Two Souls Indivisible: The Friendship That Saved Two POWs in Vietnam Book

Hirsch recounts a remarkable friendship forged between two U.S. soldiers in one of the most harrowing settings the twentieth century has ever produced â?? the North Vietnamese POW camp known as the Zoo. One prisoner, Fred Cherry, was a pioneering air force pilot and the first black officer captured by the North Vietnamese. The other was a young navy flier named Porter Halyburton, from a privileged southern background. Their captors threw them into the same fetid cell, believing that their antipathy toward each other would break them both. But Cherry and Halyburton overcame initial suspicion to save each other"s lives.When Halyburton first saw him, Cherry was a wreck; one arm hung uselessly at his side, he hadn"t bathed in weeks, and he could not walk, the results of torture and inept medical care. In his own mind, Cherry was steeling himself for death. Halyburton was much healthier but was scarred by brainwashing and physical abuse that his privileged life had not prepared him for. He had to learn how to endure, or he would become another of the incoherent wraiths who haunted the Zoo.Halyburton and Cherry became legendary among fellow POWs for the singular friendship that enabled them to overcome prodigious suffering. In limning the bond behind that legend, Hirsch compellingly shows how good people can achieve greatness in hellish circumstances.Read More