Farewell to an American hero

Commentary

By Frank A. Aukofer
Reprinted with permission, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

01.17.06

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Not many of us ever witness the farewell to a hero. Unless it's a president or chief justice, it's not something that makes the national news. Only the people who attend get to experience what it's all about. The nation and, in particular, the United States Navy, recently gave a hero's sendoff to Vice Adm. William Porter Lawrence at the U.S. Naval Academy.

The local newspaper and television in Annapolis, Md., covered the story. But that was about it.

Of course, every man and woman serving in harm's way, and especially those who give their lives or are wounded, deserves the title of hero. But Adm. Lawrence was special. He spent his life in the service of his country, including six years in a brutal prison camp in Vietnam.

Like most of you, I had never heard of him. We were brought together by the Freedom Forum, a foundation that promotes free speech, free press and free spirit. We spent nine months together in 1994-95 on fellowships at the foundation's First Amendment Center in Nashville, Bill's hometown.

Together, we tried to reconcile the disparate goals and means of America's mighty military and its unfettered journalism. The result was a book on the military-media relationship titled America's Team: The Odd Couple. Among other things, it recommended the embedding of reporters with military units, which is practiced to this day.

When I first met Bill, I was struck by his reluctance to make eye contact — until I understood. When we'd sit and talk, he usually focused somewhere near my kneecaps. It took awhile for me to figure out that it was a lingering residue of his dealings with guards and interrogators during his six years in Hoa Lo, the infamous French-built North Vietnamese prison camp, which Bill and his fellow prisoners nicknamed the Hanoi Hilton.

They were there at his funeral — 24 of them, now mostly old men, some hobbling on canes and staffs, led by Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican and possible presidential candidate.

Despite our disparate backgrounds — a Milwaukee kid who became a newspaper reporter and a Nashville boy who excelled at sports and academics and nearly became an astronaut — Bill and I became close. With more tragedy and suffering, it intensified into what Bill's wife, Diane, said simply was love.

A month after the book was published in 1995, Bill suffered a massive stroke at the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Md., where he had gone to have a heart valve replaced. It was the same valve that had produced a murmur that lost him a shot at the astronaut corps with John Glenn and Alan Shepard.

Instead, he became a test pilot and the first naval aviator to fly at twice the speed of sound in the 1950s. Later, he became a squadron commander in Vietnam. He bailed out of his crippled F-4 Phantom fighter in June 1967 and spent six years as a prisoner of war. With him in the Hanoi Hilton were McCain and future Admiral James B. Stockdale, who later became H. Ross Perot's running mate in Perot's maverick bid for the presidency.

There are so many interlocking relationships. Perot and Bill Lawrence had been classmates at the Naval Academy, where they collaborated on a codification of the honor code. McCain's physical therapist, after his release from Hoa Lo, was Diane. At the funeral, he said she had restored a knee that the doctors said would never function again — using, he said to laughter, some of the same tactics as had his North Vietnamese captors.

McCain introduced Diane to Bill, and she became his lifeline for 31 years, though she said he never got over the fact that his first wife left him while he was a prisoner.

When I met Bill, he was retired from the Navy. He suffered from depression, and his own honor code forced him to disclose it. But he had served as commander of the famed Third Fleet and, from 1978 to 1981, was superintendent of the Naval Academy, at a time when women were first graduating. His daughter, Wendy, was one of them. She now is a Navy captain and an astronaut who has logged more than 1,200 hours in space.

The 1995 stroke nearly killed Bill, and he likely would have been a wheelchair-bound invalid but for Diane. She used the same harsh and loving tactics on him as she had on McCain, and Bill responded. He could no longer play tennis or drive a car, but he could walk under his own power and function as a human being.

Bill spent a lot of time on the telephone. We spoke often and got together at home or Navy events like the Navy-Air Force football game, where, courtesy of Bill, I got to ride to the stadium on the Academy superintendent's bus with a police escort.

I was always struck by the respect the military community paid to Bill. Everywhere we sat together, old friends, acquaintances and strangers, officers and enlisted men and women, lined up to pay their respects to this man who had suffered so much he aged before his time.

Recently, my wife and I were on a foreign trip, and we went on a tour of the Hoa Lo prison in Hanoi, now a memorial that features McCain's flight suit and boots in a glass case. We were excited to return and tell Bill we had seen where he and the others were imprisoned.

But he had died at home, at age 75, on Dec. 2, 2005. He told Diane he was feeling poorly and stayed in bed. She was baking Christmas cookies and found him when she went to check on him.

Bill was cremated, and his remains were placed in a polished wooden box. At his funeral, the box was carried by an honor guard into the Naval Academy chapel, which holds 2,500 and was nearly full for the Dec. 14 funeral.

The words were all about a lifetime of integrity, duty, bravery and unflinching honor, often in the face of torture and unrelenting adversity. Once, in solitary confinement in the hole in Hoa Lo, Bill composed — in his head because there was nothing with which to write — a poem about his native Tennessee, remembering the iambic pentameter he had learned as a schoolboy.

His fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Lipscomb Davis, a spry 90-year-old, marched to the pulpit and read the poem. After Bill was released from the prison in 1973, the Tennessee Legislature adopted it as the official state poem.

After the service, the mourners followed an honor guard more than a mile on a bitterly cold day to the hillside cemetery overlooking the Naval Academy. Walking at the head of the procession, behind Diane's car, were Mullen; Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Vice Admiral Rodney P. Rempt, the academy superintendent; Capt. Wendy Lawrence, and Bill's other two children, William Jr. and Laurie M. Lawrence, a Nashville physician; and me.

On the hillside, the throng prayed with the academy chaplain, listened to the mournful playing of "Taps," heard the crack of honor guard rifles and trembled to the crashes of a 15-gun cannon salute. Three Navy F-18 warplanes roared overhead in a tribute to a fallen warrior.

That is how we honor a hero.