From prisoner to booster: Former POW eager to watch 'The Vietnam War'

Pete Peterson spent six and a half years as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War. A U.S. Air Force pilot, he was tortured and kept in isolation for months at a time. He was denied adequate food and clothing. He froze, he sweltered, he wondered if he’d ever be released. He still has occasional nightmares about his experience.

But Peterson also spent four and a half years as the first U.S. ambassador to post-war Vietnam, becoming, as one author described him, “a walking billboard for reconciliation.” He toured every inch of the country, met members of all 54 of the nation’s ethnic groups and helped resurrect the nation’s economy. He married a Vietnamese native. And together they started a non-profit organization to improve the safety and health of Vietnamese children.

So yes, Peterson is eager to see the Ken Burns series, “The Vietnam War.” The 10-part, 18-hour series by America’s leading cultural documentarian begins tonight on PBS. Ten years in the making, the series promises to be the most extensive look at the war between communist-led North Vietnam and U.S.-supported South Vietnam, which claimed the lives of 58,000 American military personnel and ignited an era of U.S. protest.

Peterson, now living in Melbourne, Australia, is encouraged Burns is going to shine a light on the controversial,  little understood war. He believes it will “ease some of the pain, anger, frustration and despair, felt by those who served and the thousands of families whose loved ones were killed or wounded in the war.”

This summer, as the Ken Burns series neared, Peterson shared his experiences and thoughts about Vietnam in a series of emails with the Tallahassee Democrat, where the clocks are 14 hours behind Melbourne.

“I think the documentary will have a positive impact in both America and Vietnam,” Peterson said. ”It could turn what Americans think about the war and their respect for those individuals who fought it on its head. What a refreshing thought, huh?”

Peterson, 82, was a three-term U.S. Congressman from Marianna, a Democrat who represented a large, Tallahassee-based district from 1990 to 1996. In 1997, after he decided not to run for re-election, President Bill Clinton tapped him as the nation’s first ambassador to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

After his ambassadorship, Peterson returned to Marianna to run for governor of Florida. In fall 2001, he was the leading Democratic challenger to incumbent Jeb Bush – when terrorists attacked the U.S. on Sept. 11.

Peterson, who had stepped away from Congress because of his growing frustration with political partisanship, immediately pulled out of the race for governor, saying:

“If ever there was a time we needed a unified front in America, it is now. We need to put aside all partisan considerations and fully support our national leadership.”

It would prove to be Peterson’s exit from political life. And his rationale sounds almost hokey in this age of even more fierce political partisanship and social media-fueled cynicism.

But the decision was illustrative of Peterson’s patriotism, background and character.

Raised in Nebraska, Missouri and Iowa, Peterson is a classic American figure: Earnest, hardworking and talented. He was twice president of his high school class, a star basketball and baseball player, a kid who delivered newspapers and shined shoes and saved money for college with full-time jobs after-school, weekends and summers throughout high school.

He went from career Air Force officer to homespun statesman, campaigning in khakis and shirts from J.C. Penney’s and growing misty eyed whenever the national anthem was played.

“Those of us who know Pete have always been touched by his spirit and his genuineness,” said Tallahassee political consultant Steve Vancore, who was Peterson’s first congressional district manager. “He has a limitless capacity for love and compassion. There are people (in Vietnam) who treated him horribly. But at the end of the day, he has compassion for the Vietnamese people.”

Peterson has said often he “left my hate at the gate,” of Vietnamese prisons. Today, he considers Vietnam the U.S.’s most important ally in Asia. He likes and admires the Vietnamese people and he believes “both countries would be better off by engagement and reconciliation.”

“I hated the Vietnamese so much during my captivity, it was almost like I had used up all the hate I had,” Peterson said. “After my release, I was able to look at my captivity rationally.

“In a broad sense, I concluded I was doing my job by bombing the country during the war and the Vietnamese were doing their jobs or exercising their rights in treating me as they did after I was shot down. Bottom line – I survived.”

Air Force

Pete Peterson always wanted to be a U.S. Air Force pilot.

Born in Omaha, Douglas Brian Peterson was the ninth of 10 children – and only family members still call him Doug. His father, a World War I veteran, was a mechanic for the post office, his mother was a housewife. He spent the first 13 years of his life living on the outskirts of Omaha, on land adjacent to his grandparents’ farm.

Omaha is home to Offutt Air Force Base, one of the nation’s major Air Force bases. During World War II, Offutt was also home to an aircraft manufacturing plant that produced B-29 bombers, including the two planes that dropped atomic bombs on Japan. The sky over Omaha was filled with planes – which fascinated the young Peterson.

“That’s where I caught the bug to fly,” Peterson said.

