Interview with John Borling # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01 Interview # 01: May 29, 2013 Interviewer: Mark DePue

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DePue: Today is Wednesday, May 19, 2013. My name is Mark DePue, the Director of Oral History with the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. Today I’m in the Pritzker Military Library in Chicago, Illinois, a gorgeous facility, and I have the privilege of sitting across the table with General John Borling.

Borling: You’re too generous.

DePue: Good afternoon, General.

Borling: Hi, Mark, how you are?

DePue: Good. I’ve been looking forward to doing this one for quite a while.

Borling: I appreciate your flexibility.

DePue: I know you have a fascinating story, and as I just mentioned to you, I’d like to get quite a bit of background information to figure out who you were before you ended up in the Vietnam War and—very unfortunate for you, I’m sure— spent six and a half years in North Vietnam.

Borling: Came out the better for it actually.

DePue: Well, we’re going to hear your rationale for saying that, but let’s start with when and where you were born. John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

Borling: Chicago, Illinois, March 24, 1940, Lying-In Hospital [this was known as the maternity hospital]. It was the first time that Easter had been on March 24 for hundreds of years, and it won’t be there again. My mother, Vivian Strietelmeier Borling, called me her Easter Lily. I never knew what the hell she was talking about until maybe four or five years ago, I happened to get curious and look that up, on the web, and found that out. So I guess if there’s anything messianic about my comments today, you can blame it on my mother.

DePue: Strietermeier?

Borling: Strietelmeier, German, Deutsche.

DePue: Strietelmeier.

Borling: Strietelmeier, Bouer [a farmer] from Bavaria.

DePue: Borling doesn’t sound very German.

Borling: Borling was really Beurling. It’s anglicized to Borling. My mother was Irish and German; my father was Swedish. I like to say we were born Pogrensa in the old days, in Sweden and Norway—which is right on the border—but I’m not sure it’s true. I lived in Norway for so long, I had to pass as Norwegian, and I love the Norwegians. So there’s typical antipathy between the two, which is more figment than fact, the stuff of jokes and the stuff of good natured competition. But some of it lingers from the World War II period. Anyway, I’m Swedish, Irish and German. My wife is Swedish, Welsh, all that other stuff, but we’re Americans, quintessential Americans. I hate hyphenated Americans.

DePue: Born in 1940. Was your father in the military by chance?

Borling: Born in 1905, he was a cavalry officer, reserve. He got called up in ’43 or ’44, went back up to [Fort] Sheridan. He had a wife and two kids by this time, so that would have made him forty-plus. They’re on their horses, drilling around on the Fort Sheridan grounds, and the colonel comes out—this is when colonels had power—and said, “What are you guys doing?” They said, “Well, we’ve been called up, and we’re drilling our unit here,” horse cavalry, and he said, “Go home,” so they went home.

DePue: In 1943. So he never made it to the war itself then.

Borling: He never did, but again, if you look at it, he was thirty-eight, almost forty years old, with a wife and two kids. I think that was ample reason to excuse him, but Lieutenant Borling was very proud of his cavalry service, starting at the University of Illinois way back when.

DePue: Did you grow up in Chicago?

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Borling: The south side of Chicago, in the family home at 77th and Drexel, 7700 Drexel, built by my grandfather/great-grandfather, and had a two-floor home, another Borling. He had three brothers. His older brother lived upstairs with a wife and two kids, two girls. We lived downstairs; I have a sister. When my dad was 100, we had occasion to take him back through the house.

I stopped by, and the woman who had bought the house from my dad was still there. I’d never met her, but she knew about me. We walked Dad through the house. I got to take some measurements of the house. I always thought it was a spacious place, and it turned out it was about 650 square feet, one little tiny bathroom, a family of four, a coal burning boiler in the basement, and it was home. We thought it was great. My room was five-by- seven.

DePue: Well, that’s going to be vaguely familiar to you.

Borling: I would later live in a five-by-seven room again, for a whole bunch of years. I had windows though, in my room in Chicago.

DePue: Chicago was then, and I think it still is today, a city of neighborhoods. What was your neighborhood like?

Borling: Mixed, and it was just starting to affect the sociological changes as we got into high school, with an influx of black students. But principally, it was…the German phrase is gemischte; it was all mixed up. There were heavy Italian, lots of Jewish people, but not as many on the South Shore, where my wife grew up. I met her in high school. It was a normal Chicago middleclass neighborhood, with focus on the park.

DePue: As you were growing up, on the grammar school—

Borling: My mother was very active in the PTA. My dad was an accountant for a while and then became a salesman for a folding carton company, proud of his Swedish heritage. He later joined, then was president, of the Southside Swedish Club, again, all this on a modest middle class salary. Mom was stay- at-home. We lived right across the street from the high school, a block from the grammar school. It was the old thing, come back when the streetlights come on, kind of thing.

DePue: Growing up, in other words.

Borling: Growing up, yeah, and we roamed around the alleys and the byways and the highways and probably never ventured more than three or four blocks from the stoop, until we obviously got older and more mobile, intractable in our ways, as young men tend to be. Always an emphasis on the church, which was two blocks away, Gustavus Adolphus Lutheran Church. The family focus was strong, and the impetus to do well in school was constant. I don’t ever recall it being onerous, but constant.

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The ability to travel. When I was ten, we took the ’47 DeSoto, the car we got after the war, took it west, down [U.S. Route] 66 and out to California for a convention, and then back across the great western states. I remember, I wanted to see Wyoming, until we got there, and there wasn’t anything to see. We didn’t go to Yellowstone. Colorado, across the Nebraskas and stuff. It was a very interesting trip. A few years later, we went to Florida. I also went to Washington and New York, the Gettysburg area, not New York, Pennsylvania. This was the stuff of, I thought, considerable horizon- stretching for my sister and me.

We also had a small summer home cottage—still a small summer home cottage—on a lake that my grandfather had bought in 1927. A fifty-foot frontage on this small lake, which we still have. In fact, I bought everybody out. That’s a mooring point for us, and I’ll be going there for the first time this year, on Saturday, on the first of June. I’m looking forward to that. Actually, I was up in the winter to get some work done.

DePue: Was the small summer home smaller than your house?

Borling: It’s bigger. (DePue laughs) It’s bigger! It’s 1,000 square feet, three bedrooms.

DePue: You mentioned a park that you grew up next to. What was the park?

Borling: Grand Crossing Park. It was a standard thing, about a block wide and two blocks long. It had a gym and a swimming pool. The park was a central focus for us when we were growing up. I was a member of the Park Boys in grammar school. In fact, we had a football team that was so good, we didn’t lose a game our eighth grade year. In fact, not only did we not lose a game in this park league, we didn’t have a point scored on us. We would win games, like sixty or seventy to nothing. We had a heck of a team, and then we got to high school and things changed.

DePue: How would you describe your father, his personality and characteristics?

Borling: Reserved, sincere, caring, not overly athletic, liked to fish, supportive, a pillar of the community, reasonable golfer, really enjoyed Michigan, a good salesman. He became the house salesman for Ritchie and later Stone Container. He ended up being the oldest annuitant on the Stone Container rolls, died at 102.

DePue: So you can be reserved and still be a good salesman?

Borling: Yeah, absolutely. I always thought him to be kind of non-aggressive, but that was probably just my critical estimation as a young man growing up. It perhaps contributed for me ricocheting/caroming into the world of the fighter pilot.

DePue: How would you describe your relationship with him?

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Borling: Good, except for certain teenage, growing up things (DePue laughs) that I think most sons and fathers have, but good, yeah, very good.

DePue: How about your mother? You said she’s a stay-at-home mom.

Borling: Really close to my mom, a great sense of humor, great personality. I think my personality is a lot closer to my mom. She was a favorite of all of us. We lived across the street from the high school. All the guys—not all the guys, but four or five of the guys—would come over for lunch every day. We had a milk bill that would have supported, I think, half the high school. Guys would bring their sandwiches, and most of the time Mom would make something up. She’d literally have two or three people for lunch during high school for my entire high school years, four years.

We all were great jazz lovers. I had a Jim Lansing eight-inch speaker, and we would play Stan Kenton, “Cuban Fire!” and “Kenton in Hi-Fi” and pretend we were playing instruments. I played the piano for a while, never got very good at it but still do play the piano, but just for my own enjoyment, the essence of the human condition being creation. I liked to improvise, can do a little of that but not with any recognizable talent. I joke that I got laughed out of the Playboy Club one night. I was sitting in, playing “Jesus Loves Me.” Do you know the song?

DePue: Absolutely.

Borling: Can you hum it?

DePue: Yeah.

Borling: What is it?

DePue: I’m afraid I’m going to hum something different from what you’re thinking. (hums “Jesus Loves Me.”)

Borling: That’s it; that’s it (hums). And then, at that point, the bass and drums would cut in. I’d get the big ten-finger Brubeck chords until I lost technique. We would swing, “Jesus Loves Me.” We were doing this on the second floor of the Playboy Club, and this blonde heckled me so badly—the old Chicago raspberry, no talent and all, that stuff—that I decided I’d better become a fighter pilot instead of a jazz pianist. So that was the end of that. There was a follow-on; I married the blonde. We’ll be married fifty years this year.

DePue: Well, congratulations.

Borling: Thank you. I will accept all of your support of my contributions to the marital enterprise, not that there are many.

DePue: You mentioned that the family went to Gustavus Adolphus.

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Borling: Lutheran Church. In fact, my father was married by Reverend Parkander; in 1935 my parents were married. My dad at that point was thirty years old, right? And mother was a few years younger.

The reason that Parkander is important: when I later went to Augustana College, I had a lady, who I just saw a couple of weeks ago. I got an award at Augustana College. I only went there a year. But Dorothy Parkander was an incredible literature teacher, a great beacon of humanities and liberal arts education, which I have favored my entire life, believing that the nation, in fact, needs a robust liberal arts education as the basis for our K-1 through 12 curriculum, rather than all this math and science nonsense.

What we need are people who can sift and winnow the ideas of the millennia, in terms of being involved in an intelligent body politic. The engineers will go find themselves. We don’t need every man an engineer or every woman a mathematician; we need some significant percentage. But their Myers-Briggs profiles will lead them there, irrespective of anything that we try to do on the American education system. We’re so wildly off target that I worry for the country.

Dorothy Parkander still lives. I gave her a copy of my book. I told her she was always…I remember the first lecture, it was Homer. She talked about the first line from Homer and “sailing the wine-dark seas.” So I inscribed something to her in the book, that if there will be any heroic literary deficiencies that would be present in my book, I wanted her to know that I didn’t blame them all on her.

DePue: For that small minority that might be curious, you mentioned Myers-Briggs. Do you know what your profile was?

Borling: ENTJ [extraversion, intuition, thinking, judging], and that was, is…although the plasticity of the mind is best represented in the book, The Brain That Changes Itself, suggests that you can rewire, notwithstanding Otto Kroeger’s protestations to the reverse, but I am an ENTJ.

DePue: We’re pretty close. I came out as an INTJ [introversion, intuition, thinking, judging].

Borling: An INTJ. Well then, we should be married. My wife is an ISTP [introversion, sensing, thinking, perception], but the bottom line orientation, with the T being bottom line, versus the F, which is the feeling. I’m fond of saying an ENTJ is hell to be married to, but we make great lovers. Do you know what the real shorthand is for ENTJ?

DePue: No.

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Borling: This is a little self-serving, but it’s not my characterization; it’s Otto Kroeger’s, who is the godfather of all this stuff, in terms of teaching it. It’s life’s natural leaders. I don’t know what an INTJ would be.

DePue: I can’t recall.

Borling: They all have strong points, and we’re all, again, to use the term gemischte [German for “mixed”], so you work on things. But ENTJs can be particularly onerous in a conversation where people think they have something to say.

DePue: You mean it’s hard for somebody else to jump in?

Borling: Exactly.

DePue: Well, let me jump in with this question. You mentioned that a school was right across the street. I assume you went to that high school?

Borling: I went a block away; it was Cornell Grammar School. My great grandfather was one of the principal foremen for Paul Cornell, who deeded a good deal of the South Side, Hyde Park. In fact, we later lived at 5000 South East End. East End was the easternmost street of the Paul Cornell development in Hyde Park. My grandfather would walk me around Hyde Park and point out all the buildings that my great grandfather basically been foreman on. Everything else to the east of East End was land that Paul Cornell gave to the city.

People would literally travel from the city to Hyde Park in the summer for vacation. It was only five or six miles, but that’s what he did. So Cornell Grammar School—now razed to the ground—is where I went to school, a block from my house. It was at 76th and Drexel, and we were at 77th. So you’d walk down there to school. Sometimes it would take me an hour to get home.

DePue: How about high school?

Borling: You don’t want to know why it took me an hour to get home?

DePue: I should, shouldn’t I?

Borling: You should; that was meant to be a set-up question.

DePue: And I blew it.

Borling: No, you didn’t blow it; I cued you. I expect you to cue me. This is not a zero- defects approach. Ms. McNally was the librarian. I loved the library, and I was a good student, after I almost failed first grade. They thought I was retarded, because I wasn’t progressing. Actually, my mother had it doped out from the start. She said, “He’s not progressing; he’s progressed. He’s just bored.” And I was. I had all these terrible report cards in first grade, I can

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remember, and they were going to hold me back. My mother was a mother, and she said, “He’s been reading since three.”

Anyway, Ms. Meyers, who was my teacher…I loved my grammar school teachers, irrespective of how dense she was with respect to my academic potential. But then I got into Ms. Foley’s class in the second grade, and there I became terribly attracted to Theresa Romano. I remember the incident when they found out that I had the sweets for Theresa, with her black, curly…What do they call those kind of curls, ringlet curls? Not ringlet, tambourine curls? No, not tambourine. Anyway, wide, black curls.

DePue: Curls?

Borling: Yeah. There was something about her. She was a beautiful little Italian lady— still is—married to a guy in Las Vegas.

DePue: I assume this is your classmate.

Borling: My classmate, yes, Theresa, second grade. I remember jumping over the desk with the Italian guys chasing me, telling her we couldn’t be boyfriend and girlfriend anymore. She looked at me with that blank look, like, I didn’t know we were. I didn’t have another girlfriend until eighth grade; that was so traumatic.

But I would spend time in the library, and Ms. McNally would hide me from the bullies who were against me making good grades and being active in class. I always thought class was kind of a competition; you were supposed to show your stuff. I was always eager to raise my hand and show the teacher I knew what the hell she was talking about.

DePue: Then how do you explain the poor grades?

Borling: That was why sometimes it would take me an hour. Well, that was just in first grade. Then we matched the course after that. The guys would be waiting for me, to beat me up, so I’d have to… I lived a block away from school. I’d have to go on a very circuitous route home, so I wouldn’t get my tail handed to me. I’m overstating the case, but there was more than once where I’m crouched down in the library by the glass doors, and there’s guys looking for me, and Ms. McNally won’t let them in the library. Then I’d sneak out another door of the school to get home.

That syndrome, about a certain segment of the student population railing against those who perform versus those who don’t wasn’t just characteristic of my years growing up, it continues today. There is this unfortunate—but I think it’s a condition of human nature—need to batter down anyone who tries to stick their head out of the pack. We wrestle with that as a compassionate nation, as a semi-egalitarian nation, when really we’re

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not. We exist and thrive to the extent that we encourage performance. We encourage a meritocracy; we accept de facto an oligarchical approach to life.

DePue: It’s an interesting comment to make from somebody who spent your career in a very competitive business, always striving for that next promotion.

Borling: I didn’t say I was for egalitarianism; I said I was for a meritocracy. Actually, I think the right term—I wouldn’t have used it as a young man, but I use it now, less needy of recognition—would be that charactered ambition is what’s important. Franklin suggested that avarice and ambition are the basic passions of mankind. I suspect that’s fairly close, but charactered ambition can be defined as the desire to do something rather than to be somebody. It’s kind of an old saw, but it’s good to remind oneself when you examine motivation in life, your own and others.

My fourth great mentor was John Gardner. God, I miss John Gardner, a citizen of our times, or so termed at his memorial service, by our president. John was fond, in his wonderful writings, of coming up with ways of capturing thoughts that the rest of us just…We kind of claw at the face of the rock, trying to gain elevation. He’s standing up there throwing out these thoughts in such wonderfully sagacious and yet humorous ways. Whenever we cut tapes together, I would always just kind of give him his lead and let him go. He talked about horse sense. Do you know what horse sense is?

DePue: Yeah.

Borling: What is it?

DePue: You’re putting me on the spot today. Horse sense is the same kind of notion as common sense. It’s the kind of sense that you make the right decisions, based on the information you’re getting.

Borling: I think you’re dead on. John Gardner, on the other hand, submitted that horse sense is the good judgment that horses display when they didn’t bet on people. (DePue laughs) Then he was quick to follow that up with, “But we have to bet on people; that’s our only recourse.” He said, “So when you’re betting on people”—and I think we came to this somewhat together; I’ll take a little credit for this— “you have to examine motivation.” You try the best you can to assess motivation, and then you put your chips on the individual whose motivation either most closely aligns with your own interests or is purer or worthy of respect and support. So, horse sense, in John Gardner’s definition, is something I’ve tried to incorporate in my own life by, when I’m doing something, I want to check motivation, my own motivation.

I ran for public office, and I was a terrible candidate apparently. I didn’t get any votes. I found out you can’t be a pro-choice Republican or a moderate Republican. I just happened to have pro-choice in there as well. But really went through kind of a Reinhold Niebuhr agonizing reappraisal of

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what’s the motivation; why am I doing this? Is this an ego trip or ego run, or are we trying to really do something versus be somebody. Regardless of the motivation, it cost a hell of a lot of money.

DePue: You’ve mentioned quite a few names, already, of people who were important in your life. Who would you say had the strongest influences on you?

Borling: There’s been four. Besides Dad, obviously, and a very strong family life, as contentious as it may have been from time to time, a strong family life. I don’t know why I ever survived teenage years. I guess I learned to breathe through a pillow; I don’t know. That’s supposed to be funny. All teenagers, I think, come up with the facility of learning to breathe through a pillow, when their parents are unsuccessful at exterminating them. I have a friend in this town who, when we were talking about issues of life and death, even the abortion issue…She claims that a fetus is viable, or a young person deserves to live, when it has graduated from medical school.

But of the four people, there was a sergeant, Joseph Ehrich, Master Sergeant Joseph Ehrich. E-h-r-i-c-h. I think it’s Joseph E. Ehrich actually, Joseph E. or Joseph F.; I’ve forgotten. He was my junior ROTC [Reserve Officer Training Corps] instructor and gave me the highest reward that I’ve ever received in my whole life, the day I graduated, or the night we graduated, from high school. I was the president of the class, and I gave a crummy speech; I read it. I did have one adlib line, which fifty years later…At the obligatory fifty-year reunion thing, people came up to me and repeated that one adlibbed line. I couldn’t believe it. “Tonight we go our separate ways, some never to meet again.” I remember sitting down in my chair at the end of my read speech, thinking, Boy, Borling, that was really a crummy speech. I’m never going to do that again, and I never have.

But as I went out to the back of the auditorium, Joe Ehrich was there. I’d been his battalion commander—that was the size of our unit in the high school—for three semesters, kind of unheard of from some junior and oh, as a senior. He grabbed me, hugged me and looked me in the eye, with a little tear in his eye, and he said, “I wish you were my son.” I went away that night; I never saw Joe Ehrich again. I never called him, never wrote him, never said thank you. After the war, I tried to find him, to do precisely that, but I could never find Joe Ehrich. I spent a lot of money; I spent a lot of time. He married a Brit, and I think they may have gone back to England.

Every time I’ve hit a crossroads in life, where some fairly distinct or indistinct choices needed to be made, and I’ve taken the time to ask myself, What would Joe Ehrich want me to do? And I’ve done that; it’s been great. Every time I’ve resisted that obvious choice, it’s been a bloody disaster, which goes back to John Gardner, who says, “When you fail, and you will”—and he was right—he said, “Then you just pick yourself up and dust yourself off and move on down the road.” He said the trick, of course, is not to be complicitous

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[complicit] in your own failure. (DePue laughs) How often have I failed in that regard?

When you asked me about the guy who was most determinative, I remember being in that little front room, that eight-by-eight, eight-by-ten maybe, front room that we had. The biggest room was the dining room, always. In a Swedish house, the dining room is the big room. My dad was over there on a couch, in the bay window, and Joe was on a chair here. I was kind of slouched up against the fireplace. It was a faux fireplace. It was after school one day, and I don’t know why Joe was in the house. It was probably the only time he was in the house.

So they’re talking, and I’m saying to my dad, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” The next thing I know, this little—he’s a little guy, a little sergeant—he’s got me up against the wall, banging me up against the wall. He said, “You call me Sir." and “I’m a sergeant.” He said, “You call your father Sir.” “Yes, Sir.” That was the last time I ever referred to my dad as anything but Sir or Dad. I think I can almost bring back why that meeting took place.

I’ve never thought of this for all the years. I may be making this up, but it’s not far from the truth. We’ve talked about the tribulations that young men, especially pretty aggressive young men, and their fathers have, the old bull, young bull in the forest thing. There had been one of those incidents. There weren’t many, but there were a couple.

I’d grown; I was a pretty big guy by that time. I entered high school small, five-two, 120. By the time I left, six-two, 185 kind of thing, football and all that. I think Joe might have been called over by my parents to say, you’ve got to help us with this guy. I’m serious. I think that’s the only reason that Joe would be in our house. I can remember being pinned up against the wall by this guy. That’s all it took, banged my head against the wall. So Dad was Dad or Sir from then until the day he died.

DePue: A gentle wake-up call for you.

Borling: Gentle my ass, he hit my head on the wall. (DePue laughs) That was Joe Ehrich; he was a big guy, a big guy.

DePue: Remind me again, John Gardner, your relationship with Gardner.

Borling: I was a White House Fellow later in life, very fortunate to be selected for that very competitive program, you know; it is a competition.

DePue: What fellow again?

Borling: A White House Fellowship. It’s a nationwide annual competition where they take twelve to eighteen folks, who get sifted and winnowed out of thousands,

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to serve at the principal cabinet level. I don’t have to go on about the White House Fellows Program, unless you’re not familiar with it.

DePue: No, and from my understanding that was shortly after you were released.

Borling: Yeah. It was surprising that I snuck my nose under the tent at that point, but I’d had enough pol-mil, principally speaking experience.

By the way, the speaking thing…I went a semester at Navy Pier, graduated in February of ’58. I went down to Navy Pier, where I had a great time being a first semester freshman in a big city, with all the things it had to offer. I lockered with a Korean vet who showed me a lot and then was unsuccessful for the [military] academies, all of them.

That first year, I tried for all the academies and went on to Augustana College in Rock Island, almost by default, a Lutheran church school, liberal arts. I went down there because some friends had gone down there and all the wrong reasons I guess. But boy, what a choice, because I had two professors, actually three, for the year I was there. I joked that the University of Illinois found me out in six months. Augustana College found me out in a year, and the Air Force, when I finally went there, didn’t find me out for thirty-seven years.

But Professor Holcomb, Martin Holcomb, who was a national level debate coach and speech guy, got a hold of me. My big brother in the fraternity I belonged to, Dick Johannasen, was there. He and Marty Katz were the two—a Jewish guy, Marty Katz—at the Lutheran church school. Marty is still in Rock Island, a big supporter. I haven’t seen him in years. Dick and Marty were the lead debaters, and Dick got me into debate. I think it was his example, and then Martin Holcomb, Professor Holcomb—he’s dead now— got his hands on me and got into the impromptu and the extemp [extemporaneous] speaking and the oratory and debate, which I followed up on at the academy. I credit Professor Holcomb with making sure that I never read another speech. It’s okay to have a few notes, but ideally, you don’t even have that.

Then there’s Dorothy Parkander, again, to mention Dr. Parkander, with respect to her. She had courses where you’d sign up; you would have to stand in line early in the morning. I lucked out in the first semester and got her and then the second semester, found out how hard it was to get into her class. The class would go from twenty or thirty to a larger lecturer, and she lectured; that’s what she did. The class was so big she couldn’t have much interaction. She would do some of that and end up with 150 people. Twenty people are paying, and everybody else is auditing the course, just to be with Dorothy Parkander. In fact, there was a statement that if you haven’t had a course from Dorothy Parkander at Augustana—and there was some metaphor I’ve forgotten—it would be like walking across the Sahara without seeing any sand

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kind of thing. She was just amazing, and she’s amazing to this day. She just quit a couple years ago and is still vibrant and fun. Again, I was an unremarkable student at Augustana, drinking beer, raising hell, playing fraternity.

DePue: I wanted to go back to a couple questions about high school.

Borling: Sure.

DePue: A very short question, what was the name of the high school you went to?

Borling: Hirsch, H-i-r-s-c-h, right across the street from where I lived and a good high school. There’s an observation, which one needs to make, although it can be tinged as racist in nature. You see these schools—Myrna went to South Shore, which was the greatest high school in Chicago, a wonderful high school—to see the schools go from highly performing schools to below average and then well below average, until they’re abysmal, in a period of a few years. It forces questions that I don’t think society is yet willing to wrestle with. Multiplicity in answering that question is probably fair. But at the end of the day, I think a no-holds-barred, critical examination of why our public school systems fail is a legitimate question.

I will offer a legitimate answer, and that is that we have forgotten what the purpose of our public education system is. We don’t have a common national appreciation of it. I think we need a local implementation, but the common national explanation or purpose or exposition of purpose, I think, is required. So, if I was to ask you the question, The purpose of the public school educational system, K-1 through 12, is to… Finish the sentence.

DePue: Educate the young to be successful in society.

Borling: You can’t say education to educate, you can’t use the same definitional things. The purpose of the educational system is to…?

DePue: You’re turning the tables on me a lot here, John.

Borling: You can’t say…To say, jump. Well, the jump is to jump; you can’t, no. We’re talking about the educational system, so you can’t use the verb to educate.

DePue: Can we use the verb train?

Borling: Sure. Okay, go ahead, you finish it. The purpose is to…?

DePue: Train the mind to analyze and to think and to train the individual to be successful in society.

Borling: That’s fair; I will accept that. But do we confuse the difference between education and training?

13 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

DePue: Well, that’s why I threw the word analyze in there, to train them how to think.

Borling: Analyze applies a cognitive capacity, okay? I’m fond of saying that people get hung up on what is education and what is training. You ask them, “Would you prefer your teenage daughter to receive sex education or sex training?” (DePue laughs) It tends to clarify matters.

Let me finish the phrase. The purpose is to provide the student with the skills and the confidence to identify and solve problems and appreciate good manners and beauty, a complete philosophy, as you know. One of the fields of the five fields is the subject matter represented by aesthetics. If the Greeks thought it was important enough to be included in the other scrolls, I suspect I can accept that too.

DePue: You’ve already suggested that you were more drawn to the humanities than science and engineering. I assume that happened in high school.

Borling: I’ve got a science background. I took four years of science, four years of math, four years of English.

DePue: Well, that was my next question and yet, you also said that you—

Borling: Well, it was college preparatory, and you did that. You took four years of science, four years of math; you took all your algebras; you took your trigs; you took your college algebras. I mean. you just took all the math you could get, and you took your general science. You took biology in the second year; you took physics in your third year, and you took chemistry in your fourth year. That’s what you did.

DePue: What led to your decision to apply to all of the academies?

Borling: I wanted to get in one. I got rejected in the first year because I failed. They sent six high school seniors to West Point, out of the whole city, and that’s the first time I was ever on an airplane. They sent me and five other guys—I was very lucky to be included—to West Point for a weekend. I really wanted to go to West Point, and now I’m there as a high school senior, living with a second year, a yearling cadet. Chip Fenton was his name. I wonder whatever the hell happened to Chip Fenton.

Anyway, we lived in those unheated barracks, and they played Rutgers or somebody at football. We marched to meals and did all of that. There was the Patton statue, pointing at the library, because you never went there, (DePue laughs) and flirtation walk. We didn’t flirt, but we saw all that stuff on the banks of the Hudson. I went back last year, the first time I’ve been back in all those years. It was really crowded, kind of a dinky looking place really. Not as dinky looking as Annapolis, but it’s really too compact. It’s pretty in its own way, but they ruined the old architecture, I think.

14 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

Anyway, I came back with pneumonia and wanted to go to West Point. So I tried West Point and busted the tests, just didn’t pass them.

DePue: But you haven’t said why you wanted to go to West Point or any of the academies.

Borling: Oh, I wanted to be a great captain.

DePue: You recognized by that time, that leadership was something that was in your future?

Borling: You’ve forced me into a non-humble corner. Let me cast an answer perhaps that will shed light on your question. In 1973, Salt Walther took the wall at Indianapolis. Remember that big, fiery crash? The [Chicago]Tribune ran a picture of this guy wrapping himself up in flame and molten metal and all that crap. The caption, as I recall, was, “This in the name of sport?” With a big question mark. And the answer to that question is…?

DePue: I don’t know.

Borling: Well I do, the answer is no. But if you change the caption, “This in the name of competition?” Now what’s the answer?

DePue: Obviously, yes.

Borling: I would say, most affirmatively, yes. Hemingway suggested that there were three blood sports, and all the rest were just games that boys played. Do you know what the three blood sports are?

DePue: Boxing, wrestling and war.

Borling: Interesting concept, that war is a sport. He suggested that it was mountain climbing, bullfighting and grand prix auto racing. But I’d throw [in] our open wheel Indianapolis NASCAR, not NASCAR, but the open wheel racing. Do you know they’re still running the Mille Miglia?1 In 1957, when Portago took his Ferrari into the crowd and killed all those people and stuff, it was not the first time. But every year they still run it from Brescia down to Rome and back up. They don’t race any more, except someone has failed to tell the Italians that. (DePue laughs)

They still go roaming around, going through towns at 160 miles an hour. They’re driving the old vintage cars, plus the new ones. In fact, there was just an article in Financial Times about guys driving the new F-Jag. It looks like… It’s a sleeker version of the old E-Jag, which was a classic car,

1 The Mille Miglia was an open-road, motorsport endurance race that took place in Italy twenty-four times from 1927 to 1957. Like the older Targa Florio. The MM made grand tourers like Alfa Romeo, BMW, Ferrari, Maserati, Mercedes Benz and Porsche famous.

15 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

gosh. I had a chance to have one, and I didn’t get one. I’ve got this on my thing, to go run the Mille Miglia, the 1,000 mile race. But they don’t race; it’s just everyone drives really fast, and so it’s great.

The corner that you were backing me into was a corner of the leadership question. John Gardner, by the way, wrote the definitive book on it. It’s one of three books I’ve recommended in thirty years. It’s called On Leadership. The Clausewitzian business is obvious, a wonderful book. I’ve given it to a lot of CEOs and chairmen in this town and to others. I use it as a reference book all the time. It’s kind of like you used to keep Thoreau’s Walden at your bedside. I keep On Leadership by my bedside. I have always relished competition and sometimes I’ve even won.

DePue: Did you play sports in high school?

Borling: Oh, yeah, sure, I played sports a lot. I started off little, as I said, and then grew up and played. My first letter was rifle team. In the old days in Chicago, we’d go down to the armory, the ROTC, open up the armory, shoot. If we had to go to Fenger or someplace and shoot against them, you’d grab your gun and walk through school [with it] in a case, throw it in the car and go.

We didn’t have any adult supervision. We had M1s down there and BARs.2 We didn’t have any BAR ammo; we had M1 ammo. We tried to shoot it one day and damn near destroyed the bullet trap, which was .22. No, we didn’t shoot the ammo; we shot a .45, and the thing was ricocheting around there, teenage kids with no supervision.

I was the battalion commander, so I was in charge. We would have enormous responsibility, in terms of leading the younger cadets and things. The ROTC programs were looked at…That was the wimp program in high school. It wasn’t a wimp for me. I played football and was class officer and all that stuff, so I just viewed it as another way to have a more rounded approach and be a little different. When you asked me about this leadership thing, I guess I’ve always tried to be a little different.

DePue: I assume that applying to the academy was an aspect of being competitive too?

Borling: Oh, yeah, yeah. I was devastated when I didn’t get in. The first year, when I blew the test for West Point, I did okay for Annapolis, but I got rejected on the physical, up at Great Lakes. I was rejected from the Naval Academy on account of extreme ugliness.

DePue: I think not.

2 The M1 is a rifle, as is the BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle), known by its initials. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1_Garand)

16 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

Borling: No, it’s true. These teeth were inverted Vs; these are crowns. My two front teeth were like that. I’d gone over the handlebars of my bike. I used to pass it off as a football injury, but actually my female cousin, a couple of years older, had taken me out in a bike race, you know, that stuff where they used to cut between the sidewalk and the grass? I got my front wheel in there and tried to get it out and went over the handlebars, made a perfect three-point landing, two knees and my face, and left my teeth. I can remember when we went to the dentist with my mother and these little shards of tooth that she’d scraped up off the sidewalk. Dr. Gilruth—how did I pull that one [name] out?—Dr. Gilruth looked at it, and he said, “I can’t do anything with this.”

I went through high school with this inverted V. We didn’t have money for cosmetic dentistry. But the gunny or whatever he was, the petty officer, said, “You’re not going to Annapolis.” [He] showed me; it said, “Extreme ugliness.” That was the box he’d checked. So that kind of teed me off.

That year, the Air Force Academy took thirteen from the state. They weren’t taking full classes yet. I was number fourteen. I went, as I say, on to Augustana College. The next year, I didn’t try for Annapolis. I tried for West Point and the Air Force Academy, which had kind of launched into prominence in my thinking, because of my uncle Dick, who was a World War II guy, B-24s, a prisoner of war.3

DePue: Was West Point your first choice?

Borling: It was, going into that year at Augustana, but when I came out the other side, I was very much Air Force, first choice.

DePue: By that time you wanted to be a pilot?

Borling: No, by that time—Do you really want to know?—I thought the uniforms were cool, and I’d get a lot of girls. I liked the newness of it, and I liked the fact that it was in Colorado, and I liked the fact that they had a football team that tied SMU in the Cotton Bowl, and they only had like 500 people in the whole school at that time. I liked the fact that there was something mystical about the air.

My uncle Dick, this is his ring that I’m wearing from B-24s. They made that after they got out of prison camp. It’s made out of vitallium; it’s a dental metal. The dentist on the crew made it. I had taken the tests and passed everything except the physical. The physical came back to haunt me. They said I’d flunked my serology. Do you have any idea what that is?

DePue: No, I don’t.

3 The B-24 was an important bomber in WWII. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_B-24_Liberator)

17 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

Borling: It’s because you’ve never flunked your serology. That meant I had a social disease. So there I was dumb, ugly, with a social disease, a perfect candidate to be a fighter pilot. (DePue laughs)

Now, as it turned out, there was a chain of custody problem because they sent it [the physical] down to Chanute, and they were screwing around with it. There was no way—this is right up there with the virgin birth—there was no way I would have anything, although after the second try, my mother was asking me if I’d been to any bus stations recently.

Anyway, that got straightened out, and I went out to the Academy and entered in the first full class, the first class to spend all four years at the site. We’re very proud of that. This is our fiftieth reunion this year, and graduation from the academy remains…It’s what Joe Ehrich said to me was the highest honor that I’ve ever received. The most important day of my life was the day I graduated from the Air Force Academy. I hold it in absolutely the…It is…What’s it? The ziggurat, or whatever the hell that thing is, the top of the crenellated staircase or whatever it is. That’s a defining quality. If people ask me, What are you missing? I graduated from the Air Force Academy.

DePue: Because afterwards, all opportunities are opened to you?

Borling: No, it was life. At the end, I wrote a poem called “This I Believe.” Some are made for mountains, and some prefer the plain, But all must have a self-esteem to bring them home again. Values come from people assessing their amounts Those worthy of respect and pride all know the striving counts.

While I’ve suggested that just the trying or the striving counts; in the end, self-esteem comes from accomplishment.

In my world, it’s a series of wickets. You get through school; you’re this; you’re that. You get through the next school, or you get through the next thing as you’re growing up. You don’t stub your toe too badly. You don’t fall into a trap that’s irremediable in terms of recovery.

I had opportunity to come close to a lot of those, but grace of God stuff, that didn’t happen. So, graduating from the academy was kind of the, I can stand on my own two feet and already look back. And at the age of twenty-three, I can say, I’m okay. I’m okay, from looking at me, and I can go on now with kind of a confidence in life that no matter what else happens, I at least did that. That’s not to say, then you sit on your duff. It’s further impetus to keep…I have used this somewhere; I’ve written it or spoken it. Do you know who Sisyphus is?

DePue: Vaguely.

Borling: Well, vaguely, who was Sisyphus?

18 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

DePue: It’s a Greek god, I believe.

Borling: A mythological character who was vacillatory in life and whose punishment …I’m not sure it’s in the Inferno, not Dan Brown’s Inferno, but Dante’s Inferno. I don’t think he’s there. But anyways, his job was to push rocks for all eternity, up a hill. He gets it up almost to the edge, and it rolls back down. Well, my view of life…Camus this sounds like.

I’m really a learned guy, but Camus wrote a book called The Myth of Sisyphus. His contention was that Sisyphus was a happy man. You see, I’m giving away the fact that I have a classical education from the University of Chicago, which you didn’t know about.

DePue: Go ahead.

Borling: You didn’t know about it; it’s not in the biography.

DePue: No.

Borling: I thought it would be presumptuous to put it in the biography because I got it on a drive-by basis. That’s also supposed to be very funny. Anyway, this guy Camus apparently said that Sisyphus was a happy man because he had something to do. C-a-m-u-s Albert.

My view is that that’s not right really. I think the job really is to push the rock and to get it up and over the hill. Then it rolls down, and then what do you see?

DePue: You see the valley.

Borling: You’re right; you’re in the valley; you see another hill. The stuff of life or the essence of life is pushing rocks. So, I think I’ve had…I would agree with Camus that pushing rocks is a good form of activity, but you’ve got to get up and over the hill. Then you’ve got to do it again and again and again.

I’m writing a second book. It’s called Comrade and Emperor: Be Your Own Best Friend and Ruler of Your Soul. One of the personage is [Vladimir] Lenin. Lenin said, “Life is struggle.” Well, he’s wrong; life should be…It is, but why can’t it be a joyful struggle? I think pushing rocks can be a joyful struggle, rocks of all kinds. There are causes, economic; they’re spiritual; they’re physical. I haven’t run in three days, and I feel like I’ve failed to push my physical rock. But I’ve been on a hard schedule for the last three days.

DePue: Would it be fair to say that you graduated from the Air Force Academy, and letting that rock roll back down the hill was not an option for you?

Borling: It’s never been an option. It’s never been an option. I didn’t know it, but it’s never been an option.

19 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

DePue: Tell me why you felt that that experience, the four years at the academy, made you so proud to be able to say that you’ve completed that?

Borling: That’s a great question. In fact, you’ve just hit virgin territory. I’ve had a lot of questions and a lot of interviewers in life, and I normally manage to chase them off after a reasonable period of time. You look like you have staying power. That’s disconcerting, especially when you come up with a new question.

One, it was a big mountain and a big rock, just the fact that you are at the academy. I went there and god, I was afraid of failing. I think I’ve been apprehensive about a lot of jobs. In fact, I think you should be apprehensive about jobs, as you go up. I would come home every summer for a period of time, not long, and as you went up, I would always say, “I’m making no promises. I’m doing the best I can.” Actually, I really wasn’t doing the best I could, but I was working at it.

The first couple of years were pretty much vanilla years. It was humanities; we didn’t have majors in those days. Our curriculum would be split, about half science and engineering, math and that stuff and half liberal arts, which I thought was an amazingly fine thing to do. We would take about twenty hours a semester.

Then, if you wanted to get a major, you’d have to overload. So then you’d take twenty-three, or in some cases I’d double overload. Once or twice, I think, [I] took twenty-six hours; that was a load, with everything else going on. But they were kind of nothing courses; you could learn them in a night if you had to. I did. That enabled me to come out of the academy with a Bachelor of Science degree with a major in humanities and a minor in management, which was a pretty unusual deal. I’ve never used, to speak of, the science, but god, I’ve used the humanities. In fact, the humanities kept me alive.

I have two girls. Fighter pilots always have girls; it’s God’s revenge and his great blessing, his great blessing. I told the girls they had to take seven courses in college. They both graduated from college, both of them on a six- year program, but they graduated. I personally have their graduation certificates, and I intend to pay off their college and their wedding[s], one of these years. I hold the specter of financial recovery out in front of their husbands. No, I don’t. Son-in-laws learn quickly that the one rule is that father-in-laws can never be wrong.

The seven courses are public speaking, number one—thank you, Professor Holcomb—a basic course in philosophy, a philosophy 101 survey course. So you know how the ideas of the millennia have percolated through, affected the changes that we see in the human condition, not necessarily human nature—thank you Mal Wakin, another mentor, M-a-l-h-a-m Wakin,

20 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

Captain Wakin, now Brigadier General, Retired, Wakin, a permanent professor at the academy—philosophy 101, and then a survey course in art appreciation, a survey course in music appreciation—boy that will stay with you for a lifetime—a course in comparative religion. I had that at Augustana too.

DePue: I would assume you did not have that at the academy though.

Borling: No, we didn’t have that at the academy. A course in political economy, we had that at the academy, a combination of demographics, resources, geography, et cetera, how that has impacted things. Then a basic psychology course, so you find out you’re about as screwed up as everybody else is, and all you’ve got to do is function. Don’t give yourself a failing grade when everybody else has already flunked the course. Everyone, in fact, has probably passed the course, and you can include yourself in the great group. They won’t even know you’re there, as long as you just continue to march, which is kind of my watch word in life. In fact, I am president of the club. Are you familiar with the club?

DePue: No.

Borling: Oh, it’s the Continue to March Club. Would you like to join?

DePue: What’s involved, just a commitment to continue to march?

Borling: I’m going to ask you one more time if you would like to join.

DePue: Sure.

Borling: Okay. Well, you remember, because if you had said, tell me more, then I wouldn’t have invited you to join the club. The supposition is that you want people with a lean forward approach, who are willing to take on faith the offer that you can now make as you proselytize new members in this club that has membership on seven continents and a website. There’s nothing on the website, (DePue laughs) but we’ve got our own URL. And because of your lean forward approach, I will waive the initiation fee. I hope you find yourself relieved.

DePue: Well, I think the next obvious question is what was the initiation fee?

Borling: Well, it varies. Actually, it doesn’t vary much, because I’m like that guy in Catch-22, who scheduled parades and then canceled them. So, there’s no initiation fee…several hundred thousand dollars probably, but I waive it. That does not mean necessarily that we or I, as the president of the club, am willing to defer the annual dues.

DePue: What are the annual dues?

21 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

Borling: They’re a quarter.

DePue: A quarter of what?

Borling: Just a quarter. But it’s such a pain in the ass to collect the quarter (DePue laughs) that I defer the quarter. You will be pleased to know that there are no meetings to attend; there are no Internet lists to maintain. You are fully accredited as a member and can proselytize, using the same thing. You ask them once. If they push you, you can ask them twice. We have no three-time- ask members in this club. Oh, when the election is held for the president of the club, there will be one name on the ballot, and you must vote for that one name.

DePue: And the name is?

Borling: John Borling.

DePue: Well, this is less involved than even being an Optimist, and I’m an Optimist.4

Borling: You’re an Optimist? How would you define optimism?

DePue: Optimism is a positive approach to the future.

Borling: You know, jumping ahead to the time in Vietnam, in prison, we had optimists and pessimists. Are you familiar with our definition?

DePue: No. I do think I saw that in the book.

Borling: It is in the book, about the pessimists thinking we would die up there, and they wouldn’t even send our bodies home.

DePue: And the optimists knew that they would send the bodies home.

Borling: Send the bodies home. Isn’t that great? I love that. (Borling laughs)

DePue: I do remember that. Let me go back to your time―

Borling: Go back; let’s go back.

DePue: …at the academy. You made an interesting comment―

Borling: We’re out of grammar school and high school?

DePue: If that’s okay with you, General. Anything else worthy of talking about then?

4 Optimist International is a worldwide volunteer organization made up of more than 2,500 local clubs whose members work each day to make the future brighter by bringing out the best in children, in their communities, and in themselves. (https://www.optimist.org/)

22 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

Borling: You know the best thing that happened in grammar school? I got to be captain of the patrol boys, except there were two captains, and I was kind of a nether captain. I had the south side of the thing, and the other guy had the north side. I thought his north side responsibilities were greater than mine. But I could tie my little belt, that little tan, brown thing or whatever.

DePue: This is about making sure people get across the street safely, that kind of thing?

Borling: Well, we had crossing guards; we did it ourselves. We didn’t have to have adults; we had the guys who were out there with their little light belts on, and we’d cross the people.

DePue: So, you get a responsibility much earlier.

