Bracelet forges bond between ex-POW, wearer

This story originally ran in the Jan 21, 1990, edition of The Gazette-Telegraph, on the 23rd anniversary of the day Baugh's jet was shot down over North Vietnam.

The name was clearly etched in the young woman's mind. But there was no face, no age, no story to go with it.

Over the years, her curiosity had waned. The memories of that time were tucked away with a silver band in an old school box safely stored in her childhood home.

Until this month.

The young woman met the veteran at a breakfast gathering in Colorado Springs and passed the freshly polished band to him. Later, she tried it on one last time while he watched intently.

"Did you wear it on that wrist?" the veteran asked the young woman.

"This way," she said. "So I could read the name."

The veteran wanted to know what else she remembered about those years. The young woman shrugged. Only bits and pieces, she said, insignificant details.

The answers left the veteran feeling unsatisfied. His own head reeled with memories, but he wanted more. It was as if those lost years had left him disconnected from his world.

Then he told her a story. It began 23 years ago today, when he was a 32-year-old from Piqua, Ohio, and she was a 9-year-old from Wausau, Wis.

The fighter planes popped out of the clouds at 10,000 feet, directly over a North Vietnamese airfield. Capt. William Baugh felt his F-4 lurch from the impact of flak, and his instrument panel flashed with red fire-warning lights.

Instinctively, he turned toward the Gulf of Tonkin to escape. One fire light went out, and Baugh shut down another engine that was still burning. He rolled out of the turn. For a moment it seemed that he might manage to guide the crippled jet to safety.

But then the hydraulic systems failed, and Baugh could not control the plane. He and his back-seater, Don Spoon, punched themselves from the plane.

Baugh was knocked unconscious when he ejected. He woke to see his tattered white parachute above - a perfect beacon for the North Vietnamese - and trees and rocks below. Then he crashed through the trees and lost consciousness again.

It was Jan. 21, 1967. What had started as a routine day for a U.S. Air Force pilot quickly became one forever etched in Baugh's memory. He was alone, injured and far behind enemy lines.

The next day, villagers found the father of three. They paraded him around their village and then tied him in a field for the night. The North Vietnamese army came the next day, and Baugh became a prisoner of war.

His pregnant wife and children in Ohio lived the next two and half years without knowing his fate.

A little girl awoke that same January morning in her cozy Midwestern home. As she did on most Saturdays, she probably had breakfast with her mom and dad, her older sister and younger brother.

She probably played the way typical 9-year-old, middle-class girls in Wisconsin do in the middle of winter, when the landscape sparkles with snow.

Nothing special happened to make Jo Wiegel remember the particulars of the day, the month or the year.

"I was a pretty typical kid," she said. "I was the middle of three children in a pretty average family."

And she didn't know anything about Vietnam.

The torture began immediately. Baugh's lanky 6-foot, 4-inch frame was repeatedly twisted, and his bones popped from their sockets. He was tied and beaten and left in cold, dark rooms.

During an early stint in solitary confinement, he tried to bring his family closer. When it was nighttime in Ohio, Baugh pretended that he was saying prayers with his children and tucking them into bed.

It nearly drove him crazy.

"I became a blubbering idiot," he said. "I just couldn't do it. It just drains you."

Baugh knew his family was safe in the town where both he and his wife had grown up. They'd be taken care of. If he wanted to see them again, he had to concentrate on his own survival. No more would he pretend to be somewhere else.

His sons were 10 and 9; his daughter was 6. He didn't learn until 1969 that his fourth child, born in 1967, was a girl. She would be 6 years old before he would see her for the first time.

In Wisconsin, Wiegel's dad managed a retail furniture store in Wausau, a town of about 32,000 people. Her mom was a homemaker.

Her life was filled with normal things - Girl Scouts in grade school and a teen girls' group in junior high. Occasionally she baby-sat.

By the time she was 12, in 1970, she was aware of the war in Vietnam. Her parents talked about it occasionally, and she saw news reports on television.

But she didn't know anyone who had been sent there to fight.

Baugh's newest daughter was nearly three when he first learned that her name was Liz. His wife, Mary, had sent a photograph in which the little girl was holding a small suitcase with her name written on it.

The packages started coming in 1969, and Baugh was occasionally allowed to mail seven-line letters. At least his family knew he was alive now.

Time passed, and Baugh survived on the order and discipline the Americans established in the camp, and on his faith. He guessed when the Air Force promoted him to major and then to lieutenant colonel.

But there was little information from outside.

