jolyn swim your own race. Swim diapers allow your tot to hang out in the water without having to walk around with a heavy, soggy diaper. He sought out inspiration through various forms of meditation, generally focusing on fire or water, possibly while under the influence of mild hallucinogens, such as nutmeg. After a while he was moved to another village, where he was interrogated, and then, still in his broken, untreated state, piled into the sidecar of a battered motorbike, and paraded through countless other villages. San Jose Mercury News, admitting that he still occasionally woke up in a cold sweat. Back in the US, his wife Carlotta also passed four years without news, since the North Vietnamese did not declare the names of their prisoners. He drank tea with Nguyen Viet Chop and Nguyen Danh Xinh – two of the men who had dragged him back to the village through the rice paddies.
They stripped him of his clothes, bound him and dragged him back to their tiny village – An Doai – where he was put on display like a hunting trophy. A special moment came four months after he took up his post in May 1997. On 10 September – the same day he had been shot down 31 years earlier – Peterson revisited An Doai, the village where he had been taken prisoner. If you were to eat the same kind of food day in, day out, you would become bored and it probably wouldn’t be great for your body over a long period of time either. Through a tap code used by the prisoners to communicate, Peterson learned that his co-pilot Bunny Talley had been captured by the North Vietnamese a day or so after him and was also in the jail. Then on 10 September, Capt Peterson and co-pilot Lt Bernard “Bunny” Talley took off to attack a bridge and ferry complex close to Hanoi. You’ve probably heard about legal jargon or medical jargon every now and then! There then followed an agonising wait as the soldiers, increasingly restive and indignant, demanded to be let out.
Peterson describes what followed as a catastrophic nightmare. Hubris describes a sense of excessive pride or arrogance. I don’t think I have a sense of humor. Lamb says Peterson was so popular that Vietnamese people would often stop him on the street to have their picture taken with him. In 2000, the Vietnamese Red Cross awarded Peterson their Highest Merit award. Peterson fell into a mango tree. And he walked through the fields, holding hands with the grandson of one of his former captors, to the mango tree in which he had fallen 31 years earlier. The former LA Times journalist David Lamb, in his book Vietnam Now: A Reporter Returns, says that during his four years in Vietnam, Peterson became “a walking billboard for reconciliation”. After four days, Peterson was finally transferred to a hospital and from there, to a prison camp south-west of the city, known by US prisoners as “the Zoo”. Four months into his tour, Peterson had already flown 66 missions – it was starting to look like he might be home in time for Christmas.
It wasn’t until mid-1970 that Hanoi released a propaganda film showing American POWs attending a Christmas church service, in which Peterson’s face was clearly distinguishable. Already the owner of a US forces Legion of Merit, the ambassador became one of the few US Vietnam veterans – perhaps the only one – to own a medal featuring the face of Ho Chi Minh. In his office, a few blocks from the site of the Hanoi Hilton, Peterson began a programme called Safe Vietnam. Before the war he had dropped out of college, but he went back to university and collected his bachelor’s degree, did some post-graduate work and ended up running a mental health programme at Florida State University. At around this time, Peterson was taken back to the Hanoi Hilton. He was first taken into Hanoi, to the Hoa Lo prison – known to its American inmates as the Hanoi Hilton – and brutally interrogated. Following the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973, some international representatives came to the Hanoi Hilton and shouted out that they were negotiating the prisoners’ release.