Borling: You get a responsibility at an earlier age. Why don’t we do that now? That’s why I’m bringing it up. I think we’ve somehow neutered the notion that the young people aren’t responsible. It’s like no more rifle teams in high school.

DePue: Well, we’re of the generation that didn’t trust anybody over thirty, but now our kids can stay on our insurance plan until they’re twenty-six.

Borling: Well, I’ll let you off for political commentary. I just kind of make observations that human nature changes slowly, and yet we make all these rabid assumptions about how much we have to change things because people are different; generations are different. They’re no different. Set the standards; tell them you live by these standards, or you don’t. What we’ve failed to do is to accept losses in the society.

There were a lot of losses when I was going to school. Guys dropped out; people did stupid things; there were losses. We started the academy with 800; we graduated 499. The losses, it’s encouraging to the rest. We used to say that there’s nothing so encouraging to the troops as to see a dead general on the battlefield. It didn’t even matter what side he was on. We need to accept losses in the society. We can’t save them all. In fact, we can’t save a large percentage of them. It’s kind of a libertarian thing.

I had a conversation with Stossel, John Stossel of New York, briefly.5 I gave him a copy of my book, and we chatted about stuff and things. We didn’t dwell on it long, but the notion that society doesn’t have a responsibility, shouldn’t try to, because we would go broke, emotionally and financially, trying to save everybody.

DePue: We’ve left grammar school now? If that’s okay with you. I do want to ask you one question about high school. You mentioned one of the reasons you went

5 John Frank Stossel is an American consumer television personality, author, and libertarian pundit. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stossel)

23 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

to the Air Force Academy is the girls out there, but I thought you were already―

Borling: No, no. I said I thought the uniforms were cool, and I’d get a lot of girls.

DePue: Okay, but you already had a girl; is that correct?

Borling: Well, I didn’t at that…Yeah, I did. God, they’re going to have to put that one on deep background. I think I was being thin in a post-adolescent way. The reality is that I really wanted it as a differentiator. I knew that the academy was different and better than anything else I could do. Because it was different and better, I wanted it. I’ll give you the flip answer, but that was the driver.

Then, in the summer, that first summer, which was so tough for me, because I’m coming off “big man on campus” kind of thing, even as a freshman in the best fraternity and doing things that were satisfying. About six weeks into the summer, they took us up to Lowry in Denver. They had a bunch of T-birds, T-33s, lined up. I flew, as I remember, with a Korean War ace. They put you in the seat pack and the helmet and everything, and they strap you in. You’re in the tandem airplane. A canopy comes down, modest training, if any, “Don’t pull that or you’ll eject,” that kind of stuff, and off we went. He broke ground, and he gave me the airplane. This was the fourth time I’d been in an airplane to and from West Point. That trip, and one trip out to the Academy, that’s it.

You didn’t fly like the kids today, go coast to coast and think nothing about it. Being in an airplane was a big deal. I wore a coat and a tie when I went out to the academy on the airplane, both times. I still wear jackets on airplanes. I don’t travel casually.

All of a sudden I had my own airplane. I knew enough that this was up and down, and that’s left and right, and here’s the throttle. So I climbed it out, and we head up to altitude. You do the obligatory aileron roll, and you do some other stuff, sucking oxygen. Flew down to the academy, and we did a thing called the split-S, lower it to its back and pull it through. You’re supposed to pull it through. I wasn’t pulling it through; I was just pointed at the ground. I didn’t know what I was doing, and the guy said, “Another three or four seconds, we’re going to be in the gym. You’d better pull this son- of-a- bitch out. Put it in your lap.” So I did, and we came out and flew back. He let me be softly on the controls while we were landing. It took a lot of guts to do that, I’m thinking, but he talked to me.

He said some nice things about it. He said, “You need to do this.” God, I got down, and I said, “I need to do this.” I still get operatic chills thinking of that first flight. We didn’t fly at the academy; we didn’t get our wings at the academy. You had to go to pilot training afterwards. So I spent my whole four years trying to position, modestly, myself in a position that I would be able to

24 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

go and not only go through pilot training but be a fighter pilot, which everybody knows is the top of the heap.

Anyway, I’d go to jump school because I heard that…I gave up my leave and went to jump school. In fact, I went home, got engaged and left the next day for jump school, hearing that that’s a leg up. If you’re a paratrooper, they’d be more likely to take you into fighters. I went to a base that had an older airplane, the T-33, thinking I would be the better pilot for that. In fact, I went down there; I was the head of my class. I don’t know how they determined I would be the class commander, but I was. [I] graduated number one in my class in pilot training and got a fighter.

DePue: When you say number one in your class, you’re talking about your flight school?

Borling: Flight school, no not at the academy. Myrna came out and lived the last six months at the academy. That was kind of a condition, semi-condition, of marriage. It wasn’t really. We said we’d get married a year after graduation. I compromised and got married like fifteen days afterwards.

DePue: What was Myrna’s maiden name?

Borling: Holmstedt, H-o-l-m-s-t-e-d-t. Her father was one of sixteen off of a farm in Nebraska, one of sixteen by the same woman. He was an automotive manager of like a boutique, an auto parts thing, up here on Michigan Avenue, South Side of Chicago guy, married Rosalie Wheeler.

I think my dad met my mom in one of the dance halls, Aragon or one of those places. I think Dick Holmstedt did the same. Dick was in the Navy in World War II, stationed at Great Lakes and never saw combat, sired a beautiful senior daughter.

DePue: How else would you describe Myrna?

Borling: How would I describe her? How would I describe Myrna? Knockout good- looking; tough; smart; willing to buy into my vision, with some pain involved, loyal, needs to dance better, a good mother, very supportive, except when she’s not. They tend to do that, you know.

DePue: She was okay with competing with your other love of flying?

Borling: Oh, she knew she was in second place. She really wasn’t, but you’ve got to do that. She asked me, when we got engaged, if I really wanted to fly. She said, “I don’t want you to fly. I’m afraid you’ll die, or you’ll get hurt.” That was on the balcony of the Air Force Academy. I gave her a ring. We had already talked about getting married. We’d been talking about getting married since Augustana.

25 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

She was really my only girlfriend. I mean, I was not experienced. But on that matter, I said, “You don’t have a vote on this one.” I said, “If you want me, you’ve got to take me the way it is.” And I said, “I am going to be a fighter pilot.” She said, “Okay.” She was as proud of that, frankly, as I am, even today.

Anyway, if you’re in that community, you’ve got to soft pedal it, because the Air Force has got needs for lots of stuff. I’ve had some great assignments. Hell, I commanded the Hat in the Ring.6 I mean F-15 Hat in the Ring, the greatest assignment that anyone could ever have. She would agree; although when we left the squadron, all the girls got dressed up in various outfits, bikinis, flying suits, jeans, formals, whatever. They put an ironing board up in the back of the F-15. Do you know what the Eagle is, the F-15 Eagle? All around it, washtubs and stuff, all the women of the squadron. They had a banner. Do you know what the banner said? This was a going away present for us. It said, “Call Myrna.” (both laughs) What a testimony.

Oh, it brings tears to my eyes, because we were on the road a lot and took that squadron all over the world, including meeting the Richthofen bunch, who we’d fought in two wars and had never met in peacetime.7 With direct verbal orders not to do it, Mufti Eggert, Klaus Eggert and I, used to have a Einundsiebzig Jagdgeschwader [71 Fighter Squadron]. [We] met and put the Hat in the Ring and the Richthofen guys together. We had one hell of a party. They still talk about it. I’m serious; they still talk about it. I, just out at the POW reunion, found out that Mufti, Klaus Eggert is still alive. He can play Stan Kenton piano; he was really good. So, I’m going to follow up with Mufti. We had a really great time.

When I came back from Vietnam, when I was at Clark [Air Force Base] after we got released from being POWs, I called Myrna, obviously, from Clark. She said, “Hi, how are you? I’m great, you know, so glad you’re back,” kind of like I’d gone out for a pack of cigarettes or something. Her second question is, “What are we going to do?” I said, “Well, we’re going to go back to fighters. If I’m any good, and I can compete against the guys who have been out while―I’ve been good on my heels―” I said, “then we’ll stay in. If I’m not, then we’ll get out, and I’ll do something in civilian life. I have no idea what it will be, but we’ll do something.” She came back, and she said, “Are you sure you want to go back to fighters?” She said, “You know, this is going to be very hard for me.” I said to her…This is in the first thirty seconds of our conversation. She hasn’t talked to me in seven years, and I’m

6 "Hat in the ring" (a boxing phrase to signify one's willingness to become a challenger) was the name of the first U.S. Air Force squadron put into operation in World War I. The name symbolized Uncle Sam’s red, white and blue top hat going through a ring. (https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/throw-your-hat-into-the-ring.html) 7 Richthofen is the surname of a prominent German aristocratic family. The most famous member is the air ace Manfred von Richthofen (1892–1918), also known as the "Red Baron." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richthofen)

26 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

saying…We had this conversation on the balcony at the academy. I said, “I’m going back to fighters.” She said, “Okay, I’m with you.”

DePue: At that point, she knew she was still married to the same guy, huh?

Borling: She sure as hell did, yeah, and she will tell you. People have asked her about that, that how can you…? She said, “I wanted a certain type of man, and I got it. But I had to pay for it.” She did, and she does, amazing.

DePue: You mentioned earlier, you had that―

Borling: All these flaws. But it’s not uninteresting, not uninteresting. It’s still going to be a hell of a ride. I don’t know what it’s going to be like when I get to the top of my game, and I’m going to go downhill. I’m not sure I’m going to like that. I’ve got a date with the “smoke that thunders.”

DePue: I don’t know about that.

Borling: Victoria Falls. The last time I was there, you could not bungee jump off of the John Borling, after six and a half years bridge between Zambia and Zimbabwe, in the Hanoi Hilton, finally was able to Rhodesia [Africa] in those days. walk his daughter Lauren to school for the first time in 1973. DePue: That’s your plan?

Borling: That’s one of them. The problem is, the aging process is such that you…The nice thing about dementia is you don’t know you’re there. You kind of just gradually do this, or you fall and break a hip or some damn thing; you go off a cliff. Then you don’t have the capacity to do what you wanted to do. I guess, if I could posit it out, I can see myself doing that bungee jump off the smoke that thunders. It’s interesting. That’s the Zambezi [River].

DePue: That’s pushing the rock up the hill and over the hill.

Borling: Well, there comes a point. There’s an interesting book called Passings, about death and dying. The precursor book was called Dinner with a Cannibal, Carole Travis-Henikoff. I really recommend Dinner with a Cannibal; although it’s not one of the three I’ve recommended. And then Carole was just doing a new one, which is the definitive treatment of sex. She deals with big subjects well.

She’s actually a rancher woman from Wyoming. Also, she’s got more degrees. She’s a paleontologist; she’s an anthropologist. We have the same opera series. I just love her to death. She’s married to Leo Henikoff, who used

27 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

to be the head of Rush, a commercial club here in town, of which I’m a member. I’m very proud to be a member of the invitation-only commercial club, the oldest men’s business club in America.

But, Carole is fascinating. She talks a lot about death and dying and just around that, thought out. It’s easy to say it, sitting here flush with health, a calm day and behind safe doors and all of that stuff. I think if we were to ask people, when they’re in such circumstances, if they’d like to expire all hooked up to all manner of machines and debilitated, lacking of capacity to participate, assuming there was any participation that would do any good in their own recovery, diminished beyond a point where any dignity is lost, pain, unable to—almost like a baby—unable to articulate or express the fact that you’re in pain. “Well, his eyelids are fluttering; I wonder if he’s in trouble,” you know. That’s a line from my father’s demise, not from me.

DePue: That’s saying quite a bit, considering what you went through for six and a half years.

Borling: Pardon me? That’s saying what?

DePue: Quite a bit.

Borling: What do you mean? What’s quite a bit?

DePue: Your understanding of what you don’t want to happen in your last days.

Borling: Oh, I don’t think I’m singular there. How would you like to finish it?

DePue: Well, the only reason I suggest it is because of the condition you found yourself in when you were a POW.

Borling: Yeah, but there the chore was to survive with honor, with survival the secondary consideration. I know that has a little “to beat your chest” bravado associated with it, but it really was true for all the guys. We so desperately wanted the… If it was going to be worth it at all, all those empty years, and more than that, all those empty days, which we tried to fill, we desperately wanted the country to be proud of us. We existed with the expectation that, if we did okay, it would be okay, if we hung in there.

Then, when it was “okay…” Then the charge, of course, was that you had a lifetime of giving back that was required because we had somehow been among the fortunate few to make it, that we had better discharge that personal, divine, national, international investment in a way that makes some sense. I think that, for a lot of the guys, that’s still a driving factor. That’s why we just got off that fortieth reunion, and a number of us talked about that. The same guys who talked about it back up there. We haven’t got any uber organization or anything, but we do have that sense that we have a requirement to try to do some good in this world.

28 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

The definition of good is elastic. It’s kind of like, “Well, I believe in God.” “Well, really, what’s your God like?” “It’s not like my God.” “How about this guy over here?” All of a sudden, you find out you’ve been sitting in the same church, in the same pew, with the same people, worshipping the same God, but it ain’t the same God. So the notion is that the elasticity of purpose, in terms of “doing good,” is there.

But I’m much impressed with the expressed desires from guys I thought were really worth something when I had a chance to live with them or talk to them through the wall. That exists. In fact, a few of us started up conversations, even though we haven’t talked to each other at any length in thirty years, forty years—not always true; we, sporadically over the years, but—where you just pick it up, and you share things that you know. When you talk about men sharing feelings, privately with…If I shared feelings with you, I’d say “Good putt” or “Nice drive.” I don’t want to know your feelings. I don’t care about your feelings. These guys, we share feelings. There aren’t many, but there’s a few.

DePue: It’s an interesting approach here, that the rest of society, most Americans, would say that because of what you and others who were prisoners went through, you’ve given enough, that it’s time for the rest of the country to give to you. You have just the opposite view of it from what I hear.

Borling: That’s (long pause, sighs) ―how to phrase it without sounding like some kind of sanctimonious asshole― In my view, giving is a very selfish act, because you get back, always, more than you give. So, there is no great altruism. I suspect there is just great selfishness. It just happens to work out that it sounds noble, and frankly, it is somewhat noble. I say “somewhat,” because we’re all imperfect. I don’t want to diminish it at all, but everybody knows you feel better by giving than getting. If you come back, and you want to “be on the take,” it just doesn’t…It’s a road that does not wear well.

DePue: Well, let’s take a step back from the philosophical approach here. I want to ask you―

Borling: The unexamined life is not worth living. Who said that?

DePue: I don’t know.

Borling: I don’t know if I know either. It’s either Socrates or Aristotle; it’s one of those guys.

DePue: I did want to ask you, though…You stated your impressions of the campus at the Air Force Academy. It had to be brand new buildings that you were going into.

Borling: Oh, man, we were the first residents they’d marched on.

29 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

DePue: Was that 1954?

Borling: They marched on in ’62. No, they had been there. This is 1959 when we showed up, and they just marched on the rest of the classes, the earlier classes. Sixty-two, ’61 and ’60 we’re there; ’59 had graduated. Fifty-nine, I guess, graduated at the site, but they never spent any time at the academy, I think. I don’t know; it’s confusing. The thing was, it was new, and it was wonderful, and it was special.

We had the honor code, and we had to live by that. If you didn’t, you were out. We did try to beat the system; that’s just human nature. It’s a military thing, griping about this and that. We would do that, but in the end, there was a great sense of accomplishment, a great sense of pride, a great sense of class identity, but even more, squadron identity.

It got back down to there were only twenty-four squadrons. We started with twelve, I think, and went to twenty-four or sixteen and went to twenty- four. Today, I think they’ve got forty-eight. But the sense of the loyalty that you feel with your classmates is really extreme. I am helping raise funds for the fiftieth gift, which means I have no friends left. I’m so glad you’re talking to me. Classmate stuff means a lot.

DePue: You also emphasized that you graduated with a Bachelor of Science and majored in―

Borling: Through overloading, a major in humanities and a minor in management. Now they give you a major, or you have to declare a major. I think it is wrong that they do that.

DePue: At that time, I believe, the emphasis was very much on engineering, especially in the Naval Academy, but also at West Point.

Borling: Try the Coast Guard Academy. You graduated with a degree in electrical engineering.

DePue: Was that not as much of an emphasis for the Air Force Academy?

Borling: I don’t know. What, engineering?

DePue: Yeah.

Borling: Oh, no, no. It was heavy engineering. Again, the average load was twelve to sixteen hours, twelve, fifteen, sixteen hours in the civilian school. We were taking twenty as a standard load, and a number of guys would overload, twenty-three, twenty-six hours. That sounds like an awful lot. I think I did that once. It was too much, with everything else going on, all the sports and all the extracurricular things you had to do. As you got older and wiser, then you had

30 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

time off. You’d go off to the Springs [Colorado Springs] or Denver on the weekend, at least for part of it.

DePue: Were you involved in some other extracurricular activities?

Borling: Where, at the Academy? What do you mean, other extracurricular activities? All the standard stuff of playing sports; I played club rugby.

DePue: Did they have a flying club there?

Borling: You know, we didn’t have a flying club, but we all had navigator training, skiing, hunting. On the academy, you could go hunting, walk out your dorm room with your rifle…Well, you didn’t have a rifle. We used shotguns with slugs on the academy, but you could walk out of your dorm room with your shotgun and slugs that you kept in the closet and go deer hunting. It was great, a lot of mountaineering.

I was head of survival. I was cadet in charge of survival training for the new classes. I did that for two years, really enjoyed that, didn’t like the fourth class system. I thought we were demeaning the military experience by trying to scream and do collegiate fraternal things. I thought we should have been a lot more…They put a lot of pressure on guys without being in a hazing standpoint. I didn’t like it when it was being done to me; I really didn’t like it, and I tried not to do it to others. It turns into too much of a gamesmanship thing. I don’t want a collegiate experience; I want a military academy experience.

DePue: The fourth class system you had was not at West Point?

Borling: The fourth class system we had now was…It was imperfectly administered; it was administered by cadets. For example, you could sit at a meal, and they’d make you drink a quart of milk or a half gallon of milk and then take you out and run you until you puked, with a rifle and boots―that’s during the summer―or not give you a lot of food. I lost a lot of weight. I went from 203 to about 165 over the course of the summer. It didn’t bode well for going out for football. But for all that, again, the academy was great.

There was just too much exposure to too many things. The travel, the exposure to the other services, the kinds of things that they heat up for us; take you to Europe on a military foreign studies tour, go out to George Air Force Base―I flew my first F-100 with Robbie Risner―go to Selfridge, where the first pursuit wing was, first attack fighter wing, which I would later be in and fly 106s.

I got my first instrument time in a C-47 at night. We all knew enough about the rudiments of flying. In those days, you had to be qualified to fly, at least initially, to entering the place. Then a lot of guys lost their eyes or lost this or that. I didn’t wear glasses until, really, after retirement.

31 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

DePue: I could be wrong on this, but my understanding is the Air Force Academy was founded by, obviously, the senior leadership in the Air Force at the time, which was primarily bomber-oriented.

Borling: The Air Force Academy was lobbied for from World War II on. It was really put into play with a decision made by [Dwight D.] Eisenhower. There were three locations: Alton, Illinois; Lake Geneva [Wisconsin] and Colorado. The process was, as always, fraught with fits and starts, but Colorado won out. My class, as part of the fiftieth reunion, is putting together a thing called USAFA Class Histories, which is this, only it’s videography and oral histories going back to the beginning, to make sure we don’t lose the beginnings.

We’re also doing a boilerplate history for every class that has graduated and will graduate. That’s part of our gift. We’re also funding a center for oral history, and we’re trying to fund a thing called the Center for Character and Leadership Development, although a lot of us think, What the hell do we need that for? We thought the whole place was supposed to be about character and leadership development.

I think putting the women at the academy has caused a strain that is understandable from a societal standpoint but strange and difficult to work with. Strenuous physical and mental activity and juxtaposition of the sexes has always led to circumstances that occasionally get out of control.

DePue: I made the reference to the bombers―

Borling: Yeah, but I don’t think it’s a bomber, fighter thing; I really don’t.

DePue: Pardon me?

Borling: I don’t think it was a bomber, fighter thing, although I can remember [General Curtis] LeMay and Tommy Powers and the others. There’s always been a tension between the bomber force and the fighter force.

DePue: Well, I made the statement because it sounds like, about the time you graduated, fighters were in the ascendancy, in terms of what students wanted to be.

Borling: Yeah, they were, although LeMay was still the chief of staff of the Air Force, although Kennedy really wanted to get rid of him. All presidents want to get joint chiefs malleable, especially the chairman. Kennedy really couldn’t stand LeMay’s forthright way. LeMay’s view of war was simple. I happen to agree with it; wars are about killing people; you kill enough of them, and they quit fighting. If we’re not prepared to accept that, we shouldn’t go to war. Militaries aren’t good at building things up; we’re good at tearing things down; we’re good at destroying things; we’re good at laying waste.

DePue: Rather than being peacekeepers?

32 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

Borling: A lot. We used to make fun of the SAC [Strategic Air Command] motto, “Peace is our profession.” Then later, I ended up in SAC and fought to save the command and failed.

DePue: Would it be fair to say that, by the time you were making decisions about what kind of service you wanted to have, most students wanted to be fighter pilots?

Borling: At the time that I was there, my sense was that there was, on the part of a percentage of the graduates, a real desire to want to go to pilot training. Most of the graduates wanted to go to pilot training, and of that most, most of them would have preferred a fighter tour because we’re all aggressive. In the end, I don’t know if we do it as a cop-out or not, but being a “fighter pilot” is more of an attitudinal thing than anything else.

DePue: I wanted to ask you if you’re even willing to paint a profile of a fighter pilot, versus a bomber pilot, versus a transport pilot.

Borling: (sings) “By the ring around his eyeballs, you can tell a bombardier; you can tell a bomber pilot by the spread around his rear. You can tell a navigator by his sextons, maps and such. You can tell a fighter pilot, but you cannot tell him much.”

Oh, I think a lot of this is folklore. But we who were privileged to fly, we who were privileged to strap on a tailpipe, I think, probably between World War II, actually WWI, aviation, the fighter aviation. World War II, the fighter aviation, even though the bombers took enormous losses…such bravery to fly those missions. But there’s always been this kind of scarf in the breeze, cocky…It’s not an ego thing; it really isn’t. It’s more of a confidence thing.

There’s something, when you’re sitting there all by yourself, and there’s nothing going to get you up and get you down except you, and you’re going to do it in maneuvering combat, and you’re going to have responsibilities.

God, I remember the night I almost put the whole damn squadron in the water. We took off from the Azores in a driving rainstorm, heading to Riyadh [Saudi Arabia]. We were challenged to go to Riyadh. I was the senior guy, and I reported to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General David Jones. I was told to do two things: do not make trail take-offs, or maybe it was don’t make formation take-offs. Yes, don’t make formation take-offs en route, and don’t fly foreign dignitaries without a clearance.

So we got into the Azores, flying from Langley. I had the Hat in the Ring; we were the squadron of choice. When we got to the Azores, they said they had eighty knot crosswinds, and we had to land, because we were out of tankers. So I said, “Why don’t you go and land first,” to the tankers, the 135.

33 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

When you came over the cliffs at the Azores, in the lodges, you can get a hell of a sheer, not the tanker.

I said, “All right, we’ll go in.” We went in; it wasn’t bad, maybe thirty knots on the wind. But that night, the storms came in. It was driving rainstorm; it was terrible. We had to take off at like 4:00 in the morning, 5:00 in the morning, in the dark, in order to make Riyadh at 11:00 in the morning. My instructions were, have that squadron over Riyadh at 11:00 in the morning because the crown prince was going to be there and the ambassador, and they’re expecting you to be there.

DePue: A fly-over?

Borling: No, land. So we woke up in the morning, at 3:00 in the morning, and drive in a rainstorm, just a terrible rainstorm. I get the guys together and say, “Man, we could stretch this thing out forever.” I said, “But what we’re going to do, I’ll lose you guys. Something has got to go wrong with the radars.” We had airplanes that are already broken, didn’t have radar. I said, “We’re going to go off in formation” in this driving rainstorm. My officer said, “But…” they said. I said, “We’re going off in formation.” We got the squadron lined up. We have twelve airplanes, plus four spares, sixteen airplanes, got everybody out there and got them lined up.

I had Clay Jones, who was just retiring, as the—I think it was Clay who was retiring—as the head of Rockwell. My call sign was Viking; his call sign was Hollywood. We changed it to Strider, with a three syllable tactical call sign. We took off, burners, the whole thing.

The tankers were coming out from Gibraltar or someplace to pick us up, got off, wind, rain. So I took us off on four ships, then two, and then, ten seconds later, by two. [I] told them to join up into four ships, so we could manage this gaggle through the bad weather. I was going to use my own radar and get through the weather. I’m down there on the radar, trying to figure out…It was a pull stop on the radar, and I’m trying to figure [it] out. We had a mapping mode in it though, so I was trying to get through the cells.

There was no air traffic control, but if we didn’t take off, we weren’t going to make it. All of a sudden, Animal, Bob Marshall, calls me up. He says, “Vike, push it up.” He was in the last cell back there. I looked down and went “Holy shit.” I got about 180 knots, which means the guys are hanging back on their intake. I thought, Oh Christ, and pushed the power up gently. Clay had slid underneath. In fact, I looked out, and I said, “Strider, you with me?” He says, “I’m hanging,” because you couldn’t see anything, and he was just tucked in so tight. So off we went. I got the power back on and went, oh god, stupid, dumb.

34 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

We all climbed out. We got up on top and picked up the tankers. When we got to Riyadh, we had overcast. The tankers dropped us off somewhere around the Red Sea, as I remember. Now we’re on our own. We’ve got Orion-S, and we’re sitting up on top of these clouds over Saudi Arabia. I kind of flew out, time and distance. I got the squadron with me and saw a hole and just peeled everybody. I said, “See that hole? We’re going through it.” There’s a big, metropolis looking area, and I said, “Well, shit, that’s got to be Riyadh.” I’m looking at my watch; it’s about ten minutes to 11:00. I look over there, and I see the runway complex. It matches up with the map and stuff, so we’re over Riyadh.

I took the squadron out and put them in tactical formation, which is about…for every four-ship [formation], you spread them out maybe 1,500 feet, so we’re in 1,000 feet, a little closer maybe, in the four-ship, then slipped them…No, I didn’t slip them into diamond. I went back out to that side of the city―wherever that side was, the east side of the city―and turned everybody around, got everybody around and put them into this…bunched them up a little bit, not in a close formation but maybe four or five airplanes apart and pushed it up.

We went over the top of Riyadh, just below the mach.8 I hit the overrun just as the crown prince is coming out of his car. He’s coming down this way, down the taxiway, and the runway is over here, bullshit. I lined up on the taxiway, where all the crowd is. We came over just as he’s getting out of the car. We hit him maybe ten seconds, five to ten seconds later, when I pulled the squadron into the vertical, and we did a rolling pitch-up brake.

Then I had the other guys…I had one, two, three, three more elements behind us. They were just right on our tails, and we had all these airplanes into a rolling pitch-up brake. We landed on the runway, coming this way. One of the guys lost his…He overran us, but that’s okay. We cleared off, and we didn’t crump anybody on the landing―it was really a spectacular landing―and taxied up in front of the crown prince and shut them down.

The ambassador comes out and General Cathey, who was…The chief―you just met him, Carl, God love him―saved my bacon later in life, after I killed General Minter’s dog in Germany, who was the commanding general. You’re safe; you shouldn’t do that when you’re a colonel.

Anyway, Carl came out and the crown prince and everybody and the foreign minister, Prince Saud; they all came out. The crown prince was kind of old, but everyone was very welcoming. We’re walking around in our G- suits; we’ve got our helmets up; we did it Thunderbird style.9 Saud comes

8 As a plane exceeds Mach 1, it causes a terrific sound wave boom. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_boom) 9 The USAF Air Demonstration Squadron ("Thunderbirds") is the air demonstration squadron of the United States Air Force, assigned to the 57th Wing and based at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada. Created in 1953, the

35 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

walking up to me. He says, “When are you going to take me flying?” I said, “When do you want to go?” He says, “How about this afternoon?” I said, “Sounds good to me.” Now I’m two for two. (DePue laughs)

I took the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia on a flight. I took a woman crew chief with me, Debbie Worth. She was really a nice gal, a good-looking gal. She’s running around the flight line in her white t-shirt and her fatigues and her boots and damn near stopping Saudi Arabia. Debbie was a good- looking young lady, and she was a great crew chief. She was my crew chief. They told me I couldn’t take her, because of the woman thing in Saudi Arabia. I said, “Debbie is going; she’s my crew chief,” and she did. She damn near stopped Saudi Arabia. She crewed us for Saud and helped strap him in. There’s nothing like having a nice young lady strap you in the jet.

Anyway, so I took Saud up, and then I went back and reported over the embassy hotline to General Jones, the mission was accomplished; we were there. He said, “You’re on time?” I said, “We’re on time.” I said, “Oh, by the way, I had to fly the foreign minister this afternoon.” (DePue laughs) I said, “There’s other guys who want to fly too, and I’ve got to make the call.” He says, “All right. You were there on time?” I said, “We’re there on time.” He said, “Great.” I had the go-around. It was great, great. Again, I can’t tell you how much…the satisfaction of commanding that squadron. The guys were all so good that I could just take my hands and take the names and throw them at the board, and the formation would fly. They were that good.

DePue: What year was that, Sir?

Borling: Nineteen seventy-nine. I helped start the program. God, I was so lucky to get in that program. I was a low-time guy, came in as a major. I got hired out as the wing historian by General, then Colonel, Welch, Larry Welch, probably the most intelligent chief of staff we’ve ever had. He was followed by Colonel Jack Chain, probably the smartest guy. And he was followed by Colonel Neil Eddins, who was the wing commander at the time that I took—

Neil was the guy that tasked us to do it. He was a former Thunderbird lead and a wonderful guy, a great logistics background, great operational background, a smart guy too. I had three wonderful wing commanders, as I was making my way through the ranks in the F-15 program, that I ended up commanding again. I was assistant ops for 71st Ops [Operations]. I went to ops with the 94th, went to maintenance, then into squadron command, and got promoted early, twice in the first one. Once you’re a first one, you’re a Hat in the Ring guy; you’re that for life. I dwell on this; I don’t mean to sound so being glorious, but it was a very, very special time, so special that one of the

USAF Thunderbirds are the third-oldest formal flying aerobatic team (under the same name) in the world, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Air_Force_Thunderbirds)

36 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

five things I wanted to do on retirement was to go back to Langley and fly a last flight in the F-15, out of the Hat in the Ring.

I hadn’t touched the airplane in ten years. There was a time when I checked out lots and lots of guys in the airplane, to combat ready, but I hadn’t touched it. I went back in March of ’96 to my old squadron, and they were prepared to fly me, except, as I’m getting the briefing, they’re preparing to fly me in the back seat of this airplane. I said, “I’m not going to do that.” So they made a couple of quick calls. They called “Tunes,” Brigadier General [William R.] Looney, who was the wing commander. With the name Looney, his call sign was Tunes. He said, “The Viking has checked out more guys in this airplane than anybody else.” He said, “Let him go fly.”

The only problem was I hadn’t had time for a simulator or any of that stuff. Hell, I couldn’t remember how to start the damn thing. So we had a real quick practice check. They threw an IP [Instructor Pilot], which is fair, in the back seat. They won’t let generals fly single seat any more. But I told the guy, “Remember,” I said, “You’re the IP. If you need to save the airplane because I’m doing something I shouldn’t, take the airplane; that’s what you get paid for.” I said, “But if it isn’t a matter of life and death, if you touch the stick…” (DePue laughs)

Well, we went off, and we had a lieutenant in the other airplane. I wanted to go off on the wing rather than lead it, because I wanted a formation take-off. I got a formation take-off and went out over Hatteras. It was a crystal blue day. We had a series of what we call basic fighter maneuvers and did maneuvering combat. It was great, and everything was working right.

We came back in—I’m leading now—I have the lieutenant on the wing. I told the guy in the back seat, who hasn’t touched the stick, I said, “Look, I’m going to shoot a couple landings. This is the last time I’m going to be flying the F-15, so I want to do it.” I pitched out and came in on the other runway. It’s on Hampton Road because it was an over-water approach, and it was a right-hand turn. Normally, fighter pilots like to turn left, and I’m turning right on base turn. [I] drop the gear and the flaps, obviously gauging it and setting up for the landing and getting ready to touch it down. The lieutenant has gone ahead and gone around. I’m getting ready to touch it down, and all of a sudden, the nose falls through. I’ve been on the ground. I look down; I’ve got like 90 knots, and I’ve touched down. It was so perfect that I didn’t even know I was on the ground.

DePue: So soft.

Borling: So soft. I punched the mike button, and said, “Full stop.” I knew I’d never get a better landing than that. (both laugh) I misstated that just a little bit. I obviously knew I was on the ground, but it was…I didn’t feel it; neither one of us felt it. I was just a little behind the airplane, I will grant you, and then the

37 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

nose started to fall through. I saw that it had more than 90 knots, maybe 100. You held the nose up, maybe 110, but punched the thing full stop.

So, we taxied over and got out of the jet and feeling pretty good. I had my white leather flying gloves on and my Danner boots.10 The gloves I got in Riyadh from the Brits who were there. Nothing like flying with Brit flying gloves. You’re supposed to wear all this flame retardant stuff, but I never did. I wore the white leather gloves and special boots. They always said the fighter pilots, you could tell them because they had a big hack watch, fighter pilot boots and a little dick, but that’s another story.

Anyway, as we went back; they took some pictures. I wasn’t supposed to hear this—this is really chest-beating stuff again—but for the pilots who may stumble into this someday, Wolf, who was the squadron commander, went up to the IP. I was walking away, and he said, “How did the Viking do?” And he [the IP] said, “The Vike’s got good hands.” That meant a lot, and I vowed, as I heard that phrase, that I would never ever fly another fighter. I would take the memory of that flight to my grave.

DePue: To finish on the top.

Borling: Finish on the top. I have been offered to fly with any number of guys and fly fighters, training fighters and this kind of stuff, jet fighters. I’ll fly prop fighters and do, but I’m not going to fly jet fighters. I got offered to fly with the Thunderbirds; I really…No, I’ll keep that one special.

DePue: Was the F-15 the best aircraft you ever flew?

Borling: Absolutely the best aircraft. Oh, I’ve got something that I have on my schedule about the F-15 and what it’s like. That was my first single seat airplane too. [Ernest] Hemingway had all this wonderful stuff about, “If your first single seat airplane is a great airplane, and if it’s mated to you like a mistress would mate to you, that’s where your heart will ever be.” So, while the F-4, which was a great airplane, was my first fighter, that flying, single seat F-15, man.

It’s one thing, being able to fly an airplane; it’s another thing being able to fight an airplane. I can say that I was not the best pilot in my squadron, but I was a credible pilot, and I could lead my guys. Some things I could do as well as anybody, but some of the guys were—in maneuvering, air-to-air combat—better on a given day than I was. When you’d get killed in the training missions, boy it was like, you’re really hurt, and some days when you’d kill…It wasn’t that I wasn’t a passive, but you had to have the skills.

10 Danner Boots was started by Charles Danner in 1932, when he opened his boot making business, based on a belief that, regardless of the economy, superior craftsmanship mattered. (https://www.danner.com/)

38 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

When I got out of prison camp, when I asked Myrna, I said I’d stick around to see if I was any good. I got into a top gun position in my wing pretty quickly. That meant a lot to me coming out, that I could compete with the guys. That was one of the reasons I was able to perform on the F-15 program, even though I was a low-time guy.

But there I was, an IP and everything else, in the F-15. I can remember flying; we’d make formation landings, and we’d be going down. Sometimes the guys would like to crowd you and put you in the dirt. I’m the IP, and I’m talking to the guys. You’re flying right on the edge; you’re kind of flapping along here; you’re eight feet off the ground, and you’re trying to get this other…That’s how you would get them down; you’d chase them. We didn’t have enough twin-seaters, so we’d fly single-seaters.

When we’d be up refueling…I can remember one guy. We just refueled the F-15; just stick it up there; let the guy stick you. It didn’t matter if he was in a turn or anything; just go do it. One night this guy was having trouble refueling, and I said, “Well, come on; hook it up.” The guy was having trouble. When we got back down on the ground, I was debriefing him about what you look at and how you do this. He finally got his gas. He said, “Yeah, but,” he said, “you’re the Viking; you know how to do that.” (laughs) That kind of stuff makes you feel good. But I will tell you, I had some sticks in that squadron who were magic guys, magic guys. I was so fortunate. So, if you get a great sense of love or a sense of affection, that endures to this day…I haven’t seen many of them over the years.

One guy, R.C., lives now in Chicago; he got out after twenty years and is a commercial pilot. R.C. was a good stick too, a good guy. But you see him from time to time, when you’d pass through someplace. It’s not the John Keegan bullfrog thing, where the old guys get together. It’s much more honest than that. But to say there’s not a genuine affection or regard, and you go back to the fighter pilot thing, some guys can be over here, with respect to image and macho and this and that, and other guys can be over there. But there’s a nice part of the envelope area where I like to exist.

DePue: Does it take a different kind of leadership skill to be a leader for a bunch of people who are―

Borling: That good?

DePue: That good but also doing their own thing out there.

Borling: No, no, you’re not doing your own thing. You’ve got to work it as an element or as a four-ship. You don’t ever fight it as a squadron.

DePue: How many ships in a squadron?

39 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

Borling: It varies; normally it was twenty four plus some extras. Now, because of the force structure reduction, it’s eighteen plus extras. So it’s kind of, we’re structurally disarming ourselves. The reality is a good sense of teamwork and reliance. When you’re hanging on the wing in weather and stuff, if the leader screws you up, you’re going to die. That’s why I’m saying, “Oh, I still cringe.” There was a statement—I don’t know if this was apocryphal or not— the Brits, with the Red Arrows, which are their demonstration team, the guy missed it on the top on the loop, and the last call was, “Tighten it up, chaps; we’re going in.” And they did.

Speaking about going in, I’m going to go to the latrine now. We’re taking a latrine break.

(pause in recording)

DePue: Well, we took a short break, and we’re back at it again.

Borling: You’re a hard taskmaster.

DePue: That’s my job. I’m going to prod you back a little bit, back into the academy days, and ask you just a couple questions about events that were happening in that timeframe, because you’re going to school at a time when the Cold War was almost getting hot. The first is―

Borling: I remember the day.

DePue: … the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Borling: Everybody got up out of the stands on a Saturday and left. We were playing a football game—I forgot who we were playing—and it was like at halftime. We were on the cadet side, which is on the east side of the field, and all these general officers were over there, the whole…It was Corona or something.11 They all stood up, and the airplane started flying away. We said, “Wow, what’s going on?” It was the start of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

DePue: Get all the cadets’ attention, did it?

Borling: Yeah, it did, just because it was so…We knew something big had to be happening. Then, of course, we were into it. But I don’t recall that we were all shook up about it. We just kind of took it as it came. I just don’t recall about being all that concerned.

11 The Corona Conference happens three times per year, bringing together the Air Force’s senior leaders for frank, open discussions and decision-making about the future of the Air Force. (http://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/131979/top-generals-meet-at-corona/)

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DePue: What were you being taught, in terms of the role, the mission, of the Air Force, in relation to the other services? Was the Air Force able to win the war all by themselves?

Borling: I think that message came through. There has been this neo-emphasis, probably over the last twenty-five years, of the need for jointness. I don’t think anyone would ever dispute the notion that, if the circumstance calls for a joint action, combined arms…That’s why I like the Marine Corps, you know, Army, Navy. No one can figure out where to put the Marines, so we always put them on the flanks, because they don’t fit anywhere else, or they have to go in unilaterally.

Surely folks will appreciate, understand, that if combined arms is called for, fine. But if it’s not—and this is where I think we fail—if it’s not, and a single service can accomplish the mission or has a fair chance of accomplishing the mission, then we ought to go for it. Classic case, I used to head Checkmate at the Pentagon, a war-fighting operational think tank. Our job was to checkmate the Russians in Cold War parlance.

DePue: What timeframe was that?

Borling: This would be right after I got out of National War College, so this would be 1980-81 kind of timeframe.

DePue: The beginning of the Reagan years too.

Borling: Right, just after Carter. But the real challenge―that I saw, anyway―is to not checkmate ourselves. I thought, we thought, in Checkmate, that a number of the contingency plans that we were also asked to look at…Remember, our reporting thing was we went from me, titularly [in name only], through the head of operations, to the chief of staff of the Air Force and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.

There’s a story that I tell about. I’ve just come over from National War College; I’m the chief of Checkmate. It’s a plum job.

DePue: Is that a joint position?

Borling: No, it wasn’t joint, although we had different elements. We had logisticians and others, and we had a liaison with the Army. Hell, we had clearances. I’d go out and sit in the office of the NSA commander, or we’d go to Langley. We had our own skiff; we had the secure, compartmented facility; we had a place to send messages. In fact, the chief would use it to send back general messages, down the basement of the Pentagon, by the purple water fountain. That’s a very important landmark. I think it’s gone, but the purple water fountain was how you oriented yourself from the labyrinth of the basement.

41 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

Anyway, I was upstairs. I had gone down to the skiff to Checkmate, where we had a briefing room and our offices. The briefing room was literally for people that…The high ranking guys would have come down there. We didn’t have to respond to the chain of command; we were outside the chain. We could call it like we saw it.

I walk in the briefing room. The secretary said, “Oh, the chairman’s here.” Well, I had never met the chairman. He was the guy I was reporting to when I took that mission to Saudi Arabia. I walked in there, and here’s one of my guys. The chairman is sitting there, and my guy’s beating on the desk and screaming at the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Well, I did this “enter, stage right” kind of thing. “Ah, General Jones, we haven’t met recently, but I’m the head of Checkmate, and what Lieutenant Colonel Hogan is meaning to say…

Jones is like this; he goes irate. Jones looked at me. He said, “Borling, just remember, this is why I came to the place. Checkmate is the only place where I can get straight words out of the staff, and don’t you dare change it.” And I said, “I’m just here to say hello, Sir” (both laugh) and got out of the way and let Bill Hogan and the chairman go back at it.

Bill was brilliant. He was a navigator. He was absolutely a brilliant red air guy, more of a red round guy. Pat Gamble was the red air guy.

DePue: What does that mean?

Borling: Soviet air, red air. So we would go through and analyze and make yearly trips to Europe and talk with the combatant commanders, Army, Navy, Air Force, et cetera, and we would judge stuff.

For example, the thing that—we never got a chop on it—but that Carter thing where the command…They had to have Marines flying airplanes. They tried to rescue the people in Tehran, and everyone had to have a little piece, to make it Joint. The services are to blame too, because one service doesn’t want the other service to get ahead.

I come back to your question; can airpower win wars? Well, the short answer is yes. You’ve just got to be willing to accept the level of damage. But let me put it in contemporary terms. If you were a private with a rifle, would you rather go down and kick down doors in Kandahar, one at a time, looking for the bad guys, or would you rather, after a few squadrons of B-52s or fighters had been over, go kick bricks?

DePue: From a very personal standpoint, the answer is obvious.

Borling: Sure. Let me give you some historical answers. How about saving millions of lives with the fire-bombing and the atom bombing of Japan in World War II?

42 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

DePue: It’s a question I’ve asked scores of veterans of World War II and Korea. The answer inevitably is the same, that dropping the atomic bomb was the right thing to do.

Borling: [It] was the right thing to do. I just left Quincy, Illinois, where Tibbetts is the local town hall, homeboy hero and should be.12 I believe that, if you go to war, you go to war with a special ferocity upfront, if the game and the gamble are worth going to war in the first place and if you have a constitutional mandate, not just “Oh,” you know. I’m talking about declaration of war. If the game and gamble are worth enough to put the blood and treasure of this United States at risk, then we ought to have a declaration of war or be bound by a very firm treaty, although there’s some holes there. I’m not withdrawing presidential war powers authorities to respond either.

We’ve gotten ourselves into a gradualism circumstance. We’ve forgotten…The purpose of going to war is not to reassert status quo, not to go build some nation. Militaries don’t build things; we rip things down; we tear things apart. We’re in the business of destroying things, and once you destroy enough, then there’s a new climate created where hopefully something good will come out of it, even though you probably need twenty years to figure out if you did right or not.

So warfare, which so often is entered into for the wrong reason… Margaret…Not Margaret, Tutwiler–Is that her name, the military historian, writer?

DePue: Barbara Tuchman.13

Borling: Tuchman, Tuchman, Tuchman. Tutwiler was a spokesman at the State Department. She wrote a book called March of Folly. She said, why people go to war and nations go to war, they go to war because of interests, and so often they’re malinformed or misinformed about those interests.

DePue: I think the last chapter dealt with Vietnam.