When he graduated from high school in 1953, the Air Force had a program in which those with two years of college could enter pilot training school. So Peterson became the first in his family to attend college, enrolling at Iowa Wesleyan College.

After his first year, though, the Air Force changed its requirements, allowing candidates to enroll in aviation training with only one year of college. Peterson immediately dropped out of college, enlisted and was sent to aviation school.

He took his aviation training at Graham Air Force base in nearby Marianna. It’s where he met Carlotta Neal, a Marianna native who worked at the base. In 1956, shortly after he was awarded his wings as a pilot, the couple was married.

The couple had three children, as they moved from air base to air base during the Cold War: son Mike in 1957; daughter Paula in 1959; and Douglas in 1966, just after Peterson was sent to Vietnam.

In 1966, when he was assigned to Vietnam, Peterson qualified for a waiver from the war: He had already served 10 years and his wife was pregnant. But he didn’t apply for the exemption.

“I was a professional soldier and I did what I had to do,” Peterson said in a BBC interview in 2013. “Obviously, I regret that now.”

Learning to endure as a POW

An Air Force pilot’s tour in Vietnam consisted of flying 100 missions. Peterson’s role was to bomb North Vietnamese transportation routes. Everything went according to plan until his 66th mission.

On Sept. 10, 1966, Capt. Peterson and his co-pilot, Lt. Bernard “Bunny” Talley, were flying their F-4C fighter plane in North Vietnam, heading to bomb a bridge and ferry complex close to Hanoi. The weather turned bad, and the plane was caught in clouds: They never saw the missile that struck their plane.

With their plane in flames, the two pilots ejected and plummeted to the ground in parachutes. Talley landed safely. But Peterson smashed into a mango tree and was badly hurt: He suffered head injuries, dislocated both knees and had a broken leg, arm and shoulder. He told Talley to run and evade capture. Peterson took out his service weapon, a .38 caliber pistol, and briefly considered killing himself. Instead, he threw the gun in a ditch and awaited his capture.

What followed was a nightmare. He was found by a group of villagers. They stripped him of all his clothes, except his boxer shorts, then bound and gagged him and dragged him back to their village – where they put him on display.

Vietnam War: A timeline of U.S. entanglement

Peterson passed in and out of consciousness, awakening once to find an old woman standing over him with a large rock – which she dropped on his head. The villagers loaded him into the sidecar of an old motorcycle and took him on a tour of other villages, where the people threw rocks and spit on him.

“I was perfectly fair game for all the locals and they took their shots,” Peterson said in the 2013 interview. “If you stop to think about it, it’s quite a natural reaction after having been bombed for several years – they had their chance to get a little retribution.”

The villagers eventually delivered the still-injured Peterson to North Vietnamese officials, who brought him to Hoa Lo prison – sarcastically named the Hanoi Hilton by American prisoners. There, Peterson was tortured and interrogated for four days.

If asked, Peterson will share stories of his imprisonment. But he does not talk about the physical torture he suffered as a POW.

“I suspect that all of us who were captured early in the war suffered from some kind of maltreatment,” Peterson said. “(But) I have never spoken much about the details of my situation. I just never thought I would gather any comfort from doing so – and probably just the opposite.”

After four days, Peterson was finally taken to a hospital and then to another prison outside Hanoi, known to the POWs as “The Zoo.” He would go on to spend time at four prisons, passing through the Hanoi Hilton a couple of times – but his 3 ½ years at the Zoo were the worst. 

His cell was 10 feet by 10 feet, with three air holes at the top and a trapdoor in the door to slide in food and water. It was brutally cold in the winter and unbearably hot in the summer.

Most of the time, he was alone in his cell. The prisoners devised a way of tapping on the walls to communicate with prisoners in other cells – though they had to time the guards’ rounds to avoid detection, which brought harsh punishment.

Each day, prisoners were awakened at 5 a.m., “to do nothing,” then given breakfast at 8 a.m., followed by another meal at 1 p.m. At first, he was allowed out of the cell only once a week to bathe and empty his toilet bucket, though eventually he was allowed to do both daily.

It was four years before his family found out he was alive, as the North Vietnamese refused to divulge the names of prisoners. But in mid-1970, when the North Vietnamese released a propaganda film showing prisoners attending a Christmas church service, Peterson could be clearly seen.

“Initially, of course, the idea is you’re going to go home in a couple of weeks,” Peterson told the BBC. “After five or six Christmases go by, you kind of wonder, ‘Well, maybe that plan isn’t going to work.’ And you take on a mental state that essentially says: ‘This is it. This is your life. It’s not going to change.’ “

To cope, Peterson began to take short “trips” in his mind, thinking back to pleasant times spent with his wife and children or growing up in Omaha.

