Heroes at home

By RAY COONEY
The Commercial Review
Bill Robinson has been called a hero.
Given that he spent 2,703 days as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, it would be hard to argue the designation. But through those seven-plus years in confinement, he drew his inspiration from a different group.
“Heroes,” said Robinson, 73. “That seems to be a name that’s thrown out for those of us who have accomplished something that we had no other choice to do. But I like to think of the heroes being the families, who had to endure.”
That was part of the message Robinson shared Saturday night during his presentation as the featured speaker at Museum of the Soldier’s annual meeting at Arts Place in Portland.
A Roanoke, North Carolina, native, Robinson joined the United States Air Force in 1961. He bounced around to a variety of locations before being sent in April 1965 to what was then called a “police action” in Indochina, and would later become known as the Vietnam War.
Of the nearly eight years he would spend in Southeast Asia, less than six months were as a free man.
On Sept. 20, 1965, he was part of a crew that was sent on a rescue mission to pick up a downed pilot in North Vietnam.
“It started out just being a normal, quiet day in Southeast Asia,” he said. “Nothing in the headlines indicated that this was going to be my last day of freedom for a while.”
They flew in from Thailand, located the pilot and were about to bring him up to the plane.
“There’s no other way to describe it than ‘all hell broke loose,’” said Robinson. “And we were down there right next to him.”
They tried to go into hiding in hopes of being picked up the next day, but the pilot informed them that the area was “infested.” Soon they were surrounded by enemy combatants carrying machine guns and machetes.
Robinson was taken into captivity, where beatings were a regular occurrence. Once he was blindfolded and taken to what seemed to be a trial.
“I could see from the bottom side of my blindfold. It looked like a freshly-dug grave,” he said. “And I honestly thought at that point that my life on earth was over.”
But, for some reason, he was instead dragged away by two guards, and eventually taken to the prison camp that became known as the Hanoi Hilton. There he was held in a 6-foot square room.
“Be prepared to die for your country,” he was told by the ranking U.S. officer at the prison camp.
Robinson was 22.
During his first five years in captivity, he averaged about 15 minutes outdoors per day. He was able to shower every couple of weeks. Meals were mostly made up of rice, bread and grass, with maybe a potato or piece of pumpkin. He spent a year and a half at a rural prison camp with no running water or electricity.
Despite being isolated from the outside world — Robinson remembers learning about the 1969 moon landing from information printed on the back of a sugar packet — the prisoners of war found a way to stay optimistic. It helped that each newcomer seemed to think the war would soon be over.
“We lived on hope,” Robinson said.
The conflict that involved a large anti-war movement at home made life difficult, he added. But things started to change when members of soldiers’ families began to demand answers.
Families wanted their country to remember that Robinson and his fellow prisoners, sometimes described by high-level government officials as “expendable,” were husbands, sons and brothers.
“That was started by our families, who wanted to do something to make sure that we weren’t forgotten souls,” said Robinson. “Over the next two years, our family members went to county fairs, they stood on street corners, anywhere there was Americans listening … and said, ‘This is a real person. We want to bring them home.’”
Eventually their efforts resulted in the POWs being allowed to receive small care packages, and slowly life began to get better.
Robinson pointed to the Son Tay raid of November 1970 as another turning point. Though no POWs were rescued, the effort proved they were not forgotten.
“The men who completed that mission wept, thinking what a failure that had been,” said Robinson. “But those few men had become real heroes to us, because as a result of their action, that label of ‘expendable’ was replaced …”
After that, Vietnamese prisoners were taken from Robinson’s prison camp and it became populated by only Americans. Conditions continued to improve, and soldiers started to “feel human again.”
Finally, on Feb. 12, 1973, Robinson was released. No enlisted soldier has ever been held longer in the history of the American military.
He endured more than most could imagine. And yet, he defied the odds. Nearly 60,000 died in combat in Vietnam, and only one in five of those shot down came home.
“I consider myself one of the luckiest men alive,” he said.