Borling: “The Light on the Stern” is the name of that chapter, and she said, “Expect more of the same.”

I happen to think nations go to war for three reasons. They go to war for interests, her point, real or perceived; they go to war for fear or hate. I would suggest that, if you don’t have a combination of those three things working, you probably don’t have the body politic working behind you. If you don’t think you need to…It’s really strange to go kill people. You’ve got to

12 Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr., a brigadier general in the United States Air Force, was the pilot of the Enola Gay, which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Tibbets) 13 Barbara Wertheim Tuchman was an American historian and author. She won the Pulitzer Prize for literature twice. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_W._Tuchman)

43 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

have some reason, sustaining of the endeavor, if you want to send folks into combat, be it ground, air or sea combat. You do it because of interests, fear or hate. That’s why the body politic supports too, because they’ve been whipped up into a frenzy, or they’ve been thrust into a position where those elements come into play.

If they’re not there, I’m saying it’s going to be very difficult to go. Don’t go. Then if you go, go with the ferocity—again to use that term—that hopefully limits the amount of time that one will be involved, certainly will hopefully limit the amount of blood and treasure that will be expended on both sides, on both sides.

DePue: But it’s fairly rare, wouldn’t you agree, that the soldiers among us get to make those decisions about what the parameters of going to war should be?

Borling: War is too important to be left to the politicians. Isn’t that the phrase? Hardly.

DePue: Ferdinand Foch, perhaps?14

Borling: Yeah, it’s too important to be left to the generals. The problem is that the politicians have forgotten how to give mission-type orders. What’s a mission- type order?

DePue: What’s a mission-type order?

Borling: Give me an example of a mission-type order.

DePue: Well, we want you to accomplish this particular mission, and how you go about accomplishing the mission is up to you.

Borling: Right. Go do an oral history of General Borling, not how you do it and where you do it and when you do it. Your mission is to get the oral history.

It is fair; it is fair as political leadership to put certain strictures on, like, we do not want you to use nuclear weapons or chemical weapons. Besides, the release authority for that is at the presidential level anyway. We don’t want you to hurt anybody (laughs)—at that point, the generals should stand up and say, “I can’t do that”—or, I don’t want you to allow sanctuary. It’s like choosing high ground.

Who was it? When Meade hit Gettysburg, the first question he asked was, “How’s the ground? Have we got good ground?”15 We need to assess, when we go to war, if we have good ground or not. Then, once having

14 Marshal Ferdinand Jean Marie Foch was a French general and military theorist who served as the Supreme Allied Commander during the First World War. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Foch) 15 General George Gordon Meade was a career United States Army officer and civil engineer, best known for defeating Confederate General Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Meade)

44 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

assessed that, then you make a determination of what level of jointness is required.

For example, if one was to posit a present day circumstance…We’ll take Syria, a tough strategic and tactical problem. But let’s assume the strategic problem, vis-à-vis the other major powers who might have an interest, Russia for one, maybe China—

DePue: Iran.

Borling: They’re not a major power.

DePue: They want to be.

Borling: That’s the problem. But it is a nation-state problem, quintessentially. In fact, I did a morning TV news show on why it’s different than terrorists, because it is a nation-state problem.

But, you could posit a circumstance where they talk about this no-fly zone. No. We just go in and bloody well destroy the whole air force and set up, then, the one thing that airpower gives you that nobody else can give you. And what’s that?

DePue: Control of the air.

Borling: Ah, air supremacy, control of the air, lethal presence, where if the Air Force is short, it’s because we haven’t developed—other than drones, think of mini Battlestar Galacticas—that presence where you keep the head down.16 I could fly a Piper Cub over some of these areas, given air supremacy, and that would keep people’s heads down. If it’s got some mortality associated with it, that’s great.

So you say, or posit the question, can an individual force carry the day? I think airpower, with its destructive capabilities, can sure give you a leg up, where then maybe the ground force would have to go in and clean up. I think you could, on certain literal circumstances, where basing might not be available, naval air power, naval force projection…Although the Navy’s gotten away from guns.

They’ve got these million-dollar missiles they shoot from hundreds, thousands of miles away. The naval gunfire thing, you’ve got to sometimes get up where you’ve got the capability first. They’ve got these little popgun things that they’re using, and I’m not sure they have enough force…They’ve

16 Battlestar Galactica is an American military science fiction television series that first aired in 2003. The premise is that, in a distant part of the universe, a human civilization has extended to a group of planets known as the Twelve Colonies, to which they have migrated from their ancestral home world. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica)

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fallen into the trap that we used to fall into, of not putting guns on your fighters.

On the other hand, nothing like having a parachute force go in and take Crete, like the Germans did in World War II. That’s an Army force going in and make them surrender. I think it’s very much situationally and geography and almost temperament dependent, what the issues are. Are we fighting to invade someplace, or are we fighting to take back someplace, or have we been attacked? The invasion protocol is tough. Man, it is really tough to take over someone else’s land, especially if a theology or spirituality exists where, as Hoffer suggested, you’re fighting for the one reason that only humans will fight for.17 Man is the only animal to fight and die for an idea.

The fact is, though, that the watch word in Washington is joint, joint, joint, joint, joint, and the answer may well be joint, joint, joint, joint, joint. You should never dismiss it out of hand, but if it doesn’t have to be, it shouldn’t be. Unity of command and cleanness of command channels, you start with that.

When we did the Panama incursion, it was supposed to be a surreptitious approach. I’ve had all the tankers and positioned them so we could push the forces off of Bragg.18 We had to lay it, and there was some confusion there, but the flight profile was to fly out, go down, get under the radar coverage of Cuba, come back up and then go.

The Navy, wanting to be helpful, wanting to be joint, put a carrier smack in that gap, with F-14 air cover circling, and we blew all kinds of tactical surprise. They did it unilaterally, by the way, as I recall.

DePue: Well, let’s take it back; let’s go back to the 1960s, if you don’t mind, Sir. I wanted to ask you about one other memorable event while you were still at the academy, and that was November of 1963 and JFK’s [President John F. Kennedy’s] assassination.

Borling: I wasn’t at the academy; I’d graduated. I was in pilot training. In fact, I was in base operations at Waco, at James Connally [High School] in Waco, Texas, going on my first cross country in a T-37, other than the T-34, which I took on cross country when I didn’t know how to fly. But that’s another story for another time. Another guy knew how to fly, and I didn’t, and the two of us took a T-34 illegally and went across country from the academy to Chicago and back.

17 Eric Hoffer, 1902-1983, was an American writer on social and political philosophy. (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eric_Hoffer) 18 Fort Bragg, North Carolina is a military installation of the United States Army and is the largest military installation in the world (by population). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Bragg)

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DePue: When did you find out that you were going to get what you had been pining for all along, and you’re going to be able to go to fighter school?

Borling: Probably within about six weeks of graduation. I graduated in August of ’64, probably found out in July.

DePue: So that was at the end of the initial flight training.

Borling: Yeah, that’s right, the pilot training. Then [we] went from there, on down to Davis-Monthan [Air Force Base]. [I] actually went home on leave. We were broke, surprise, surprise. We’d run up quite a bill in Laredo, Texas. So I went home and got a job on leave, doing construction as a lieutenant and told my wife to get a job, and when she made enough money, she could join me in Tucson, where I was going to report in for my first fighter base, first training base.

DePue: That was Davis-Monthan?

Borling: Davis-Monthan, yeah.

DePue: Where did you get married? You said, in fifteen days.

Borling: We got married in Chicago, at the Gustavus Adolphus Lutheran Church on the South Side of Chicago.

DePue: Was there any thought about getting married at the academy?

Borling: We did, but the chapel wasn’t quite ready. It was still leaking and doing all that other…They were still working on it. We retain the mantra to this day that the Air Force Academy chapel is a structure to which you either pray in it, to it, or for it. (DePue laughs) John and Myrna Borling on the day DePue: Well, it’s the one most distinctive piece of John graduated from pilot training architecture on the academy, I would think. at Laredo Air Force Base in 1964.

Borling: Well, it is; although it’s going to have a rival shortly, with this Center for Character and Leadership Development, the CCLD, which is going to have an orientation that’s going to shoot out over Arnold Hall and be pointed at the North Star. It’s kind of a cool artistic design. It’s kind of a stainless mosaic. It’s done by the same guys who developed the academy, OSMO and Skidmore Merrill [Skidmore, Owings & Merrill]. Netsch, the guy who did the

47 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

chapel, died within a couple years ago.19 He was a Chicago guy. Anyway, it’s really a striking—

DePue: Walter Netsch was the—

Borling: Yeah, Walter. That’s right, Walter.

DePue: I know that because he was the husband of Dawn Clark Netsch, Illinois Senator Dawn Clark Netsch.

How much were you hearing, while you were still at the academy, especially when you were going through the early stages of flight training, just getting in the Air Force, how much were you hearing about what was going on in Vietnam?

Borling: Not much, other than we knew the war was on, and we were in a hurry to get there.

DePue: Anything distinctive about going through the—

Borling: Communism, domino theory, got to do this because it makes sense, got to protect the free people of South Vietnam. I don’t think that the intricacies of the Indo-Chinese theater…although I’d read the La Rue Sans Joie, the Street Without Joy, which was the Bernard Fall book, which was somewhat off- putting to me. But I was persuaded that the domino theory, however flawed, at least to a lieutenant’s eye, seemed to make sense. Besides, who could fail to bend to our will? [It was] kind of the haughtiness of American superiority.

Well, in the first few days of combat, we lost two airplanes out of the squadron. We said at the bar that is going to be a very long or very short war. The intensity of combat was real. But that’s okay; they’re authorized to shoot back.

DePue: Before we actually get you to the theater of combat, any memorable experiences going through basic flight training. Is that the right term for it?

Borling: Yeah, I couldn’t land the damn airplane. I almost flunked out of pilot training.

DePue: What were you training on at the time?

Borling: T-37s. Jim Hecker—Rain Dance was his call sign—was my IP. I just was having a heck of a time landing the airplane.

DePue: Is this a prop or a jet?

19 Walter A. Netsch, 1920–2008, was an American architect based in Chicago. He was most closely associated with the brutalist style of architecture, as well as with the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Netsch)

48 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

Borling: No, it was a jet; they were all jets. You normally soloed [with] about sixteen hours, I think fifteen, sixteen hours. Still, I’m sitting at twenty and three or four extra sorties. He hasn’t what they called “pinked me,” which is you’re failing. You get one or two pinks, and you’re out of the program. I was a class commander; you couldn’t pink me.

DePue: Pink me?

Borling: Pink, they give you a pink slip. I remember, it was traditional that you buy…I would go home and sit with a broomstick and try to practice. This is a side picture. I’d get the airplane down, and then I’d not land it correctly. I’d get it down, but it’d be bangy. It was kind of like your golf swing; I couldn’t replicate the drive three times in a row kind of thing. So, I went and bought a fifth of liquor, and I put on the desk, a fifth of scotch, which is what you’re supposed to give him when you solo. I said, “Look, either you’re going to drink that, or I’m going to drink it.”

So we went out flying. I think everybody else had soloed in the outfit, and here’s the laggard here. We were flying around, and he said, “Land and stop.” So we did. He got out, and he said, “Look, I don’t think it’s you.” He said, “I think it’s me. I just don’t think you like anybody flying with you.” He said, “Don’t kill yourself; go fly.” I just took off. My landings hadn’t been any better that day; I’m still banging them in.

So, I took off. The trick was, in those days, you had to make three landings, solo. I went around. I remember, I dropped my speed brakes on crosswind, and the aircraft starts buffeting. I couldn’t figure out what the hell it was. I thought the aircraft was coming apart. I dropped the speed brakes and inadvertently figured that out. Anyway, shot a landing, it was fine; shot another one, it was fine; shot another one, it was fine, and rolled out.

I think they greet you with hoses or something or water, and I got hosed down and felt great. I had soloed. My IP felt pretty good about that, but I was still bringing up the rear of the class, in my view, from a flying standpoint.

We had our first check ride. This is the one where you have these check rides along the way, and if you fail the check rides, now you’re subject to being washed out. I went on my first check ride. I was nervous, but I really had a feel for the airplane, in the air. I was still a little mentally unstuck with the landing business. Anyway, I aced the ride. I got the highest grade that was given or close to it. I think it was the highest grade given for this ride. In fact, they stood up and said, “Well, the old dummy over here, the class commander who couldn’t land the airplane, just aced the first check ride.”

DePue: You got all your mistakes out of your system.

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Borling: From that point on there was no holding me back. It was just great. So I flew well, and I did the military thing well. I kind of sloughed off in academics, but they graded you on kind of equal weight, and I ended up off-the-charts with respect to flying and off-the-charts with the military stuff. For selection purposes, I think I was like third or fourth in the class. But when the final order of merit came out, I was first in the class. That was—

DePue: Does that mean you get your pick of assignments and your pick of aircraft?

Borling: Well, we all picked the fighter. We didn’t get any single seat; all we got was F-4s, two seat fighters. So that’s what I took.

DePue: How did you end up being class commander?

Borling: I don’t know.

DePue: Was that a vote early on or a selection?

Borling: I’ve had shitty luck with elections. I think that Hal Halbauer, who died in the war by the way, class of ’59, Harlow and Dee Halbauer. He was really a good guy. I think he just may have made some inquiries back…He was our squadron trainer, our flight training officer. I think he, in a process that only he knew, made the selection.

But we had a great run, and he was very supportive. He and his wife, Dee, became really good friends. The class was pretty coherent. We had a couple guys who…There were a few cliques formed and things, and I wasn’t good enough to get them un-cliqued. But for the most part, the class did things, and we did a lot of social things together that were fun. It worked out.

DePue: Was this a mixture of academy graduates and ROTC?

Borling: One of the reasons that we went to Laredo [Community College, Laredo, TX, number one: the classes were smaller, and they were half academy and half a mixture of ROTC Guard, Reserve, et cetera, versus like going out to Williams [College, Williamstown, MA], where the whole class was academy. I didn’t want that anymore. So those of us…We had a choice. I could have gone to Williams, which is a neat place, but we elected to go to Laredo.

A few of us who wanted to be together did that, but we also knew the class would be leavened by these ROTC guys, and that was good. I also wanted to be stationed close to a foreign country. One of my career objectives was to spend a lot of time flying, but to spend a lot of time in foreign countries or near foreign countries.

So, in my ’60 Chevy, un-air-conditioned, two-door BelAir, we rolled into Laredo, Texas. The streets turned to dirt, and the newspapers turned to Spanish. Myrna turned to me and said, “This is not close to a foreign country.

50 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

This is in a foreign country.” (DePue laughs) We stopped at the only fine apartment complex in all of Laredo, which was the Seville Apartments.

We went in there. A couple classmates, a couple guys I didn’t even know, were there. They showed us their apartments, and boy were they something, the standard U-shaped thing with a pool in the middle and two floors, air conditioning, and it smelled like a new car. We walked into this one guy’s house; he had a two-bedroom, furnished apartment. But god, it cost like $250 a month. We were only making $222 plus fight pay and commissary pay, about $400, maybe $380 take-home. I said, “How can you afford this?” Well, his wife was working as a nurse or something. They had more money than anybody. The one-bedroom was $175, furnished, plus utilities. Well, I said, “I can’t afford that.” We looked at what we had, and we just don’t have enough money. I had an advertisement in my pocket that said, four-room house with a swimming pool, forty bucks a month. I said, “Let’s go look at this place.”

We drove over, down the dirt roads and found this place. In fact, it was a four-room house. We walked in through the open door. We could have gone in through the open windows, which had only that kind of gray wax paper stuff, dirt floors. There was a bedroom, a bathroom, inside, a kitchen or a sitting room kind of thing. But the dirt floors were a little off-putting, and the lack of the window glass in the windows was a little rustic, and the swimming pool was a cattle-dipping vat, (DePue laughs) with about that much green slime in it.

I’m, “Well, we can clean the thing, and we’ll get some windows.” Myrna said. As Myrna will, she said, “We’re going back to the Seville Apartments, and you’re going to rent that one bedroom.” I said, “We can’t afford it.” She said, “Figure it out,” and I said, “Okay.” We went back, and we did that.

We went into the Seville Apartments, and we had a great time at Seville Apartments for about six months. Then we bought a couch. We bought a couch for $40 at the Modern Furniture Store in Laredo, Texas. That was the tipping point.

So, we moved from the Seville Apartments to the Castle Apartments, which was the home of Jimmy Stewart in World War II, by the way, in Laredo Texas. This was $40 a month, with one little, window air conditioner. We only had four or five months to go. The walls were green, but someone had taken purple paint and thrown it at the walls. It had a kitchen, dining room. There was a bedroom that the ceiling collapsed on, eventually. We had to pull the mattress out and sleep in the front room. Anyway, so we moved in there.

51 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

The problem was, we were up on the second floor, and we had a neighbor whose door abutted ours. So, as you walk up, it would be like his door was here and the next door was right here. The screen door was open, because the air conditioners weren’t that good. The problem was that this guy was the class leader of another pilot training class. In those days the classes played one another in sports, contact sports. And this guy, a big guy, and I tussled a lot. I didn’t know his name, but we’d see him at the club. Myrna would hiss at his wife, and she’d hiss back. We’d give one of these South Side of Chicago kind of things. This guy and I did not get along, and we mixed it up pretty good. They lived there. (DePue laughs)

In those days, you could move in a ’60 Chevy, everything you owned in one move, including that couch that tipped us on the top of the thing [car] with the mattress. So, we moved in. It took us twenty minutes to move. We saw him as we moved up; they’re kind of “holy shit, it’s them.” We got into our place, and you know those pitchers you used to get when you got married, with kind of the blue, Scandinavian Dansk pitcher? Everyone got them in the ‘60s. So we got a quart of Oso Negro gin and poured it in there and threw a bunch of ice in it.

I went over and knocked on the door. They came to the door, very defensive, and I said, “You know, we don’t know you; we don’t like you, but we’re neighbors, and we’d better figure this out.” I pulled out the thing of gin. Well, that quart of gin and another quart of gin, about half of it later, and we were the fastest of friends. (DePue laughs) They are godparents to my daughter. In fact, we just left Jim and Sharon in California; we stayed with them while we were out. They live in Huntington Beach, and we cut a couple days off that POW convention so we could spend it with them. They have been as close to us over the years as any classmate from the academy.

But I must tell you, that Monday, when we went out onto the playing fields again—we’re into water polo or football or something—I started screaming, “Hanley, you son-of-a-bitch.” He said, “Borling, you asshole.” The guys said, “Oh, they’re going to get after it.” They were trying to hold me. I said, “Let me go; I’m going to take this guy on.” So we ran at one another, like this, down the center of the field. The guys are going, “Oh no!” Then we just… (both laugh) “What’s going on?” We would literally…It became kind of a funny thing, because the girls just loved each other and still do.

You’d go out with your own group on Friday night or Saturday night, but we’d plan, “How long are you going to spend with them? We can be back here at 9:00.” So we’d split from our own thing, and then we’d party. Jim and Sharon graduated a month and a half or two months ahead of us, and they went into C-130s [Hercules Cargo aircraft model 130]. Jim was a troop carrier guy his whole life and then flew for the airlines after that, good guy, just a wonderful friend. That’s the kind of thing you get in the military, I think. You

52 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

get these associations that are so close, not many, but you get a lot of friends. The guys that are really close, that means a lot.

DePue: Because there’s shared experiences, as much as anything.

Borling: Yeah, in this case, we were all young pioneers. We’d go across the river and go to bullfights, and we’d do whatever. In fact, a couple weeks before I got shot down, they were at Clark, and I was with them at Clark. They were the ones that relayed to Myrna that they were the last ones to “see me.” That’s important stuff, and I have great regard and respect for the Hanleys, Jim and Sharon.

DePue: I want to make sure I’ve got your timeline right, because I was looking at your list of duty assignments, and I saw that June and July of 1964, you were at Laredo Air Force Base.

Borling: I was at Laredo from July of ’63 until August of ’64. I graduated August 5, and showed up at Davis-Monthan [Air Force Base, Tucson, Arizona] probably October, November of ’64, graduating in about February of ’65, going to George [Air Force Base, Victorville] in California, where our first daughter was born, and left George to go to war in December of ’65, having been the first lieutenant to upgrade into the front seat of the F-4.

DePue: When did you start your F-4 training? Was that once you got to Davis- Monthan?

Borling: That was at Davis-Monthan; that was backseat F-4 training. They had the two- pilot concept, a flawed concept. None of us liked it. My quest was to get out of the backseat and get into the front seat.

DePue: So the backseat was definitely the second seat?

Borling: It’s the co-pilot seat, if you will. You’ve had a stick, and you had stuff, and you could fly the airplane, but you were heavy on systems, heavy on radar and other navigation kinds of things, even though we had an inertial navigation system. It was principally air-to-air for intercepts and things like this. But you had two pilots in one airplane. It’s kind of like two women in the same house.

DePue: An F-4 pilot friend of mine said it was the weapons systems officer who was the back-seater. Is that not the same concept?

Borling: It’s the same concept. It changed after a couple of years, and they put navigators back there. But in our early years, they had two pilots. Again, I think that it was just a way to gin-up the number of pilots in pilot training. I flew tests; I did everything I could to build the hours. As a matter of fact, I volunteered for A-1s, to get out, to go to the combat theater. Then one night I had a hot hand at the crap table at the George Stagg bar, and Colonel Kramer, who was the commander of the 479th, which was an F-104 wing, down the

53 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

ramp…We had four F-4 squadrons, and I think they had two or three 104 squadrons on the ramp at George. I made Kramer a lot of money.

Afterwards, we’re standing at the bar, he said, “Anybody who’s got hands like that needs to be flying the 104.” I said, “I couldn’t agree more.” He said, “I’m going to request you, on Monday morning, to come transfer over to the 104s.” I said, “I’m with you, Sir.” I had just made close to 200 hours in the F-4, months ahead of anybody else. I was getting thirty-five and forty hours a month; I was flying a lot, gone on the weekends, gone all the time, sacrificing family. So the A-1 thing came through and so did the 104 thing. My wing commander and my squadron commander came to me and said, “If you stay with us,” like they couldn’t stop it, they said, “We’ll make you the first lieutenant to upgrade in the F-4.”

DePue: When you say A-1s, is that F-4, A-1 or what?

Borling: No, this is the A-1E; this is the able dog, the sky raider. It’s a radial engine, single engine fighter.

DePue: Excuse my ignorance, it’s F-A1E?

Borling: No, it’s A-1E. There’s an A-1H; there’s an A-1E. Some are multi-seater, and some are one-seater, but the A-1 basically. It was a Navy airplane originally.

Anyway, I started to upgrade in the F-4, and I remember that was a source of some angst by some of my contemporaries, who were also back- seaters, who were pilots. But they did, and I had some wonderful guys. It was all local check-out. It got down to the point where you had to qualify on the range, dropping weaponry. You had to shoot rockets. We didn’t have a gun, so you had to do rockets and dive-bomb. Then you had to do nuclear delivery of bombs, and you had to bomb within a certain category. We were running out of time. I’d never been on the range, other than with other guys in the back seat. Some of these guys were taking twenty and thirty missions to qualify; they were all a bunch of old ADC pilots, Air Defense Command pilots. They weren’t tactical guys.

I hung out with the tactical guys, Bob Hutton, Chuck Kalb, Walker, John Walker, and I just tried to milk everything I could out of these guys as to how you maneuvered on the range and how you did stuff. I knew that, but I hadn’t done it myself, other than little ersatz stuff from the back seat. But you don’t have a gun site, so you have to set mils and do things. It’s different for rockets and different for bombs, different for low level…You have a skip bomb or a napalm run, then you have a dive-bomb. You had to get two bombs in out of six, into 120 feet, I think it was, of the circle. You’re going down the hill, and you’ve got to pull out; you don’t hit the ground and all that stuff.

Anyway, I’ve got two missions, and that’s what I’ve got. And it takes two missions to qualify, two out of six missions, but you’ve got to get two

54 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

missions out of six. I was only going to get two missions. I qualified in those two missions, which meant a lot.

DePue: Why didn’t you get the six that everybody else got?

Borling: We didn’t have the sorties available; we were going to war. The next sortie I had, I had my two range missions; I filled all the squares; I’ve done everything you need to do, flying front seat, and then off refueling at low levels, doing all that stuff. We went off on a low level check ride through Death Valley and up and around, and then to the range and bombing again. You could get a Q, which is qualified, which is kind of like passing, or you could get an HQ, highly qualified, which was reserved for the guys who had been around for a long time. I got an HQ, and then we went off to war.

DePue: Was this while you’re still at Davis-Monthan, or you were assigned to a unit?

Borling: No, this is at George, this was George. Davis-Monthan was just initial training, and then this was operational training, getting you combat ready, at George.

But my paperwork didn’t flow. I was flying front seat test, and I’d fly into Laos and take people who get shot at. But most of my flights that tour were backseat missions. That’s one of the reasons I volunteered for a consecutive 100-mission tour, called Myrna and said, “I’m staying to get a full mission,” 100-mission tour in the front seat, and got shot down on what was ostensibly the ninety-seventh mission. It probably was a few more than that. I had kind of quit counting, so they couldn’t throw me out of theater before the paperwork got through.

DePue: You just explained this situation, where you had just two chances at getting qualified. Were you already assigned to the 433rd?

55 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

Borling: Yeah, I was in the 433rd. I went from Davis-Monthan to the 433rd, which was the last of the four squadrons in the 8th Tac Fighter Wing. Remember we were talking about four structure before? Like the first wing in F-22s, we’ve got two squadrons now, I think eighteen airplanes apiece. We had four squadrons of twenty-four airplanes apiece, plus spares, four squadrons.

DePue: I wanted to ask you a couple more questions, if I could Sir, about the nature of the training you got. I think this probably occurred at Members of the 433rd Tactical Fighter Davis-Monthan; I could be wrong. Squadron, Borling’s unit while he was stationed Did you get any SERE [Survival at Bar, Ubon Royal Thai Air Base, Thailand, in Evasion Resistance Escape] 1966. training?

Borling: SERE training? After pilot training, we went to Stead Air Force Base.

DePue: Stead?

Borling: Stead, S-t-e-a-d, in Reno, Nevada. That was the place where you did your survival training and your POW [prisoner of war] compound business.

DePue: Can you describe the kind of training you got there?

Borling: Well, it’s a little strange, because I was already a survival instructor from the academy, and for part of the time, for the survival phase, when you’re out in the mountains living off the land, if you will, with some limited food supplies and things, learning how to use parachutes and things, hell I knew all that. All the instructors were guys who’d already been out with us and taught us and taught me. Especially when we were on the trek out, I’d just go up. I knew where the instructors had to be, so I’d split off from our guys, and I’d walk out with the instructors, and then I’d bounce back down, but played it straight for the most part, because we were legitimately able to be attacked by folks.

Then, the one time you get attacked, and you get captured. They put you in a compound. Then they interrogate you and put you in the black box. I don’t recall the waterboarding thing, but they poured water on you. I don’t recall thinking I was drowning. The Navy, I think, did it more, but they would beat you up a little bit and put you into a very cramped circumstance, a black box, with a hood on and manacles and things. It would hurt. They’d throw you there, and they’d come and beat on it with a sticks and things. Then they’d take you out and interrogate you and put you in uncomfortable positions, but

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they wouldn’t torture you; they wouldn’t hammer you; they wouldn’t knock you off the…They wouldn’t make a piñata out of you, the way the North Vietnamese would. They would allow you to get away with name, rank, service number, date of birth; although I was surprised that some guys, even under that little pressure, slipped.

Anyway, after that phase, when you’re done being kept in isolation and all that, they’re trying to create communications, didn’t know about the tap code, just trying to talk to somebody. They threw you into the compound, and then you’d engineer a little escape. Then they’d screw around with you, and you’d be living in the communal sense. Then, after a period of time, they’d come and let you go. Then you’d all go get cleaned up and go down to Harrah’s Club in downtown Reno.

DePue: How many days…how long was that training?

Borling: The total was about three weeks, as I remember it.

DePue: Was that all the intent, actually being treated like a prisoner, or was that obviously the entire scope?

Borling: That’s the survival phase. [There was] the academic phase, survival phase and the prison phase. I think the trek and the prison phase probably lasted about seven to ten days, something like that.

DePue: Do you think it was effective?

Borling: Effective. Effective needs some measurement tools associated with it or indices. What do you mean effective? Did it prepare me for—

DePue: Did it prepare you for the experience you were going to have?

Borling: No, no, no. Well, that’s not fair, a little bit, a little bit, but not really, because there was the hard code of conduct. You give them anything else, and you were a traitor. Well, you haven’t been tortured enough then, because you’re going to give them something else. It’s a question; do you bend, or do you break? You don’t want to break; you want to bend. You want to make sure you don’t bend easy either. So, marginally so, I think it was useful.

I was trying to think, what was the…The biggest survival experience was I was broke after that night at Harrah’s. Pat Riley, whoever the hell Pat is, I said “Pat, I’ll bet you ten bucks I can get home from Stead to Chicago on ten bucks.” He said, “You can’t get—” I said, “I have no car, no airline, but I bet I can get home from Stead to Chicago on ten bucks.” He said, “I’ll take that bet.” I said, “All right, pay me now, and if I lose the bet, I’ll send you twenty.”

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So I took that ten bucks (laughs) and got a ride from Stead to…caught a hop to Tucson. From Tucson, I got a ride to San Antonio. From San Antonio, I got a ride…There was a night involved here someplace—I slept on the airplane—got a ride to…I want to say the O’Hare Guard Unit that used to be the tanker unit. I got an IC train from O’Hare, where you got a train in to downtown. Now I’m standing…It’s cold, because it’s…I don’t know why it’s so cold, but it’s cold.

I’m standing at the Hilton, is where I got off the train. I’ve got like $9.00 in my pocket, and the taxi pulls up. I said, “Will you take me to the South Side of Chicago for nine bucks?” The guy says, “I will.” I said, “To this address?” He said, “I will.” I said, “Let’s go.”

So, I walked into my house, my folks, where Myrna was holed up— she always stayed with my folks, not her own—I said, “Where’s Myrna?” They said, “Well, I think she’s gone out to the Lincoln Park Zoo.” So I went to the Lincoln Park Zoo, drove up in the family car. Here I am, at the Lincoln Park Zoo—I forget what day it is, but it’s a busy day—and I said, “Now, if I was Myrna Borling, where would I be?” The things that she hates the most is snakes. I bet she’s in the reptile house. So, I walked…You come in; I went in the back way, into the reptiles. I’m walking out, and sure enough there she is, looking in the case, and “Eeeeee,” you know, doing this stuff. I went up and pinched her on the fanny, and she swung around. So that was that.

I got home for ten bucks. In fact, I got all the way home for about eighty cents. Then it was the cab ride to the South Side of Chicago that took all the rest of the money.

DePue: Well, a different subject altogether, describe for us what it was like, flying an F-4, that aircraft.

Borling: J-79 engines, two of them, Navy derivative. We called it the double ugly. It was an amazingly reliable airplane, very reliable airplane, honest airplane. It had a couple of squirrely features to it, depart, controlled flight, if you put it into a…It had an adverse yaw circumstance, so if you did it wrong and you were at slow speed, and you put an aileron, you’d whip out of control and spin, things like that. 20 Post-stall gyration we call it. But basically, it’s like any other airplane; you just kind of fly it by feel. If something’s happening, you get a little light in the seat, and if you’ve got enough room to be “light in the seat,” you hump it over, and you’re fine.21

20 A yaw motion is a side to side movement of the nose of the aircraft. Rotation around the front-to-back axis is called roll; rotation around the vertical axis is called yaw. (https://howthingsfly.si.edu/flight-dynamics/roll- pitch-and-yaw) 21 Light in the seat is what the body feels between 0G [gravitational force] and 1G. (https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/32275/what-does-it-mean-to-maintain-a-positive-g-loading)

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It was very good low level, wanted to run about 420, with low level, even with stores on it. In those days, you could take it, I don’t know, to Death Valley, and watch the altimeter go below zero. (DePue laughs) We’d run across Death Valley. You know, hell, we were going to war. We were a bunch of wild ass guys. There is a certain thrill of running low and fast and light when you’re restricted. There’s something kind of cool about batting along Death Valley and looking back, and see you’re leaving a dust trail. You’re down there twenty feet or so, and you’re doing 420, and you’re stomach bopping along.

This one day we were maybe two-ship, I guess; we’re bopping along. I looked out; [there’s] a black speck out there on the horizon. I wonder what the hell that is. I’m going up toward Scotty’s Castle. As we get closer, we can see. It’s like a ’48 Chevy, and people are picnicking out. They’ve got a blanket and stuff, and there’s a guy literally sitting on top of the ’48 Chevy. I remember flying by. I’m at the same level he’s at, maybe a little higher, and all I can see is…because we’re right there, we’re faster than the sound. I just do this, and my sense was—although we were by in an instant—that the guy pitched off backwards, and then we were gone.

They had Borax trucks in Death Valley. God, you’re going to think we’re just a bunch of screw-offs, but we were practicing our route wrecking and stuff. We see a Borax truck coming across the thing. This was more fun with a four-ship.

We’d get one guy, and we’d line up a few miles away. We’d spot him, ah! And we’d come around, and we’d play like he was the target, to pop up and do this stuff. We’d get a guy coming in this way, a guy coming this way, a guy coming this way, another guy coming that way, and we’d use this truck as our target for practicing pop-ups. We weren’t dropping anything on the guy, but we’d kind of come swooping in. You watch this big ole truck start going around the desert, after we had made a bunch of passes on him. We got into some trouble over that.

When I checked out, Bill Craig, who’s dead now, was a squadron commander. We were up, and we were having an air-to-air mission. I was on the wing, properly, as a lieutenant. We had a special procedure where, if this is Death Valley and George is down here, we’d have to fly out over the top of Death Valley to come back down, because this is all restricted area; Edwards Range is. But we figured out that we could fly down the boundary lines of the range areas. We wouldn’t be violating any restricted areas if we stayed right on the boundary lines, kind of on the printed map thing. So we would do that.

This one day, Edwards said, “No way, you’ve got to go the north way.” Well I, as a lieutenant and not being very smart on gas management, I

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was down below bingo fuel.22 I called it out, “I’m bingo, minus.” We went out the long way, and we get down here, and there’s a bunch of green spots, green irrigation spots, about ten miles off of George. I’m looking down like, Geeze, [I have] like 800 pounds of gas; which is nothing. Your minimum on initial is supposed to be 2,000. Man, I’m ten miles out, and I’ve got 800 pounds of gas, and I’m a lieutenant, and I’m going to flame it out, and they’ll kill me, and I’ll die. I didn’t worry about die; I worried about I was going to get court martialed or something, for scratching a jet.

I said, “I need to go straight in.” Colonel Craig, who was an old Korean guy, said, “Oh, we’ll take ‘em in and pitch ‘em out.” I’m looking; I get down to 700 pounds, 600 pounds; we’re going down. I said, “I’ve got to go straight in.” I dropped out of the formation, as a lieutenant, with the squadron commander and the ops officers, majors and things, here’s the lieutenant, just checked out in the F-4, just front seat, and I’ve left the formation illegally. Man, I may as well shot myself in the heart. But I’m sitting there thinking, What’s better, do this, or lose the jet?

When I land, get a good shoot. You get in the chocks, and it flames out.23 Literally, roll the chocks, and it flames out. Well, I was on his [Col. Craig’s] shit list big time. I’m his executive officer too; I’m his lieutenant. I just banged the microphone here, shows you how my heart was beating. I think that’s what relegated me not to get any more front seat time in Southeast Asia.

Bill Craig, for all that, was a good commander to me. He relied on me, and I respected him for that. His wife’s name was Mack. But he had a hard time in combat. I remember the night; it was a funny thing.

I don’t mean to demean a guy who’s gone, but there’s a funny story. We all have these call sign things. Mine, back then, was Thor, but it sounded too much like whore to me. He came in, and he had a ball cap. He said to me, “I want you to popularize my call sign, and we’re going to use my call sign when we go fly.” I said, “Okay, what’s your call sign, Sir, first lieutenant, lieutenant colonel?” He said, “I want you to help me with the men on this.” I said, “Well, I’ll do what I can, Sir.” I’m the exec [executive officer].

He said, “The call sign is The Iron Duke.” (both laugh) That’s exactly what I said, “Sir, you can’t do that. You don’t want to do that. Duke, sure, Iron Duke, even Iron, but...” He said, “The Iron Duke.” He pulls out this hat, and he’s got a hat in our squadron colors with The Iron Duke written on it. I thought, Oh, no. He said, “I want you to go to the club; popularize the fact that

22 Bingo fuel is military slang for the minimum fuel required for a comfortable and safe return to base. (http://www.guidance.aero/bingo-fuel-never-say) 23 Chocks are wedges of sturdy material, placed closely against the vehicle's wheels to prevent accidental movement. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel_chock)

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I’m going to be The Iron Duke.” I said, “You don’t want to do this.” I said, “You can’t.” I said, “I’ll try.” I said, “I promise you; I’ll try.”

I went to the club, and I drank too much. This PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] stuff that people talk about, it’s all because of lack of release, I think. We were losing our share of guys, but at the end, what you look for is— and I think it’s universal—food and booze, sleep and sex, dry socks and singing dirty songs at the bar to ward off fear and death. I just think it’s a way…When guys would buy it, we’d just raise our glass and say, “Well, good guys; we lose them.” But it’s always going to happen to the other guy. You didn’t harbor any notions that if you went down, that the guys were going to lose much sleep over it. We had one or two guys wimp out, but not many.

Anyway, I went to the club that night, right away and walked in. The guys were raising hell, and I said, “Hey.” I was the exec and also the briefing officer for the wing commander, a little common peer stuff. I said, “Look, the boss is going to come in, and he’s got this hat, and he’s got this call sign thing. Let’s just humor him; let’s just go along with it.” I tried to pitch it straight. I wasn’t trying to cut him down. But I did the same thing. The guys said, “What is it? What is it?” I said, “Well, it’s The Iron Duke,” (laughs). [They said], “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

He walked in with that hat on, walked [to] the bar, hat on. That hat ended up being nailed to the front of the old club, up on a high sign where no one could get it down. A guy stood up on his shoulders and nailed it there. I think that that’s one of the reasons he lost his squadron, The Iron Duke thing. There’s stylistic points, and there’s other points. God love him, he was a gentleman to me, taught me a lot, almost as much as our first sergeant did, as a matter of fact. He gave me a chance to do some things that other guys didn’t do, but that was a mistake.

DePue: Just that call sign lost the respect of—

Borling: Yeah, yeah, on such narrow grounds. But in truth, he was a combat experienced guy, as was our ops officer, who took the other squadron, Jim McGuire. Jim was kind of a carefree guy. He was a POW in World War II, got lashed to a banyan tree or a bamboo tree on Hainan Island. He’d take his form five, his flying record, and he’d say, “Smell this; that’s Southeast Asia; that’s where we’re going.” He was a B-25 strafer in the war.24

DePue: One other question about the F-4. You mentioned before, Sir, it didn’t have guns. Why didn’t it have guns?

Borling: Well, because the Navy version didn’t have a gun. We used a gun pod, but it was wildly inaccurate. The D-model used a pod as well, but the E-model had a

24 Strafing is the military practice of attacking ground targets from low-flying aircraft using aircraft-mounted automatic weapons. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafing)

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built-in gun that was very good. I’ve flown all models of the F-4, but we were flying the F-4 Charlie, which was a non-gun. It was an Air Force mounted F- 4B, which meant it had stick and flying controls in the back and some other modifications that the Navy didn’t have, I think different tires. But it was basically the Navy airplane. The Navy had it as a missile-only airplane, sparrow missiles and sidewinders for fleet defense. They thought it wouldn’t need guns, so they didn’t have a gun.

DePue: Does that mean they didn’t expect to have to do air-to-air combat?

Borling: I don’t know what the rationale was, except that boy, more times than not, we wanted a gun.

DePue: Did you get air-to-air combat training?

Borling: Not very much. I got it as part of my check-out, but when we were flying there, we would fly very little escort or air-to-air stuff. We were flying a lot of night missions, night attack missions, around the clock stuff. So, you knew the basics, the yo-yos and the high speed stuff, but that all presumed that you were going to get into maneuvering combat. What you were really doing was setting up for missile shots, and the principal adversaries were MiG-17s and 21s. But I never saw a MiG in the air, so nothing substantive came of that.

That’s why Red Flag was set up, of course, to give you simulated combat in the F-15.25 I spent months at a time down at Nellis [Air Force Base]. In fact, at Nellis, the whole time there, we’d take guys in the F-15. Now, these were all experienced pilots. But I’d take guys to Red Flag, then I would lead the jets out to Red Flag. I was always one of the low time guys, not in the F-15. We’d take guys to Red Flag with twenty hours in the airplane—but they would have several hundred or a thousand hours in another airplane—and make them participate. Red Flag was a good program.

DePue: Red Flag, is that what we think of “Topgun”?26

Borling: Well, it’s like Topgun, yeah.

DePue: The Air Force version of it.

Borling: Topgun was actually a school, as is our fighter weapons school, but Topgun was also a title you gave to people in the squadron or wing, who were winners of the gunnery competition or whatever. Outside of Miramar, off the Pacific

25 Red Flag is a realistic combat training exercise involving the air, space and cyber forces of the United States and its allies. (http://www.nellis.af.mil/About/Press-Releases/Display/Article/1407710/nellis-afb-hosts-red-flag- 18-1-jan-26-feb-16-2018/) 26 The United States Navy Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor program (SFTI program), more popularly known as Topgun, teaches fighter and strike tactics and techniques to selected Naval aviators and naval flight officers, who return to their operating units as surrogate instructors. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Navy_Strike_Fighter_Tactics_Instructor_program)

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Coast, there’s an electronic circle that people would fly in, the Topgun circle. We’ve got ranges up in Nellis, where the guys who went to fighter weapons school would go. I was not a patch wearer; I was not a fighter weapons school guy.

DePue: Sir, we’ve been at this for over three hours today, so my recommendation is that this is a logical place to call it a day and that we pick up your wartime experiences and your POW experiences tomorrow, if that works for you.

Borling: Okay. You know, there’s a lot more to life than POW and wartime experiences. We had a whole, great run after the war. The majority of my career was from the thirty-three years commission, even though the first eight or so were spent…nine perhaps, were spent in pilot training and the war. The rest of it was all around the world, with wonderful assignments and great opportunities to expand professional and personal horizons, very important. Right up to the last assignment, if you asked me and Myrna how we looked at things, we’d say, “Hey, it was a great run.” You’ll meet her tomorrow.

DePue: Excellent. Thank you very much, Sir.

Borling: All right, thank you.

(end of transcript #01) Interview with John Borling # VRV-A-L-2013-037.02 Interview # 02: May 30, 2013 Interviewer: Mark DePue

COPYRIGHT

The following material can be used for educational and other non-commercial purposes without the written permission of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. “Fair use” criteria of Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 must be followed. These materials are not to be deposited in other repositories, nor used for resale or commercial purposes without the authorization from the Audio-Visual Curator at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, 112 N. 6th Street, Springfield, Illinois 62701. Telephone (217) 785-7955

Note to the Reader: Readers of the oral history memoir should bear in mind that this is a transcript of the spoken word, and that the interviewer, interviewee and editor sought to preserve the informal, conversational style that is inherent in such historical sources. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library is not responsible for the factual accuracy of the memoir, nor for the views expressed therein. We leave these for the reader to judge.

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Borling: Okay, ask me questions, and I shall respond.

DePue: Well, today is Thursday, May 30, 2013. This is my second session with General John Borling. Good morning, Sir.

Borling: Good morning, pleasant day.

DePue: We are here in your residence, a gorgeous residence on the river in Rockford, Illinois. Coming in, I was reminded that Rockford is a fairly good size town.

Borling: The metro area, with the rest of the sister city, is about 250 [thousand, population].

DePue: How long have you lived here, Sir?

Borling: Twelve years. My wife’s got a widowed sister here, and we moved here from Chicago. We came home to Chicago after the service was finished, retired from Norway and went to our summer home for the summer and then went about getting hired out into civilian employ.

DePue: When we finished yesterday, we had you at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona. You just finished all your flight training, and you got to a real assignment. You were assigned to what unit, Sir?

Borling: George Air Force Base, 433rd Attack Fighter Squadron, 8th Tac Fighter Wing, the last of the F-4 squadrons. There were four on the wing, and there was also a wing of F-104s down the ramp, the 479th.

DePue: How long were you there before the entire unit ended up deploying?

Borling: Two of the squadrons went over TDY [Temporary Duty Assignment] in the fall, and we went over in mid-December of ’65. The Air Force loves to deploy just before Christmas, to screw up your holidays.

DePue: What were you hearing? What was the news about the war in Vietnam when you were getting ready to deploy?