“(It was) just deep mental concentration, almost to the point of a trance where you would simply mentally place yourself somewhere else doing something else,” he said. “It was a great mental escape and I recall getting quite angry if I was disturbed during one of those sessions.”

Teaching love at Dozier School for Boys

The Paris Peace Accords, ending the Vietnam War, were signed Jan. 27, 1973. Peterson was in the second contingent of POWs released on March 4, 1973.

He remained in the Air Force until 1981, retiring as a colonel. He took six months leave in 1976 to complete his college degree at the University of Tampa. And after he retired, he started a construction firm in Tampa.

But in 1983, his youngest child, Douglas – a high school senior Peterson had not met until he was released from Vietnam and the boy was seven years old – was killed in a car crash. Driven by grief and the declining health of Carlotta’s parents, the Petersons returned to Marianna.

Peterson spent a year working for a friend’s construction firm, before Florida State University professor Wallace Kennedy asked Peterson to manage a specialized treatment program at Marianna’s Dozier School for Boys.

The school, founded in 1900, had once been an infamous juvenile prison where boys were physically beaten, mentally abused and sometimes killed. In 1969, Dozier was reformed as a juvenile detention center under Florida’s Department of Children and Families, and attempts were made to counsel the boys and reduce criminal recidivism.

Peterson oversaw an FSU program that provided boys mental health treatment and behavior modification programs. Though Dozier would be dogged by occasional accusations of physical mistreatment until its eventual closing in 2011, the FSU program was well-regarded and showed signs of reducing recidivism.

“I spent about five years there and they may be the most professionally satisfying years of my life,” Peterson said.

Vancore, whose then-wife was Peterson’s aide at Dozier, said the former POW was renowned for his one-on-one “come to Jesus” meetings with boys who were causing problems – meetings that always produced several weeks of better behavior by the boys he counseled.

“Everyone assumed he told them, ‘Look, I was tortured. I spent time in a box. What you’re going through is nothing compared to that so get your (act) together,” said Vancore, who later asked Peterson what he said in those meetings. “He told me, ‘I believe there is love in everyone and my job was to search in their hearts and find where that love was. I tried to show them the goodness in the world and how with goodness and compassion, they could turn things around. “

Vancore added: “I thought it was the most lovely thing I had ever heard.”

Everyone should run for dogcatcher

A similar optimism drove Peterson’s political career.

In 1990, the U.S. Representative for the 2nd District of Florida, Bill Grant, announced he was switching parties, from Democrat to Republican. Peterson joined Tallahassee attorney Bob Boyd in filing to run for the Democratic nomination for the seat.

Peterson said he had a longtime “compulsion to enter politics at some level.” He said that desire began to take particular shape after he returned from Vietnam. He spent one year in the Air Force assigned to the National War College in Washington D.C., where military personnel often attended Congressional hearings and meetings.

The desire was further sharpened after he moved to Tampa and Marianna and got involved with local politics in both cities – especially Marianna. When then-Gov. Bob Martinez made a short-lived attempt to close the Dozier School for Boys, Peterson became one of the leaders of the successful effort to rally support against closing.

“I always thought it would be a good idea if everyone at least ran for dog catcher or served in government in some capacity so they would have a better idea of how the system worked,” Peterson said.

After swamping Boyd in the Democratic primary, Peterson beat Grant easily in the general election. Peterson claimed 60 percent of the vote in the district that stretched from Jacksonville to Panama City – even claiming a 1,000-vote victory in Grant’s home county of Madison.  Peterson easily won re-election in 1992 and 1994.

In Congress, Peterson prided himself on being a “bridge builder,” who worked to gain support for legislation from members of both parties. He helped win support for restoration of the Florida Everglades and a revamping of a national transportation bill. He was instrumental in rewriting policies for FEMA disaster response. And he worked diligently on a health care program overhaul, though his bill died without a vote amid partisan politics.

Throughout his six years in Congress, Peterson emphasized “constituent services,” in which he helped North Florida residents cut through the red tape of dealing with the federal government. He pushed his Tallahassee staff to find answers for residents who had problems receiving Social Security payments or Veterans Administration benefits. The staff tracked down answers to postal complaints, and helped local agencies apply for federal grants.

“He had a real heart for wanting to help people in his district,” said Lois Kennedy, who was Peterson’s head of constituent services. “I really thought he had no other agenda than serving the country and doing the best he could.”

Perhaps Peterson’s biggest impact came as a member of the House Veterans committee, where he joined U.S. Rep. Lane Evans, and U.S. Senators John McCain and John Kerry – all Vietnam veterans -- in rejuvenating reconciliation efforts with Vietnam.

