Virginia Beach three years later, for that matter. We lived in a different neighborhood in 1973 when he was finally released, and shortly after that we moved away again. Military families are like that.

So I never met Adm. Denton. But I went to church with his family for two years, and I lived not far from them. Sometimes I played with some of his younger children. He had seven children, and at least two were old enough to have moved out by the time my family met the Dentons. Still, Michael Denton was my older sister's first boyfriend, to the extent an 8- or 9-year-old girl can have a boyfriend. My older sister was a heartbreaker early, though, so Michael got the title of First Boyfriend. And I knew and played with several of Adm. Denton's other kids from time to time. It might seem odd to a lot of people, but because the father of pretty much everybody I knew was in Vietnam, had been there or was going there, at the time I rarely thought much about the fact that the Denton kids' father wasn't just in Vietnam. The Dentons were, in many ways, just some kids whose dad was away at war. Like mine.

I knew, even then though, that their dad was no "like mine." Adm. Denton was a POW long enough to get promoted twice before he was released. He endured unbelievable torture and was awarded the Navy Cross -- second only to the Medal of Honor -- for his actions as a POW. The award stemmed from a television appearance with Japanese journalists that really didn't turn out the way his captors hoped:

In the [televised interview], orchestrated by the North Vietnamese as propaganda and broadcast in the United States in 1966, he appeared in his prison uniform and blinked the word “torture” in Morse code — a secret message to U.S. military intelligence for which he later received the Navy Cross.

Having been tortured to force him to do the interview the right way -- on top of the random torture to which he was subjected -- and knowing that he would be tortured again if any of his captors figured out what he was up to, this was an incredibly ballsy move.  What he said in the interview was even more courageous than sending his coded message:

Ten months into his imprisonment, Adm. Denton was ordered to submit to an interview with a Japanese reporter. He said the North Vietnamese tortured him before the meeting in an effort to compel him to assist with their communist propaganda.
In the footage, Adm. Denton walks through a doorway, bows and then, with evident discomfort, takes his seat in a chair. Hunched over, he clasps his hands between his knees. Looking into the camera lights as he speaks, he blinks his eyes hard and repeatedly, in a manner that to an untrained observer might have seemed involuntary — and that in Morse code spelled t-o-r-t-u-r-e.
Adm. Denton later said that while the blinking drew more attention, the words he spoke to the interviewer required greater courage. At one point, the reporter asked him what he thought about the “so-called Vietnamese War.”
“Well, I don’t know what is happening,” Adm. Denton replied. “But whatever the position of my government is, I support it fully. . . . I am a member of that government, and it is my job to support it, and I will as long as I live.”
Another torture session followed.

I remember the video playing on the news and thinking, "Hey. Naturally, there is video available today:

I didn't know anything about this when I was 6 and 7. All I knew was my father was at Khe San, which was under siege, and my friends' father was a prisoner. To the extent I thought about it, I was scared shitless my father would be joining their father. Didn't happen, and I felt bad for my friends and the plight of their father, but a 7-year-old probably has tunnel vision in that respect, so mostly I was glad my father came home. But even then I knew the Denton kids were suffering. The youngest among them didn't even really remember him, or at least only vaguely -- the very youngest was only 18 months old when Adm. Denton was shot down in  July 1965. I came to understand that feeling later, when my own father came home from Vietnam after 13 months there. Because he spent his tour of duty prior to Vietnam on a Navy ship, he was deployed more than half of the time even in the year before he went to Vietnam. Before that, he was part of one of the Marine Amphibious Units that spent six months of the year in the Mediterranean. Even before he went to war, my father was away more than he was home. That was the life of military kids (or at least Marine and Navy kids), though, and we accepted it. Or we thought we did --I spent several months after my father returned from Vietnam and had a posting that let him come home ever day sort of semi-nervous everyday when I saw his car in the driveway in the afternoon. He was, in many ways, a stranger. I can only imagine what it was like for some of the Denton kids who had little or no memory of their father to come home from school and find someone who really was literally a stranger, even though he was their father.

During the war, though, what the Denton kids had to deal with -- and what the rest of us feared -- was not "away more than home," but "never coming home." I'm sure I wasn't as happy as the Denton kids when Adm. Denton stepped onto the tarmac at Clark Air Force Base in the Phillipines in February 1973, but I knew exactly how they felt, because I felt that way when my own father came home. Stranger or not, I wanted my father home. And when Adm. Denton came home, I remember crying like a baby seeing it on TV.

I don't know where somebody who underwent what Adm. Denton suffered finds himself able to say something like this:

On February 12, 1973, Denton was released in Hanoi by the North Vietnamese along with numerous other American POWs during Operation Homecoming. Stepping off the jet back home in uniform, Denton said: "We are honored to have had the opportunity to serve our country under difficult circumstances. We are profoundly grateful to our Commander-in-Chief and to our nation for this day. God bless America."

Adm. Denton was part of the Reagan Revolution and was elected senator from Alabama in 1980, the first Republican elected to the Senate in Alabama since Reconstruction. He served only one term, losing his re-election bid to Rep. Richard C. Shelby, a Democrat who later became a Republican. He spent four years in solitary confinement; I doubt losing an election upset him too much. This guy was tough.

Hard to believe somebody would be thankful for having served his country at least in part by becoming a POW; Jeremiah Denton was. This video is long, but it's worth it:

I doubt the family remembers me, or my family. (Well, maybe Michael remembers my sister -- she was hot, even at 8 or 9.) But I remember them. I wish I had met Adm. Denton. He might be the only guy I never met that I miss now that he's gone. Now I'll never get to meet someone who was both a national hero and a mythic figure from my childhood. Rest in peace, Adm. Denton. You've earned it.