Borling: Not much, other than the guys over there were at this base in Thailand that nobody knew where it was. We were going to go over there and take their airplanes and relieve them. They’d been there for three months, but we were going to go for a PCS [Permanent Change of Station], a 1200 mission, although that was flopping around.

It was so early, the procedure really hadn’t been set yet. We were going to be in a permanent change of station category, a remote tour. I was busy checking out in the front seat of the F-4 and trying to get as much flying time as I could. [We] didn’t really think about it, other than we were kind of

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glad the war was still on, and we were going to be able to get a chance to go over there and end it. And I did.

DePue: (laughs) One way or another. You were talking about getting a lot of front seat time. Was there anything specific about the nature of the training you were doing before?

Borling: There was different training, gunnery training and other things that you had to do when you were “pilot in command.” The front seat guy was the aircraft commander. The guy in the back seat was an assistant to capacity or a copilot, if you will. That was what I was doing. I was flying a lot of tests as well. I got qualified as front seat test pilot right from the get go.

DePue: At the time you were going, a lot of Army and Marine units were also deploying as units. By the time they were done with their rotations, which was typically one year—I think thirteen months for the Marines—they were ending up doing rotations individually, rather than as units. You went over as the 433rd—

Borling: We went over as a unit and had some individual augmentation that came in after that.

DePue: How long would 100 sortie rotation take?27

Borling: It’s 100 counting missions, and it varied; the rules varied a little bit. If they counted Laos…I’ve forgotten, frankly, or if they counted North Vietnam. I think it had to be North Vietnam. I would think that most guys would get done in seven months or so, eight months.

DePue: And then rotate as individuals back to the States?

Borling: They would rotate back to new duty assignments. Europe was chinning up F- 4s, a lot of assignments to Bitburg [Germany]. I had an assignment to [RAF] Bentwaters, but I’d volunteered for another 100 missions, so it didn’t much matter to me. But that would be typical, back to the States or back to Europe.

DePue: How about the ground crews and those who weren’t on flight status?

Borling: They were on a year’s tour, as I recall, or thirteen month rotation.

DePue: The rationale for the difference in the rotation policy?

Borling: No bloody idea, other than you flew your 100 missions north. In the south, they flew…It was a year tour. So the guys were flying in the south. I never

27 A sortie (from the French word meaning “exit”) is a deployment or dispatch of one military unit, be it an aircraft, ship or troops, from a strongpoint. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortie)

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flew a combat mission in the south, always flew north and principally North Vietnam.

DePue: The old rationale that went back all the way back to the Second World War era, with the B-17 and the B-24 missions over Europe was, you get to those twenty-five missions, and then they figured you were so lucky to have survived as a crew that you were rotated to some other position.

Borling: You were rotated back to peacetime duty, and often the crews weren’t integral. There was lots of mixing and matching on those bomber crews, and there was lots of mixing and matching for us, although a lot of the missions tended to be—not a lot; a number of the missions tended to be—raise your hand if you want to take this one. And there were a number of us who always raised our hand.

DePue: Was there any other rationale than the number 100 sounded good for that rotation policy? Was it something to do with the mental breakdown?

Borling: I think it had something to do with Korea. I think they had a 100 mission thing in Korea. I don’t know.

DePue: Where did you actually deploy to, Sir? Where did the unit go?

Borling: We left C-130s and went to Hickam [Air Force Base, Oahu, Hawaii], the whole squadron, the whole wing; we took a mai tai break at the Hickam O [Officers’] Club. We played a game called twenty-one aces. You roll the dice, and the guy who rolls the twenty-first ace, as you keep passing the dice cup, gets to buy the squadron a round of mai tais, impossible to lose in a big game. I won twice...in a row (DePue laughs), and there went my paycheck for about a month and a half or two months. It caused me to seriously take up some heavyweight gambling on markers. Frankly, I lived on my gambling winnings after that, because a couple rounds of mai tais was like 300 bucks. That was a lot of money. For me, that was all the money I had in my flight suit.

Then we flew from there to C-130, A-model, loud. We flew to Guam, had some kind of rotten meal at Guam, flew to Okinawa, and they wanted us to keep going. The wing commander said, “We’re done.” He said, “We’re authorized,” something. He said, “You guys be back at the airplane in four hours.” So we did, and they’re all screaming, “You can’t do this.” I said, “We’ll be back in four hours.”

We went and got a hotsi bath, a massage, hot bath. Everyone showed up three and a half, four hours later. We blew on, and we went to Thailand. None of this stopping for jungle survival at Clark; we didn’t have any of that. So we flew into Ubon on about the twenty-second or twenty-third of December, or twentieth, somewhere around there. Ubon’s in Eastern Thailand, butting up against the Mekong [River] almost.

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As we landed, the Mach 6 Aussie airplanes came over and toilet papered us. They had toilet paper in their speed brakes, and the guys were out to greet us. They took us in immediately—there was no rest—immediately to a mission briefing and gave us the old boy treatment.

The next day, with no further adieu, we found ourselves in Pack 6, which is Package 6, Route Package 6, well north of Hanoi, up along that railroad, along Penh Xoi, I think it was, or whatever it was, someplace up there to the northwest of Hanoi, but close enough to see it. There was cloud cover, and we lost an airplane. The next day we went up and went back to Pack 6, and we lost another airplane. We got the crew back that time. We said to ourselves, This is going be a very long or a very short war. We didn’t have any warm-up to speak of.

DePue: Well, that is interesting. I wonder if you could tell me your first impressions of Thailand, landing there.

Borling: Glad to be on the ground. Two days in a C-130A model is enough to make you think any place is beautiful, exciting, different. I’d never been to Asia. The base butted up against settlements. I really didn’t get much of an impression of Thailand the first week or so; we were so busy flying. I think we stood down for Christmas day, although I’m not sure we did. I don’t think I got off the base for the first couple weeks, three weeks. [I] took the one baht bus—a baht was a nickel—downtown and walked around downtown Ubon, lots of bicycles, lots of motorcycles or motor bikes, lots of dirt roads, lots of funny smells, a pretty country, rural.

DePue: What were the smells?

Borling: I don’t know, just some strange to the nose. You’d go down to the central markets…It’s like being at Laredo; you’d go down over to Nuevo to the Mercado. The first time there, you couldn’t even walk by it. A couple weeks later, you’re in there haggling for a piece of flyblown beef or cabrito.28 It’s what you get used to. I remember the same kind of deal. We went down and bought some shirts. There was a restaurant called the Lotus Restaurant that was pretty good; they featured the tizzling platter.

But if you want first impressions, the first impressions was in that first mission in North Vietnam. After Bob Jeffries and George Rims got shot down, we continued on and broke through this hole. Actually, they got shot down by going through a hole in the clouds that was zeroed in by the gunner. I can remember saying to myself, as we broke through, I saw North Vietnam for the first time.

28 Cabrito is the name, in both Spanish and Portuguese, for roast goat kid in various Iberian and Latin American cuisines. (https://www.interglot.com/dictionary/es/en/translate/cabrito)

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DePue: At what elevation?

Borling: We were in the Karst [a kind of stone] Region, somewhat northwest of Hanoi, northwest of Fujian.

DePue: But how high up were you flying at the time?

Borling: We were loaded up, so we probably came in around 18,000 to 19,000 feet, and we came through about a 10,000 foot hole. It’s the first time you saw Vietnam. It was cloud cover all the way up. My thought was, My God, it was... In fact, I said it over the air, I said, “My God, it’s beautiful.” Then we bombed the shit out of it. And that’s still my thought; I think Vietnam is a gorgeous country.

DePue: You came in as a unit, so the ground crews and everybody were just falling in on the support?

Borling: Everybody came in as a bunch.

DePue: Were you hearing any news about the maintenance level of the equipment that you had inherited, any concerns about that?

Borling: No. The concern was the shortage of ordnance [mounted guns]. We had a very definite ordnance shortage, and we’d take off light loaded, a couple of bombs, a couple pods of rockets. I went up on a gun-only mission once, stupid.

There was a sortie race thing going on with the Navy, both sides trying to show that they were really good. The Navy had, in terms of North Vietnam…Route Pack 1 was around Dong Hoi, and then there were a couple of route packs that were just geographical things that the Navy could get to easily.29 They had Route 6-A, this side, if you will, of Route Pack 6. We had 6-B, which was all the rest of it, and we shared Hanoi and that kind of stuff.

There was a real unhelpful, in my view, competition over terrain and over who was going to get the glory and who was flying more sorties and who was doing this and who was doing that. There’s a certain amount of that in every war, looking for the glory road, but this one seemed particularly stupid. But from a command and control standpoint, maybe it made sense.

My whole thought is, about air power, that air power is good to the extent that it provides presence overhead, because then it is inhibiting. Whether or not it’s even got lethal force, people will quit doing stuff with airplanes overhead. I think I mentioned this before. You asked me about, can one service win a war? I think it was said by Douhet or one of those early air

29 Planners divided North Vietnam into sectors, or route packages, where the USAF and US Navy flew during the Vietnam War. Ultimately there were 7 route packs. (https://www.afhistoryandmuseums.af.mil/About- Us/Fact-Sheets/Article/639570/route-packs-in-vietnam/)

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pioneers, that first you must win the battle of the air.30 That must be done before you start a single land or sea engagement. I think we’ve gotten away from that. We give credence to it, but then you don’t win the rest of it. So you win the battle of the air, but that doesn’t mean that, all right now the ground folks can go in and get their brains blown out. We should take out everything, from a targeting standpoint. The essence of strategy is targeting.

The targeting, when I was chief of Checkmate, [what] we’d always talk about was take out the electrical infrastructure; hit the dams; hit the things that would cause…not blowing up a railroad track, blow up the whole switching terminal aspect of it. But in the end, if you take electricity and dams out—and we’ve been reticent to take dams out—then you’ve caused some significant damage.

You can go popgun on targets like bridges and roads until you’re blue in the face, but what you’ve got to do is take out that critical war-fighting and morale sustaining kind of infrastructure. We finally got it right in the first Gulf War, where we blew everything that could be blown, in terms of putting them in the dark, putting them in the heat—we didn’t hit dams, but that aside—and then go in, and go to work on their civilization. If you’re not wanting to kill a lot of people, then don’t go to war.

DePue: I’m going to pause here real quick.

(pause in recording)

Borling: Okay?

DePue: I think we’re in good shape here. You were talking about the mission. What were you told, as far as what your objectives were when you first went in?

Borling: We were always told that we were going against a specific target, with a backup target. This came off the fragmentary order that was published by 2nd Air Division, and then 7th Air Force, I guess is what I turned into, under General [William Wallace] Momyer, who I briefed. I was kind of one of the briefing officers for the wing. I got a chance to brief heads of state.

Whoever the guy was from Australia, he fell asleep when I was briefing him. This was not fancy; we had one of those little school desks with the thing on it, the curved desk you’d slide it in; that was our VIP briefing room. So, he was sitting there, and I was pointing out our missions and things, and the prime minister…I remember, Joe Wilson; he was trying to help, but he wasn’t helping. This guy was out; he was just jetlagged. I went over and said something like, “And when you hear that crack of thunder…” or whatever it was, and I took my pointer with the rubber tip on it and whacked it

30 General Giulio Douhet (1869–1930) was an Italian general and air power theorist. He was a key proponent of strategic bombing in aerial warfare. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giulio_Douhet)

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across his desk. He went, “God…” He sat up, and I saw Joe Wilson, General Wilson, “No, no.” And I go whap! Boy, he stayed awake from then on.

Anyway, we would tell how we were doing the sorties. I was also the PA [public affairs] guy for the wing, extra duty, because we weren’t getting any…We were in a non-base; we didn’t exist. Thailand was not in the war, and yet we had wings flying out of Ubon, Takhli, Korat, had a wing flying out of Ubon, later, U-Tapao; by that time Thailand was announced.

I’d go down to Saigon, take a jet down, and walk into Stars & Stripes.31 I’d have a half a dozen stories about, these are the…“Dateline Saigon — The 8th Tac Fighter Wing flew missions to Dien Bien Phu” or wherever the hell we were and tell stories of the guys in hometown news releases. But they were all “Dateline Saigon,” because we couldn’t tell anybody we were flying out of Thailand, not that it was a very big secret.

DePue: I guess I wasn’t aware that the public wasn’t supposed to know that the Air Force was flying out of Thailand.

Borling: It was in deference to the Thai government; they needed a fig leaf. In fact, Ubon Air Base was a Thai air base. They had T-28s or something there.32

DePue: I know both Laos and Cambodia had their own version of a communist insurgency. Did Thailand have anything like that while you were there?

Borling: Nothing that bothered us. We’d go out banging around on our little Honda motorcycles into the hinterland—after having imbibed a bit, perhaps—and go out and just scramble in a pack of ten or fifteen. Why we weren’t all killed, I don’t know. We’re in shorts and t-shirts and sometimes bare feet. We’d go out on these dirt roads, driving as fast as we could, typical fighter pilot stuff. Somebody’d fall down and go rolling up, and we’d laugh. The guy would crawl up, and sometimes guys would get hurt.

I was fond of saying that, in those days, it wasn’t so much that you belonged to a fighter squadron as much as you belonged to a gang, a really good gang. We only had one coward who quit flying. They had to get him off the base; I think we were going to kill him. I think we would have killed him or at least hurt him bad. You had to do your job, no matter what the fear factor, and there was fear factor. You’re stupid if you don’t have fear when you’re getting hosed by all kinds of stuff and flying deep and in and around Hanoi.

31 Stars and Stripes is an American military newspaper that focuses and reports on matters concerning the members of the United States Armed Forces. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stars_and_Stripes_(newspaper)). 32 The North American Aviation T-28 Trojan is a piston-engined military trainer aircraft used by the United States Air Force and United States Navy beginning in the 1950s. Besides its use as a trainer, the T-28 was successfully employed as a counter-insurgency aircraft, primarily during the Vietnam War.( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_T-28_Trojan)

70 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

The release mechanisms for us were substantial. I think that’s, again, something we can think about as we consider future combat. It’s unnatural to go into circumstances where you’re killing and where you have the chance to be killed, without having some significant psychological release mechanism. You just can’t go around being goody two-shoes kind of thing.

DePue: Well, there’s been a lot written and said, philosophized, about the difference between that ground troop who’s in combat day in and day out, for a long period of time and what your experience was. You have very intense experiences—

Borling: We’re more like divers; you dive in; you dive out. I will grant you—I’m no expert on the ground combat in Vietnam—people would be out for twenty and thirty days. But if you look at the history of combat—John Keegan again— and how long people can be in combat, sustain combat, before they lose effectiveness, ten, fifteen, twenty days, they’ve got to have some kind of respite. They got to pull them back. Some units never gain effectiveness after that first sustained clash with the enemy.

It brings to mind, when you send guys out on these patrols into Iraq and Afghanistan, whether or not the kind of 360 combat that they’re in—they never know where it’s coming from; they never know who’s friend, who’s foe. There was certainly some of that in Vietnam, as well, a lot of that. But it’s much, much different in an urban setting than it is in a more rural setting.

We’ve done an awful lot of urban fighting, like mini-Stalingrad kind of things. You wonder though, with all our firepower, why, if somebody’s shooting at you from that building over there—I don’t care what it is—if they’re shooting from that building, you think twice if it’s a hospital or a mosque. You know they do that because of the impunity. A hospital, I’d think twice about. A church or a mosque, take it out.

DePue: But obviously, that wasn’t the war you were fighting.

Borling: No, the war we were fighting was very restrictive. We had a very, very precise set of ROE, rules of engagement. We were basically only authorized to go after those targets against which we were fragged.33 We had very few armed recies [reconnaissance] sorties, except some in Northern Laos, some in Route Package 1, where trucks were considered to be military targets, regardless, trains. But most of the stuff we went against was fixed targets, depots. We had some stupid targets, underwater bridge made of stones, with rockets. (DePue laughs) I just made a filthy gesture. A lot of it was just…A lot of it was repetitive. The guys riding the frag, we’ll have a morning go; we’ll have an

33 Fragged is the verb form of frag, which was derived from the Vietnam War Era wounding caused by Fragmentation weaponry, bullets, grenades, and mortar shells included. (https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fragged}

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afternoon go; we’ll have an evening go; we’ll have a late-early morning go. You could almost…A lot of it was predicated upon your maintenance cycle.

DePue: All against the same target?

Borling: No, not always, but often they’d have a morning go against the target and an afternoon go against the same target. The guys would come back and [we’d] say, “Well, how was the flak?” “Oh, we didn’t have anything.” We’d go back there that afternoon, and we’d get our ass shot off. So, sometimes, tactically, we just did very dumb things.

DePue: Did anybody sit down and tell you the grand strategy of what the air campaign was supposed to be geared at?

Borling: I think we divined that the policy was one of gradualism, that we were going to put…How could they possibly resist our might? I think we went in with a good deal of an attitude that I would only describe as supercilious, one that was so overconfident of our superiority that we didn’t see how anybody could stand up to it. And in fact we were right, but you had to apply that power. You had to go downtown and level the place. And we weren’t willing to do that, at least initially.

DePue: You talked about the nature of the targets; a lot of it was primarily infrastructure oriented, military type targets. How about―

Borling: Bridges, road junctions, truck parks. One of the guys I served with, who was a POW when they deployed with SAMs [Surface to Air Missiles], was sent out to see if the SAMs could fire. So they tasked him to send a four ship over at about 20,000 feet, over the SAM site. Three of the four airplanes were shot down, so we figured that, hey, they can do that. That’s a true story.

DePue: And not the best mission to draw to in that case. Was there a notion that you were also supposed to be targeting the North Vietnamese public support?

Borling: No. There were strictures against civilians, if you talk about public support. But when you inject yourself in an invasion protocol and into essentially what is a civil war, especially a war where there is differing ideology…You recall the communist theology, Juche theology, had all these natural laws, where their victory was inevitable.34 We were there principally because of the domino theory rolling against Thailand and Malaysia. The Brits had had a communist insurgency in Malaysia going on for years.

34 Juche postulates that "man is the master of his destiny," that the North Korean masses are to act as the "masters of the revolution and construction" and that by becoming self-reliant and strong a nation can achieve true socialism. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juche)

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These were wars of surrogates. Russia and China were supporting Vietnam, and we were supporting South Vietnam. But we’re involved; they weren’t involved—at least not overtly—but they were. There were Russian pilots that flew later in the war; there were Chinese pilots that flew; there were Chinese labor battalions; there were Russian advisors. It was a test of wills on a world scale, without going to a world war. It was kind of confined to Laos and Vietnam and later Cambodia. Cambodia was sanctuary. Why you’d ever go to war and allow sanctuary is beyond me. You ought to look at the ground, assess the ground.

All that said, we did some stupid things with respect to trying to burn down jungles and defoliate and do all these kinds of esoteric things that the politicians and the scientists think will work. In the end, you’ve got to go up and either shoot them in the face from a distance, or shoot them in the face up close.

DePue: I wonder if you could walk us through a typical mission, from initial briefing all the way through the debriefing once you come back.

Borling: The frag would break…I’ve been struggling with this a little bit because we were daytime for a while, and then we moved into night owls, the night business.

DePue: And by frag, you mean fragmentary order?35

Borling: Fragmentary order. The frag would break, and they would normally break a day in advance or the day of, because you needed a planning cycle to get the airplanes bombed up with the right ordnance, and the crews needed some time to assess how they were going in and going out. There was a lot of autonomy. We didn’t have a lot of these big packages that we sent up. The thuds were doing mostly the ground war. We were flying escort, and we’d have a coordination as to TOT [Time on Target] and places and times.

DePue: Thud?

Borling: F-105s. They picked up that appellation because that’s what it sounded like when they went in, “thud.” When we were doing escort, we would experiment with kind of a rolling CAP [Combat Air Patrol] or a fighter. The missions for fighters are fighter sweep, which is great, where you’re out in front.36

We had an identification problem. They made us visually ID anything we were going to shoot at. Well, that’s stupid as all hell. You ought to de-

35 Fragmentary order is an abbreviated form of an operation order (verbal, written or digital), usually issued on a day-to-day basis, that eliminates the need for restating information contained in a basic operation order. (https://www.thefreedictionary.com/fragmentary+order) 36 Fighter sweep is an offensive mission by fighter aircraft to seek out and destroy enemy aircraft or targets of opportunity in an allotted area of operations. (https://www.thefreedictionary.com/fighter+sweep)

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conflict the airspace or have electronic means to identify…If you’ve got a radar target out there, shoot them in the face from a distance. We had sparrow missiles; we had sidewinders you had to get to 6:00; that’s a heat seeker. But we never got that, at least in my term. They did later on.

Then you’ve got the close air support mission, where you’re in support of ground troops; hit the target; knock out troops; do whatever. We never did any CAS [Combat Air Surveillance]. Then you’ve got a CAP, or a Combat Air Patrol, where you would set up in a geographic region and hope to shield the strike force, or then you’ve got a close CAP or a revolving CAP, where you’re literally on top of the strike force, and you’re rotating over, through and around the strike force.

The problem was the thuds would run at 520 to 540, low 480 sometimes but mostly 520. Our comfort zone was somewhere around 420. We could push it up to 480, but we were drinking a lot of gas. We found that if they wanted to, once they pushed it up, they would leave us behind.

DePue: Did they carry more ordnance then?

Borling: They were more of a bomb-carrying outfit; they’d carry…Remember, we were short. The typical load for us was a 500-pound bomb, a big, dumb, fat bomb, sometimes snake-eye, which was a more sleek, 500-pound bomb with a retard tail on it. So, you’d deliver that at low altitude. The thuds would carry 1,000-pound, sometimes 2,000-pound bombs, going after bridges.

We all used high dive angle. You practiced with a dive angle of thirty- eight degrees, sometimes forty-five. Man, the dive angles we’d use. Instead of rolling in from the nominal, 6,000 to7,000 feet, roll in, get your pipper; walk the pipper; pull out.37 You’d have 1,000 feet or so to go for safety margin. All you’re doing is putting yourself in small arms. We’d roll in from 15,000 feet, go down the slide at sixty or seventy degrees, drop the bombs off and pull out by 8,000 or 9,000 feet or 7,000 feet, 6,000 feet. Our bombing accuracy suffered accordingly; we threw bombs all over hell and gone.

DePue: It’s important that you mentioned these were dumb bombs. This is the days before any kind of guided munitions, right?

Borling: The days before JDAM [Joint Direct Attack Munitions], yeah. I helped develop the JDAM. I was a big supporter of it, as head of ops requirements. It’s a breakthrough for ordnance delivery. It really complicates the defense too. You can stay straight and level up at 35,000 to 40,000 feet; throw a dumb bomb fourteen miles downrange, five or six miles off axis, individually target whatever you got. In some airplanes you can dial a bomb; you can change the

37 A pipper is a target sight, especially on fighter aircraft. It is the marker for a predicted point of impact (PIP). (https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pipper)

74 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

coordinates on the bomb. It’s got an INS [Inertial Navigation System] front end and a GPS [Global Positioning System] terminal, with a steerable tail.

Anyway, we would do that. We’d typically go into briefing a couple hours before, two and a half hours before a flight leave. We’d normally always go up as a flight of four. Depending on how complex the mission was, two and a half hours before takeoff was plenty. We’d brief it up. Most of the stuff, once you’d been through it, ground taxi, takeoff standard…

We did find out, in the F-4, that the rotation speed would often come after liftoff speed. You could have a center of gravity problem on an F-4, where if you tried to do this and rotate, the thing would…I’m forgetting what it would do. It wouldn’t rotate. Where you’d normally have a rotation speed in the dash-one, you’d be laden down with missiles and bombs or stuff, and you’d have to hold it down until you basically got to flying speed on the ground and then rotate. So rotation speed in the dash-one was wrong, which is normally thirty knots short or forty knots short of where you need to go when you start to rotate.

DePue: Rotation speed, meaning rotating―

Borling: Where you start to get the nose off the ground. You hold it until you build up more speed, and then the aircraft flies off. But what we were doing—this is the way we would take the F-4 off—you’d just fly down the runway. You had both burners cooking, and you’re on the runway. You’re well past the normal rotation speed, around 120, 130. So, you’re up to 165, 170 knots on the runway. Then you just go “boop,” and now you’re flying. (DePue laughs) It’s almost like you took the stick and moved it up. Set the gear and flaps.

You had to be careful on the flaps; you could suck it back down into the ground. We were careful about that. We had some thrilling ground aborts before the guys kind of learned that. We learned a lot of stuff that wasn’t in the manual, about the F-4. The ops losses were, frankly, as numerous as were combat losses.

DePue: Ops meaning there’s some malfunction or―

Borling: Operational losses. Oh, guys taking them off the end of the runway, weather losses…The nice thing was nobody cared. We didn’t worry about accident boards or any of that stuff. You scratch an airplane, shit; here’s another one; who cares?

DePue: As long as you’re not losing pilots in the process.

Borling: Well, we lost that too.

DePue: You mentioned weather. I would think that weather would always be a big part of the initial briefing that you got.

75 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

Borling: We’d have time hack weather intel intelligence briefings, time hack weather intel. There would be a general briefing, just a big briefing in the course of the day or the night, kind of an overall, give you kind of the bottom line stuff. But you’d have an update weather intel, and then the flight lead would brief all the stuff, and we’d go through and worked all the settings out and all of the navigation stuff and all the tactics we were going to use on that particular day. Then we would step to the airplane, probably twenty minutes before start engine time. We had an absolutely ironclad rule that you could not carry a drink to the airplane.

DePue: Alcohol or any kind of drink?

Borling: Alcohol. That’s a little bit of a bravado but not far from the truth. The next question is, would you guys ever fly impaired? The answer is, not much. But what the hell, it was combat, just like you don’t smoke in a fighter. Everybody smoked. You just want to make sure you turn off your oxygen. In fact, they had ashtrays in the F-4, (DePue laughs) The crew chiefs would put ashtrays in the airplane. You don’t smoke in a fighter airplane. We did.

DePue: Was part of the getting ready routine make sure you relieved yourself before you strapped in?

Borling: Yeah, we had piddle packs. You’d take a leak as many times as you could before you got in the air, including even in the arming area, because you’d taxi out, and then they’d arm up the bombs. They were safe; they were…We didn’t have revetments; we were just out there on the ramp.38 If somebody came over with a Piper Cub and a Gatling gun, they were just going to wipe out the whole base. [We were] all parked in a neat row, no revetments. There was no room for revetments, but you’d pull out to the arming area.

You start engines about twenty, twenty-five minutes before takeoff, pull out in order, standard calls over the radio, nothing fancy, and pull out to the arming area, which is right next to where you’re going to take off. They’d arm you up, and you’d get lined up on the runway, and off you go. We would take off…If we were heavily laden, we wouldn’t take off in formation. In fact, I think most of the time, given the width of the runway and what we were doing, we were taking off in trail, like ten-second trail, and then later you’d pull it back.

DePue: You said there were four aircraft?

Borling: Two to four normally, yeah, four aircraft normally. You’d take off, and you’d head north. Lion Control was the air controlling group with the radar there.

38 A revetment is a barricade of earth or sandbags, set up to provide protection from blast or to prevent planes from overrunning when landing. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revetment)

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They had both surveillance and PAR [Precision Approach Radar] for precision.

We’d fly north, and we’d hit a tanker up in northern Thailand. We’re flying up there about 18,000 feet, 19,000 feet. It would be off to the south and to the right of Vientiane and Udorn. There were three tracks up there. I think they were color-coded, coded brown or yellow or something like that. We’d hit those tracks, and then we would cross the fence, which was the Mekong River, into Laos. At that point, we would arm everything up. We’d put on the master arms, and get everything—we called it a fence check, once you crossed the Mekong—and then, depending on where we were going, we’d get another fence check; maybe we can get everything except the master arm. When we would cross the black or wherever we were up there, we would go through another fence check and make sure that we were all ready to go, nothing so stupid as to try to pickle off bombs, and they don’t go, for whatever reason.

DePue: Fence check is simply an imaginary control line on the ground?

Borling: No, in this case it was the Mekong River. We used a fence check most of the time; that’s where you wanted to be armed up and safed up. Couldn’t go supersonic in Thailand. You could, obviously, over Laos and North Vietnam.

So you’d go do your mission, whatever it was, and then you’d find each other and get formed up and come scooting back the same way you went in. You probably have to hit a post-strike tanker. You would always have bingo, trying to get back to something like Udorn. You’d plan your bingo to get back to that base just south of Vientiane.

DePue: Bingo meaning what, Sir?

Borling: Bingo is the fuel at which you have to leave to have enough to get home with some little reserve. More often than not, you would end up bingo-minus, so you had to have a tanker. The tanker guys were great. Some of them would come into Laos, against orders. On occasion, some of them went into North Vietnam when guys…

Maneuvering combat, you can be out of gas in five to six minutes. When you need gas, you need gas. The procedure was, you’d come back post- strike. You’re looking there; you’re under 1,000 pounds maybe, and you slide in. You get a few hundred pounds, and you slide out. The next guy, he’s not…there’s none of this peacetime. You’re sitting on the boom; you’ve got a guy sitting on your wing on the boom; you’re off; he’s on. There’s another guy over here; he comes in; he’s on. You do that a few times to get enough gas to get gas. Then finally everyone’s got enough, and we’re all breathing easy. You talk about refueling proficiency, there was no time for screwing this one up. You’ve got to be able to get your gas, get in and get off.

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I remember one night, I was with this guy; he was not a good pilot. I was in the back seat, and it was night. It wasn’t even post-strike; it was pre- strike. We’re up there flopping around; it was weather, and he couldn’t…This guy was a flight commander, and he couldn’t get gas. I finally got so pissed off, I said, “Give me the airplane.” I didn’t fly with this guy regularly. Here I am, sitting in the back seat; the boom comes in and “whap.”

Refueling’s always been an easy thing for me, in-flight refueling; I like it. I don’t use any of the standard stuff they do. I just go up, and I have a mental picture and feel for it. Why don’t we go―

DePue: Take a break here?

(pause in recording)

DePue: I’m going to start us up here. We took a little bit of a break. You had a phone call to take care of. We were talking about refueling, and I think I want to start with asking you if this was a KC-135.39

Borling: It was a 135; that’s all we had, KC-135 with the old engines on them. [They] saved our bacon more than once.

DePue: And I had asked you to kind of lay out the sequence of a typical mission.

Borling: We’d go up, and we’d do our thing, and we’d come back, and we’d shape everything up crossing the fence. Then you were fighting the weather. You’re always fighting the weather in Thailand. You’d pass from these various controllers at the various bases. Sometimes there was no tanker, and you’d have to bingo in. I’ve bingoed into Da Nang, Vientiane, got weathered out of Ubon into Karat, Takhli, Saigon, never into Cameron. You would get it home, and put it on the ground.

We had a single runway with PAR precision approach on one side and only surveillance on the other, over the city. Surveillance is when you have a azimuth [direction expressed as an angular distance from a fixed point], but you don’t have a glide slope. You just have some things that you do mechanically to get it down.

Then we’d get all of our stuff and go hit a debriefing room, normally with a beer or something else, and talk through it. The guys who were maybe going off on the same mission or the same area would be looking for you and want to know how was it. You’d tell them what you could.

39 The Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker is a military aerial refueling aircraft. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_KC-135_Stratotanker)

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DePue: Some of the focus was on SAM [System for Award Management] that you were―

Borling: Defenses around the target area, SAMs, MiGs, whatever; although I never saw a MiG in the air the whole time I was there.40

DePue: Did you see any enemy aircraft?

Borling: Never. I think, yeah; I think there was one. There was a small puddle jumper down real low once―a light airplane kind of thing, over in Pack 6―and lost it. It went down into areas that we…It was literally in the trees.

Then you’d go do whatever you did. You’d go to your additional duties, or you’d hit the bar; you’d gamble; you’d eat; you’d smoke; you’d take care of your laundry. The laundry girl there was named Big Box. She had a bicycle, and she had a huge box on the back of that bicycle. So we’d call her Big Box.

We had common latrines. We lived in hooches.41 After a while they even air conditioned them, kind of nice. But you were four or five guys to a room in a hooch. Guys were on different shifts, so you’re always tired. We used to say, “Well, when you’re tired you’ll sleep,” and you’d watch guys fall asleep at the table, just boom, go down.

DePue: In the debriefings?

Borling: No, at dinner, when you’re eating, or breakfast, the meals. When you’re flying a twenty-four hour schedule, everything gets mixed up. You don’t know where you are.

Then we had R&R [Rest and Relaxation] a few times, a couple, three times. Once, I went to Da Nang to see how it was to be with the Marines and firefight. After that, I went to Bangkok. So, Bangkok once and went up to Chiang Mai [Thailand]. Another time I went to Clark [Air Base] in the Philippines. Shortly before I got shot down I was at Clark.

DePue: When you say you went to Da Nang to see what it was like in a firefight, does that mean you went out with the Marines on a ground patrol?

Borling: I went out beyond…I guess you could call it that. The perimeter around Da Nang in those days was still pretty dicey, and Da Nang would take fire. I went out with a squad of Marine guys, and we went out into the hinterland, not very far, a few miles, and drew fire. It was almost like a fireworks show. I’m not

40 A MiG is a Russian fighter aircraft made by the MiG Company, a Russian aerospace joint stock company. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mig) 41 A Hooch or hootch, is Vietnam War slang for a thatched hut or improvised living space. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooch)

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sure anybody knew who was firing at who, but everyone was putting a lot of lead in the air. I thought that was exciting enough. I went back, and as I say, the future R&Rs…You’d go R&R about once every two months maybe, for a couple days.

DePue: Well Sir, I want to ask you some questions that only an Army guy would ask about this stuff. You said a typical flight was four aircraft?

Borling: Two to four, yeah.

DePue: Were you a front seat or a back seater for these?

Borling: As I told you, I flew swing seats, but principally back seat in the first part. My front seat stuff would be in Laos and would be test work.

DePue: Were you flying with different people, or did you always have the same person?

Borling: No, I flew with different people. I was kind of the IP back-seater, checked out a lot of new guys who came in and was proud to be, because I was qualified in both seats, qualified to be useful in doing that.

DePue: Was your experience typical, or did most of the pilots always fly as a team?

Borling: We had formed crews, but in my experience, I flew with everybody. Some guys were closer to it, but on my schedule, with my additional duties and the briefing and the PA and the test work and the other stuff had me bouncing around a good deal.

DePue: Both in your descriptions of a typical mission and in the book that you wrote, Taps on the Wall, in talking about missions that you went on―

Borling: That’s the soft cover version.

DePue: I think you kind of downplayed actually being on the mission, doing the combat, hitting the target, those kinds of things. One of the things you mentioned was, after you did that [reading from the book], “Then we’d have to find ourselves, find each other.”

Borling: Yeah, because sometimes you’d get separated.

DePue: From the rest of the men at―

Borling: From the rest of the folks, yeah. I can remember one mission; I was flying; I don’t know where I was. I remember saying…This was a front seat mission, and I got separated, a typical lieutenant thing. The guys [were saying], “Where are you,” whatever the call sign was. I said, “I’m all right.” I said, “Pressing south.” It was an afternoon mission. I said, “I’ve got the sun on my

80 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

left wing,” because my INS had gone down. It took me about ten seconds to figure out, I was not heading south; I was heading north, toward China, at a high rate of speed. It took them about that long, “Your sun is where, you stupid son of a bitch?” It cost me a lot of drinks at the bar that night. (DePue laughs)

DePue: Was there any part in the mission that you had to maintain commo [communications] silence?

Borling: Yeah, our last mission, because we were doing something very different. It was a volunteer mission, again. We went in lights out, close formation at night, low altitude, after a target, 18-23, the JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] target, the Bac Giang railroad bridge. When we got there, on course, on time, we had a two-ship and then another two-ship behind us, about two minutes. Our job was to lay down the CBUs [Cluster Bombs], flares, and we had rockets for suppression. When we laid down the flares and the CBUs, lo and behold the bridge was down. Our wingman had pulled off into a bombing position, and we went straight across the target. I was kind of proud of that, made that happen, and the bridge was down. It had been dropped that afternoon by Glenn Nix, who became a POW about sixty days later, forty-five days later.

We didn’t have the intel, the real time intel, to let us know it was down. Then we called everybody. We hadn’t talked yet; we called everybody. We were at Highway 1, so we trolled up Highway 1. We still had two pods of rockets. This is the ordnance business, ordnance, and shot some rockets at a bunch of trucks and then had a second pass. It was on that second pass that we—A.J. and I differ a little on this—felt the airplane dish big time, felt the tail go, and the stick became ineffective, and we had to punch. We were actually rolling, inverted, going through about 1,000 feet.

DePue: If you don’t mind, Sir, I’m going to hold off on a more detailed description of what happened after that.

Borling: Well, hell, I can’t…You mean in terms of the actual ejection sequence?

DePue: Yeah.

Borling: Boom, hit the ground.

DePue: I did want to ask you a few more questions before we got to that point though. Did you have a call sign then?

Borling: You know, I’m trying to remember back. For some reason…We talked about using call signs, and we did, but I didn’t have my own call sign then, I don’t think. I can’t remember if I did. I really didn’t get a call sign until after the war, and you didn’t get them; they gave them to you.

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DePue: What kind of weather caused you to scrub a mission? How bad did it have to be?

Borling: The birds would have to be walking.

DePue: The birds would have to be walking? It was so wet that they couldn’t fly? It was so windy that they couldn’t fly?

Borling: No ceiling, no visibility, no…WOXOF was the word. In fact, the poem in the book, SEA Story, starts off:

One WOXOF day, down Ubon way, the monsoon rains in town. Out at the base, the 8th was in place, but flying ops were down. The jocks were lolling; wind was howling, a weather day condition. When holy smoke, some frags they broke, said we had a mission.

This is where I’ve been accused, by the way, of inventing rap. I apologize for that. I didn’t mean to do that.

DePue: You were ahead of your time then, Sir.

Borling: WOXOF means obscuration, no ceiling, no visibility, fog and deteriorating. WOXOF, W-O-X-O-F or something like that, pronounced “walks-off.”

DePue: Monsoon season. What was monsoon season?

Borling: A period―I think it was in the March timeframe, April timeframe―very heavy rains that would come through. In fact, it was the water festival in Thailand. You’d be riding down on the one baht [a denomination of Vietnamese currency] bus, which was an open bus. Somebody would come up and throw a pail of water on you.

Because it was raining all the time, everybody was wet all the time. It was great fun; you just picked up a pail of water. You’d walk into squadron ops, and somebody would be standing behind the door―you’re in your flight suit; your flight suit’s dry, not any more―throws a pail of water at you. It’s a funny deal, fighter pilot deal. It was a Thailand custom that we adopted. The little Thai waitresses in the club would have great fun; they’d come up and pour water over your head, where you’re sitting at the table, get your cigarette all wet.

DePue: I assume you’d better have a good humor about those kinds of things?

Borling: Oh, everybody laughed about that. It was funny, sitting on the bus and having people come out with ash cans full of water.

DePue: Did you have a houseboy for a group?

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Borling: Yeah, I think we had someone who took care of the place. I think it was a house girl actually. I can remember, the normal bathroom protocols observed in the west were not observed. You’d be taking care of your business there in a stall, and a little girl would open up the stall door with a mop and a bucket and ask you to lift your leg, kind of thing. It was a different kind of world.

DePue: You mentioned additional duties. What additional duties did you have?

Borling: I was the briefing officer, again, one of two for the wing. I had the public affairs business. I was the exec, but they changed the exec, or the executive officer out, the commander at the squadron level. But I screwed up the AFSC submission papers. I didn’t know how to do it, so very easy to screw it up. So they put a more knowledgeable guy in, a captain, to do that.

But the squadron commander and I stayed pretty close; he was a big supporter. The wing commander kind of co-opted me, Colonel Joe Wilson. He turned into General Joe Wilson, lieutenant general, good guy, great guy, a lot of respect for Joe Wilson. And that was it. That would keep me moving.

DePue: What would you consider the most dangerous part of a typical mission?

Borling: The most dangerous part of a typical mission…probably night dive-bombing. We would dive-bomb on typical missions, at night. Pull up and go down, vertigo and all that stuff; you would stress yourself considerably.

DePue: From the epic poem you wrote, I got the idea that sometimes the landings were very difficult, especially if bad weather had come in.

Borling: Well, yeah. By the way, that’s taken from real events; that really happened, not to me, but it really happened. It happened to a guy by the name of Chuck Kall, actually, who was a great pilot too. In fact, we went out to the end of the runway that night; he was trying to get down, and the weather was crummy. We watched him shoot. You’d have to be from me to the edge of the building. I’m standing on the flight line or maybe out about halfway into the yard, where the tree is, and we could hear the airplane go by.

DePue: About thirty feet or so?

Borling: Yeah. We could hear the airplane go by, couldn’t see it. He’d made a couple passes. We’re standing at the end of the runway. God, he could have hit us. We’re out there in a driving rainstorm. Then he turned around and shot this surveillance thing. I said to the guys, I said, “He went by this way this time. (DePue laughs) I think he was on the ground.” I thought he was on the ground. We didn’t hear anything, and I said, “I wonder where the hell he is.” Nobody knew where he was. He’s not flying anymore.

So they sent the equipment off to the far end of the runway, in that direction. We’re standing out there in the rain; we’re absolutely soaked. We’re

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in a squadron truck, and it’s almost like something out of Swamp Thing.42 These two guys come out of the rain, mud from head to toe. They couldn’t run, because it was so muddy. They’d come, and they had taken the airplane off the end of the runway. That’s where all that stuff had sheared off. One of the guys ended up hanging in the straps, and the nose was sheared off. The airplane was in fifteen pieces, didn’t explode because it was out of gas.

So, we went back in. We threw them in the back of the truck. We didn’t have a radio, so we said, “Where do you want to go?” They said, “I need to go to the bar.” (DePue laughs) We didn’t even stop at the squadron; we said, “All right, let’s go to the bar.”

We drove to the bar, and everyone came to the bar then. They were knocking them down, and Chuck was trying to demonstrate how they’d gotten out of the airplane. About this time, some maintenance guys are walking in. Chuck jumps off the bar and sprains his leg, (both laugh) which is the only injury. We had to take him to the hospital because of a bar injury. But that’s the model for the story, and I was out there. It was really funny, you know. You don’t go back to ops, “Just take me to the bar.” “Fine, let’s go to the bar.”

DePue: I would imagine that hurting yourself that way is a tough one to live down as well.

Borling: Oh, we had a swimming pool too. The guys would go out and dive in the swimming pool. The first night they did it, they learned there wasn’t any water in the pool. We lost a couple guys that night, to injury.

Saw one of the greatest acts of leadership, Colonel Covington, Jim Covington. We were hanging forth at the bar and had been whatever; we were going wild. One of the guys, Dave Connett, who liked to steal couches from the O Club [Officers’ Club]. He’s a big guy. He’d steal a couch, take it home. He’d do it at George too, but he’d always bring it back. His wife, Peggy, would make him bring it back.

For whatever reason, we used to rip the knife pocket off the flying suits the guys who would come in, because we wore G-suits.43 You couldn’t even get to it, so you just… Dave had ripped off the flying pocket of a guy who was passing through. The guy was due to go down and brief General [William Wallace] Momyer or somebody at 7th. He was just staying over that night, and now he had nothing to wear, because Connett had ripped the leg off

42 Swamp Thing is a 1982 American Technicolor superhero film, based on the DC Comics character of the same name, a scientist who becomes transformed into the monster through laboratory sabotage. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swamp_Thing_(film)) 43 G-suits are equipped to protect pilots from the fast-changing G, or gravity, forces inherent in combat flight. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-suit)

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his flying suit. Dave, being a good guy, took off his flying suit and gave it to the guy, right there in the bar, gave it to him. (DePue laughs)

So, Dave’s standing in his underwear, drinking at the bar. He’s got his boots on. Somehow we thought that was funny, so somehow the shirt went and then the…I don’t know. Anyway, Dave’s standing there now in his boots and drinking at the bar, when the new base commander walks in. We had started a small fire over in the corner of the club. I think they wanted to roast hot dogs or something. There’s beer, and we’re playing dead bug, and we’re just…Everyone’s having a great time.

This new base commander came in, and he ordered Dave out of the club for being nude in the club and ordered us to do things, which we didn’t do. Dave went, but then he came back. He had a pair of shorts on now, as I remember. The guy came back, this time with air policemen. He told them to draw their guns and arrest Dave. We all stood around Dave and wouldn’t let them get to him. We said, “You’ll have to shoot us first,” that kind of thing. The cops weren’t going to do anything. We ended up physically throwing the new base commander out of the club. (DePue laughs) The cops ran away.