He didn't know that bracelets etched with the name Maj. William Baugh and the date Jan. 21, 1967, were being worn by people all over America.

When Wiegel was 12 or 13 - she can't remember exactly when - she saw a newspaper ad about the POW bracelets. Right away she sent $2 to the organization that was trying to ensure that American servicemen who were missing or being held prisoner weren't forgotten.

Many of her friends did the same thing. In fact, before long people nationwide were wearing POW bracelets made by several companies. (Five million bracelets would be sold by the end of the war.)

Wiegel's reason for wearing the bracelet had nothing to do with politics. She didn't have many opinions about the war, nor was she a hippie or a flower child.

But she never took the bracelet off. That was expected of you.

Soon, the black lettering had worn off . She repainted it with black nail polish. It lasted.

When American POWs began coming home in 1973, she watched the newspapers for Maj. William Baugh's name. One day, it appeared.

"I was excited," she said.

Wiegel intended to mail the bracelet to Baugh, as its makers suggested. But she lost the newspaper clipping with Baugh's address. As time passed, she didn't know what to do with the bracelet. So she placed it in a box with other treasures from her school days and put it away.

On Feb. 28, 1973, Baugh thought he was going home. He lined up with other POWs in the order they were taken captive. They had agreed that the first in would be the first out.

But suddenly the release was canceled.

On March 4, 1973, they lined up again, trying to contain their hopes. This time, the bus came.

When they reached the airport, their names were called, and one by one Americans escorted them to a waiting plane. They spoke quietly to each other while others boarded.

"But when the wheels went up, we just cheered and yelled," Baugh said.

After more than six years in captivity, an emaciated Baugh was going home. He was blind in his right eye - the optic nerve was destroyed when he crashed onto trees and rocks after bailing out of his plane. He had back problems and had suffered from dysentery and worms.

"I wasn't in too bad of shape," he said. "I missed a lot of stuff that went through the camp."

The POWs were flown to Clark Air Base in the Philippines for physicals before returning to the United States. While hospitalized at Clark, a little girl came by with something for him.

It was a POW bracelet with his name on it.

The next day he bought the girl a watch so she could wear it in place of the bracelet.

When he boarded the plane for home, the girl and her mother were there with a sign showing the name of Baugh's hometown. Baugh broke ranks and went to the fence to hug the girl. She was wearing the watch.

He has tried, but today he can't remember her name.

Wiegel graduated from high school in 1976. She lived in Milwaukee for a while and then moved to Florida. She returned to Wausau before moving to Colorado Springs in 1981.

In 1988, a friend of Wiegel's went to a meeting where Baugh gave a presentation on his days as a POW. Baugh has, with some pain, been telling his story ever since his return from Vietnam. People kept asking about his experiences.

"I think people should know, so they don't take freedom for granted," he said.

Wiegel's friend was telling her Baugh's story when she stopped him. What was the former POW's name? Wiegel asked.

Her friend pronounced Baugh differently than she had as a teen-ager; she asked him to spell it.

It had to be Maj. William Baugh, she thought.

On her next trip home to Wisconsin, Wiegel sorted through her school box and found the bracelet. She brought it back to Colorado Springs and arranged to meet Baugh, who had retired from the Air Force and was working as a public affairs officer at Falcon Air Force Base.

Of the millions of POW bracelets sold during the war, at least 106 had Baugh's name on them. He received many shortly after his return. That Christmas, Baugh designed a card to send to those who had worn his bracelet.

A trickle of bracelets has continued to come through the mail over the years. He always writes back.

When they met, the veteran gave the young woman a book entitled "Prisoner of War," by John McGrath, a former Navy man who Baugh knew in prison. Baugh uses many of McGrath's black-and-white sketches of life as a POW in his presentations.

It wasn't in exchange for the bracelet, he told the young woman, but because she had cared enough to wear it.

"She took good care of this one," he said as he held up the latest addition to his treasured bracelet collection.

They shared stories of their past and marveled about the coincidence that had brought them together in Colorado Springs. The few parallels in their lives stuck out starkly against the differences.

The young woman was stylishly dressed in a dark gray suit and red blouse. She said she managed a nice, modern apartment complex. She said she was 32 years old.

Then she paused. She suddenly realized that she was the same age the veteran had been when he was shot down; that he had been robbed of six years that she would have; that he had been scarred in a way she could never understand.

Then she looked at him.

The veteran nodded knowingly and gazed out the window.

"Yeah, my son said `Hey, dad, I'm the same age you were when.' " . . .'

The veteran broke off with a telling wave of his hand. "I said, `Yeah, I know. I know.' "