The foursome made three visits to Vietnam and pushed MIA search efforts in Vietnam to high priority. After they won support for reconciliation from President Bill Clinton, they also succeeded in lifting the economic embargo of Vietnam, returning international agencies to the country and re-establishing the U.S.’s diplomatic relations to Vietnam – highlighted by Clinton’s eventual naming of Peterson as the first ambassador to the new Vietnam.

Despite his ardor for reconciliation, Peterson never traded on his POW status for votes or sympathy.

Tom Pitcock, district manager for Peterson’s last two terms, remembers putting together a campaign TV ad that included a very brief shot of POWs smoking celebratory cigars as they left Vietnam on a plane.

“It was just one second, but he made me take it out,” Pitcock said. “Now, did everyone know he had been a POW? Sure. But he never allowed it to be a part of his office.”

A country – and woman – to love

Peterson was a wildly popular ambassador. He accomplished several important tasks, notably completing the negotiations and signing of the long-delayed US-Vietnam Bi-Lateral Trade Agreement. That agreement cemented the relationship of the two nations, spurred the Vietnam economy and led to Vietnam becoming a member of the Worth Trade Organization.

Peterson also continued to push for a full accounting of MIAs and POWS, and helped re-establish the Vietnam’s diplomatic relations with other countries.

Mostly, he helped improve the way Vietnamese viewed Americans. He traveled all over the nation, visiting schools, hospitals, clinics and individual homes more often than official functions. He got his hair cut by local barbers and ate at local cafes. On weekends, he often jumped on a moped and tooled around the country. Vietnamese people regularly stopped him to have their picture taken with him.

“Regaining trust was my biggest challenge in Vietnam,” Peterson said. “I went to places few Westerners had been before and engaged with people from all walks of life and people from virtually all of Vietnam’s 54 minority ethnic groups. It was a fantastic education . . . and it helped me determine where American influence and assistance would be most effective in the country.”

He also found a wife. In 1995, during his third term in Congress, Peterson’s wife of nearly 30 years, Carlotta, died of cancer. Peterson, then 60, feared his romantic life was over.

But in 1997, two weeks after he arrived as ambassador in Hanoi, Peterson met Vi Le, a native of Vietnam who was Australia’s senior trade commissioner. The two soon became inseparable and were married a year later. In 2002, the couple settled permanently in her hometown of Melbourne, Australia. In 2009, Peterson became an Australian citizen, though he also retains his American citizenship.

In 2001, after Peterson dropped out of the Florida governor’s race, the couple founded the Alliance for Safe Children (TASC), which focused on child injury prevention in Asia. It was born out of a landmark study that found accidents were the leading cause of death among Asian children – and chief among those accidents was drowning. Thus, one of the organization’s main efforts has been teaching school-aged children survival swimming, CPR and water safety.

In 2002, the couple also started Peterson International Inc., which advises mostly American corporations on doing business in Asia.

The couple is always on the go. They make frequent trips to Vietnam and other Asian countries on business. Avid bicyclists, they bike all over the Melbourne’s 1,000 miles of bike trails and take biking vacations in Europe.

“Meeting Vi has added so much to my life, I could never describe or define it,” Peterson said. “(She) continues to inspire my life every day.”

Today’s Vietnam welcomes Americans

Vietnam also inspires Peterson. He cherishes his role in helping the country as much as he laments his 6 ½ years as a prisoner. He notes Vietnam is the world’s 13th most populous country (93 million people) and has one of the fastest growing economies in the world.

Though technically a socialist country, Vietnam in the 1980s and 1990s passed numerous measures to allow and encourage free enterprise, creating a socialist-capitalist economy that is much like China.

“Vietnam is a huge success story, albeit it took them a long time after the war to get their act together,” Peterson said.

Just as importantly – to a former prisoner of war – the Vietnamese have embraced Americans as their friends. The country emphasizes tourism, both as an economic engine and as a badge of its new attitude.

“The Vietnamese have a high regard for Americans, and they are welcomed into the country with open arms,” Peterson said. “There is no longer a distinction between North and South of Vietnam. Regardless of where you visit, it is quickly apparent the Vietnamese hold no grudges relative to the past.”

Which makes it the perfect time for Ken Burns to explain the war that once divided us.

Gerald Ensley is a retired Democrat reporter. He can be contacted at geraldensley21@gmail.com.

“The Vietnam War,” a 10-part, 18-hour documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, premieres Sunday on PBS television stations nationwide, including Tallahassee’s WFSU. The first five episodes air Sunday through Thursday; the final five episodes will air Sept. 24 through Sept. 28. All episodes begin at 8 p.m.