Colonel Covington showed up, the vice wing commander. The fire’s still going; Dave’s still at the bar. We’re all there; we’re having a great time. Colonel Covington, the vice wing commander walks in—you’re laughing; this is the stuff of release—and he says, “Are there any fighter pilots in this bar?” We all went “Aaahhhhh,” and he screams, “Dead bug!” Well, we all throw ourselves off our chairs, with everything. You’ve got to stick all your legs up in the air and your hands and squirm around in the glass and the beer and the stuff. Covington stands up; he said, “Good show,” and he goes down too. Then he hops up, and he grabs a broom that’s over there. He said, “Let’s get this place cleaned up,” and he starts to sweep. Everybody grabbed brooms, put out the fire, da-da- ta-da, cleaned the club.

That’s leadership; that’s leadership. I always remembered that. If you’re going to do something, make sure you do it first. Make sure you…especially if you’re dealing with an unruly gang at the time. I always remembered that. I don’t know if

Jim Covington is still alive, but Lieutenant John Borling receives his first Air Medal I’ve got a picture of him pinning from Colonel Jim Covington, Vice Commander, 8th Tactical Fighter Wing, in early 1966 for combat an air medal on me. I remember missions over North Vietnam from Ubon Air Base that night a lot. Thailand.

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DePue: Well, it illustrates the point you’ve made a couple times already about how important it is to have some kind of a release.

Borling: A release mechanism, yeah.

DePue: What kind of an emotional roller coaster were these missions, or was it?

Borling: No. It’s a combination of fun and fear. It was great flying. It was great flying, exciting, with just enough danger thrown in to make it really worthwhile. That’s why I wanted to stay for another 100 too; I really liked it. The guys who tell you they don’t like combat…Granted there’s downsides to this, but there’s a…That line from Patton about…He talks about war.44 “Consider how every other human invention shrinks to insignificance before it. God, how I love it,” George Patton.

I think there’s an element of “Man, you’re young; you’ve got guns; you’ve got planes; you’ve got tanks; you’ve got…and you’ve got a chance of getting killed.” Those are serious, because there’s a really funny gradation in the human condition, for men anyway; I can’t speak about women. There’s the guys who say—and you’ve met some of these guys—“Well, I wish I’d been in the service, but my draft number wasn’t there,” or “I didn’t make it,” or whatever, a bad foot, bad this. “If I could have done one thing, I would have liked to have been in the military.” Heard that message?

Then you have the message of the guy who says, “Well, I never really got there, overseas,” or “I never got to combat. The guys who are in combat now are kind of a leg up over the guys who are in the service, but now you never got to combat. “Well, god, I never really got shot at or wounded,” and then “I never got captured.” Finally, you get up and say, “You’re cheated if you felt you never got killed.” There were some people who would go to war who almost seek out death because it’s the…They keep volunteering for stuff because it’s almost like a narcotic; combat’s like a narcotic, to a point.

DePue: That adrenaline rush?

Borling: I don’t know; it’s strange. I ran the bulls at Pamplona, and I know what…For example, I run long distance; I’ve run marathons.45 I ran my last marathon three years ago; I’ll run another one, shortly, I hope, a few years. Running the bulls was a rush. I don’t know what drugs are like; I’ve never taken an illegal drug. There is an allure to putting it on the line, at least I thought there was. But this gradation about, “Gee, I wonder how I would have borne up under

44 Patton is a 1970 American epic biographical war film about U.S. General George S. Patton, staring actor George C. Scott. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patton_(film)) 45 The running of the bulls at Pamplona, Spain is an event that involves running in front of a small group of cattle, typically six but sometimes ten or or more, that have been let loose on a course of a sectioned-off subset of a town's streets, as part of a summertime festival. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_of_the_bulls)

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this, or how I would have done that.” I tell the guys; I said, “That’s a stupid ladder of our own making.”

I can understand the thrust to combat. I can understand the desire of a young man wanting to get there and do it. Once you’re there, you’re faced with the reality. As I said, you function, but sometimes you’re scared, and sometimes you’re, wow! But then you get back, and it’s over, and it’s done. [For] ground guys, I think it’s different, depending on how much and how long. Navy guys, under fire from submarines or something, I’m sure there’s a whole different ethos there, and you’re zig-zagging. It’s a curious business, but it seems to have fascinated mankind throughout the ages.

DePue: We certainly haven’t figured out how to get beyond it.

Borling: Probably won’t.

DePue: Were you one of those young men who figured you were indestructible?

Borling: Absolutely, still am. It’s always the other guy.

Mark: I assume that―

Borling: “Always the other guy” is a large coping mechanism. I really didn’t think… Even if I got shot down, I was so convinced that I would be able to get out, because I was a survival instructor; I was a paratrooper; I was a…I’d been through enough SERE [Search Evasion Resistance Escape] training and a little mini ranger training. I’m not a ranger; I don’t want to do that, but I’ve been around Victory Pond and all that stuff.46 I never thought they’d get me. Even if I went down, I never thought they’d get me. The reason that I just was very confident about that I was geared up to be…I was ready for that kind of circumstance. When I couldn’t walk, I was in excruciating pain; all those options went away. I’ve gone back, could I have…I couldn’t hold up any more; they were all around me. I had to get out of there. But I had…anyway―

DePue: Before that fateful day, had you seen other fellow pilots, other aircraft, that had been lost?

Borling: Um-hmm, sure.

DePue: Again, going back to World War II era, you read that the casualty rates were so high for the bomber pilots and the fighter pilots—in Europe especially— that they got very stoic about dealing with the losses they had.

46 Victory Pond is the location where the United States Army Ranger School conducts its Combat Water Survival Assessment. This test consists of three events that test the Ranger student's ability to calmly overcome any fear of heights or water. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranger_School)

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Borling: We got stoic about it too. Like I told you, we’d just raise a glass, guys go in, and here’s to old Sam; here’s to old Lucky; here’s to Frank Ralston; here’s to Don; here’s to Bob Jeffries; here’s to George and on and on. You just kept raising your glass. Some guys took it more personally. I think that affected their…You’ve got to build walls; it goes back to the walls, Taps on the Walls.47 I don’t know what version you have. I hope you’ve something’s that’s been corrected. Is that the bound galley? I guess it is.

DePue: I’ll let you take a look at it. I was going to ask you.

Borling: That’s just a bound galley. I ought to get you one before you leave here, the real McCoy.

DePue: I can go with that. I can give you a little money to get a couple copies, so I can hand a couple out as well.

Borling: Well, you can do that too. I’ll give you one, and you can make your choices on the others; how’s that?

DePue: That sounds great. Before we get to the ultimate mission, were there any other missions that really stick with you that we haven’t talked about?

Borling: I remember one night over Mu Gia Pass that separated North Vietnam and Laos. We were sent up there; we had napalm. It wasn’t in my airplane. A guy who was the wingman, who’s dead now…The weather was crummy; the pass was much obscured. We went down. We didn’t have napalm; our wingy had it. We got down there and damn near bought it in the mountains, in the dark. You couldn’t see shit. We’re flagging, and we’re well below the terrain level and didn’t see anything. Climbed out, got out, and then thought we’d do it again.

It was at that point that the guy with the napalm did a dive-bomb pass with unfinned napalm from about 12,000 feet.48 We never even saw it land; that’s how heavy the weather was. I don’t know why that one stuck with me, but I thought that was kind of not playing by the rules. Napalm’s a low level weapon; you lay it down, and something is going to burn.

I’ve got a friend who…When I asked him, I said, “How do you define a successful flight?” He doesn’t like to fly commercial. I said, “Why don’t

47 The poems in Taps on the Walls, by John Borling, were composed while he was a POW within the infamous Hanoi Hilton during the Vietnam War (https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/taps-on-the- walls-poems-from-the-hanoi-hilton-by-john-borling/2013/04/11/b29f7f1a-9dfb-11e2-9a79- eb5280c81c63_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.15af7960e63e) 48 Unfinned napalm bombs are unstable after release, with random tumbling until impact. Impact ruptures the napalm can and spreads the napalm mix over a broad area. (https://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/Napalm-Bombs-Vietnam-1962//1)

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you fly commercial?” He said, “Because I think a successful airplane flight is one where you leave a burning village in your wake.” (both laugh)

DePue: Does that mean you weren’t worried about civilian casualties?

Borling: I just thought that we should have done something as an alternative to throwing in napalm from 10,000 feet or 12,000 feet. We didn’t do it, but I thought the less of him for that.

There was another time when we went in and really got our tails shot off, just amazing, AAA [Anti-Aircraft Artillery] all over us. I had no idea why we didn’t get shot down that day. I can remember being frightened, going down the slide to deliver the stuff and just the whole world exploding in our faces. We delayed release of the weapons. I was not flying the jet. I’m along for the ride at this point because I’ve got us to the point where we’re going down. This is a new guy; that’s why I’m riding with him.

I’m watching the clock and the altimeter, and we are too low. He lets the bombs go, and I’m saying, “Oh, shit! We’ve just…” Now I’m on the stick, because we were going to knock ourselves out of the sky with our own bombs, with the blast frag. We were that low. The bombs went off, and the airplane went whum-whum-whum, but our vector’s this way, and we were still flying. But when you feel the blast from your own bombs, you’ve cut it pretty close.

DePue: How close to the ground do you think you were that day?

Borling: I have no idea, close enough that we could have died in another second or so.

DePue: I want to read a quote here. I’ve got the Historical Atlas of the Vietnam War. I want to just get your reaction to this quote. Harry Summers is the author of this book. I suspect you’re familiar with his work. He’s talking about rolling thunder, and I think that’s―

Borling: Most often Pack 6, yeah. Those were the missions north. A great call sign, huh, a great code man?

DePue: Rolling Thunder. And here’s what CIA analyst, Rafael Iungerich—I’m probably mispronouncing his name—here’s what he said about Rolling Thunder. “Rolling Thunder must go down in the history of area warfare as the most ambitious, wasteful, ineffective campaign ever mounted. While damage was done to many targets in the north, no lasting objective was achieved. Hanoi emerged as the winner of Rolling Thunder.”

Borling: I think he was right, until the end, when they sent the bombers downtown. If you remember, in my book I talk about Operation Reprisal, the plan that we wanted to put together in the January, February timeframe, which we did put

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together. I was a junior member of that team, certainly. So, I think he was right for a long time, but it wasn’t a military failure, if you will.

I’m not trying to cop out; there’s lots of stuff where the military can be blamed. But [there was] the political interference with the targeting business and what we could or couldn’t hit and the intensity with which we approached it. Remember, I started out with…You asked if there was any grand strategy; it was just gradualism. Surely they’ll quit if we just hit them a little harder. Bullshit. You’ve got to rip their heads off and shit down their necks before you get their attention, which is a phrase that goes back to those days.

DePue: Rip their heads off?

Borling: And shit down their neck. If you’re not willing to do that, then don’t go. It’s a particularly graphic image, isn’t it?

DePue: Yes, it is. But there was something about it, if I can speculate, that you did love.

Borling: Oh. The sky is the only perfect place.

DePue: I want you to give us a little bit more background. You’ve talked about this several times, but explain why you decided to extend for another 100 missions.

Borling: I wanted to have a full front seat tour.

DePue: Which means 100 missions in the front seat?

Borling: Another 100 missions in the front seat, yeah, rather than back and forth. I found the flying to be excellent, wonderful, exciting. I thought I was doing something important. I thought we were stopping Communism, as imperfect as I thought the process was, with all this political nonsense going back and forth. I thought I could get it done in another four or five months actually. I thought that the timeframe would be fine, and Myrna had agreed. I’d talk to her on MARS [Military Auxiliary Radio System] radio about this.49 I think I talked to her once or twice from Ubon in the time we were there. It was difficult, not like today with Skype and all that stuff.50

DePue: Did you tell her or ask her?

49 The Military Auxiliary Radio System is a civilian auxiliary consisting primarily of licensed amateur radio operators who are interested in assisting the military with communications on a local, national and international basis as an adjunct to normal communications. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Auxiliary_Radio_System) 50 Skype is software that enables the worldwide conversations. Individuals and businesses use Skype to make free video and voice calls, send instant messages and share files with other people using the program. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype)

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Borling: It was probably a 60/40 deal. [I] just really, really felt that that’s where I needed to be. That’s where I wanted to be. So I hung around.

DePue: And you volunteered for your ninety-seventh mission, from what I understand.

Borling: It was ninety-seven; actually, I say this…We were waiting for the paperwork to come through, and there was some reticence on the part of higher ups about allowing a consecutive combat tour, because of the danger involved and all that stuff. But my wing commander went to bat for me. I forget if it was that day or a few days before that I was walking—colonels had a table where they could sit at—I was walking in, and he called me over. He said, “Your paperwork is in, and it’s approved.” I said, “Great.”

I think I’d fudged a few missions, so I wouldn’t get 100, because they cut you off, then you’re over. There’s administrative stuff that happens, so I was parsing myself to 100. But the official mission, if you want the official number, is ninety-seven, and I’m willing to accept that.

DePue: Why was that a volunteer mission? What was different about it?

Borling: The tactics, the ordnance, the difficulty, where it was. Bac Giang is well north of Hanoi, northeast, north of Kep, deep. If you went down, there was no rescue available. The stuff that we were going to do going in, blacked out, low level, night, was…because they’d lost a lot of airplanes at Bac Giang. We thought we could take it out. In fact, we wanted the mission.

DePue: The target was?

Borling: The Bac Giang, B-a-c, G-i-a-n-g, Bac Giang railway bridge, railroad bridge.

DePue: Let’s pick it up then―

Borling: JCS-1823.

DePue: JCS-1823, that’s the target number?

Borling: That’s the target number. Strange, how I remember that after all these years, huh?

DePue: Well, if there’s one thing that served you well, it has been your memory. Let’s talk about that mission then. You’ve already kind of laid out what happened in going in. Pick it up from actually knowing that you’re going down. Who was your―

Borling: A.J. Myers, Armand J. Myers was in the front seat, captain. Armand, A-r-m-a- n-d, called A.J. I don’t know if he was a major or not; I forgot. Anyway, second pass, after we saw the bridge down and two rocket passes, I told you,

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there. In the second pass, coming off, the world was pretty much exploding around us. A.J. had put a big move on the airplane. I remember I said, “Don’t take me up, Pops,” because we were going up pretty steep. It was at that point, at that second, that we did that; it was just, boom!

DePue: You flipped over?

Borling: We flipped over and got hit. He had rolled it, but we got hit right at that point. So now we’re going this way. My recollection was 480 knots on the clock, going through about 1,000 feet AGL [Airborne Gun Laying], in a semi- inverted position.51 We both screamed, “Eject!” because there was no stick movement available, pulled and went.

DePue: Did you eject down?

Borling: (laughs) Well, to tell you the truth, that’s my last knowledge of where we were. [I] went up the rails, lost the helmet, felt the chute pop, and hit. [I] didn’t get a swing, just pop, hit, almost that fast. Still had a lot of momentum, but I hit on this furrowed hill, long furrowed hill, and bounced like some kind of tumbling act, down to the bottom of the hill, long bounces. I remember being in the air and coming down, crunching and crunching again. Then, when I got up, I was all tangled up in the parachute.

If I’d gotten a swing, I think I would have been dead. But the miracle was, again, that over there, like [from] about in the middle of that white house [to] the middle of this place―in fact, closer than that―this long furrowed hill was cleared and heavily plowed, if you will. The jungle and the karst were on either side. If I hadn’t hit on that hill and (sneezes)―excuse me―rolled down to the bottom…If I’d hit fifty yards in that direction, I would have been dead. If I’d gotten a swing, I would have been dead.

I posit now―and I never really thought about it then―that when we went up like that, and then we came down, that a lot of our momentum… We’d almost stalled out, so it wasn’t like we were going through…I’d say we were going through 480. Maybe that’s going down, but I’ve often wondered, as I’ve looked at the mechanics of that…You’re dead in the cockpit. I’ve got to be wrong on my parameters somewhere, because I remember we still had that momentum, going down. Anyway, I roll up on the bottom. The rest is in the book, and people should buy the damn book.

DePue: This was nighttime?

Borling: Nighttime.

51 Airborne gun laying is the process of aiming an artillery piece, such as a gun, howitzer or mortar from an airplane against a surface to air target. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laying)

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DePue: Did you have any overcast, any moon?

Borling: There was a moon going in, but by the time we were there it was overcast again. They were all around, and the shooting started almost immediately. I couldn’t get to my survival kit, because they were right there, like they were between me and the boathouse, right down here, like maybe thirty, forty yards. So I went, and I tried to get up,” Oh shit,” fell down and rolled into a log, about where—if you had rolled into my dining room and then over in the living room—there was a huge, big, old decayed log—I got into it—which was not decayed on the front side but on the back side. I was able to get around and get into the backside of this log. It was in kind of weeds and bushes and stuff.

They would come around. They were shooting and screaming and jumped over, past me, but never saw me in the log. As a matter of fact, I passed out, shock and fear no doubt. “Oh, Lord, get me out of here.” When I came to, they had gone up the hill, maybe as far as that house over there, but uphill. I could hear the noise. There were people moving around down there, maybe sixty, seventy yards. In fact, a guy hit me with a light. I’m crouched by this thing, and he hits me with a light, flashed it three times. I had a pen light in my thing. I flashed him three times, and he went up and wandered on up the hill.

I’m looking around for something I can use as a staff, crawled around a little bit, really in a lot of pain, not real good, ankles are all shot and stuff. I get a tree limb and immediately figured out, I’m going to have to break all the rules to get out of there. Highway 1 is down there about fifty, sixty yards, seventy yards or so. It takes me a long time, but I get down there. They’ve gone up and over the hill. That’s where they found A.J., by the way, on the other side of the hill.

DePue: He was alive?

Borling: Yeah, he was alive, broken up. He had a badly broken ankle or leg. He got on the other side of that hill. He said he rolled down the other side of it. So it was this kind of thing, as I remember anyway. I got down there, and I got my gun out and wanted to steal a truck thing. Crouched by the side of the road, the first truck came by—I’ll give you the expanded version—the first truck came by, didn’t even see me. I’m saying, “Damn.” So, I got out in the middle of the road. The road came in like this, curving, and then went up and over a hill and that way. I’m standing out there in the middle of the road now, with my gun and my staff, waiting for the next truck.

DePue: Is this a .45 that you had?

Borling: I had a .38 revolver. Here comes a guy on a bicycle; you can’t hear a bicycle. He’s got a plowshare over his shoulder. I stop him. I’m debating—it’s just a

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farmer—could I shoot the guy? You can see I’m hurt. I can’t knock him out or anything; I haven’t got any power. I’ve got my gun on him, and he’s like this. I reach into my G-suit pocket. I figured, I can’t shoot the guy, because they were right there, fifty, sixty yards away.

I reached into my pocket, and I pulled out some money. I saw that I’d had a good month of May, and I thought, “Geez, I’m giving this guy a $100 bill.” I pulled it back and gave him a twenty, parsimonious, even in this moment. I said, “You’ve got to be quiet.” He thought I wanted to buy his bicycle, so he was trying to give me his bicycle. If I could have ridden the bicycle, I would have done that. He goes off that way and up and down the hill. I’m saying, “Oh, shit, now I’ve made contact. This guy’s going to turn around and get the hordes coming back over the hill.”

About that time I hear a truck, and this is the one I stop. [I] make eye contact with the guy. This is the one [truck] that’s full of the North Vietnamese regular troops. They come piling out, smoke break. I’m screaming, “Surrender” at all these guys, and they’re all armed up. Nobody knows what’s going on, typical military operation. Who’s this guy on the road? What’s he doing? No one’s briefed these guys, but now they know he’s got a gun. So pretty soon, I’ve got AKs and everything shoved up everywhere I can do it.52 They knock the gun out of my hand. I elect not to die in a ditch that night, not to shoot it out with them.

Remember, I told you about the staircase? I did not give it a Frank Luke ending.53 Frank Luke shot it out as a balloon buster. I didn’t.

DePue: Before that time, would you have been telling yourself, I’m not going to allow myself to be captured?

Borling: I don’t think I ever took it that far. I don’t think I wanted to go there mentally. They stripped me nude―they could see I was hurt―laid me down in the road nude—had my boots on—and ripped my dog tags off. On my dog tags was a wolf’s head ring made out of Vitallium that my uncle had given me.54 [He] called it his, “get me home ring.”

It was the ring that…four of them were made, and four of these wolf’s heads rings were worn by the B-24 crew that my uncle was on in World War II. They were the only four guys to get out of a B-24 taken out by a Focke- Wulf [German plane] over Leipzig, on their seventh mission. They called it

52 AK rifles were typical weapon of the North Vietnamese. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_of_the_Vietnam_War) 53 Frank Luke Jr. was an American fighter ace, ranking second among U.S. Army Air Service pilots in number of aerial victories during World War I. In a single rampage, he shot down fourteen enemy aircraft, including ten German observation balloons, in eight days. He was fatally wounded by a single machine gun bullet fired a mile from the last balloon site he attacked. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luke) 54 Vitallium is a trademark for an alloy of 65% cobalt, 30% chromium, 5% molybdenum, and other substances. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitallium)

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their get-me-home ring. They spent twenty-two months in a prison camp, but they came home. When I went to my first war, Dick gave me that ring and said, “That’s a get-me-home ring.” I remember when they ripped it off my dog tags, I grabbed it and said, “That’s a get-me-shot-down ring.” I never saw it again.

When I got back from the war, interestingly enough, I asked Dick, “Have you seen that ring I wear with the officer’s crest?” That was the ring they made after the war in celebration of making it. I later lived next to a guy who I tapped on the wall to, Dick Kern. In the book I say, “Hello, Dick, this is John Borling. Who are you?” [He] couldn’t say; he tapped back, “Dick Kern.”―“Pop” Kern, we called him―and he said, “Hello, Dick.” I said, “No, no, no, it’s John Borling.” Pop said, “No, it’s Dick Borling. I lived with you in south camp, Stalag Luft I in World War II.” I don’t know if Pop was a big bullshitter, but I don’t know how he got Dick Borling at Stalag Luft I. I’m not sure he got it all, but he got some of that.

DePue: Was he that much older than you?

Borling: Oh, he was an old guy. He was maybe even fifty-seven, that old. He was a kid in World War II. He’d gotten out, got recalled for Korea, Ohio patrolman, and then got recalled for Vietnam.

DePue: What was your plan if you had gotten that truck to stop?

Borling: Oh, I was going to make him take me to the coast, and I was going to steal a boat and go south.

DePue: How far to the coast?

Borling: Ten minutes and fifty-three seconds.

DePue: Ten minutes and fifty-three seconds flying or driving or walking or what?

Borling: Flying, (DePue laughs) 420-knots from the heel to the toe. There was an island out there shaped like a boot; it had a high heel on it. From the heel into Bac Giang was ten minutes and fifty-three seconds.

DePue: I shouldn’t be laughing.

Borling: That’s 420 knots, so at seven miles a minute, nautical miles a minute, it was about eighty miles or so in, not bad.

DePue: Then what happened after you were actually captured, Sir?

Borling: Well, they could see I was hurt and bloody and couldn’t walk.

DePue: Can you describe the injuries that you had at that time?

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Borling: No, they didn’t care. They just had me land there. They picked me up and chucked me into the back…The truck turned around, and they chucked me in the back of the truck and drove for a period of time, and then―

DePue: What were your injuries though?

Borling: Had the back, ribs were in bad shape and sprained everywhere. Everything was hurting, legs, arms, wrists, but nothing else broken that I could figure.

DePue: Lacerations?

Borling: Yeah, lacerations and blood, but that’s just normal stuff. They tried to clean me up with a towel, get the stuff off my face. But in the end, I was still nude. I remember I lost my combat boots somewhere along the line there. They took me to this camp and tied me with a very, very loose rope to some kind of banana tree or something, but just my hands, and let me lay there. Then they were inside, and I could hear them talking on, I assume, some kind of radio.

We’re close to a village. It’s light; it’s daytime, and the jungle is kind of right here, right by the…from here to the basketball thing. I was able to get out of the wrist things and screw around with something on the legs and started to roll or crawl, roll in that direction. I figured if I could just get into the jungle, maybe there would be a way.

They had given me some water, which was good. Boy, you get thirsty. The biggest single thing on ejection or something, where you are stressed like that, is you get an inordinate thirst. So that water really kind of brought me back. I rolled from there, and I probably rolled as far as that tree down there by the water, so another thirty, forty yards. I’m scooching along. Then they figured out I was gone, and they sent out…It wasn’t hard to find me, and they got me.

Now they tied me up, sat me up and tied me up this way, tight, and kept me that way. Then [they] had the villagers come up and parade by, to look at me. They did show and tell for a while. Then they gave me a pair of shorts, as I remember. [I] couldn’t get them on; they kind of scooched them on. I’m really…At this point, the injury thing has taken over. They pick me up and throw me in the back of a jeep, propped me up in the back. You have the jeep thing with the…and I’m leaning against the tailgate.

DePue: It’s an American jeep?

Borling: Well, it’s like an American jeep, but it’s a half jeep, half truck. I’m bouncing in the back as we’re going down. They’ve got [my] hands behind, tied to something back here. I have nothing. Every bounce is…And I’m going up and down. At that point, they have gagged me, and they put a thing on my head, a hood, but it kept slipping. No, they didn’t have a hood; it was a blindfold, but it kept slipping. I remember going across the makeshift bridge at Bac Giang

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and then getting down to Hanoi. They were hitting me if I tried to rub this blindfold off. But when we stopped, the blindfold slipped, and I could see―before they put it back on―that sign, “Maison Centrale,” Central House.

DePue: French.

Borling: French for the old colonial prison.

DePue: Let’s pause for just a second here, Sir.

(pause in recording)

Borling: They dragged me in, literally, to a place called Heartbreak Hotel, which was the initial series of four or five or six torture cells that they used. What starts now is about a thirty-day period or more where they hurt you. They hurt you a lot. So you try the name, rank, service number, date of birth trick, which they don’t accept. They hurt you until you start to say something else. In fact, in my case they came in and told me that I was in the 433rd Squadron; I flew F- 4s; I’m from Chicago, Illinois, because they publish this in the paper when you go down. They told me some stuff. I assumed they’d gotten to A.J. a little bit. They wanted to know what the targets are. Hell, I don’t know; I’m a lieutenant; what do I know? The answer is nothing.

They wanted you to be compliant, so they would rope you and use other techniques, beatings, until you gave in. In my own case, I was sure that I’d become the world’s biggest traitor by telling them something other than name, rank, service number, date of birth. I remember going back and crying; I was drug back crying, didn’t have contact with anybody. This will go on for a long period of time.

Then they wanted you to write something. Well, I couldn’t write; my hands and arms were shot. They wanted an apology, this many days, in fact, weeks later.

DePue: What’s going on with that? Hang on. (a problem with the microphone; pause in recording)

Borling: Anyway, everybody had to make some kind of statement, everybody that I… everybody did. But that’s not an excuse. You still felt like shit. I remember the phrase that I…You wrote nothing about…“I’m from America, Chicago.” You had to give them some kind of basic background, which they had anyway. They said you have to call the war immoral and wrong. I didn’t do that. They said you need to do something that shows remorse, or we’ll…I didn’t mind about them threatening to kill me, but I didn’t want to get hurt any more. I was afraid that I would become very pliant in their hands if I didn’t give them something. So I wrote a line, something to the effect that, if I have created injury or caused injury to innocent Vietnamese people, I regret that, and I’m

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sorry. They bought that, or something to that effect. But they would make you do something.

I remember my strategy that I used for several weeks was…They wanted to know about how the F-4 navigated, and I said, “Well, we use a secret code, but I can’t tell you about it.” Then I’d make them hurt me some more until I’d say, “All right, I’ll tell you about it.” I said, “It’s called Delta Romeo; that’s the code name, Delta Romeo.” Obviously, this is phonetic alphabet. I said, “But it stands for something that’s more secret. It stands for dead reckoning.” I said, “We use the secret wings plotter, and ice-T is another code word.” I’d draw the…Ice-T, is for indicated, calibrated, equivalent to true airspace; it’s nothing.

So, we went for about two weeks or so, with me describing in some detail dead reckoning and ice-T, two very secret things that would come out on the desk in the back of the F-4 that would come down from the cockpit. You would have your pencils and your pen and your clock, so you describe a desk. Again, you’ve got to pause. “I can’t tell you about that,” and you’d make them hurt you some more. After about three weeks, some new guys show up; they’re MiG pilots.

DePue: Russians?

Borling: No, they were Vietnamese, or they’re Asiatic anyway. They said, “Tell us”― through the interpreter; they didn’t speak any English―“Tell us about this.” I tried to fade it by them that we were so good at dead reckoning, that with this highly technical set of tools we were going to…It took these guys about six minutes to basically say, This guy’s full of shit. (both laugh) Then they really laid into me again. I forget what I came up with, but at that point, I’d been there for a month. I’d given them the apology, such as it was. I can remember going back and just feeling…

In fact, that was one of the first things, when I got into contact with somebody else, “Basically,” I said, “I’m a traitor.” I said, “I’ve offered this apology.” The guy said, “You’ve done what we’ve all done. You bent, but you didn’t break.” He said, “It’s okay. Just don’t give them anything that they don’t…make them hurt you, and then give them as little as you can. But bend, don’t break; bend, don’t break.”

DePue: Can you describe any of the ways that they would torture you?

Borling: It’s been described, the rope tricks, where they bind you up and they get you into a position of extreme pain, where they make you a contortionist, where they hang you up on a hook and play piñata with you, or they put you in stocks and walk away and leave you with a hand and a foot in a stock and may leave you there for a couple days, or backwards. Or they’ll put you on your knees, and if you try to get off your knees, then they beat you.

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Somebody said, they’ll put you on your knees with your hands in your hair, and we refuse to self-torture ourselves, because that is self-torture. You want to try that? Get yourself on your knees, with your hands in your hair, and try to hold that for fifteen minutes maybe, on a hard floor. We wouldn’t do it. We’d roll off, and then they’d beat you some more. Then they’d tie you up. The ropes was what they used principally, and the hell cuffs.

DePue: Had they given you any kind of―

Borling: It doesn’t sound like much, but trust me, I can have you telling me that your mother was a communist spy and had personally bombed Hiroshima if you want to really take it to that point.

I’m within four minutes of a conference call. You’re welcome to hang around here, but it’s going to go an hour.

DePue: I think this is probably a good place to stop, if you don’t mind, Sir.

(end of transcript #02)

Interview with John Borling # VRV-A-L-2013-037.03 Interview # 03: March 20, 2014 Interviewer: Mark DePue

COPYRIGHT

The following material can be used for educational and other non-commercial purposes without the written permission of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. “Fair use” criteria of Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 must be followed. These materials are not to be deposited in other repositories, nor used for resale or commercial purposes without the authorization from the Audio-Visual Curator at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, 112 N. 6th Street, Springfield, Illinois 62701. Telephone (217) 785-7955.

Note to the Reader: Readers of the oral history memoir should bear in mind that this is a transcript of the spoken word, and that the interviewer, interviewee and editor sought to preserve the informal, conversational style that is inherent in such historical sources. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library is not responsible for the factual accuracy of the memoir, nor for the views expressed therein. We leave these for the reader to judge.

DePue: Today is Thursday, March 20, 2014. My name is Mark DePue, Director of Oral History with the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. Today I’m in Rockford, Illinois, sitting across the table from General John Borling. Good afternoon, General.

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Borling: Delighted to have you with us again, Mark, in such a nice setting here, with spring upon us almost, looking out on the Rock River and a nice afternoon to have a conversation.

DePue: It’s a wonderful afternoon, and we can actually anticipate spring after a tough winter.

Borling: March 24, I’ll be seventy-four and looking forward to this spring, looking forward to a lot more springs after this one.

DePue: It’s been a long time since we last met.

Borling: You’ve been too busy.

DePue: Well, I think you’ve been very busy. You had this book that came out just last year, Taps on the Wall: Poems from the Hanoi Hilton. I imagine you’ve spent a lot of the last year promoting that, haven’t you?

Borling: We’ve been heartened by the reception on a national basis. A book like that could expect to sell 1,000, 1,200 copies maybe, if you were lucky. It looks like you’ve got a pre-advanced copy there or a pre-production copy. We’ll have to remedy that later in the day. We’re close to 25,000 copies now.

DePue: Excellent.

Borling: But like most books, it will die a natural death this year. I’ve probably got another dozen events that we’ve got scheduled to play peddler with a pack. As you know, I do a lot of speaking around the country on a variety of subjects but have focused a lot on the genesis of, the meaning of the value of the book and have not been disappointed with audience reaction. I’ll be speaking, for example, this weekend in Flint. Well, I fly into Flint; I’m going to Lansing, the capital. There’s a major Civil Air Patrol convention, Michigan convention, and they’ve hired me to keynote. At the same time, I’ll, as I say, be a peddler with a pack.

DePue: Twenty-five thousand. Is that in the neighborhood of being able to call it a best seller?

Borling: Certainly for the genre it is, but it never broke the New York Times [bestsellers] list for two reasons. One, we elected to do things internal through the Pritzker Museum and Library and use it as a selling point.55 Now surely we had Amazon and the bookstores and the others, but we found that the way you get counted is through your distributor, in our case Green Leaf. While we were credible, and we made some money there, the largest amount of sales

55 The Pritzker Military Museum & Library is a museum and a research library for the study of military history in Chicago, Illinois. (http://www.pritzkermilitary.org/)

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have come through the Pritzker Museum and Library and, frankly, my efforts out on the road.

DePue: I imagine you’ve signed a few thousand copies of it.

Borling: Well, we’ve signed a bunch, I’ll tell you. It is affirming to go out and meet folks from all over the country, then get some wonderful notes and things back. If you look at the Amazon site, there’ll be testimonies.56 People come back with POW bracelets, for example. This lovely lady by the name of Jones, Kathy Jones, in Indiana, she just sent me a bracelet and then wanted a picture. 57She’s been carrying it [the bracelet] around with her all these years. Then she said, “Oh my God, I have to get a book.” Then she had to get another book. What happens is, people with affinity to the subject or with relations that have served, they find it a pretty cheap birthday or Christmas gift. (DePue laughs) It says twenty bucks on the cover, but we charge $25 for taxes and shipping and handling. My signature must be worth thirty cents, thirty-five, a good day. So, we have some fun with it.

The deal I’ve got with the Pritzker bunch is, we settle up expenses and then split things fifty-fifty. My wife, who deals in the finances of this house, has it all equated to how many renovated bathrooms are we going to get out of this thing? (DePue laughs). At the moment we’re still working on number one. So it hasn’t been an enormous financial success, but it’s achieved a certain place out there and well received in the New York Times and the Washington Post and certainly on a host of other national things, TV and radio, print. From that standpoint it’s, as I say, been affirming.

We’re off on a new tear now called SOS America, Service over Self America. You can look at the website at www.sosamerica. We’re off on the tear, after me having ripped―which is another word for failed―over the years to excite the passions of America on this subject. But now, with certain business and other things in the book fairly well behind us—although we’ll still use it as a lever—the subject of SOS America as a renewal factor for America, a program that argues for national service, military service on the part of our young men, eighteen to twenty-six.

Pick a year anywhere in that timeframe; you will be seconded into platoons of thirty, companies of 100. You’ll have a couple of company-grade officers running the company and a sergeant for each one of the platoons of

56 Amazon.com, Inc. is an American electronic commerce and cloud computing company based in Seattle, Washington, the largest Internet retailer in the world as measured by revenue and market capitalization. (http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/Amazon.html) 57 In 1970, a group of students in California created nickel-plated bracelets engraved with the name, rank and loss date of an American serviceman captured or mission in the Vietnam War. Those who wore the bracelets vowed to leave them on until the soldier named on the bracelet or their remains were returned to America. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POW_bracelet)

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thirty, roughly. You’ll keep that small unit loyalty. Small unit loyalty is so important. You’ll augment all the services on that basis, and the Merchant Marine and certainly the Coast Guard. And you’ll still have a bunch leftover for “civilian duty,” although all of the people will be in the military, albeit at a different pay level, to make it affordable.

The whole notion is that young men will particularly prosper from having had this experience. They’ll be able to have a badge, if you will, on their lapel that says something that’s very important for young men. They look for their life to have meaning, and this will just say, I served.

DePue: Is this something similar to the Depression era, the Civilian Conservation Corps, is that what you envision? 58

Borling: You know, you could make that analog. It certainly will keep a lot of young men off the street and put them under the uniform code of military justice and let them experience the advantages of seeing different geographies through the eyes of their fellows, mixing age groups. The eighteen-year-old is much different than the twenty-one-year-old or the twenty-five-year-old. Socio- economic and educational levels will be meshed; certainly the races will be mixed as well, in some kind of grand stew, the whole thought being that, as nations get older and get more comfortable, they just become softer.

This is kind of a tuck-pointing approach on one of the pillars that would hold up the arch of America. Now, this is an idea that I’ve had and have tried to make popular in the [U.S.] Congress on a number of occasions and have had legislation, never made it out of the committee.

Our approach this time was going to be to go for membership of a sizeable nature. [It] costs you $24 a year, two bucks a month, to join. There will be emoluments of membership. The real purpose, then, is to grow this membership base, keep our admin costs a third or less doing that, and then have a third—if we use a third for membership development—have a third leftover for a pretty serious lobbying effort.

I’m convinced that when you go to town, you’d better go with a constituency behind you and millions of dollars, in order to turn heads. That’s what we’re going to do. But the purpose is noble; the purpose is altruistic— without suffering from any illusions—that this program, if enacted, or variations thereof, could have a great salubrious effect, a very healthy effect on America.

The nice thing is we’re not looking for cannon fodder. This is not get out there at the point of the spear and be a hard-charging infantryman. More

58 The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was a public work relief program that operated from 1933 to 1942 in the United States for unemployed, unmarried men. Originally for young men ages 18–25, it was eventually expanded to ages 17–28. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps)

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likely, these people will serve in support roles, with only a year of service. They will have to learn, one from another. Then they will have to adapt into positions that you might think that skill sets would come easily.

For example, I was a fighter pilot, and I never had more than one crew chief on my airplane the whole time I was flying. I know how hard they work. Wouldn’t it be fun to have a half a dozen crew chiefs for these multi-, multi-, multi-million-dollar, hundred-million-dollar airplanes, to help marshal, to take soap samples, to check the tire inflation? These are things that I suspect…

Let’s take a guy from MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] who has graduated and elects to take his year of service. I suspect he could learn to marshal an airplane and change the oil fairly quickly, given a modest amount of instruction, or become a billeting clerk or guard the front gate and check IDs, or do the things we don’t do in the Air Force or the military very well. That’s to inspect and repair our infrastructure, our machinery, our boilers, our chillers. Just to go oil them, for god sakes, seems to be more a task that we can’t do, cut grass, drive generals around in cars, (DePue laughs) provide a presence.

The deal is, if you can take care of yourself, you don’t have to be Superman in terms of these entry level, physical criteria that the military uses, if you can basically take care of yourself, because you’re not going to be out there, again, doing airborne ranger things. You’re going to be out there providing the necessary but often lacking support required of the all-volunteer military.

As a subset—and you’ve got me lecturing now—the all-volunteer force will fill up in a hurry because people will prefer it. It’s going to be viewed as a draft; it’s really a conscription program. Now we’ll turn it to you. Do you know of any nation that has conscription?

DePue: Switzerland.

Borling: Do you know another?

DePue: I can’t think of anything right…Well, Israel, obviously.

Borling: Can you think of another?

DePue: Not at the present.

Borling: Russia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany. Germany is backing off their program for the wrong reasons. Italy has a semblance of conscription. Some of the eastern European countries have―

DePue: Conscription being the same as draft?

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Borling: No. Draft is a crapshoot. Draft is a program whereby some certain percentage on a lottery system are inducted into the military for a period of years, two years or more, two years in the Army.

This is a program whereby every able-bodied young man and young woman who would choose to serve…although it’s not a program for young women, frankly, because young women aren’t the problem in this society, as you know, you remember, and their physical needs are different, and the cohort would be so large as to have an absorption problem. We’ve already got an absorption problem, because the cohort is about 1.5 million a year that we’re talking about rolling through. So it’s about 14,000―

DePue: When you say cohort, you mean the eligible young men who’ve reached that particular age?

Borling: The eligible young men in that window who can be expected to go. Now, they choose it. There will be some exemptions. If you’re on the medical track, we’re not going to upset that. We think people that are on the medical track are generally going to be—as much as we’d like to have them—be role models for some of the others. We’re not going to interrupt that. The medical corps has agreed—in the past anyway—to provide sick call on a pro bono basis. Then if we get something serious, we put them into the military medical system.

If you’re married with kids, I suspect there’ll be a deferment, and you won’t have to go. But in the end, the cohort is going to be 1.3 to 1.5 million a year. That means the government or the military in its current structure can’t train them. So the training’s going to have to be done by that captain and lieutenant and the sergeants at some basic level, customs and courtesies, marching, discipline, those kinds of things, but again, not trying to take them out to the rifle range and make marksmen out of them or to turn them into some kind of hand-to-hand body killers. This is not the aim.

The aim of it is to create a structure of mutual support within the society, whereby the young men can do something that is worthy for a period of a year, come out with an educational stipend at the end, and create kind of a new breed of citizenship out of the deal.

I’m going to jump all the way to the end of the deal that you have me on. I didn’t realize I was going to offer prepared remarks here. I’m deficient [in] that I haven’t arranged it better in my mind, I suspect.

Our polling, which is nationwide, reveals something very interesting. On the website, I’ve had to lie about the acceptance of the program. I say that the people who, on the face of it, without getting into practicalities, they do like the idea that it’s an affordable program. In fact, the country makes money on the program, given the labor rates and things of this nature, but just on the

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face of it…even put affordability off to the side. That’s the how to do it, the practicability.

Is it, standing there pure, naked, if you will, a good idea for America? Or is it a bad idea to have such a program? The website, sosamerica.org, argues that it is palpably a good idea, but it advances the notion that 63 percent of America think this is a great idea. That’s a lie.

DePue: It’s higher than that?

Borling: Higher. But I couldn’t, in good conscience, put down 72 percent and not have people all of a sudden want to get inside of it, so I just chose a very robust number. It happens to be, I was the class of ’63 at the academy, and I thought, Well hell, we’ll just discount it a little bit. (DePue laughs)

DePue: You like that number, sixty-three.

Borling: I like that number; I like that number. I don’t even bother to argue with the people who say, “Well yeah, but…” I say, “Okay, if that’s your opinion, that’s fine. I’ll take a 63 percent number across America.

And it varies a little bit by age groups, with the people fifty-plus well north of seventy, as you might imagine; with the people in the cohort of twenty-eight to fifty, the childbearing and rearing-up years, running in the fifty-five-ish range, men and women alike, men a little more, women a little less. If something happens in the world, women [favor it] a little more, men a little less. It’s funny how this works. And then you get down to the cohort themselves, of the men who are in that eighteen to twenty-five, seventeen or eighteen to twenty-six, seventeen, with parental permission.

I’ll ask you the question. What do you think the young men, seventeen to twenty―divide them into two cohorts, seventeen to twenty and twenty to twenty-six―what do you think the young men think about this? Even though they get to choose, it is a conscription program; you are going to serve a year. What do you think they’d think?

DePue: My guess, since you’ve put me on the spot―see, I’m supposed to be putting you on the spot, General, but you’re good at this―is that it’s over 50 percent, and it has something to do with economics and how likely they can see that they can have employment, either coming out of high school or coming out of college.

Borling: It’s a rational actor answer you give me, and often, rational actor models are dead on target or dead wrong. In this case, you’re dead wrong. They are interested in four things: getting drunk, getting laid, playing sports, making money. So, the economic argument…They think, out there, the streets are paved with gold, and they’re just going to be able to go out and do it. But

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meanwhile, biology is driving them around at such a great rate that they’re not interested in any big thing.

All right, now let’s go to the cohort twenty to twenty-six, roughly.

DePue: Oh, you’re going to put me on the spot again?

Borling: Twenty-one to twenty-six. Yeah, you’re on the spot again. What do they think, just generally, majority for [or] majority against?

DePue: I would say, based on your last answer—I’m probably falling into a trap here—against.

Borling: By the time they are turning twenty-one and out there in the workplace or in school or getting out of school, they look back, and they look ahead, and they say, “Gee, a year’s worth of service wouldn’t be all bad, just to kind of round out what we’re doing.” And those young guys really need it.

Think of the difference between the eighteen-year-old, the twenty-one- year-old and the twenty-six-year-old, a quantum difference in terms of orientation. In fact, I knew the head of Brunswick.59 The chairman and CEO at Brunswick used to lecture at Harvard Business School, and the last thing he’d throw at them was the platoon leadership manual from the Marine Corps. He said, “Now that you guys have had some business experience, and you’re through Harvard Business School,” he said, “go get some real experience.”

That’s how the men shake down. The young guys, they’re not real. It’s not 100 percent, but the majority just want to be left alone to go test their new horns out in the world of being an adult at eighteen. God, I remember me at eighteen; I wasn’t safe at any speed, and I was going to the academy, for god sakes.

DePue: I know most of the mindset of people who are thinking about going to the academy. They’re thinking, Let’s see, four years at the academy, five years obligation after that. That’s a lifetime; that’s a long time.

Borling: That didn’t bother me. I would have signed up for thirty years the day I walked in the place; I really would have. I really wanted to be in the military. I thought I needed the military. I thought it was differentiating. The military is differentiating in your life. You may hate it; you may love it, but it will change your life and, as I say, it gives you that badge that says, “I served.”

I’ve got a high school friend who we still maintain contact, one of the very few. He was a clerk typist during Vietnam. He hated the military; he was

59 The Brunswick Corporation, formerly known as the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company, is an American corporation that has been active in developing, manufacturing and marketing a wide variety of products since 1845. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunswick_Corporation)

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so thankful he didn’t have to go to Vietnam. That two-year period as a clerk typist at Fort Dix, New Jersey remains one of the enabling periods in his life, in terms of his own self-esteem.

Let’s turn to the women; let’s go to the women now. Remember, we’re not going to draft or conscript the women. If they want to volunteer for this, they can, but there’s reasons why we really don’t want them to.

DePue: General, if we go to the women, then after that, we can go to…I get to ask some questions then.

Borling: Sure. Well, you started me off on this. (DePue laughs) All right, what do the young women…A lot of this is out of focus groups and polling. This one comes out of a group, up on the north side, young women, not college and then some college women. Women seventeen, eighteen to twenty, twenty- twenty one, what do they think about having the young men choosing to join this program, the year that they will go?

DePue: My guess, and I’ve been wrong so far―

Borling: Well, you’re not very prescient.

DePue: I would say that they would be in favor of it.

Borling: The seventeen-to-twenty-year-old girls…The one I remember the most is piercings, bone in her noise, heavy earrings, tattoos, and she said it best, “Take those sons of bitches yesterday, and go make men out of them.” (DePue laughs) God, I loved her.

All right now, the women who are twenty-one to twenty-six, what do they think about this program?

DePue: The same answer.

Borling: Unh-uh. Biology speaks again. Don’t you dare take any of this horse flesh off the ranch. They’re looking to get mated up. Again, it’s just basic…We tend to discount human nature and biology. We think we move into these post periods, this current debacle thing, where we stupidly said, “How can you act like a nineteenth-century person? This is the twenty-first century, because we’re human people, for god sakes.

DePue: We’re talking about Russia going in and taking Crimea and the administration saying, “You’re playing by the nineteenth-century rules.”

Borling: You’re damn right; I am. And I’ll play by any rules I can to advance the cause of Rodina. What’s Rodina? This was a word…Nobody reported on this. I did;

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I’m a war, political correspondent for TouchVision.60 You didn’t know that; that’s a new thing that has come my way. I go in once a week and shoot some pieces, and then I occasionally show up on this TouchVision TV, which you can get on your tablets or on your TV or whatever. It’s trying to reach that forty-five and under demographic. It’s on mobile platforms, TouchVision.

As you watch the people in the Ukraine and in Russia, waving the Russian flags, and you heard the murmurs of the people―and no one picked up on it―the word was Rodina, Rodina, R-o-d-i-n-a. There’s a Russian proverb that goes, “A man without a motherland is a nightingale without a song.” Rodina literally means Mother Russia. It is the most evocative term in the Russian language, to my understanding of the language. I speak enough of it to be dangerous, in bars. That’s not true, very dangerous in bars.

I tried to come up with an analogue for it in English, because this is the word; this Rodina is what would summon forth the energies and the lives and the enthusiasms of the Russian peasantry to nobles under the czars and certainly under the horrors of the czars, horrors of the communist period, the Russian purges.

Even in the Ukraine, with five million to seven million killed by Stalin and another five to six million killed by the Nazis, the Russians, not the Ukrainians, but the Russian people who lived there, you heard them murmuring Rodina. You heard the same thing in Russia. This love of Mother Russia, it’s a reverential term.

The closest I can come to it, in terms of summoning the spirit, is imagine that you’re the surviving spouse, and they’re just giving you your husband’s flag off the casket and the depth of feeling associated with that moment. When you use the term Rodina, it stirs kind of like everyone has emanated from the common loam of the Russian steppes. When I heard that being invoked, game over.

There probably is a significant argument to be made for the self- determination of the Ukraine. Now, you would have wished it could have gone a different way and more in accordance with international law, because clearly international law was violated; sovereignty was violated. When sovereignty is violated, of course, of an independent nation, the first thing the rest of the nations do is say, “We’re going to go to war to correct it.”

Maybe that wasn’t the first thing that was said by the rest of the nations trying to correct it. (DePue laughs) They said, “No, we’re going to

60 TouchVision was 24 hour broadcast, presenting national and international news in a widescreen format similar to a newsreel, using pictures and video footage, mainly adapted from wire services and presented without any on-air anchors. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TouchVision)

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take the county dog collector of a distant province out there in the Urals, and we’re going to maybe think about putting sanctions on him.”

The difficulty, of course, is this thing ratchets up, and then some people start to do stupid things because their pride has been hurt, much less the legality of the situation. Then events start to control events, and then you can end up in a war. So the question is, is the Ukraine worth going to war? I would argue that, absent the threat of the use of force, absent a coherent Western European and United States thing, this will not stand. It should have been done before it was acted upon, that this, in fact, is a casus belli.61 Now the game changes. Absent that, it’s like a half a hand job, not very satisfying.

DePue: Well, we’re going to have an opportunity to see how this―

Borling: We’ll see how that transcribes. (DePue laughs)

DePue: And we’ll see how all of this plays out, because, of course, Russia, Putin―

Borling: It’s going to play out imperfectly, as it always does.

DePue: …Putin has his eyes on other places as well, the eastern sectors of Ukraine, Estonia―

Borling: Well, it’s going to be tough to get to Moldova. Where, where else?

DePue: Estonia.

Borling: Well, now wait a minute; the Baltic States, that’s a whole different deal. They’re in NATO, and Article V plays.62 We will fight; NATO will fight. They may take it over, but that’s casus belli, and we should fight.

DePue: Well, that’s the question. Where will the line be that the West will―

Borling: We ought to draw a red line. (DePue laughs)

DePue: Well, General, we ought to get to the subject at hand today, if I may.

Borling: I thought we were handling it quite nicely. (DePue laughs)

DePue: Well all of this…We’re here today to talk about your experiences as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War.

61 Casus belli is a Latin expression meaning "an act or event that provokes or is used to justify war." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casus_belli) 62 Article V provides that if a NATO ally is the victim of an armed attack, each and every other member of the alliance will consider this act of violence as an armed attack against all members and will take the actions it deems necessary to assist the ally attacked. (https://www.nato.int/cps/ua/natohq/topics_110496.htm)

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Borling: How boring.

DePue: We finished the last time, the last session, up with you going through the initial interrogation after you were captured. But this whole discussion that we’ve had up to this point is to suggest that there’s much more beyond the point of just being a POW, and I’m happy to do that. We need to take a look at your entire career, because obviously your life is defined by much more than just those POW years, although I’m sure that’s what most people are most interested about.

Borling: It’s a work in progress, Mark. When I grow up, (long pause) I hope I can look back and see that a significant percentage of people I know and maybe people I’ve met or people I think that are out there, would think that…They would have respect for what I and others have tried to do to advance the cause of city, state and nation. That will be good enough, but it’s still a work in progress.

DePue: Well, here’s the first question I have. Again, we finished off with your fairly detailed description of the initial interrogation that you were going through. I want to go back and reiterate how much training you had and instruction you had in how to deal with being a POW before all of this happened to you.

Borling: I had a lot of training; I had a lot of discussion; I had a lot of talk. But in the end, it always happens to the other guy, and you don’t really think it’s ever going to come into play. So, a reasonable amount, but I’m not sure there’s anything that would have prepared you for that experience. I think everyone thinks a POW experience…You think more of a—at least in our ken—the German POW camp circumstance, the slightly more rigorous Hogan’s Heroes kind of thing, Stalag 17 kind of thing.63, 64 You tend to wash out or wash through the unpleasantries of the Korean experience, and you do this in your growing up years.

DePue: But I was just going to say that the military that you entered was still dealing with the trauma of the POW experience from the Korean War and the Code of Conduct and the much more serious security training that happened.

Borling: The Code of Conduct, as almost an absolute text. It’s kind of like Thoreau; the premises are great, but to put it into practice almost requires that you invite them to kill you at the beginning, or you wish for death in the course of it, because the real reality is, the survival with honor and the continued resistance

63 Hogan’s Heroes was an American television situation comedy, set in a German prisoner of war (POW) camp during World War II. It ran from September, 1965 to April, 1971. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogan%27s_Heroes) 64 Stalag 17 is a 1953 comedy-drama war film that tells the story of a group of American airmen held in a German World War II prisoner of war camp, who come to suspect that one of their number is an informant. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalag_17)

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and the tying up of resources may not seem like much, but it’s something, in order to continue the effort.65

So, when you talk about the training, you’re in a shock mode, and you rely on the Code of Conduct and your own sense that you don’t want to be weak, and you don’t want to let your nation down. Those were the kinds of clarion calls, instructional paths, beacons in the night―I love beacons in the night as a metaphor―that you walk to.

What we found out, as I indicated, I think, earlier, what you do is you just do your best. When you’re faced with great pain and great punishment and great physical hurt over and above the injuries you may―some have suffered; some didn’t―you find yourself evolving to kind of a patriotic pragmatism.

DePue: Were the North Vietnamese signatories to the Geneva Convention?

Borling: I do not believe that they were, but you’re going to have to fact-check that. By their definition, even if they were…I take that back; I think they were signatories, frankly. But their view was that we were, given the nature of the conflict, not POWs, but war criminals. Their legalistic approach, which they took some pains―almost like communist tautology―to represent on the world stage―shot down by many others―but at the end of the day, all those many years later―although treatment, as I suggested, changed somewhat for the better over the years―they still referred to us as, and thought of us as, war criminals.

DePue: I know that you went through, for the first few weeks especially, pretty intense interrogation, frequent interrogation―

Borling: Well, when you say interrogation, it was frequent pain, torture. The interrogations were rudimentary, frankly. It was the resistance that we put up and, again, this patriotic pragmatism, causing us to talk beyond the Code of Conduct, which says you can only give them three things. Well, there’s nobody up there who did that, that I’m aware of. You had to be…After pain, you had to say something, do something; so the object was to do your best, yeah.

DePue: As far as the Vietnamese are concerned, was the object of the torture and interrogation to isolate you and break you down and destroy your will to continue?

65 In Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau's basic premise is that a higher law than civil law demands the obedience of the individual. Human law and government are subordinate. In cases where the two are at odds with one another, the individual must follow his conscience and, if necessary, disregard human law. (https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/t/thoreau-emerson-and-transcendentalism/thoreaus-civil- disobedience/major-themes)

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Borling: Oh, yeah. Will they continue? Probably no. What they really wanted to do was to make you malleable for their purposes, their propaganda purpose, as well as any military information that they could summon from you. Most of us, a bunch of fighter pilots, I think it would be correct that we didn’t know shit. We were at the end of the spear, reacting to the daily, fragmentary mission or orders that would come down. We were just trying to follow those orders and live under the rules of engagement and gripe that it wasn’t aggressive enough.

In fact, in my book there’s a thing I write about called Operational Reprisal that we put together in January of ’96 to end the war. I say we; I was a coffee carrier. I had input, but it was a bunch of very practiced captain-, major-level fighter pilots, who went and put an operational plan together to end the war.

DePue: You said ’96?

Borling: I’m sorry; it was in January of ’66, during the bombing pause. Thanks for the correction. It’s relevant enough that we should have done it in ’96.

If you go to war, go hard; don’t screw around. You save lives; you save money on both sides. But this gradualism and this “We’ll hurt them a little” and “We’ve got to be proportional,” the hell; you don’t have to be proportional. If you go into a knife fight, what do you want to have?

DePue: You go the Chicago way, you bring your gun with you.

Borling: You bring a bunch of guns.

DePue: Do you remember any of the interrogators, torturers that you had? Do any stick with you?

Borling: Oh, yeah. I just know them by our nicknames for them, Spot and Rabbit. The guys who did the work were really the guards who would…The officers would be the interrogators, and they’d bring in the sergeants and the privates to either string you up or put you into all these positions that were so difficult. There was Spot and Rabbit. There were some other guys, but that’s the only two I can remember. Rabbit was supposedly nicer, but he wasn’t.

DePue: Were these all Vietnamese?

Borling: Yeah, sure. I never had any contact with the Cuban program.66 A few years later, some Cubans showed up. They were particularly vicious. It was a good

66 Between July 1967 and August 1968, nineteen US POWs in Hanoi were separated from the other US POWs and were subjected to interrogation and torture by a group believed to have been Cubans. One of the POWs died of the torture. US intelligence learned of this event as soon as US POWs returned in 1973, and it became known as “the Cuban Program.” (http://www.miafacts.org/rjd_cuban.htm)

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guy, bad guy for a while. It really…Since I wasn’t involved in the program at all, [ I] never met them; [I] saw them through slits in the wall and stuff. But they went to work on twelve or fifteen guys. They would alternately good cop, bad cop kind of thing. In the end, it was all bad cop and terrible treatment and exploitation of the guys who were in the Cuban program.

DePue: How good was their English?

Borling: Again, where do you want me to jump in at, ’66, ’69?

DePue: I remember that you told the story when we met last time about dead reckoning, as a way to kind of deceive them.

Borling: Oh, yeah. I think that their English was good but unable to cope with the slang and some of the artifice that we tried to use. They’d often come in with prepared statements—not often—they’d then say, “Sign here.” It would be fractured syntax. But even then, bad stuff, saying that I…I can’t even give you an example. It wouldn’t be an expression that you or I would use. You would know; it would be stilted. But even then, it was to be avoided, and you would fight against having to do that.

Now, in truth, sometimes guys would get hurt so bad that they would sign prepared statements or “make a tape” under extreme duress. I don’t hold myself as a hero guy, but I never did that. And I did sign some things I didn’t want to sign. You said, why did they keep doing it? They wanted you to write an apology. They would start off with…After they thought they’d gotten everything out of you militarily that they could, and there was nothing to get, then they would ask you for a biography, so that they would know about you. This was a technique; we knew it. They just wanted to get you doing something. They would torture you to write a biography. You write some bullshit biography, part of it true, part of it false.

As the years went by, you couldn’t remember what the hell you said. Then they’d come and hammer your ass for, “What about your brother?” “I haven’t got a brother.” “You say here you have a brother.” God, what did I say two years ago under duress? So you’d write this bullshit thing. We learned to make it factual enough to be―

I remember too…I do remember this in the interrogation thing, that time has gone by, and I’ve been roped up and stressed up and then beaten up. And they wanted to know what outfit I was in. They came in, and they said, “You’re in the 433rd Squadron, 8th Fighter Wing out of Ubon, Thailand,” because it was in the paper (DePue laughs) that I was missing. You’d get that played back to you. I remember that.

DePue: For the first few years you were there, what were the conditions of your imprisonment?

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Borling: Isolation or semi-isolation. I’m talking, you were either alone, or you were with one or maybe two other guys in a very small area, with no ventilation to speak of, no windows. That would be typical for the first four, five years. In fact, I lived with one guy and another guy, on and off a third guy…Well, on and off for all of us, but roughly two to three guys. We were in a room―two of us for sure―for three and a half years.

DePue: Was one of these your copilot?

Borling: No. A.J. Myers and I were together. Remember, I told you I was the first lieutenant to upgrade and flew both seats in the war. The night I got shot down, I was in the backseat as the copilot, if you will. It was a volunteer mission, and A.J. and I…Nobody wanted it.

In fact, I found out this year, from a classmate of mine who was in my squadron, at the fiftieth reunion, he said, “After you guys got shot down, they quit putting that kind of mission together. Nobody would fly it because everyone was getting shot down. You guys were the last guys to volunteer to do it, and you got shot down. Then they said, ‘We’re not going to do that anymore.’ In fact, they sent it down and we said, ‘We’re not going to fly.’” I said, “Wow!” I said, “I didn’t know that.”

After a couple of months in the early period, they put A.J. and me together. He and I were great friends. We’re brave guys. We were good guys, and I enjoyed flying with him; he enjoyed flying with me. Then we thought we were invincible; we were that good. Hell, I was on number ninety-seven. It didn’t matter, because I was going to do another 100. We were together for about twenty days, I would think, twenty-five days. I remember it was room one of the barn. We called it the barn; it had a place we called the Zoo. They took us out of Hanoi Hilton and moved us a few miles, still inside Hanoi, inside a military camp.

There was an old, French, we think, French film studio called “the Zoo,” and we were in that. I can draw it. Hell, I can’t even remember the names of the buildings, but there were two buildings here. If you look at 12:00, 6:00 thing, at 6:00 there’s two buildings. There’s an old, crusty swimming pool kind of thing in the middle. Over at your left, 9:00, there’s an administration building with offices and torture cells in it. The gate is at your left (sighs), 7:00. Right next to it is a place called the gatehouse; it’s a terrible place. There were three cells in it, and it was used for torture. A lot of people died there, or at least a number of them.

That’s where I tried to escape from. I was in the middle room. Darrell Pyle was in the room at 12:00; I was in the middle room, and Jerry Denton, to start with, was in the other room. That’s what split A.J. and I up. We were with room one of the barn down here; I think it was called the barn; another

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building here, I forget what it was called, the office or something like that., And there were about nine cells in this building.

They came through this one day, and they said, basically, “Do you want to live or do you want to die? If you want to live, you’ve got to sell out your country.” We said, “All right, we choose to die.” A.J., he was all broken up; he couldn’t walk. I was getting better; I could get around, still couldn’t walk real well, but I could get around, in pain now. You help each other go to the bathroom, the bucket. It was pretty basic living.

I remember that Art Burer moved in next door. I hear this tapping on the wall, and it was Art Burer. Shit, he was one of my instructor pilots in pilot training and a good friend. So Art moved in next door.

But anyway, I ended up, from there, going over to the gatehouse, into the middle of…when I said, “No, we’ll just die.” So they take you over there, and they worked on you. I was there for thirty or forty days, because I was able to get a…They put the hell-cuffs on you.

DePue: The hell-cuffs?

Borling: The hell- cuffs. They’re ratcheted handcuffs, where they can…Think of a ratchet thing, the thing that they put down in the dryer, where you ratchet it, with the little―

DePue: Exactly.

Borling: …the little metal thing. Well, think of that ratcheting thing, only think of them as metal handcuffs that they could put on you, sometimes multiple cases, and then squeeze them down and jump on them to get them…In fact, you wondered if your bones weren’t going to break, and the pain was excruciating. Then they would put you in leg irons and contort you and then tie you down so you had no movement, except your arms were up here. Sometimes they were tied down.

There was this board; you were laying on it, and there would have been a nail I’d worked out of that board. I’d stuck it into my gum, carried it around in my gum. I found that I could take that nail, and the lock was like, if you stuck it in the keyhole, you could trip the mechanism; you could loosen it up. It was that singular technique that allowed me to last all that time, because most people break in a matter of hours. They could never figure out why. They’d come in and jump on them, and then, as soon as they’d leave, I’d get the thing out of my gum and loosen them up, because the door was not only bolted, it had a thing up against it, total darkness. There’s no light, nothing. You’re laying in there with all the vermin. In one case a snake (laughs) crawled…That’s when they had me strapped down, laid down later, and it was hot, terrible.

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Darrell moved in next door. But the wall wasn’t thick; the wall was thin. I could take that nail, and I could drill a hole in the wall. It was on a Sunday morning that Darrell and I first met through this hole in the wall. He was all trussed up too. I was able to pass the nail through to him and teach him how to slip the cuffs. Then Jerry Denton was on the other side. The wall was very thick though; it was a brick wall, and I couldn’t get through it. They broke Jerry down. Jim Mulligan moved in and then somebody else.

But Darrell and I were convinced that we could…We use this nail, and we could get out of this stuff. We could get out of our leg irons; we could get out of our handcuffs. Now, sometimes they’d come in and tie you down and leave you for a few days, and you couldn’t do anything. Then they had you down like this. You weren’t in pain; you were just laying there in your own offal. Didn’t give you enough water, obviously.

DePue: Any food at all?

Borling: Oh, yeah, there was food, but the gruel kind of thing. I don’t remember. The food was always cyclical, like if it was cabbage season you’d have cabbage soup for three months, and greens, you’d have greens, indiscriminate greens, soup, sometimes a little piece of pig fat with hair on it; that would be typical.

Anyway, so Darrell and I tried to escape out of the gatehouse. Darrell got up into the ceiling and, in fact, moved tile and said, “We can get out of here.” I got up in the ceiling and agreed. This is when we were able to get out of all our stuff. This board that we were laying on, we could spread it out. There was a hole in the ceiling. That’s how we got up into the attic, if you will, and we could get out and move the tiles. We said we’d wait until a rainy evening, a Saturday evening, because they didn’t check on you until late on Sunday. We had some plan to get to the Metropole Hotel, which is where the ambassadors hung out. We thought we could get asylum or some damn thing.

DePue: For what countries would ambassadors be there?

Borling: Well, Sweden would be there. I had visions of me throwing myself into the arms of a six foot blonde Swede, didn’t matter, man or woman. I had a preference. And there were other Eastern European countries and Switzerland, we assumed. But we knew they hung out at the Metropole Hotel. We had no bloody idea where it was. It was just something I’d read, the La Rue Sans Joie, the Street Without Joy, which was a spin-up book to the Vietnam War, La Rue Sans Joie, the Street Without Joy.

The night we tried to escape, Darrell…They changed his locks, and he couldn’t get out of it. He was making a lot of noise. He bent the bar on his legs. They came in, and they hit us, and they caught us. Darrell panicked; he said, “Please don’t go without me.” I said, “Okay.” They figured out that we

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were trying to escape. They went up into the attic, found…I think we’d put some stuff up there; I can’t remember, frankly.

I think our plan was, we were just going to get out. Of course, we were going to jump right into the middle of an armed camp, but we thought we’d do this in the middle of the night, and we could just stealthily make our way out, in our purple pajamas.

DePue: Striped pajamas?

Borling: Striped, purple pajamas. Then we would jog. I couldn’t jog very well, because I was still hurting. But we would go, and we would find a Vietnamese person and knock him down and get some money. If there were streetcars, we’d take a streetcar, just play like we owned the place, rather than go furtively flopping around. We thought we were just going to guts it out. That was the plan.

But we never got out of the place. Then they killed us; they just ripped us a new asshole. That resulted with me and Darrell being thrown in together then, because up to that time, I’d been with A.J., who I knew, or alone and then with Darrell. But that wasn’t until later in ’66, October maybe.

DePue: The initial escape attempt was in that first year, as you recall?

Borling: For me, yeah. The initial escape attempt was shortly after I got shot down. After they captured me, I tried to get away, but it was a half-hearted thing. [I] couldn’t walk, so I tried to roll my way to freedom. I got from about here to the dining room table, but I almost got into the jungle. Then they found me, and then they hurt me bad.

DePue: You say you were in the Zoo at this time. Did you spend more time in the Zoo or in the Hanoi Hilton itself, or did you go back and forth?

Borling: No. I left the Hanoi Hilton in the summer of ’66 and went to the Zoo. I stayed in the Zoo for years, until they opened up a camp next door called the Annex. The Annex was eight buildings, with two large cells per building. In those large cells, which had a funny ceiling…You couldn’t stand up. No, I guess you could stand up, but it was a low ceiling. Maybe it was a slanted ceiling, where you could only stand up in the middle; I’ve forgotten. It had little courtyards, and those rooms were nine-man rooms.

In fact, I left Darrell…No, I didn’t leave Darrell; Darrell came along, and we were in the same room of the Annex. Of those eight buildings, we were in—I don’t know how you’d number them—we were in the back row in the second building. We had nine guys, with a little courtyard, where they would let you out. There was a well. You would throw water on yourself, winter, summer whatever. It gets cold. So that well…But we would stay locked up most of the time in that nine-person room. But god, that was really something, a nine-person room, wow.

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DePue: So much better than being in solitary confinement, I would think.

Borling: Or in semi-isolation. You had this area where you go outside in this courtyard for thirty minutes a day and wash. You could sling notes back and forth. They would only let the catty-corner buildings out. They wouldn’t let this building out here, directly opposite. But we had contact, and we could get up on shoulders and, in fact, get eye contact and do a hand code back and forth. Then we had manufactured some ink, and we could throw notes back and forth. There was good connectivity throughout, at least for the four. Yeah, there was good connectivity.

For this building here, Connie Traubman, a captain, was a senior guy. Connie had eye contact across the wall, back into the Zoo, with a building— this is the barn—with one of these buildings. I [was] never there, so I don’t know. But we had eye contact, so we had the Zoo and the Annex connected in communications for senior officer guidance and what’s going on, all that stuff. That lashed up a significant number of guys.

DePue: Apparently, when you guys were let out in the center courtyard, you weren’t being that closely watched by the guards.

Borling: No, they would come in, let you out, shut the door, lock it, and leave you alone for twenty, thirty minutes, the nine of us. So you’re out together. This is unusual. We spent years where, if you’re outside twenty seconds a day, that was a lot. Now, my god, we’re out for―

DePue: What timeframe are we talking now, ’67, ’68?

Borling: Sixty-nine maybe.

DePue: Was that after the Son Tây raid?67

Borling: No, this was before.

DePue: The prisoners, were they almost all pilots, either Navy or Air Force pilots?

Borling: Um-hmm.

DePue: All officers?

Borling: For the most part. In fact, we had in that room in the Annex, three enlisted guys who were helicopter crewmen of an HH-43, Neil Black, para-rescue; Art Cormier, engineer; and Robbie Robinson, crew chief, I guess.

67 Operation Ivory Coast was a mission conducted by U.S. Special Operations Forces and other American military elements to rescue sixty-one American prisoners of war thought to be held at the Sơn Tây camp. The mission failed when it was found, during the raid, that the camp contained no prisoners. They had previously been moved to another camp. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivory_Coast)

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DePue: That’s a Navy helicopter?

Borling: Bill Robinson. No, the HH-43 is Air Force. They were shot down in ’65, in the north, with this little non…Most helicopters are survival; this one really wasn’t, like a tin can with a prop on it. I think the crew was killed. The pilot crew was killed, and the three enlisted guys survived. They had taken the same ship that all of the officers had.

So, the idea came up, and I must say…In that group of nine, we had two Naval Academy guys, two Air Force Academy guys, Darrell Pyle, Harold Monlux, who was not academy, and these three enlisted guys, and we came up with the idea. I would say I thought of it or Dave thought of it, Dave Carey. We all thought of it, that we ought to battlefield commission these guys. They’d taken as much crap as we had, and we said, “Well, we’ll…” Maybe it was just we wanted to use time and make it as a plaything, not really. We said, “We’ll put you through an officer training school. We know all about that shit; we’re academy guys.

So we did. We put them through customs and courtesies and how to drill and how to do this. They were already in the military; they knew how to march and that. But those were some things that we did. Then we had a swearing-in ceremony. By note, we said, “Hey, this is what we’re doing,” across to the county of Troutman, who relayed it back into the Barn.

People knew about Art and Neal and Robbie, and they said, “Sure.” I remember. Because they’re Air Force, I swore them in. I administered the oath of office and made them second lieutenants. After the war…They were accepted as lieutenants from then on, when we got into the bigger rooms, back at the Hilton.

After the war, the most senior guys, Flynn and Stockdale and others, took the issue of the battlefield commission to the Pentagon and eventually to the White House, and it was affirmed. They were given, with back pay―or maybe not with back pay―but they were made lieutenants.

Neil Black, Art Black―he goes by Neil now—went on to pilot training and got his wings. They asked…At the end they said, “What do you really want to do?” When we got out, it was kind of a wish list. They said, “What do you want to do?” For me, I said, “I just want to go back to fighters.”

Neil was so enamored of us guys—there was a little hero worship— that he wanted to go back and be a pilot, actually wanted to be a fighter pilot. He ended up flying 130s but had a credible career. Art Cormier stayed in maintenance, which is what he knew. Art was a tech sergeant and, I don’t think, was as totally comfortable with the officer position but was a good guy, a solid citizen. I saw him at the reunion this year. And Bill Robinson, who was a big hefty guy…

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Boy, he used to amaze the Vietnamese on the amount of rice he could eat. This guy was like a human…They’d bring a basket of rice like this. He was a huge guy, big gut. He slimmed down obviously, in the war, but they seemed to understand that Bill was…He was the junior of the bunch. He became a maintenance officer and did very well. All these guys retired as officers.

DePue: I’m guessing the reference to him eating a lot and everybody being amazed happened a few years into the imprisonment.

Borling: Oh, yeah, yeah, late into the deal when the…There was a point when there was an abundance of rice, I don’t know why, but somewhere in the late ’69 timeframe.

DePue: I want to go back to the early times, especially the solitary confinement experience. Describe the cell and the furnishings in the cell that you’d have there.

Borling: There were no furnishings, early Spanish…What is it, early Spanish inquisition. (DePue laughs) There was no furnishings.

DePue: I’m laughing now; I’m sure it was no laughing matter then.

Borling: The cells, depending on one person, two persons, were six feet across, with two hard pallets―

DePue: Off the ground?

Borling: Off the ground, concrete…with leg stocks that went through the wall, here. The ceiling was fifteen feet tall. I said six feet across; the thing was probably six-by-six, six-by-six and a half. That was the two-person thing.

The three-person cell, which often you were in alone or with two people, would be…add another, let’s see, six, eight, ten, probably ten feet this way and ten feet that way, because you had a small walk area that was three steps, one, two, three, one and a half, one, two, three.

DePue: So that was as much exercise as you could possibly get?

Borling: That was it. You’d get three guys walking that, and you’d walk a lot.

DePue: I know initially you were banged up pretty badly. I’m assuming almost everybody was. Was there any medical treatment?

Borling: Yes and no; it varied. I think, being banged up, I probably was, at least initially, in the critical stage―critical is the wrong word―in the real banged- up stage. But then I healed miraculously, rather quickly. The medical care―I think I made reference to―after a period of several weeks, maybe even more.

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I remember they took me out one night, put me in an ambulance thing, took me and X-rayed me. I came back the next day, and they said, “Your back is broken; be careful.” That was the day that they tried to get me to do some stuff, because of their lenient treatment and ended up torturing me that same day that they said be careful, kind of hanging me up like a…I’d say, like a piñata. But that, rope tricks and stuff, it’s indistinct.

DePue: Did you get any kind of medical treatment in the long-term while you were there?

Borling: I got real sick in ’71 and lost a lot of weight. I was on my way out, frankly.

DePue: Do you know what it was?

Borling: It was amoebic—that’s my word—amoebic dysentery, unable to hold any food or water down and just lost weight. You’re already thin, but went way, way down. I was very weak and just able to lay there, puking and crapping my guts out. I’m in a big room at this time; I’m with a group of forty guys, but just really…It really went downhill in a hurry.

It was just at the start of some guys started to get packages. Again, this was as things started to improve, in the ’71, ’72 timeframe. But I don’t remember if it was ’71; it’s got to be ’71.

DePue: Packages from home or the Red Cross?

Borling: No, packages from home, heavily pilfered, and not everybody, just a smattering.

I can remember this sickness occurred. In the middle of this sickness, the most amazing thing happened―it was amazing―that one morning the doors opened up, and they walked in, and they had little quarter loaves, not quarter, little tranches of French bread—we hadn’t seen bread in five years— and a hot, sweet milk, like the French would make a steamer, except it wasn’t a steamer, per se, but it was pretty close to it.

They ladle out bread and hot sweet milk in your cup. They gave you a cup of hot, sweet milk and a hunk of bread, and this is breakfast! We never got breakfast! Geez, the war’s over. You think about…Yeah, we’re going home tomorrow! (both laugh)

Still had a couple of years to go. But this is out of that treatment hockey stick there, toward the end. So, I can remember, I was very sick, and the guys brought it to me. I couldn’t even get off the damn pallet thing.

Now, I haven’t remembered this in years. I can remember…I can taste the bread and that milk. This is forty-one years later, and I can taste that bread and milk. What’s more, we thought [it was] a one-time shot, whatever. Some

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guys saved the bread. It was funny; we were like little subhuman people. They came the next morning, same thing, and I still wasn’t able to keep it down. I was still…

In fact, [it] probably accelerated my condition, notwithstanding how good it tasted, but somebody had gotten a package. I want to say—this might not even be the right word, but the word that comes to mind is Tetracycline— there was Tetracycline in the package. Whoever got it, they gave it to me. They also…as I remember now, the bread and the milk ration got stretched out, and there wasn’t as much. Some of the guys gave me their bread and milk to try to nurse me back to health. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t even tell you who it was today, but they did. The combination of that medicine and more than my share of the bread and milk, because they did it spread out—it would go up and down as to the amount—brought me back.

DePue: Before all of that, in the early years especially, how would you describe your diet? What was the food and the water you got?

Borling: A watery soup, mostly of greens, hot water that they’d deliver around twice in a day, in a jug. A water girl, we called her, would drop the little panel in the door. You’d hold your jug up, and she’d ladle hot water. She carried one of those chogi poles [carrying sticks], with two forty-gallon or thirty- gallon…She had to be pretty strong to go…If you’ve ever tried to carry anything heavy on a chogi pole—I tried after the war to do that—god, that’s a task, Olympic skill required.

She would go around and refinish water, when they would do it, which is most of the time after the early parts, when they would deprive you of water. But they’d give you a couple of…The pot was about that big and about that big around. In the summer it was never enough; in the winter it was plenty.

DePue: About eight or ten inches deep.

Borling: About eight or ten inches deep, and it was heavy porcelain stuff, so it would retain heat. It had Chinese crap or something on the outside of it, it depended. They were all chipped and beat up. If you lost your top or the top broke, then you wouldn’t have a top. In the winter, you’d use it for heat; you’d just use it for heat. It got really cold.

DePue: What do you mean, use it for heat? Were you able to burn something in the pot?

Borling: No, you just hold the pot, the hot water in the pot, until it got cold; you’d just hold it on your hands. The trick was to keep your feet, your hands and your head covered, especially at night when you were trying to sleep.

DePue: Did you have any kind of a cap or something like that?

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Borling: Well, we’d make a cap. Later, you got another pair of shorts or something, like undershorts, to go with the pajamas. You’d take those undershorts and wrap them around your head, and then you had a blanket. If it was winter, you didn’t need the mosquito net, so you’d wrap the mosquito net around your feet. You’d take your rubber zap, which was a rubber-tire shoe that you had, with the straps on it, and you would use that. You’d take those two, and that would be your pillow. Then you’d have this thin blanket; you’d try to stay warm under the thin blanket. It was cold, boy.

DePue: Wool or a cotton blanket, do you know? You said you’re sleeping on some kind of a pallet?

Borling: You’re sleeping on an elevated concrete pallet, or you’re sleeping on a lattice- work board. And oh, you have a straw mat; it’s a roll-up mat, like just a straw mat that you roll up. It’s your sleeping mat, and you lay that down on either the pallet or on the deal. For example, back at the gatehouse, they didn’t have a pallet, you were just strapped down on the…They had a board thing. You didn’t have a pallet then, or you didn’t have a raised thing. You were down on the floor, and that thing was heavy, but that was also the ladder that got us up into the attic.

DePue: Was this a dirt floor or a cement floor?

Borling: It was a cracked cement floor, because I figure that’s where the snake came from the one time. I was strapped down on that thing, and a snake crawled across my chest.

DePue: He figured out a way to get out afterwards, I take it?

Borling: I don’t know; he went away. I had two snake experiences, and that was…I was just tied down; I couldn’t do anything. You worried about a krait, because kraits like to come and snuggle up to you, and then if you move around, they bite you.68 They’ve got a smaller bite, but a lot of people who sleep on the floor or close to the floor—in India and other places in Southeast Asia—suffer the bite of the banded krait, which is the kraits do that. They like the warmth; they’re a cold-blooded thing, and then they―

DePue: So, it’s a poisonous snake?

Borling: Oh, yeah, a very poisonous snake.

DePue: Kill you?

Borling: Absolutely kill you. The other was a cobra in a room. (DePue laughs)

68 Kraits are highly venomous Asian snakes of the cobra family. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_krait)

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DePue: We know their reputation. How much weight did you end up losing, do you think?

Borling: In that timeframe, we didn’t have scales or anything, but I was cavernous, probably was down to 115, 120 pounds or less; I don’t know.

DePue: How much when you got captured?

Borling: Two-0-three, 210.

DePue: How tall are you?

Borling: Six-two and a half.

DePue: So it went down by about 55 percent of your body weight when you went in?

Borling: In that sick period…When we came out―this is after having been fatted up now for the better part of a couple years―I came out at like 160, 162, 163.

DePue: Going back and talking about that mat and your sleeping conditions and living conditions, I’m wondering if you had problems with lice and other vermin.

Borling: Oh, probably.

DePue: You don’t remember though?

Borling: I don’t. I know when we came out, they had to deworm us and de-fumigate us. So I suspect we probably did, although the secretary…They let us wash, especially at the end. They let us wash, including washing our clothes. I think at a point, we had two sets of pajamas, two bottoms, two tops and a couple of shorts. The towel was just like a golf towel, and the soap was like this yellow, Lifebuoy laundry soap thing. They’d give you one bar every ninety or 120 days. They even had toothpaste and a toothbrush. I forget the name, but I remember what it said on the toothpaste thing—which goes back to the use of English; it was in English—it said, “much bubble, nice taste.” (DePue laughs) That’s what it said. I have no idea what the hell the thing was, but much bubble, nice taste on the toothpaste.

Boy, if you want to talk about a horror story, that’s the guys who had toothaches or abscess or…I went almost seven years without…Well, I went six years and eight months and some days [with] broke teeth and had all kinds of—from time to time—some aches, but never really had a toothache in all that time. Then two days or three days after hitting Clark [Air Force Base], I’m in the dentist chair for a root canal. I’d got an abscess almost overnight, upon hitting Clark, and it was a root canal that was required. God, I thanked the Lord for that. If you had told me that I would win $400 million in the lottery, but all I had to do was to experience the dental problems that a number

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of the guys had, which would I choose: freedom from the dental problem or the $400 million? You know what I’d choose today?

DePue: Freedom from the dental problems.

Borling: Freedom from the dental problems.

DePue: How did they deal with the problems they had?

Borling: Badly. Knocked themselves in the jaw. If they had a roommate to knock themselves in the jaw, try to rip the tooth out. A number of years out, they did bring in a dentist. You sat in that straight-back chair kind of thing that you’d like. It was a wooden apparatus, with a foot pedal, that had a metal drill on it. It was kind of Marathon Man plus.69 They just drilled it out, no antiseptic.

They’d strap you in the chair. They’d have a guard doing the pedal. You’d listen to the screams. They wouldn’t fill anything. They’d just drill a hole and let off the pressure or do something, and the guy was a dentist. But this foot pedal thing…I don’t know, you have to admit…a foot driven drill, rrrr, rrrr, rrrr. You want to know why I didn’t take the $400 million? (DePue laughs)

DePue: I’ve heard similar stories, talking to Korean War veterans who were POWs about their dental care. It was nonexistent; you took care of yourself.

Borling: It was nonexistent, yeah, and what did they do? Whatever you could. You’d puncture your gums. You’d try to get a knife or something sharp. When they came around with the razorblade…They’d come around…And remember this; we had beards. Then sixty days out or something, they came around, and they had this razorblade and that bar soap and no mirror. God, we got it, and we shaved. It was rough and tough. No, this was less than that, yeah, about sixty days out. We looked like Duck Dynasty guys, you know.70 So we’re shaving; it’s an old safety razor thing, so there was a razorblade in there. That’s what some of the guys used later on to try to lance their gums.

DePue: To relieve the pressure.

Borling: To relieve the pressure. [Here’s something] interesting about the shaving. A.J. and I use it, and then they moved it next door to Art Burer. (DePue laughs)

69 Marathon Man is a 1976 American suspense-thriller film with a dental torture scene that has been described as one of the most frightening sequences in film. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_Man_(film) 70 Duck Dynasty was an American reality television series that portrayed the lives of the Robertson family, who became successful from their family-operated business, making products for duck hunters. The Robertson men are known for their long beards and conservative Protestant Christian views. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_Dynasty)

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Art used it, and he comes back and says, “Holy shit, what did you guys do to that razorblade?” (DePue laughs) We thought it was terrible when we had it.

That razorblade, as far as we know, it was kind of the regimental razorblade. It made its way…We didn’t see anybody, but apparently we all looked like we’d been in a knife fight or something, with patches of skin and stuff. Then they would come around, maybe once every ten days or something, and they’d let you shave. They didn’t have a concept of shaving, being Oriental, with not any facial hair to speak of.

DePue: I wonder when you were really, really hungry—you were close to starvation I’m sure, quite a bit of the time—what foods were you dreaming about?

Borling: Breakfast.

DePue: Bacon and eggs?

Borling: Breakfast. Yeah, eggs, bacon, toast, steak, SOS [“shit on a shingle”], pancakes, nothing exotic, no eggs benedict, just fried eggs and bacon or scrambled eggs and bacon and toast and jam and butter and coffee and pancakes, maybe some orange juice but mostly screw the fruit.71 And that’s what we all had when we came back. We had one humungous breakfast, and then that was it, back to the fighter pilot breakfast, the coconut candy bar.

DePue: Was it a good thing, or was it torturing yourself to be thinking—

Borling: You’re making me hungry. I’m on the Atkins diet thing, and I’m eating only protein, as you know. In fact, when I blew my knee out this January, I went up about twelve pounds. Well, it’s off now, but it’s been…I quit drinking, except for one day, where I went to a neighbor’s house, but running hard, working hard. Sometimes you can get me talking about food, and I can start to think I may need a snack here later in the day. I did go out and have lunch. I had some lettuce and a couple scoops of tuna fish and a pickle.

DePue: Only a couple more questions about food then.

Borling: That’s all right.

DePue: Was it a good thing or a bad thing to be daydreaming about food?

Borling: Oh, it was a normal thing. We were hungry most of the time, and sometimes we were really hungry. When you said starvation, I don’t think that was very much in play. Everybody lost weight, and everybody was hungry, but they gave us enough food, and it was rice for the first four years.

71 SOS, or “shit on a shingle,” is a classic military dish made with creamed, chipped beef, served on toast. (https://www.cooksinfo.com/shit-on-a-shingle-recipe).

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They had done bread before I’d gotten there. They didn’t know what, how to feed…They’d done bread, and then they’d gone off bread and had gone to rice. Remember, we were right on the transition thing in June of ’66. I was never a big fan of rice, got to be a fan of rice. They’d give you this green soup, again, with some pig fat in it. When I’m talking pig fat, I’m saying a piece of meat, maybe the size of your thumbnail. That’s too big, forefinger, too small, probably between your thumb and your forefinger. It would have the outer skin of the pig, with the hair on it and some stuff. We would sometimes, in the soup, get strange things, like rats, dead rats.

DePue: By design, or just because they weren’t paying attention?

Borling: I don’t know; I wasn’t the cook. We ate the rat. That was in that room of nine. In fact, they would bring in a cauldron of soup and leave the cauldron of soup for the nine of us, with a basket of rice. We’d divvy it out ourselves; they’d come back and pick it up.

This one day—this is pretty foul—but we got some unusual looking piece of meat in the bottom of the soup thing, and we ascertained that it was a pig’s asshole. (both laugh) You know the game, hup-hup-hoe, where you put out one to three fingers? So we hup-hup-hoed, and who got the pig’s asshole? Bill Robison, the big guy I told you about, he got it. He said it was delicious. (laughs)

DePue: It wasn’t big enough to divide among the nine?

Borling: No, no. It was either a pig’s asshole or a pig’s vagina, I don’t know, one of the two. I don’t know if pigs have vaginas. If I won it, I was probably going to give it…I wasn’t that hungry. (laughs)

But the rat…When we got a rat out of the bottom of the soup one day, same room, right there where I told you, in the Annex was the nine-person room. We got the rat out, and it was a dead…fur, tail, the whole thing. We kind of skinned it with…We didn’t have any knife, but we kind of skinned it with a…Oh, we had these metal spoons, soft metal spoons. You couldn’t make a knife out of them or a shiv. They were some very, very—you know how when you go to a Chinese restaurant, that flat, funny—these were made out of metal, but they were really soft metal. So you couldn’t do anything with them, but we used those spoons to skin the rat. It was well cooked, so we could slice it open and get the guts out of it. I think Bill Robinson ate the rat mostly. (laughs)

DePue: It sounds like the rat just kind of fell in on its own.

Borling: Fell in on its own, yeah, yeah.

DePue: You had mentioned, when we first met, something about a chicken bone. Was there a chicken bone incident?

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Borling: You don’t want the chicken story.

DePue: Well, now I’m intrigued; I’m especially intrigued. It’s one you’d rather not tell?

Borling: No. Hell, I don’t care; it’s funny. When we were―after Son Tay raid―put together in a big camp.

DePue: That was ’69.

Borling: That was ’70, after November of ’70, so this would probably be ’71 again, ’72, mid-’71. We’re in the Hilton, and all these cells are around this big courtyard. So there’s a cell here, a cell here, a cell here, and then there’s a wall down here. This is where there was a cell where some fellow travelers lived.

DePue: Here’s the picture of the Hilton, the Hanoi Hilton. Does that look familiar?

The Hoa Lò Prison, known to American POWs as the Hanoi Hilton, as it appeared while John Borling and other American POWs were imprisoned there during the Vietnam War.

Borling: Not really.

DePue: Your perspective was different from an overhead view.

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Borling: Yeah, I’m trying to figure. Where’s the main drag? Is it up here, the main entrance, someplace? I would think so. I would think that was over here, off of the Maison Centrale. You walked in, and you walked down a garden here. I kind of know where it is. All these are buildings; all these are―

DePue: We’re looking at the exterior walls and the buildings.

Borling: The courtyard, yeah. But it’s more than exterior. The exterior wall is really here, because there’s a gap. See this gap here?

DePue: Right.

Borling: And that wall is embedded with glass [along the top of the wall].

DePue: The exterior wall.

Borling: …barbed wire, the exterior wall. But there’s a patrol way that goes around the whole camp. We were somewhere, and I think this may have been the courtyard. I don’t remember anything with trees. Later I do, when we came back. Just before release, they had us in this bigger courtyard. But I think we were all over here. We obviously weren’t over here, because some of these are the interrogation rooms. This is the part that’s torn down, I think, because Heartbreak Hotel [Hoa Lo Prison] and the other things are right in here, as I remember.

Anyway, this is this big courtyard area. We were all clustered in there. Initially, they didn’t do anything; they were in such a rush to get us in there. We were in, and we’re all looking at one another. God, we’re seeing everybody; we’re all together after that raid. Well, then they came in and put up bamboo sheeting that was supposed to stop us from looking over half the…Of course, we just poked holes in it, the private part. After a while they kind of gave up. But for a while we had to peer out, and we would flash, tap code stuff or shout.

That’s the way we got to those guys who were fellow travelers down there. They weren’t like that, but there were a couple of real bad guys, real bad traitors, who lived down there. The rest of the guys didn’t want to have anything to do with them, and they all were part of the fold.

DePue: These were Americans who had cooperated?

Borling: They were Americans who cooperated, yeah. There was a Marine lieutenant colonel and a Navy commander or captain, Edwin Wright and Gene Miller. There may have been somebody else too. I’ll give you another story about that later on, but we were able to…In fact, I was part of the team that shouted down to quit giving them stuff for free; make them…These guys were putty in their hands, and they weren’t hurt. They were just fucking traitors, and I use the phrase, in my opinion, so as I don’t get slandered or liabled.

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So, to the chicken story. Now we’re peering out. I think it was John McCain; I’m not sure—I can’t pin this on John—but we had chickens; there were chickens out there. We had all this squawking going on. Suddenly, the guy is peering out in the courtyard. This is during the quiet period in the day. Somewhere there’d be a gong that would go off, and it’s siesta time in the hot part of the day. It would go for three or four hours before there would be another gong, and that’s the wakeup time.

You’d get up at 5:00 in the morning or 4:30, and you’re up until about 10:00. Then there’s supposed to be this rest period, siesta type, for four hours, and then you’re back until it’s time to do something else. We’re all locked up; of course they wouldn’t let us out running around. We stayed in those rooms with over-capacity; we stayed in those rooms.

So the guy was watching out there, and we’re hearing this terrible chicken squawking going on. He falls down laughing, and we said, “What’s going on?” He said—whatever the guard’s name, I forget the name—“He’s fucking the chicken.” (both laugh) This is big stuff, so we’re all fighting to get over there. I didn’t see it, but the other guys, “Oh, look at that; he’s got it strapped on.” Well, that night we had chicken soup, (DePue laughs) and we ate it.

DePue: There probably wasn’t too much left of the chicken, I would guess.

Borling: I told that story to a very senior officer years later, a good friend of mine, senior to me; I was a colonel at the time. He howled. He thought that was the funniest thing. The next day he called me into his office. He gave me a little ceramic chicken thing. (both laugh) I’ve still got it someplace. Anyway, so that’s the chicken story.

DePue: Well, this isn’t probably nearly as humorous a situation―

Borling: You remember the funny stuff; you remember the weird stuff and the bad stuff. Again, after about late ’70, ’71, ’72 on, it just got to be an exercise― notwithstanding that sickness that I talked about―it got to be an exercise in time, in trudging it out.

In the book, there’s a thing which earlier was called Hanoi Epitaph. How you time-managed was important. There were some things that were— when they put us in those bigger rooms—that were stimulating intellectually. We had hypothesized how to put together the diatonic scale and the minor scale in music.

We got a guitar; they threw a guitar into us one day, in this big room. We were able to validate…Somebody remembered, “Every good broad goes down at Easter” kind of thing. We tuned to what we thought was the right tonal structure. I remember, I created in my mind a song, “Angel Eyes,” (singing) “Angel eyes, da-doo-doo-doo-doo.” I had thought through the…I

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played the piano enough to really be unworthy of the name pianist, but I still mess around with it, so I’d constructed “Angel Eyes.” When it was my turn on the guitar…Remember, we had forty people waiting for their turn on the guitar, and it only was with us for a couple months. Then it went away, and we never saw it again. But we were able to validate that.

We got some books. We had a grammar book in French that was Russian, or it was a Russian grammar book in French. Anyway, it was the two languages. I spoke enough French to be able to get into Russian. So, I self- taught Russian, and then I taught everybody else Russian. But I never could figure out the two types of verbs. There was a perfective and imperfective verb in Russian, and I could never figure out how that worked. So we had classes with these groups of forty.

There’d be language class; there’d be toastmaster class; there’d be…This was after morning exercises, the guys would say, “Fuck you; we’re not doing anything. We hate these gooks.” They’d just walk around like they’d been walking around. There would be a storytelling class; I’d tell stories. Books, I’d recite poetry, and we’d give it back and forth. There would be golf classes. When you’re with a group of forty guys, and you’re trying to use time, you would have these sessions.

Guys would make cards. We made cards out of toilet paper. Ever try to shuffle toilet paper? (DePue laughs) They’d play bridge, and then we’d have arguments, but we never had fights. Whenever it got close to a fight…The rule was, if we got close to a fight, then you had to make a $100 bet. Then we’d settle up after we got out. There were funny bets. Go back to the chickens; did I tell you this story already?

DePue: No, I don’t think so.

Borling: Well, we had country boy, city boy, and we’re watching the chickens again. We’re in Hao Lo. You know how the chicken jumps up on the back and starts pecking the back of the hen’s head. Well, the city boy says, “The chicken’s pecker must be in its beak,” and the country boy says, “No, no, it’s not there.” So they got into this big argument. I mean the argument was “You son of a bitch, look! I’ll bet you a $100.” Country boy took the bet; city boy made the bet; city boy paid up after the thing. At Clark, there was a big settlement of all these bets because we had money.

The other one that I remember, the funniest one, was that a buzzard doesn’t have an asshole. (DePue laughs) Yeah, I know…to the point of fisticuffs. Then, “Wait, it’s time for the $100 bet.” That would always bring everybody back. Of course, a buzzard does have an asshole, and it was a $100.

There’s an old fighter pilot song, called the Hamburg Zoo. (singing) “I’m going to the Hamburg Zoo to see the da-da and the kangaroo. Da-da-da-

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di-di-di-di, I’m going to the Hamburg Zoo.” (speaking) “And here you are, my friend; we’ve got an animal over here. You wouldn’t believe it; it’s the meanest animal in the world. It’s half alligator, and it’s half crocodile, joined together in the middle. You can see it for your own very self. What’s that Sir? You asked me how it shits. It don’t; that’s why it’s so mean.” (DePue laughs) So this is the buzzard. That’s a mild Hamburg Zoo thing too. There’s wild stories. You know why men sing? Haven’t I mentioned that?

DePue: No.

Borling: …why men sing in bars, especially fighter pilots, why they sing and get together and sing bawdy songs?

DePue: Haven’t heard that.

Borling: To laugh at death, deal with fear. They’ve outlawed that now, by the way.

DePue: They’ve outlawed singing in bars?

Borling: They’ve outlawed singing dirty songs in bars. They’ve outlawed bars for god’s sake, much less―

DePue: When you say, “they,” do you mean the military brass?

Borling: The authorities, the DOD [Department of Defense]. It’s politically incorrect.

DePue: I’m sure the Army Jody calls are in trouble then too.72

Borling: I knew more dirty Jody calls as a junior ROTC than…and not the “GI, gee and GI Grady, gee I wish I’d joined the Navy” call. Stuff that…We’d go marching around Hirsch High School, out at Jackson Park, marching the platoons.

DePue: When you’re living in solitary confinement and maybe also in the nine man cells, how did you guys relieve yourselves?

Borling: When you’re alone and assuming you weren’t tied up or hurt, they’ve got these buckets, these rusty buckets. You had a bucket that you would squat over, sit on, put your shoes on them. You sit on it, on just a regular bucket, without putting too much weight on it. That you could use, or you could just pee in the bucket.

Now, the problem was, again, that old joke about don’t make waves. These buckets would get full and overflow, very ugly stuff. And a lot of times,

72 In the armed services, a military cadence or cadence call is a traditional call-and-response work song, sung by military personnel while running or marching. These cadences are sometimes called Jody calls or Jodies, after Jody, a recurring character in some traditional cadences. Jody refers to the man with whom a serviceman's wife/girlfriend cheats, while they are deployed. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_cadence)

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you wouldn’t have any toilet paper. The toilet paper they had was this really rough stuff. Are you familiar with the John Wayne toilet paper story?

DePue: Um-hmm.

Borling: This Indian goes into the mercantile. He wants to buy some toilet paper. The guys says, “Well,” He says, “We’ve got Charmin over here, soft, squeeze-it stuff for a buck a roll. Then we’ve got Scott, which is even better for… (interruption)

Hello. I’m just telling the John Wayne toilet paper story.

Mrs. Borling: Oh. (laughs)

Borling: She’s a fighter pilot’s wife, see? Hello dear; how are you?

Mrs. Borling: Hello. Are you having fun?

Borling: We have Mark DePue. My wife, Myrna.

Mrs. Borling: Hello, Mark.

DePue: How are you?

Borling: Did you get everything done?

Mrs. Borling: Yeah, I did; I got everything done.

Borling: He’s making me talk about food and breakfast, and I’m hungry.

Mrs. Borling: Carry on.

Borling: Alright. Now she’s back. Call your dog, Myrna. She’s coming.

Anyway, we’ve got the Charmin, and we’ve got the Scott tissue. “Over there we’ve got…” He said, “That’s a dollar and a quarter, but over there,” he said, “we’ve got what we call no-name toilet paper, big flat things of paper, as much as you can carry, fifteen cents. The Indian says, “I’m going to take some of that.” So he grabs a big handful and staggers out.

Comes back a week later. He says, “You know, I’ve got a name for that no-name toilet paper of yours.” He says, “What do you call it?” He said, “I call it John Wayne toilet paper.” He said, “Why do you call it that?” He says, “Well, it’s rough, and it’s tough, and it don’t take no shit off nothing.” (both laugh) We had a version of John Wayne toilet paper, but thank god we weren’t Indian, but we used it.

We had better uses for it. We could make ink; we could get cards. Again, in the ’71, ’72 timeframe, when they give you a pencil, we’d make

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cards, and we’d write books. We’d try to transcribe the book. We’d sit there like monks and try to get the guts of that French-Russian book onto toilet paper. We’d have stuff this high. Then, of course, they’d come in and inspect and find this stuff and take it away, and you’d have to start over again. We were always liable to shakedown, from the earliest days, all the time.

DePue: So they were willing to give you a book, a French-Russian book, but no paper or anything else?

Borling: No, no. In late ’72, they came around with little gray, five-by-eight, little books and things and pencils. You had a little book, kind of like a little journal book that you had, and we used that to scribe stuff. I’ve still got mine around here someplace. I smuggled that out in my shorts. They wanted us to leave everything behind, but that was, again, in the last six months or so.

DePue: As you were sketching out a couple things, I noticed your ring. Did you have your ring during the captivity, your academy ring?

Borling: This is the original academy ring, and that’s my original wedding ring. This ring is from my uncle, after the war. I didn’t tell you the ring story?

DePue: No.

Borling: You’re not supposed to fly with your rings, because you’d catch them on the ladders and stuff. I always flew with my ring. But the night I was shot down, for some reason, I took the ring and the wedding ring off, just threw them in my…We didn’t have lockers, just a little box.

It was the first of June, and I’d had a really good May, gambling, and I had a lot of money. The guys pay up on payday. I took handfuls of money and threw it in, handfuls of money, a lot of money, several hundred dollars.

My uncle had given me a ring. He was a prisoner of war in World War II. He was a navigator on a B-24. The bombardier was a dentist and had made a ring out of a metal called vitallium—which is this ring—made out of vitallium. It’s a dental metal for bridges. It was a wolf’s head. The four officers wore the wolf’s head ring on their finger. When they got shot down over Leipzig, on their seventh mission, only the four officers got out. All four of them were wounded, captured. They were hiding in a haystack and got pitchforked and stuff and went to Stalag Luft I, where they spent twenty-two months as POWs. My uncle called that ring his get-me-home ring.

When I went to my first war, he gave me that ring and said, “This is your get-me-home ring.” I threw it on my dog tags; I carried it on my dog tags. The night I got shot down―I’ve told the story about the road and everything―stripped naked. The last thing to go was my dog tags and this ring. As they ripped the ring off, I grabbed them. I held that ring for the last time, and I said, “That’s not a get-me-home ring. It’s a get-me-shot-down

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ring.” Then it was gone; I never saw it again. But my uncle and his buddies were able to keep their rings during the war.

I had no rings, no jewelry, nothing. When I came back from the war, I told my uncle about that. He got a little mad at me. But this was the ring made in celebration by the bombardier after the war, with the officer’s crest on it. I said, “I want that ring when you die,” because he never took it off. He gave it to me or actually his daughter did.

One day, it’s got to be prior to ’69, I’m tapping on the wall [taps on the table]. There’s been a banging. I’m living with Darrell, and somebody moves in next door. I get on the wall and said, “Hi, John Borling here; who are you?” because you can’t see. He says, “Hi, Pop Kern.” Pop Kern, that was his nickname. He may have said, “Dick Kern,” but it was Pop Kern. We knew him by reputation. He was the oldest guy; he was really old. He was maybe fifty-seven, fifty-eight. He tapped back to me; he said, “Hello, Dick.” I said, “No, I said John.” He said, “No, Dick Borling. I was with you in Stalag Luft I south camp.” This guy had been with my uncle.

DePue: Wow.

Borling: Wow. There’s a story that’s not well known. Pop is dead now, but obviously, he was twenty-five years older than we were.

DePue: To go through that twice.

Borling: Yeah. In fact, his mission was to take a flight of F-4…He’d gotten out and gone to the Ohio Guard, stayed in the Reserve and got recalled. It was to take an F-4, a flight of F-4s, over a SAM [surface to air missile] site to see if it was operational. It was; it knocked down three of the four airplanes, and Pop spent over seven years as a POW.

DePue: I mentioned that I’ve talked to Korean War POWs about the indoctrination that they got. It was very frequent; every single day they’d get together and do this indoctrination.

Borling: Oh yeah, I know.

DePue: Did you have any experience like that?

Borling: Yeah, but they didn’t do it in the way of classes, I think, like the way they did it in Korea. Their indoctrination was that they would play over that speaker. Remember, up at about that level, where the molding level is up there―

DePue: About eight, nine feet ahead.

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Borling: They would be three holes, about like that. One of them had a light bulb in it; one of them had a speaker in it, and the other one was for ventilation, such as it was, and that was our total ventilation in the room.

Again, remember that bucket I told you about? They never changed the number of buckets for one, two, or three people. They only had the frequency of dumping the bucket once a day. So, one guy could basically…Sometimes, I guess, when you were alone, they would only let you do it once every two or three days. But bucket management was always a chore, because it was always full and would always slop around. They never washed out the cells, never had anything to throw water on and sweep with the brooms. They would sweep outside but never the cells. So you can imagine what kind of circumstances after a period of months.

DePue: I would imagine though, that after you’d been in there, and you’d been sweating, and you’re living in that filth, you couldn’t even smell it any more.

Borling: You couldn’t; you’re absolutely right. But anyway, that’s the story of the rings. I hope that was an interesting insight. Not many people know that.

DePue: And I was asking about the indoctrination.

Borling: Oh, indoctrination. Yeah, so they used that speaker. They would have Hanoi Hannah come on.73 When they’d break down some POWs, they’d have them make tapes, an unjust war, bad war, bad kitty, bad war criminal, bad this, bad that. They had camp regulations; that was posted on every door. You’ve probably heard about the camp regulations, the twelve or fifteen. We were supposed to have them memorized. I never memorized them. But they were all this shit: “You will never…you won’t talk; you won’t speak; you’ll say ‘bao kao’ if you need something;” and then they’d go get an English speaker, maybe. You would have to bow to the guard as a sign of respect.

We’d go through these anti-bowing periods. They’d just come through and beat the shit out of us. Then we’d start bowing again. I never thought that was a grounds on which to…They were trying to make it demeaning, and it’s so foreign. We’re not scraping or anything; you’re basically just nodding your head or a little more.

DePue: Let me jump to present day. I probably shouldn’t ask this, but what’s your reaction to some of these images of our president [President Barack Obama] doing that today?

73 Trịnh Thị Ngọ, also known as Thu Hương and Hanoi Hannah, was a Vietnamese radio personality best known for her work during the Vietnam War, when she made English-language broadcasts for North Vietnam, directed U.S. troops. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanoi_Hannah)

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Borling: That doesn’t go over very well, because I think that that is…Some of it just… Just a slight head nod is kind of a courtesy, but more bowing from the waist, that’s a sign of subservience. We viewed it as a sign of subservience.

They’d play the speaker up there, and they’d be doing stuff. You’d hear this coughing, up and down the thing. The coughing would start, and it would be, (coughs as he speaks) “Oh, shit, oh shit.” (both laugh) They couldn’t get you for sneezing, but they would; they’d come in.

The guy who had come on, they’d force a guy to say something. You know, when they force a guy, because it would be, “Today I’m going to talk about the leader of the democratic republic of North Vietnam, the beloved leader of North Vietnam, who gives us fair and lenient treatment. His name is Horse-shit Minhs.” (both laugh) That was a true statement, Horse-shit Minhs. We would all pick that up then. You’d go… “See, Uncle Ho, Uncle Horse-shit Minhs.” “No, no.” They’d know. “Uncle Horse?” “No, it’s not horse.” “Uncle Horse-shit Minhs.” Then they would get mad. But we would try to turn into something like…We’d try to take the serious stuff they were throwing at us and turn it into something foul or anti or something. We would do that all the time.

Remember I told you about that siesta period? God, whoever reads this or transcribes this is going to think this guy Borling is really weird, certainly not ready for primetime stand-up. (DePue laughs) We’d talked about the water running. You’d hear the dog yelping—this is when we were in the barn—and the dog would be yelping, just excruciatingly. I tried to imagine, because you try to keep each other smiling. We’re in the room; I said, “Darrell, I’ve got that thing figured out. That’s the water girl giving the dog a blow job.” (both laugh) “Easy there, honey, easy.” (both laugh) That joke swept the camp every time the dog yelped, “Easy honey; easy honey.” So anyway, that was part of it.

DePue: Well, I want to take you back to the early days that you were in the camp, especially during those times when you were in solitary confinement, and ask, when you’re stretched out for hours or days on end―

Borling: Days, exactly.

DePue: …You’re isolated for hours, days on end; what do you do to keep your mind active?

Borling: You fight pain.

DePue: It’s as simple as that? Is that constantly on your mind?

Borling: No, it’s never far from your mind. (long pause) I’m now back to the most extreme times. It did turn into a straight survival exercise. Again, survival with honor, but survival. I remember tapping on the wall to Jerry Denton,

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back there in that gatehouse place. I had tapped to Jerry. I tapped, (tapping) “Hot.” Do you know what he tapped back? “Dying.” He was so beat down that that’s all…I couldn’t offer him a word of support. I couldn’t…because I was dying. I was covered with boils; it was total darkness, and the heat was so hot. You have no idea, this particular time.

That’s when the first…well, probably the second or the third miracle happened. You were so torpid. I wasn’t tied down at this point, but I was all shackled up and stuff. I had the hell-cuffs loose. I got over…Maybe I tapped it to Jerry or maybe not, because…No, I didn’t get…I went to Darrell. I said, “Pray for rain,” because there hadn’t been rain for a long time. It was hot; god, it was hot. The door, sometime later, had opened up, or maybe I’m confusing on my times. When the door opened, you got this—because you’re in total darkness—this blazing sun and stark blue sky, just for a minute, until they came in and checked you and adjusted stuff and slammed the door again. I remember seeing this antiseptic sky and thirty minutes later, an hour later, a crack of thunder and torrential downpour. This was not in the rainy season, by the way. It rained and rained. The temperature must have dropped in our darkness, twenty degrees. It stayed cool and rained for about the next two weeks. It was one of the things that I’m…I’m convinced we were dying from the heat, if nothing else. That kept us alive.

Now, they broke Jerry down; they took him out, even from that torture cell and took him into another one and just ripped him a new asshole, hurt him really bad. He wrote something to get them off his back, then he was in solitary for a long time. They kept the senior guys in solitary much more than they kept the junior guys. Once they found that Darrell and I were talking anyway, then they threw us together. My solitary period would be episodic over the years. That’s why I use the term in isolation or semi-isolation or maybe isolation, total isolation, six months, seven months out of the whole timeframe.

DePue: You used the word miracle to describe this incident.

Borling: Oh, absolutely a miracle, had to be.

DePue: You mentioned this was not the only miracle?

Borling: Oh, no, no, multiple miracles. Getting out of the jet alive and living through that. I was dead in the jet. There was no way that you were going to live through that. If I hadn’t hit on that hill and gone down that hill―

DePue: That freshly plowed hill.

Borling That freshly plowed hill. I was a goner. If I had even got a swing at that speed, and then hit the ground…I had to come out and keep that momentum. Everything had to work; it had to work.

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Art Black, one of the enlisted guys, talked about the time when he was in hell-cuffs. He didn’t have anything to do. He’s at the end of his rope; he can’t do it anymore, and “God, you’ve got to help me.” He talked about how he took the cuffs and slid them down over these bones, to the narrow part, and could rotate the cuffs and got relief. This is after they’d been jammed on to a point where there was no movement and everything else. He can remember crying out, praying to God. He was Jewish. He said, “Listen, I don’t give a fuck what god it is.” (laughs)

There were times when the hopelessness got so pronounced that I’ve developed what I call my current theological position. That is that God is a knotted rope. It’s hanging there all the time. You can neglect it for years; you can neglect it; you cannot believe this or believe that about a particular tenet. You can question; you can do all that. But when you get to a point, either some great success or great failure or great duress or great exhilaration, and you need something to get you going or through, you reach out. And that knotted rope is there, and you can hang onto it; you can rely on it.

Now, my own theology, raised up a Lutheran and part Catholic and exposed and the garden-variety agnostic and all of that business, I am so convinced that there is a superior presence—again, a knotted rope—that all this just couldn’t have happened and that it’s somehow fashioned, the Aquinian argument of a prime mover.74 I’m unwilling to accept any organized religion that I have found yet that seems to have all of the answers. I’ve made a considerable study of this. Not that I’m the smartest guy in the world, but for me in my house…Although it’s very hard to kick your youthful indoctrinations. That’s why they send kids to church, so they can make them feel guilty about thinking things that are not directly in line with what they were taught as kids.

I think there is a knotted rope aspect to the kind of God that I sense today, but [am] quite easily ready to fall into the “traditional” Christian mode when we got into those larger groups. In fact, they made me chaplain. Jesus, what a mistake that was. (DePue laughs) I still remember the first prayer that I offered that first day, when we got in the big group after the Son Tay raid. I think John and I were both lead chaplain. We looked at each other and said “Jesus, can you believe it?”

There was a prayer found after El Alamain―It’s always stayed with me; I don’t know why―on a scrap of paper.75 It’s a far-reaching prayer. If you have any literary bent to your soul at all or any expansionist tendency with your thinking, you’ll see what I mean. I said, “Hey guys, I am unworthy

74 Thomas Aquinas' Argument from Motion begins with the empirical observation of motion in the world. Aquinas drew the conclusion that God must exists as the prime mover of everything that is in motion in the world. (https://philosophy.lander.edu/intro/motion.shtml) 75 El Alamein is a town in the northern Matrouh Governorate of Egypt and located on the Mediterranean Sea. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Alamein)

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to do this, but here it goes.” This is this prayer that I remember: “The night is cold, and I am alone. My little spark of courage flickers and dies. Stay with me, God, and make me strong.”

That was probably the best poem that I could have offered that night for the POWs, but it has applications throughout life because the little spark of courage to do the right thing in life flickers and dies. So I talk about miracles, and I firmly believe that it was miracles that made me come through it. In some way that is an impetus to try and endlessly give back or pay back, within the poor limits of my capacities, as haltingly and as fleetingly and as ill- equipped in those efforts as I may be. I will still think that I have an obligation to somehow move the stone.

DePue: I would think one of the natural tendencies for when you’re going through something like that—and maybe you saw this—was for the prisoners to say, “Well, I was taught that God is just; I was taught that God is merciful; I’ve got no proof that God is here.”

Borling: I say, in one of my poems or in the introduction, I said, “God was either very near or very distant.” I don’t think there’s a code to break. Some guys who are much more fundamental with respect to their thinking took a lot of strength from that. Oh, hell, we all…Not all, A.J., my guy that…was a devout atheist, and he never bent from that. He also committed suicide, but that’s another―

DePue: Was it after he was released?

Borling: Yeah. He had a lot of things going though. It was not just that. His son died in a sand dune cave-in. His wife and he split. He developed a disease that he didn’t want to fight. So he shot himself, which would be consistent with his thinking, anyway. He was a very strong guy. I had a lot of regard for him, a very smart guy, except the time when he tried to shoot down his wingman, but other than that…But that was in a different airplane in a different place. He was grounded for a long time. It was a funny story there.

The 102 carried rockets. You would fire all these rockets, 2.75 rockets, off. But you would test it, using a non-loaded airplane with a thing called WSEM [Weapon System Evaluator Missile]. It was an electronic check circuitry. A.J. went and had aborted an airplane, got another airplane, and he was supposed to do a WSEM check in the first airplane. The second airplane was fully loaded. So he lined up the other airplane and shot like 100 rockets at his leader, at his squadron commander, (both laugh) and he didn’t hit him. This is at Clark Field.

A.J. went back and took that 102 and beat up the field; he did everything. [He] landed, and the squadron commander’s on the ground. He said, “What, what did you do? You just did this to me, and now you’re over here flat-hatting and doing all the field!” A.J. said, “Well, I figured I wasn’t

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going to be flying for a long time anyway.” (both laugh) He didn’t; he was grounded. He got back into the air in F-4s, but he was grounded for about two years.

DePue: Well, what I’d like to do next is talk to you about the tap code.

Borling: How about talking to me about going to the bathroom? Let’s take a break.

(pause in recording)

Borling: You just asked me if it was going good, and I thought, Yes, it’s going okay. But on reflection, you’ve got me reverting to my fighter pilot-ese and kind of fundamental expressions to put a euphemistic factor in play. I’ve tried to tell it almost in the vernacular, in the terminology of the time. Whoever has to transcribe this less-than-stirring rendition, my apologies for some of the more graphic language, but you ain’t heard nothing yet, if you haven’t been around a fighter pilot bar.

DePue: This is history, and we want to get it as close as we possibly can to the authentic history as you remember it and those experiences. I appreciate that approach. Right before we took a break, I mentioned taps, the tap code. You’ve got the book here that we’ll talk about quite a bit I’m sure, Taps on the Wall, which is a collection of―

Borling: Taps on the Walls. It should be plural.

DePue: Taps on the Walls, which is a collection of the poetry that you wrote there. I wanted to start with the origin of the tap code itself.

Borling: Again, it’s in the book, and you can buy it for $25, which you already did, by the way, I think.

DePue: I purchased one, and I got one complimentary copy from the Pritzker Military Library as well.

Borling: Good. I try to restrain people to at least 100 copies or no more than that, so you’ve got a ways to go.

Smitty Harris, as I say in the book, got some extra instruction at Stead, which was the old survival school outside Reno; now it’s up at Fairchild. It was, “Hey, you may have need of something like this. Probably not, but here it is.” Smitty was, I think, the number three or number four shoot-down, just by happenstance. He brought the tap code in, and the rest of us—one way or another, either through shouted instructions down a dim hall or through the old thing, where every letter was just a tap—would get this notion about breaking the alphabet into five rows and five columns, with K the outlier, and then how you would communicate.

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If you were on the other side of a wall and you heard “da-da-da-da- da,” the shave and a haircut, you’d immediately come back with (two taps on the table) just because that’s…I don’t know why, but if you hear that, (five taps on table) that starts the communication thing. Now, of course, if you got caught, you got hammered, especially in the early years. Later, that just turned into…the need of it was less, but we would use visual codes sometimes, in the later years.

That tap code was a lifeline. C, for example, is one, one-two-three; E is one, one-two-three-four-five; G is two-two, second row, second column. L is one-two-three-one, third row. I’ve probably gotten it confused, third row, first column. Anyway, it’s three-one. Figure it out. So, the next time you go to jail, as I say, you can talk to the guy

next to you. Z is five-five. So, if This is the tap code that’s a row, and that’s a matrix that prisoners in the Hanoi Hilton used to column, you use the column pass messages through first and then the row position. the walls while they endured solitary It’s pretty simple. confinement. Borling used this same code to DePue: How long did it take the average pass along his poetry. prisoner to master the code? How long did it take you?

Borling: Master is a funny word. What do you mean by master?

DePue: Where it becomes so second nature that you don’t even hardly have to think about it.

Borling: It’s like piano; you’ve got to practice it a while, and then, given the ability to use it, it’s almost second nature. If a guy would type a word, and you’d (two taps) cut him off, with “I’ve got the word.” Extraordinary, x-t-r-a-d- (2 taps), “Got it,” extraordinary. You would have these long conversations, or you’d have abbreviations that you’d use. If you were on the wall yourself…There was only one guy on the wall at a time.

If you were living with two guys, [and] one guy’s on the wall, you would fight for wall time―not fight but―because it was a way to use time. The other guy would be pacing and the guy who was on the wall, or listening for the guard or watching, that kind of stuff…But you could sit there, and you’d be listening to it, and you’d be translating it as fast as your buddy was. He’d be waiting, and you’d already have the word. You’d say, “It’s mightily,” and the guy will then (2 taps), boom. The facility came easily. I can’t give you a timeline on it. It starts out slow, just like learning how to play the C-scale, but then, after a while, you’re rolling, thirty, forty words a minute.

DePue: This is an obvious question, but how important was it?

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Borling: It was the lifeline. It was a way to get your name out, because people didn’t know you were alive. It was a way to have a chain of command. It was a way to make time an ally. It was a way to run that uncertain race. It was a way to compete, and most of us missed competition terribly; so you could compete by creating things.

The essence of the human condition, I say in a series of speeches I make called, “The Eight Virtues of Leadership,” the seventh one is, the essence of the human condition is creation. God knows we needed humanity, and we needed creation to help us get there. It was the lifeline.

DePue: How long before you actually started using it?

Borling: You have to be next to someone. It wasn’t until I got to the Barn, August of ’66, a couple months probably, that we really started using it.

DePue: You just mentioned the chain of command. Tell me about how you guys established a chain of command, and if you can put some personalities to it.

Borling: Sure. Whoever was senior was the SRO, senior ranking officer for the cell, if you were with someone, and the building. Then each camp had the SRO of the SROs. If you had contact, you were supposed to follow the orders of the senior ranking officer. If he got taken out, taken away for some reason, then the next guy stood up, and you kept standing up. Now, they [the North Vietnamese] hated that.

DePue: I would think that’s exactly what they wanted to prevent in the worst way.

Borling: They could take it down…In my case, I was the SRO with Darrell; I was senior to Darrell; I was the SRO. Now, I didn’t order Darrell around, but when they came, they would say, “You don’t have senior officers, right? There are no senior officers in this room.” We might say, “Yeah, we’re both lieutenants.” They’d say, “There’s no rank.” We’d say, “We’re lieutenants,” and I said, “And I’m the senior lieutenant; I’m the SRO.” “No SRO; there’s no SRO!” They knew that term. We kept [the SRO], under great pain and stress, especially for the senior guys.

In the early days, the two names that we hung on were Robbie Risner and Jim Stockdale, both of them colonels.

DePue: Full colonels?

Borling: Yeah. And there were others: John Flynn, later; this is later. There was a Jim Mulligan, and there was, obviously, Jerry Denton. They tried to keep the senior officers―and did―much more isolated than the rank and file. The senior guys had it harder.

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DePue: You mentioned though, that there was a chain of command, and there were orders. What kind of instructions or orders were you getting from the senior leadership?

Borling: Well, because in the early days everyone was getting hammered all the time, it was “Do your best. Make them hurt you. Don’t break, bend. Give them as little as you can. Keep the faith. Tell the truth to one another.” You’d come back, and you’d have been busted wide open, and you had to have given something, innocuous or not, and you would tap on the wall that they really…We called them quizzes, interrogations. The question was—you’d hear the door slam, normally in the night, not always—“How was it?” “Piece of cake, nothing” or “bad” or something.

Didn’t I mention that terrible story about Al Brunson, about how they almost killed him in a quiz?

DePue: I don’t think so, no.

Borling: It’s in his book, I’m told, but I’m not sure. I got it from Al. Once again, this is real life. He’d been to a quiz, and a long time; a week later they throw them back. He’s laying there, all beat up, and the guys next door, tap (tapping), “How are you; how did it go?” He tapped back, “Dying.” And he says, “I was on my way out.” He said, “They’d broken me down.” The guys tapped back and said, “Don’t die. We have a question for you.” (laughs) He said, “We’re taking a poll,” he said, “and we’ve got ninety-nine responses so far, positive; we’re trying to make it 100. Have you ever jagged off while you’ve been in prison camp?” (both laugh) Yeah, exactly. Al said he started to laugh, and he was all beat up. He said that joke kept him alive.

DePue: How many were in the prisons?

Borling: How many were in the prisons? I don’t have a hard number. I think in North Vietnam, we were around 350, 400. Your universe was small. It was the universe that you had direct contact with. When we were in the Annex, we’ve got contact with two, four, six, eight, nine-man rooms. We’ve got contact with seventy-two people plus across the wall. But we really had contact with the guys next door and the guys across the way.

One of those guys across the way was Dramesi and Atterbury, who made their escape. We know they made their escape because Darrell and I broke the light so they could come out through the roof. They crawled right by our…We didn’t have any windows, but we had a little ventilation screen that they crawled by on their way out that night, and we wished them good luck. We thought they were crazy; we thought they would get everybody hurt, but they were going to do it; so they did it. The SRO gave them the okay to do it, and as I say, we broke the light.

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That ended up with…They got out of the camp. They got over the wall and got out of the camp, out of the Annex, out of that place, but had to hole up in a field 500 yards away and got captured there the next morning. Then a reign of terror descended on the camp. Dramesi was tougher than Atterbury, but they killed Ed.

DePue: Ed Atterbury?

Borling: Yeah, they tortured him to death. John Dramesi, who was a wild sort anyway, was, I think, hurt badly, to the point of affecting him mentally. Everyone else, they instituted a new form of pain, which was whippings, floggings. They hadn’t had that yet.

I was the SRO, and they took the SRO and the next SRO, me and Darrell out, split us up and did the old thing about beating us until we started to talk. Then when the stories diverged, as to “What did you do?” “We didn’t do nothing, didn’t do nothing.” “You did something.” I forget who said what when, because we don’t know, but they said the light was broken. I didn’t know the light was broken; it was out. They said, “Did you break the light or did Pyle break the light?” I said, “I broke the light.” This is after being beaten with coaxial cable. Darrell, of course, told them that he broke the light. So now they said, “You must tell us who broke the light.” We got beat the shit out of because we kept reversing our stories, “All right, he broke the light.” (laughs) “No, I broke the light.” We couldn’t get it right. Finally, “We both broke the light.” But it took us…I think I was out that time―that was the last time I saw Darrell for three years―a month and a half.

DePue: What was the method of torture that you feared the most, if that’s the right word to use?

Borling: (long pause) The ropes.

DePue: Being strung up and tied in these positions?

Borling: Well, just being strung up, tied in positions you wouldn’t believe, human pretzel stuff. I was going to say self-torture. They got pretty…They tended to get…Well, the beatings were terrible. (long pause) I carried those scars for a long time.

DePue: Are you talking about physical or emotional scars or both?

Borling: No, physical. That’s why you see these things where they talk about people getting 100 lashes. Shit, if they gave me 100 lashes, I would have been dead. If you’re laying there nude, stretched out, and they’re laying into you with coaxial cable, somewhere around that third string, they got your attention, and some were ten-plus, and they don’t stop then.

DePue: I assume they’re breaking the skin.

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Borling: Oh, yeah, they’re breaking the skin; you’re bloody and―

DePue: When you do get back, how do you medicate yourself? What do you do?

Borling: Like I said, I was about a month out, maybe more. It was a terrible time, hazy recollection. Like I said, they killed Ed. They took him back to Hoa Lo, and they killed him.

DePue: So you were in a coma essentially?

Borling: Pardon me?

DePue: You were in a coma then? You were out; you were unconscious? When you said you were out―

Borling: No, I meant out. I mean I was in solitary and being worked on for a long time. That’s when I tried to commit suicide. I had my nail. I never let go of that nail. Or did I have a piece of glass? I don’t know. Anyway, I cut myself. It wasn’t a real suicide; it was real enough at the start, and then it turned into kind of a sympathetic thing. That got them excited, but not a lot, because in the end it was kind of a half-assed thing to do.

DePue: What do you mean when you say it was a sympathetic thing? You wanted their sympathy?

Borling: Yeah, I wanted them to stop. I wanted them to stop hurting me, and I figured that if I…It was the only time that I ever…I wouldn’t have…My thinking was unclear—it still is unclear—but I thought if I could make the suicide attempt honest enough or genuine enough, they would quit hurting me.

DePue: Did they not want to kill the American prisoners?

Borling: Not want to kill? No, I don’t think they did, although I think they did a lot unintentionally, in the early years. In the later years, they didn’t even torture anybody, the later years they just didn’t do it. There was like a change in policy after Ho Chi Minh’s death. The later shoot-downs didn’t have the physical abuse that the early guys had. That, strangely, is kind of a differentiating element, that somehow we’re tougher. Shit no, we just got caught earlier, and we were in the different regime. That’s the way it played out anyway.

DePue: Do you have a percentage of the numbers who died in those North Vietnamese camps?

Borling: You know, we won’t know that, because when you went into Heartbreak you were very much alone. All we knew was—and it’s by supposition—there were things that were left behind, things written, things scratched, that the guys’ names that never made it; they never made it into the system. That was

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the thing you wanted, to get into a position where somebody else knew you were alive. Then the fact that they knew you were…Other people knew you were alive, because that was a way to “stay alive.”

When I talk about the stay alive feature, that was certainly a big driving feature. But the “staying alive with honor” was almost a bigger component. After you got over that initial…You told somebody, “I’m alive” or “You know I’m alive, right?” Then you’re okay. There were some guys who were letter writers, who were publicized and were encouraged to write letters.

DePue: Write letters home, write letters to the press?

Borling: Write letters home. Some people wrote letters―very few, a dozen guys― because they were publicized, would get an occasional chance to write a letter home and almost never get letters back, but write a letter home in the early years. In my case, I didn’t get a letter or anything or write a letter for five years, five and a half years.

DePue: How long before your family even knew you were alive?

Borling: We’re indistinct, but it’s two and a half, two years, three years, in that range. The reason they did was because of Darrell. He put into one of his letters, he said, “Tell Aunt Myrna in Chicago that I miss her and love her.” Only took the Air Force about six months to figure that one out. There’s a very poignant story about Myrna coming apart at the seams, because she…No one else thought I was alive; she said she could feel me, the old rainy Saturday night thing, 10:00, and she’s holding our little girl and crying. The doorbell rings, and she goes to the door. It’s a couple guys in uniform. She’s going down now, for the count, and the two words are, “He’s alive.”

DePue: After two and a half years of wondering.

Borling: Yeah.

DePue: How did you get started writing the poetry?

Borling: Well, I have a classical education from the University of Chicago. You didn’t know that, did you?

DePue: I would suspect we talked about it, but it’s been so long since we had the initial interview.

Borling: The rest of the story is, I got it on a drive-by basis, but still. That’s funny; that’s supposed to be very funny. (DePue laughs) No, I’ve always loved literature. I did go to the University of Illinois for six months and then Augustana College for a year, before going out to the academy. I was always a humanities kind of guy and have loved the structure of poetry and the way that

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language can be used to paint a picture. I’m not a very good artist. I found out I wasn’t a very good piano player. I wanted to be a jazz pianist; I think I told you that story. But I’ve always had a fair facility with writing and some speaking, and so used it as a model.

I should say I used models, like the various kinds of sonnets and other things, to create this body of work, which was my way to stay competitive and to fight time. I keep coming back [to] how you had to make time an ally. It was [Henry David] Thoreau who suggested that by killing time, you injure eternity. I don’t think so. We needed to kill a lot of time, but liked to kill it in a way that was constructive. I wanted to have something that would last. If I died up there, I wanted something that would go on after me. That’s why I tapped it through the walls, and later, when we got together with guys, I would give it to them, and they’d memorize it.

I did a little editing after the war—in fact for this book—and guys would come to me and said, “Yes, but you’ve changed ‘The Bone Yard,’” or done this or done that to it, a word here or a word there.76 At the fortieth reunion, third guys who came up to me and could recite poems out of that book as if it was back forty years ago, amazing.

DePue: Were there others who were doing the same thing?

Borling: There were a lot of guys who worked verse. Jim Kasler designed golf courses, people who did houses, people who built houses that they actually designed. But, yeah, I think there was a lot of creation going on. Without beating my chest too much, I think I was kind of the poet laureate of the bunch, in terms of quantity anyway, and I would hope some quality, although I do apologize for creating rap. (DePue laughs) That’s what I was told by a poetry critic, that two of the poems are early rap, “This One’s For the Birds.” Did I mention that?

DePue: No.

Borling: That’s why it’s called “This One’s For the Birds.” It’s about a couple of woodpeckers living in Texas. It starts out:

Well, way down south in the Texas flat where prickle pear and jackrabbit at lived two woodpeckers in a sawed off stump looking all the day for something to thump.

Anyway, it goes on and talks about these two guys. They’re talking to one another one day

76 “The Boneyard” is a poem written by John Borling and published in his book, Taps on the Walls: Poems from the Hanoi Hilton. (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16171085-taps-on-the-walls)

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It happened one day, as I recollect sitting on a cholla with nothing to peck Maggie―the old guy―turned to Jamie―the young guy— Say, brother-o, I’ve got me an idee, think you ought to know from yonder back, north of San Antonio Local flying wood, as dry as a bone. Cottonwood, willer, other thorny thing just don’t fill the bill, that empty hollow ring But I heard tell of a promised land where trees grow tall and the peckin’s grand. California redwoods, supposed to be best. I’d be of a mind to mosey on out west.

Well, it talks about these guys going west and how they get there and everything and what happens. At the end, there’s a great variety of life story that comes out. It’s “This One’s For the Birds.” I think it’s kind of white-man rap really, but that’s what this poet critic said. But there’s only two like that. The rest of it is Petrarchan or Elizabethan sonnet makeovers, and epic poems and odes and all kinds of stuff.77

DePue: But what you just recited is one of your poems, correct?

Borling: Um-hmm.

DePue: What I’d like to have you do here, to finish off today—then then we’ll have more to talk about tomorrow—I’d like to have you pick another one of the poems that’s in the book here. I don’t know if you need the book or if you just want to pick something.

Borling: Don’t need the book.

DePue: Then tomorrow, I’m going to pick one poem for you to read, as well.

Borling: Okay, we’ll see if you’re any good. There’s been one person, in the year plus that I’ve gone through, who has said to me, would I read my favorite poem in the book. Then she said, “And I’ll tell you which one it is.”

DePue: I have never claimed to be a poet or inclined for poetry.

Borling: She was my lit [literature] teacher at Augustana, Dorothy Parkander. She was a great influence in my life; god, she was wonderful. In fact, her father married my parents. Her father was a Lutheran minister at our church. Then

77 First designed to be read silently, the Petrarchan sonnet follows the structure and rhyme scheme originated the poet Francesco Petrarca. Elizabethan sonnets, also known as Shakespearean sonnets, are structured differently and were first written by poets like William Shakespeare. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrarchan_sonnet)

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Dorothy Parkander was a ’44 graduate from Augustana and spent her entire career there and made literature live like no instructor I’ve ever had. I also had a great speech coach there, debating coach, Prof Holcomb. So Augustana was formative in many ways. In fact, I was associated with them and gave them a bunch of money and went down there and got an award and did some nice things.

So she found the poem, and she’s the only one. She was right; it’s my favorite. The first poem is “The Bone Yard.” That’s the first one I wrote, which is the third poem in the book. To give a taste, again, the book, divided into four sections, has as its thrust to basically make you laugh, make you cry, make you think. But for me, it was, again, a vehicle of creation, which was so ennobling of existence. You could put in, using a flying metaphor or not, all kinds of hopefully enduring messages. But you wanted to do it in a way that the yolk is easy; the burden is light.

I hate reading stuff and I did, What the hell did he just say? So, I’ve got a glossary in the back for some of the language. But if you want a poem, there is a poem in the book called Taps on the Walls, which I wrote last year, which is a poem for every man and every woman. If I had to write one that I think shows a piece of my soul, in a short and digestible version, there’s a poem in there called, “This, I Believe.”

THIS I BELIEVE

Some are made for mountains, and some prefer the plain. But all must have a self-esteem to bring them home again. Values come from people, assessing their amounts. Those worthy of respect and pride, all know the striving counts. The striving counts.

That’s what I believe.

DePue: Well, that sums it up in a very succinct way, doesn’t it?

Borling: Well, I hope so. Again, it’s supposed to make you laugh, make you cry, make you think. As I told people, that book’s a piece of my soul. That’s another reason I kept it buried, because I wasn’t sure I wanted people roaming around in there. But now, I think my manhood is sufficiently strong that I can stand the scrutiny.

DePue: Well, it’s not unlike the World War II generation that waited until the 1990s to start really talking about some of their experiences.

Borling: Well, there is some of that; the time is an enormous bridge. There was a great book, written by Richard Bach, who is a wonderful aviation writer. His writing is in many respects like poetry. His book is called A Bridge across

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Forever. The book that struck me…Of course, you know Bach from Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

DePue: Um-hmm.

Borling: Everybody knows that book or should. But the one that turned me on to Richard Bach was Stranger to the Ground. It’s about a guy strapping on an F- 84 in the night in England, taking a pouch across to Germany. I frankly think the rest of the book is kind of unremarkable, but chapter one, the strap-in sequence and the takeoff sequence, dead on. He gets it as right as it’s ever been gotten, with respect to a man and his airplane.

DePue: Let’s finish with that today, and we’ve got plenty more to talk about tomorrow.

Borling: Thank you, Mark.

DePue: Thank you.

Borling: Thank you. Good.

(end of transcript #03)

Interview with John Borling # VRV-A-L-2013-037.04 Interview # 04: March 21, 2014 Interviewer: Mark DePue

COPYRIGHT

The following material can be used for educational and other non-commercial purposes without the written permission of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. “Fair use” criteria of Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 must be followed. These materials are not to be deposited in other repositories, nor used for resale or commercial purposes without the authorization from the Audio-Visual Curator at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, 112 N. 6th Street, Springfield, Illinois 62701. Telephone (217) 785-7955.

Note to the Reader: Readers of the oral history memoir should bear in mind that this is a transcript of the spoken word, and that the interviewer, interviewee and editor sought to preserve the informal, conversational style that is inherent in such historical sources. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library is not responsible for the factual accuracy of the memoir, nor for the views expressed therein. We leave these for the reader to judge.

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DePue: Today is Friday, March 21, 2014.

Borling: It feels like the first day of spring.

DePue: Well, it is the first day of spring, but the weatherman says we’re going to have a couple more days of winter before we actually get into it again.

I’m back here with General John Borling. We’re at his beautiful residence in Rockford―

Borling: Thank you, thank you.

DePue: …right on the river. We had an amazing conversation yesterday, but I have a lot more questions that deal with your experiences.

Borling: Shoot. I’ll try to be less verbose.

DePue: I want you to be verbose; that’s the whole idea of the exercise. I’m going to ask a very quick question, and then I want you to recite some poetry for us. Why was it known as the Hanoi Hilton?

Borling: The mystery of that has eluded me. I’m sure somebody knows. It was just kind of a sobriquet, to use a French term, nickname, that devolved. I’m not sure if it’s something that came out of Hanoi Hannah or if it came from us or if it came from popular usage in the States. The real name of it was the Hoa Lo Prison, or if you look at the front of it, it says, Maison Centrale, again French, for the Central House, which was the name given to the French colonial prisons.

Whenever they would set up colonies, that’s one of the first things they’d build is a Maison Centrale, to throw all the dissidents in. This was a place, for example, where—I think I have the facts right—Vo Nguyen Giap’s daughter and wife were thrown into this prison by the French in the ‘30’s―

DePue: General Giap?

Borling: General Giap…and never came out. You can understand why the passions ran deep. Later, when I met General Giap, I never mentioned that to him, other than it mentions in the book how Giap and I met on that delegation. It was Tet, and the Dien Bien Phu veterans were there for a photo op with General Giap in ’54.

DePue: What year was this?

Borling: We were there in 2002, but Dien Bien Phu was obviously, what? Fifty-four. He was supposed to give us five minutes. Well, I went out in the hall and greeted him and said, “Je vous connais bien, General Giap,” “I know you well.” He says, “Je vous connais aussi, General Borling,” “I know you as

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well, General Borling.” He took my hand, and the two of us walked into this briefing room; it was probably twenty-by-forty, the delegation out in front of us. We sat at the head table, with a bunch of his minions and translators and all, and he gave us an hour-plus. I never asked a question. I translated and talked, and we sat there.

When the questioning got tough, he would take my hand and just pat my hand. As I mention in the book, you never really leave combat; it’s a lifetime thing, but you feel differently about the enemy. There was this kind of sad sense of mutual reflection on the times. It was in the course of that that there was affirmation, as I read it, that we both won; we both lost, except we won a little more, he would suggest.

DePue: He would suggest.

Borling: Yeah. Because they got their independence, and they got their united Vietnam. We would argue that the whole economy and all the people were so western oriented, it seemed kind of a waste, as most wars are, to have fought a war of such intensity and depth. It cost them millions of men. It cost us 58,000 and a couple hundred thousand wounded, as you know, and all of the angst and unrest.

At the same time, you could argue that Vietnam caused the opening to China, caused the Soviet Union to come tumbling down economically, because of the competition involved. So Vietnam was very much a hinge conflict, probably the last direct conflict—absent something that may come out of China and Japan—to stem from World War II. Of course, we’re still contending now in the Syria, Jordan, Iraq area, with problems stemming from World War I. We can blame it all on [T.E.] Lawrence of Arabia.

DePue: And the Europeans drawing maps in the―

Borling: In the desert, the Hashemite communities, yeah.78

DePue: When you were a prisoner―

Borling: So, “I don’t know” is the answer to your question. I told you I’d be less verbose, and look what I just did. (DePue laughs)

DePue: Well, I don’t mind. When you were a prisoner, how did you view the Vietnam War, in what context?

Borling: Going there, it didn’t matter. We were going to war. We were fighter pilots, and the country only sends us off to just wars. So the geopolitics of it all were fairly strange. When we went to Thailand, we didn’t go in-country to Vietnam. We were flying north. We never flew missions in the south. All our

78 The Hashemites are the ruling royal family of Jordan. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashemites)

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missions were either north or in Laos, and the geopolitics of the war seemed to be crudely spoken. It was the domino theory, fighting communism, self- determination of people and all the nuances of the Geneva conferences and of the condominiums that have been struck and of the earlier allegiances of Ho Chi Minh in World War II, to the Americans.

In the end, it was very much a hazy specter of communism. But like most young men, you fought, and you went to the fight because it seemed exciting and was exciting. Then, once you got there and you found out that, hmm, it really is exciting, and you were risking life and limb and―

I remember I went on my first R&R―I think it was the first R&R―over to Da Nang, because I wanted to see what the real world was like. I went out with the Marines, outside the perimeter.79

DePue: Actually on a patrol with them?

Borling: Yeah. And we got into a firefight of sorts. People were shooting guns, I guess. I didn’t hear anything coming our way, but we were sure shooting out into the brush. I elected then and there that I would take my subsequent R&Rs to Bangkok. (DePue laughs)

So, while our war may have seemed more antiseptic from the air, when the roman candles are coming over the cockpit and missiles are going off, you’ve had your share of…You knew they were shooting back, which they were authorized to do; that’s kind of a rule.

The study of the war, the reading of the books, the history, I knew a little. Call me shallow; I didn’t care. It was just exciting and great fun, and we were young and flying fighters like you couldn’t believe. Again, it was exciting. I think for most of us, except when you got your pants scared off you…I never fouled a flight suit, but there were plenty of guys who did. “Meet me at the airplane with another flight suit, personal nozzle failure,” was the call. I never did that, almost, a couple times. It’s why we should go to war only after real deliberation and real authorization by the Congress.

I do a speech on why we war and then how we war. In fact, it’s in the book, under the epic poem of “How We Should War.” We should do so, as I say, deliberately, thoughtfully, reminding ourselves that the casus belli should revolve around interests, often more perceived than real, but as best as you can, determine your interests. You have to be able to accommodate and deal with fear, and it’s very helpful if you can develop a hate, because killing is

79R & R, military slang for rest and recuperation or rest and relaxation or rest and recreation, is a term used for the free time of a soldier or international UN staff serving in unaccompanied (no family) duty stations. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%26R_(military))

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kind of an unnatural action, despite all the killing that goes on, and a hate, for one reason or another…again, interest, fear and hate.

A fourth principal motivator is, of course, religion, which falls back into interests. The impact of religion on forcing groups and nations into war cannot be underestimated. So you have to watch for that constellation of forces that puts religion and secular forces together and political forces together. Whenever that happens, the tendency to conflict doesn’t lag far behind. In fact, I could make a case that religions or -isms or theologies on the upsurge are those that are willing to kill for converts. If you’re not willing to kill for converts, then you’re probably in a stasis situation, if not in a declining situation. So killing is a part of convincing, is kind of the last resort, if you will, or option and is used throughout history. And I don’t see human nature changing very much.

DePue: That’s a tried and true Lutheran kind of an approach to things.

Borling: What is Lutheran? Why is it Lutheran?

DePue: Because Martin Luther didn’t feel that human nature would change either. That’s because we are inherently sinful and unclean, and that’s why he had struggles himself with the whole notion of forgiveness. I didn’t mean to get into a deep theological discussion.

Borling: Well, yeah. I was reared up a Lutheran. I never could figure out why, if babies weren’t baptized, they wouldn’t go to Hell. That was one of the reasons that I became an un-Lutheran, and I’m kind of a garden-variety Christian. I never understood either why all of this…If you get back into the language of the Bible, I’ve never understood why the Bible has to be taken literally, when there’s so much in it that’s metaphorical, to my reading.

This thing about Mary being a virgin…well, the word in Isaiah, almah, translates “young woman;” it doesn’t translate virgin.80 That came later. And virgin births…Ever since time immemorial, when the gods had been down screwing the young ladies of the field―and in some respects that’s what happened with Mary―it’s a continuation of the God thing. Then you look at all the holidays, where Christmas was really Saturnalia and still is in some respects, and where Easter may have devolved from the Roman goddess Ēostre; that’s up in the air.

But certainly, the poaching of ideas and holidays, one religion to another, give pause to the finality of the fact that not only is there only one true religion, which is a complex creature derived from all these other religions. But if you look just to Christianity, all the denominations can’t be right; all the divisions can’t be accommodated. This has led me out of the

80 Isaiah was the 8th-century BC Jewish prophet for whom the book of Isaiah, in the Bible, is named. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah)

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quagmire of indoctrinated youth to be severely questioning. So, I suggest that I would belong to that pew of Baptists…We’ll just pick the Baptists out of a group who, if you went up and down the pew of Baptists or up and down the pew of Catholics or Presbyterians or Lutherans or Congregationalists, we have to leave the…What the hell are they called; they only believe the singular―

DePue: Unitarians.

Borling: Unitarians. We have to leave the Unitarians out, because they don’t even agree about anything. That’s why they’re crummy singers too, because they look a stanza ahead to see if they agree with what the hymn is saying. But if you went down and you asked every person in that group—they could be in the same family—about the concepts of God and what you believe in, it’s all different. They talk about cafeteria Catholics; hell, it’s cafeteria this and that. Well, yeah, but I don’t believe in that or resurrection of the body; who the hell believes in that?

What kind of body or whose body or, you know, why do you have to…Why are we cannibals? Why are the Catholics cannibals? If you define cannibalism as ingestion of body, blood and parts, transubstantiation is palpably a cannibalistic rite, because it’s supposed to turn into the body and blood of [Christ]. Shit, that seems a little brutal to me.

So I, like most people, concoct my own brand of religion. If it’s not good enough, I can see all these angels on judgment day with bulldozers, as the world lines up, shoveling us over the cliff into a fiery hell for all eternity, endless pain and torment and suffering, which is just what you’d expect from a loving God. It doesn’t compute.

DePue: Well, let me ask, since we’re in the area of theology and religion and -isms, let me ask what you were being taught when you were at the academy, if anything, about Communism and then early in your military training.

Borling: I can’t really remember much about an overt focus on Communism, other than we had some political economy courses where you dealt with the Adam Smiths of this world and the [Dr. Meredith] Beblins, and the [Karl] Marx and [Friedrich ] Engels stuff came along. Communism wasn’t really presented as a boogeyman, except in some specialized circumstances, the Cuban invasion business.

DePue: Which would have occurred while you were at the academy, right?

Borling: No. It was shortly before, I believe. Wasn’t it? That was, they’re putting missiles in Cuba and so forth. This is post-McCarthy period.

DePue: That was October ’62, the Cuban Missile Crisis.

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Borling: Oh, the Cuban Missile Crisis, yes. No, I was at the academy in that timeframe, absolutely right, but I’m talking about the invasion of Cuba. I don’t know when that took place.

DePue: That would have been in ’61.

Borling: Sixty-one. That was Kennedy’s legacy from…So I was there.

DePue: You’re talking about the Bay of Pigs.

Borling: That brought an immediacy, that we were being threatened at our borders. That went by, but I don’t recall that we were particularly fearful. This was the area of [Curtis] LeMay, you know, “Bomb them back to the Stone Age.”81 We were aware that Vietnam was going on, and our concern, most of us anyway, was that the damn war was going to be over before we could get to it. We were attracted to the notion of conflict. If anything, the politics meant nothing; it was the action itself.

We were talking about the Playboy Club82 earlier and me playing piano in the Playboy Club and being jazzed by this woman—who I later married—for no technique. We were talking about my piano, and I still do play. But the key that we used was from a classmate of mine, Roger Sims, who was twenty-one when he entered, I think, a big black guy. My class had the first three black cadets in the history of the academy. Roger had applied for a Playboy…

In those days, you got a Playboy key; you didn’t use it, but you had to show it. I remember, he was filling out the affidavit that you had to fill out and mail in. There was no email in those days. It came to occupation. He wrote down—I’ve always remembered this—“professional manager of violence (trainee).” (both laugh)

I think a lot of us, not all of us, thought ourselves as professional managers of violence, because it was kind of a cool thing to do. I kept coming back to Patton, that speech, that pre-D-Day speech he made about…He said, “War. Consider how every other human endeavor shrinks to insignificance before it. God how I love it.”

DePue: But you’d never wanted to consider yourself a mercenary, did you?

81 Curtis LeMay was a United States Air Force general known for designing and implementing the systematic strategic bombing campaign in the Pacific Theater during World War II. (https://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/curtis-lemay) 82 The Playboy Club was initially a chain of nightclubs and resorts owned and operated by Playboy Enterprises. The first club opened in downtown Chicago, IL in 1960. Each club generally featured a living room, a playmate bar, a dining room, and a club room. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playboy_Club)

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Borling: No, no. I was clad in white with a red cross, and I had a horse and a shield and a lance. We were going to kill the infidel.

DePue: A crusader then would be a better term.

Borling: Damn right, even though the…What crusade was it, when they walked down the Via Dolorosa, hip deep in blood and body parts, the third crusade? Many of them were good Christians they wiped out at the time. Let’s sack Jerusalem and Constantinople all over again.

DePue: Well, let’s go back to your time in the Vietnam War. I want to have you read or recite one of your poems that deals with your love of flying. I was thinking maybe, “Carpet of Clouds” might be appropriate, unless you’ve got an alternative.

Borling: Remember I said yesterday, can you pick out the one poem, or was the one poem ever picked out that was my favorite, and I told you that Dorothy Parkander, my instructor, picked it? I didn’t tell you the name of the poem. I sat down—this was within the last ninety days, over lunch—she asked to have lunch with me when I was down at Augustana, getting this award and all of that business. She said that that was the poem. She said, “because that’s the one where you showed your love of flying the best.”

I might comment, just for preface, that the book’s divided into four parts; the “Strapping on a Tailpipe” part, which is the flying part, a dark and bitter and horrors of the evil soul kind of thing in the second part. Then there’s the family part and holidays, which resonates with both the pleasures and the poignancy of the season, Christmas and family and things of that nature, and then this long epic poem, “SEA Story (Southeast Asia Story),” which has observations on all the major themes that you really like, politics, sex, religion, renewal, self-renewal, shaking one’s fist at the shibboleths of the day.83 But in the end it’s very much about a renewal theme.

When you take me back to a poem, which is quite lengthy actually, “Carpet of Clouds,” which I’m certainly willing to recite…But let me give you a short sonnet first, which is the second poem in the book, and then I’ll do “Carpet of Clouds.”

The second poem in the book comes after “The Derelict,” the opening of “The Derelict.” I love the first two lines of ‘The Derelict.” It’s about an old B-17 kind of airplane going back into the western desert, trying to find itself again. It starts out that,

83 Shibboleths are the customs, principles, or beliefs that distinguish a particular class or group of people, especially a long-standing one regarded as outmoded or no longer important. (https://www.dictionary.com/)

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The west was a patchwork of color, flung over a racing sky And the wind was a lover’s whisper that needed no reply. The strip was of weed-torn concrete, scarring the desert floor And a derelict came flying―flying―flying A derelict came flying along final to 0-4.

Then it goes on and talks about its visitation out in the western desert, somewhere west of Tucson. Actually, the base is a place called Ajo, a deserted bomber base, A-j-o, and I’ve actually been there. It’s the model; although I stole a bit from “The Highwayman” too, if you are familiar with that old…“And a highwayman came riding, riding, riding. A highwayman came riding up to the old inn door, where Bess, the landlord’s daughter, the landlord’s fair-haired daughter…” and it goes on.

DePue: Every artist needs a little inspiration.

Borling: Well, you do. So anyway, that’s the first poem. But the second poem…and I’ll recite it now. We should say we’re doing all this from memory; is that correct?

DePue: Yes. I’m looking at the text, and you’re not.

Borling: When I was at George, which was my first fighter base, in California, I was checked out in the T-33 as well as the F-4. I would fly weather recces [reconnaissance] early in the morning for fighter units coming through from the east coast. We didn’t have good weather reporting in those days; you had to go see what it was like. They would often take off, headed to the west, early in the morning, say from Seymour Johnson or someplace in North Carolina and hit tankers coming across, normally making their way all the way to Hawaii, first leg.

I would take off from George, and I would fly east in the pre-dawn, solo, and report back on weather conditions out several hundred miles. In the course of that, on more than one occasion, I would have multiple dawns. I could have a dawn and then drop down and get it dark again and then come up and have another dawn. So it was really something. The second poem is called, “First Light Flight.”

First Light Flight

Pale golden talons stir the eastern sky Another fledgling day departs the hills. It takes the air, as thermaled falcons fly, Cascading light as carefree first flight thrills And who attends this noble soaring bursts From mountain crag to gentle rolling plain May marvel from their vantage point on earth But miss so much not of the sky’s domain.

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But I’m not of the earth. At altitude, I greet the infant day with engine song My contrails etched on endless morning blue And rare abandon urging me along. It’s here, unfettered brother-men enthrall to first light flight The one judged best of all.

I really like that one too.

DePue: Well, you do need to hear these, and not just read them.

Borling: I have been told that; I have been told that. That’s why I make a supposition in the book or a suggestion that you read it out loud. In fact, I say you should do it, especially in the company of others, one of two ways. You have to do it casually, Steve McQueen-like, with a beer, leaning up against the wall, kind of just talking. Or, give it full measure of your own interpretation and assume [Sir Lawrence] Olivier kinds (DePue laughs) of stature, and use your voice as an instrument.84 Depending on my mood in a given day, I’ll do it one way or the other.

I will tell you, I have never read publicly “Carpet of Clouds” out loud, just because it’s too long, and there’s so much specific aviation information in it that you need to get back in the glossary. For example, it starts out that “A recent PIREP calls it topping out flight level, whatever it is, twenty- two”―you may have an earlier version here, because I adjusted it slightly― “with CBs building northwest quad, some anvil tops in view.” A PIREP is a pilot’s report. I’ll take this just for a second because I’m not sure I can do “Carpet of Clouds” from memory, [after] all this time. CBs, cumulonimbus clouds are thunder clouds; you need thunder storms. A Cuban eight is an aerial maneuver where you do a loop and then roll out of the loop and do another loop. So, think of an eight in the sky.

DePue: Well, maybe it’s just because I’m familiar with lots of military jargon and acronyms that I wasn’t too put off by that at all.

Borling: G, of course, is G-forces. You sit in your chair, 1-G. If you pull back on the stick, you add G-forces, like it takes four Gs to get around on a loop. We would routinely fly six and seven Gs or more and maneuver in combat.

DePue: But see, here’s one of my thoughts on this. That had deep meaning to your fellow prisoners when you were writing this, I would think.

Borling: Oh no, it did; it had great sense. The “Carpet of Clouds” was an energizing poem. We talked about how flying equals freedom equals flying. There’s

84 Sir Laurence Olivier, an English actor and director who dominated the British stage of the mid-20th century. He was knighted by the Queen Elizabeth for his excellence in acting, especially Shakespearean. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Olivier)

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another poem called “Hanoi Epitaphs” that is from the dark part of the book. It sets a very somber scene.

When the floor is furrowed by tired feet And life slips away beneath the pounding beat You trudge on in the dark desolation When the heat is so hot and the cold is so cold You think of your youth and how you’ve grown old Now live consigned to life’s slowest station.

And then it goes on in a similarly happy phrase for a happy way for a number of stanzas. But at the end, it finishes up with:

The years have passed, the many Decembers And no one knows, and no one remembers The sound of your voice, your face or your name So you dream of steel chargers and skies to roam Mostly a dream of just going home But you dream without hope or conviction.

That, of course, is designed to plunge us all even further into the depths of despair, which is fair because that’s a genuine feeling. That was the downside of this book, was that you would plunge into despair or rise up to giddy heights with respect to some of the humor or with some of the serious thinking.

“Carpet of Clouds” falls into serious but uplifting stuff. For inspiration actually, it was “High Flight” by John Gillespie Magee, Jr. Are you familiar with that poem?

DePue: No.

Borling: Of all the poetry, aviation poetry, it’s probably the most famous. He was a World War II guy, Canadian, who composed his poem, sent it to his mother, and then was killed shortly thereafter. But it starts out—I’m sure you’ve heard it—

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth, And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wing Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth Of sun-split clouds and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of―Wheeled and soared and swung High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there I've chased the shouting wind along and flung My eager craft through footless halls of air... Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace Where never lark or even eagle flew―

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And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

Whoa, there’s a poem; there’s a poem, “High Flight.” In “Carpet of Clouds,” I was inspired by “High Flight,” not the structure, not the verse, but the ethereal sense of oneness with the sky, the only—as I say―the only perfect place, stealing a phrase from Richard Bach, “The sky is the only perfect place.” Again, I had nothing to reference. I didn’t have books or anything like that. I’m doing all this from memory, imagining it myself.

Again, I have been where I’m going to take you next, up on top of a gray drizzly day and when you break through and you look forever and there is this white cloud carpet, dazzling sunlight, in the distance storm clouds, white, puffy storm clouds building. You’re up there in your airplane, and it is all yours.

Carpet of Clouds

A recent PIREP calls it topping out, Flight level twenty-two, With CBs building, northwest quad, Some anvil tops in view.

And so it is, as I come piercing through, Abandoned gray and gauge To stride with giant steps upon A great and vacant stage.

Gold flecked, extended carpet wisping white Beyond the eye and mind. Here distant towering pillars stand In warning to our kind.

I level scanning, maybe six above; My mask conceals a smile. All mine, I climb, then half roll off To Cuban eight, a mile.

My flashing craft responds to eager touch. (Now it’s “My flashing craft alive to eager touch responds”) With easy g. We dive and zoom, then lazy roll, A-skimming, running free.

A quick cross-check, my wandering mind attends, As swept-back silver soars

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Across the domed and vaulted heights Along wide, wind-washed shores.

A pilot’s halo follows fast beneath, And boundless like the air. The joy of flight, though strapped in tight, I find great freedom there.

Perhaps below, some hapless soul can hear Faint bugles in the sky. He’ll shake his head at darkling clouds And wonder why we fly.

His collar up, cap pulled warding down, He’ll never know the thrill Of chasing across a shouting sky, The solitude, the still.

But you’ve been there, so know of what I speak, The empty spaces hurled From cockpit throne, you reign alone, On top, in titan world.

Now marking on the antiseptic blue, This message from on high, Engraved within the hearts of men Who love and live to fly.

On top, some special sun-split afternoon, You’ll find no-limit sky And live lifetimes in brief minutes Whole lifetimes as you fly.

“Carpet of Clouds.” More written for me, I think, than anything else.

DePue: The line that speaks to me more powerfully than anything, just listening to your stories yesterday, is, “But you’ve been there.” I would think that, the other fellow prisoners, this is one of their favorites.

Borling: Oh, I got nice reviews on that one. Not like, “Why the hell did you have to say that?” (both laugh) So this was when I was just trying to suggest that, when you read this thing, you really have to go back and look at the glossary in order to find…For example, a pilot’s halo, what the hell am I talking about? You know what a pilot’s halo is?

DePue: No.

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Borling: You can see it sometimes in a commercial jet, if you’re flying along, and the sun conditions are right. If you’re streaking across a carpet of clouds and the sun angle is such, you can make it happen. You will look down, then to your right or to your left, but normally you put the sun up there on your right, and your airplane will be in a halo.

DePue: Wow.

Borling: You’ll be scooting along, and you will see the shadow of the airplane in this halo. On a rare occasion, it’s not only a halo, it’s a rainbow halo. So you’re dashing across the miles, hundreds of miles an hour, and your whole being is captured. It’s called a pilot’s halo.

DePue: Well, maybe I just got lucky, but the one poem that I wanted you to read that dealt with your captivity was “Hanoi Epitaph.” You’ve recited most of that already.

Borling: I gave you a piece of it. I think we should just let the reader go find it. That’s in the “Dark and Bitter Stuff.” Other than being honest, that section, with “The Journey,” a very deep and bitter poem on love, a sonnet, a thing called the “Sonnet 4, 45, 43,” which is in the tap code, “Sonnet for Us.” It starts out; I’ll give you just a taste:

The world without, in our weathered walls, Remote, like useless windows, tall and barred. Here, months and years run quickly down dim halls, But days, the days, the empty days come hard.

It goes on and sets a case in the next four lines about what it’s really like and the numbing horror of it all. As you do in sonnets, you set that case in the first eight lines. Then the next four lines are supposed to set a counter case, and then the last two lines are supposed to sum it up. So, I’ll give you the counter case.

We used to talk about the policies, the camp policies, the American policies of war and how to prosecute the war and how none of it made any sense. So it starts out:

But policy insanities unwind, ‘Till bad is good and betterment is worse. So refuge, blanket, net, and molding mind Create a mingling dream-real universe. I’m told that steel is forged by heavy blows. If only men were steel, but then, who knows?

That’s some of the stuff from that thing. I quoted yesterday, I think, about the rap thing.

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DePue: Right.

Borling: Did you read, “This One’s for the Birds”?

DePue: Not in the last couple days, I haven’t.

Borling: Okay. Have you ever read it?

DePue: No, I don’t think so. You’re not talking about a poem in your book then.

Borling: Yeah, a poem in the book, “This One’s for the Birds,” the one where they accuse me of inventing rap.

DePue: I don’t remember. I’m sure I read it a while back, but I don’t recall it.

Borling: Well, I’ll give you a taste of it, again. Again, it’s about two woodpeckers; one named Maggie and Magnuson—all the guys named Magnuson are called Maggie in the military—and then Jamie, another guy, the young guy. Maggie’s an old fighter pilot leader, and Jamie’s a young guy coming up. It starts out:

Well, way down south in the Texas flat where prickle pear and jackrabbit at lived two woodpeckers in a sawed off stump looking all the day for something to thump.

Now I knowed one name of Maggie Mo To other buddy, B-brier, Jamie, Joe. Maggie was old, with a bunch of Rs, But Jamie, he were young, kind of unawares.

It happened one day, as I recollect Stting on a cholla with nothing to peck Maggie (the old guy) turned to Jamie (the young guy) Say, brother-o, I’ve got me an idee, think you ought to know.

From yonder back, north of San Anton Local flying wood, as dry as a bone. Cottonwood, willer, other thorny thing Just don’t fill the bill, that empty hollow ring.

But I heard tell of a promised land Where trees grow tall and the peckin’s grand. California redwood’s supposed to be best. I’d be of a mind to mosey on out west.

Well, it tells about how these guys go down to base ops and file an eyeball route, and they head west, and how they fly, hanging on the wing and

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landing at Kirtland, but “Albuquerque for moon pie and cola, another tank of gas, soon headed west again, really headed fast.” Well, they’re flying through Oak Creek Canyon. Anyway, some weather occurs, and they’ve got to climb up and get a clearance, and they do.

I’ll go to the end of the poem.

They entered into Holon, by and by Weather a might touchy to Maggie’s eye. “We’d better take a TACAN [Tactical Air Navigation ] radar too, Caw should be the watch word, before we have a chew.”

Well, Jamie started fretting, young and bold, They called for clearance, continue to hold. Jamie, so anxious, so bothered to peck, He rolled to his back and split-S to the deck.85

Well, luck of a rebel helped him down. He landed on a tree, commenced to pound. He just reared back for that first giant peck, When come a bolt of lightning, struck him in the neck.

Poor old Jamie, laying in the brush, Tail feathers singed in a deathly hush. Maggie was on final, he touched down good, To find full stout, next to a likely hunk of wood.

He looked for Jamie, it appeared to be, That Big Daddy Sherman had marched to the sea. There were feathers all strewed, blood on the ground, Jamie lay a panting like a redbone hound.

Maggie stood a looking and shook his head, “It’s a wonder, I declare, you ain’t dead.” Now I’ve seen me some sights and heard me some tales, There’s one thing I know that’s true for all males.

Boy, before you fly again, think on these words, I think I just said, it’s true for man, and it’s true for birds. No matter what you call it, love or sin, “Don’t be such a hurry; put your pecker in.” (both laugh)

That one has occasioned a snicker or two from a more knowledgeable crowd. I’ve always said this; I say, “Well, I’m glad to see we have people who

85 Split S is an air combat maneuver mostly used to disengage from combat. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_S)

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have a great appreciation for literary expression. They told me you were a literate bunch.” Again, the poems―as I say when I’m out on the hustings― are supposed to make you laugh, make you cry, make you think. That’s a flavor for them.

They want me to do an audio book, but the economics aren’t really there unless you can almost go out and sell it. Maybe I could do a YouTube version or something. Anyway, the book’s important, but we’re in the waning stages of the book.86 It’s been out a year plus now. It’s got another six, seven months, and then it will be on…It’s already on eBay, but it will be collecting dust on shelves and things like that and add to the body of literature surrounding that time.87 At the end, maybe the grandkids or great-great- grandkids will know a little bit about their grandpa from that book.

DePue: Well, from my perspective, the historical value is priceless.

Borling: Thank you.

DePue: As is doing the interview itself. General, I’m going to bring you back down on the ground, I’m afraid, and back down into the days when you’re in prison and creating these things. How much did the prison officials know about your attempts to write this poetry?

Borling: They knew nothing about it and never did. I was afraid that if they did know it, they would exploit it. That’s why I never wrote anything down. I kept it memorized all those years. In fact, it was a daily chore, kind of like going out and running in the morning, a daily chore. But you get up in the morning, I’d start to recite, and as this body of work built up, that’s a pretty sizeable book.

DePue: Right.

Borling: And then I’d go back, and I’d recast some lines and do things. So it was always a work in progress.

DePue: How did you think they might want to exploit it?

Borling: I wasn’t sure.

DePue: Use it for propaganda purposes?

Borling: Yeah, exactly. That somehow, “Look, we’ve got this guy who’s written this book.” God knows; they didn’t know anything about it.

86 YouTube is a video sharing service where users can watch, like, share, comment and upload their own videos. The video service can be accessed on PCs, laptops, tablets and via mobile phones. (https://www.webwise.ie/parents/what-is-youtube/) 87 eBay is an online shopping site for selling and buying products, best known for its auctions and consumer to consumer sales. (https://ecommerce-platforms.com/glossary/what-is-ebay)

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DePue: I’m sure you’re familiar with Ray Bradbury and Fahrenheit 451.

Borling: Um-hmm.

DePue: Did that have some special relevance, just because of the exercise—

Borling: No, I don’t think so. Certainly, I knew Ray Bradbury, one of my favorite authors. I didn’t mind sharing it with my fellows, but as I think I said yesterday, the book does represent a piece of my soul. It shows a lot of me in various eras, some not very complimentary, frankly, showing hesitancy, fear, a level of vulnerability if you will. The vulnerability is to write this thing honestly, you had to open yourself up to the range of human emotions.

We tended to build walls. That’s why the last poem, Taps on the Walls, which I wrote last year, speaks to this, how we all build walls in our life. But the walls we built were to try to block out normalcy, to live within…It was probably not to live in despair. Try to allow elastic wall with upward appreciation of humor and fidelity and those kinds of things, but still walls, so you could stay in control, so you could prevail.

Writing that book, I had to break down the walls. I had to imagine how my…not that other guys didn’t, but I really had to try to get inside of what Myrna was going through and what the little girl was going through, in some approximation. Then I had to roll that around and put it into a construct. That required considerable work, I mean effort, god, wonderful work, wonderful effort. I imagined myself as [Poet Edgar Allan] Poe, and I chose the words quite agonizingly, to make sure that I was—or at least I thought I was— offering some credible stuff, except when I wasn’t, like in “This One’s for the Birds.”

That was just kind of…that was meant to…that was fun, just like “The Ballad of the Cross-Country Flyer” was fun. It was patterned after an old joke. The old joke was…It talks about this fighter pilot leaving a base. As he’s flying along, the airplane keeps coming apart, fire, smoke, hydraulics, whatever, and he keeps praying to the Lord, “Boy just get me out of this, and I’ll give up smoking and drinking and gambling and women,” because the thing is just terrible. He gets over home base, and then the airplane keeps coming back to straight and level finally. He gets over home plate and pitches out. He drops his gear and flaps, and he’s got the landing made. He punches the mike button, and he says, “Cancel out that clearance, Lord; I’m downwind; I’m short, final.” (both laugh)

So that’s “The Ballad of the Cross-Country Flyer,” but done in a poetic metaphor.

He wore a big hack watch and fighter pilot boots. He was liquored; he was leathered; he was lean. He’d RON’d at Nellis,” (out in Vegas)

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Drank, gambled, chased the toots.

He was outbound, all gauges green. His visor down and slumping great gulps of oxygen. He’s so hurting; he’s so haggard; he’s so hung With bloodshot, be-livid eyes and a pickle-tasting tongue, He’s filed direct and BLD (Boulder).

BLD is swung, so he’s passed Boulder, and he’s pressing east, across the canyon when things start to happen.

I got a lot out of that. Again, I come back to the notion of yesterday; creation is the essence of humanity, and God knows we needed humanity. So that’s how I got there. You keep leading me back into the book, but it was one of my lifelines. Now, forty years later―granted, I’ve had some exposure to it the last year―I can bring back great pieces of it from memory, obviously.

DePue: Did you start the process of writing the poetry as just an escape or a way to keep your mind active, or did you just kind of fall into it?

Borling: No, no, it was a cognitive effort to do that, killing time.

DePue: In the early years that you’re there, and much of this is spent in solitary confinement or in―

Borling: Semi-isolation, yeah.

DePue: Were you able to keep a sense of the calendar and time?

Borling: Oh, yeah, because that speaker in the little hole in the wall, up on the top there, they’d play that Hanoi Hannah on a daily basis, and you’d know what day it was, yeah.

DePue: We talked a little bit before about holidays. Did you have a sense of when you’d get to Thanksgiving or Christmas or Fourth of July?

Borling: Obviously. We kept track of time through that radio program. So, yeah, you knew when that was happening. It wasn’t like you were cut off. Now, when you were in punishment cells or in total darkness or being worked on, then time became elastic, and you weren’t sure. You knew it was daytime; you could see the light under the door, the crack, but you were in darkness. You had that sense of passing of time, but then it got indistinct. Then you didn’t have…It got indistinct.

DePue: We talked about thinking about food, and that had to be constantly on your mind as well. How about thinking about Myrna and the family and back home?

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Borling: You did that all the time, going back. But in the book, again, because I had to not have that wall where we won’t worry about that, we…You did, and that “hurt,” and then you would make it so it didn’t hurt; you would have your wall. You’d just make your wall up.

Probably the lasting legacy, psychological legacy of that, if I stand back now and kind of go out-of-body…But I’m not alone on this. If you talk to some of the other guys, we’re not normal, because we don’t let things that affect normal people upset us, death of close friends or family members. Why would I choose to be unhappy? Those walls that we’ve built have a—at least for me and a number of others—have a large height to them and sturdiness to them, where we don’t go.

On the other side, I think we―hopefully with good judgment involved, not always―have upside; the childhood joy stuff is easier to grasp. Sometimes I get accused by Myrna of being too intent on trying to suck out the marrow of life.

DePue: To enjoy every moment of it.

Borling: Yeah, to enjoy every moment of it. It’s not perfect, and it’s not Pollyanna-ish but on the whole, it’s that. Again, Myrna, God love her, she’s pretty tough too, very tough as a matter of fact, and we share a lot of just, “Okay that happened; that’s bad; too bad, let’s keep marching.”

DePue: I know you were involved in at least one escape attempt, and you helped in another. Was that something you thought about a lot, the possibility of escape?

Borling: Yes and no. I think we fantasized escape as much as we thought about it. I really view the escape attempts as half-assed, but something that kind of the code demanded. I’ve often thought about…It’s scary; you do get a little Stockholm syndrome, “At least I’m living; I’m alive.88 I jump over the wall, and, oh shit, then what?”

The real thing was when Darrell and I made that go, and then when he couldn’t go, and then we got caught in the process of…I have thought about if I’d gone alone, rather than waiting. But you have no idea how close Darrell and I were. That’s probably the great…in terms of full disclosure in an oral history. We dreamed of flying together, and we dreamed a lot. And we did; we flew T-38s down at Randolph.

I remember that first day we went out. We said, “All right, look, we’re flying the same day.” We said, “We’ll go out, and we’ll have a little hassle, a little aerial combat maneuvering stuff.” This is something that they don’t do in

88 Stockholm syndrome is a condition that causes hostages to develop a psychological alliance with their captors as a survival strategy during captivity. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome)

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air training command. I got in the jet, and I’d never flown the T-38. I don’t know if Darrell had or not.

DePue: This is before your war experiences, right?

Borling: No, this is after the war. This is after we’re back. We’re getting back to get re- qualified in jets, to see if…I’m going to go back to a fighter unit, with the promise to Myrna that if I’m not any good, I’m going to leave the Air Force. If I can’t compete with the guys who’ve been out there all those years, hell, I’m going to leave.

But this is the first day. So, I told the IP, I said, “If you touch the stick, other than to save your own life…” ―the IP is sitting in the back seat; I’m in the front seat—I said, “I’ll break your wrist.” This was to Captain John Satterwhite. I was a senior captain at that time.

Darrell was in the other airplane. We’d had the briefing separately; we were going to go out single ship. I said, “I’ll meet you…” We’d looked at a spot on the ground. I said, “I’ll see you out there. Take off behind me” or me behind him; I’ve forgotten what it was. They wouldn’t let us take off in formation, which is what we wanted to do. But I rolled like ten seconds after him, or he rolled ten seconds after me. Anyway, we flew out there, kind of in trail, and both the IPs were saying, “What are you guys doing?”

“Well, we’re just going to go out here, and then we’ll split apart.” We got out there, and we split forty-five for about five seconds, turned back in, (DePue laughs) head to head, fight’s on, and then put it into the vertical. Darrell laughed; we laughed afterwards. “What was your IP doing?” “He was screaming, ‘What the fuck are you doing!?’” We were, you know, rrrrrrrrr, and rrrr-rrrr-uuumm, down the burble, and G. We only did it for a minute and a half or so. “All right, knock it off, knock it off.” Then we went off our separate ways to do regular air work. “Now see if you can do a loop.” Well, hell, we’d just been wrapping it up.

We got back down on the ground; he hadn’t touched the stick the whole time. I hop out of the airplane. I’ve got some pictures of Myrna and Lauren meeting me at the airplane, with a bottle of champagne. I said, “All right; that’s it. Schedule a check ride tomorrow. I’m out of here.” It was that great a flight. It was a great, great flight, and he’d never touched the stick. He just said, “WOW.” He said, “Were you flying a lot up there?” (both laugh) So, we had the champagne. Darrell and I felt pretty good; we swaggered back together. His wife had divorced him at this time—that’s another story—or was in the process of divorcing him.

DePue: Swagger is probably the right verb to use in that respect.

Borling: So, we were swaggering. But the next day we went out. I was unsafe at any speed. (both laugh) I thought, god, we’re going to crash and die!

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DePue: But I suspect they gave you a little bit of a special allowance, because of the circumstances that you had found yourself, not flying for all those years.

Borling: Yeah, they did. Later we went out to George in F-4s—we were both at George—and got to wrap up in fighters and flew a lot together in fighters.

Then Darrell bought an airplane, a Cub or a Jenny, I guess, a tandem airplane. We flew that all over Southern California. Myrna would fly, and the daughter would fly with Darrell. We’d go up. I never checked out in the airplane. Hell, it was a tail wheel airplane with a prop; I’m a jet guy. But I’d fly along and fly the stuff. We had great fun with that and never thought anything about landing in a field and taking off again, just had us kicking around the high desert in this Cub.

I ended up staying at George. I was supposed to go to Holloman [Air Force Base][but] ended up staying at George, operationally. He [Darrell] went up to Alaska and killed himself in that airplane.

DePue: An accident?

Borling: Best guess, carburetor ice, frozen lake. He had his son, Philip, in the back seat. He knew what was going to happen. I think he kicked rudder at the end, and he ended up with the engine in his lap and was thrown out, but it crushed him. Philip was basically uninjured in the back seat. Darrell’s circumstance…In fact, he was godfather to my second child, a daughter, born in February. We had a girl born in February of ’74, and Darrell’s divorce…His wife―

You can make a comment that here’s an intensely private piece that depicts the relationship between me and Darrell. People think we were screwing or something; we’re not. You know, I never knew of any homosexual activity the whole time up there. Men in prison, shit, you’ve got to have enough to eat, and you don’t have to…It takes a very permissive environment to want to screw somebody, another man. I think we ought to learn something about conduct of prison things in our own prisons.

DePue: I suspect you learn quite a bit about Maslow’s hierarchy of need, didn’t you?

Borling: Yeah, I think so too. But it’s strange; we could bounce from the bottom of the pyramid up to the top. That book for me was fulfillment, and again, it was meant to be legacy.

DePue: You mean this book?

Borling: That book, yeah. The highest Maslow need is fulfillment, as I recall the triangle anyway. After a point…Well, it was fulfillment. It was almost like our fascination with death and dying, where we go out to the graveyard and carve a stone, because we want to have something to mark our passing, or the

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family wants to have something to mark our passing. The fact that in 100 years you won’t be able to read the front of it means nothing.

The Norwegians would do it too, in the mountains. You’d go out on the high mountain plateau, the Hardangervidda. You’d go trekking, and you’d see these cairns of rocks. I think mankind has this need to note that our passing was hereby erecting something. As I get older, I find it wondrous on one hand and futile on the other, kind of the Ozymandias thing.

DePue: Well, what I wanted to ask you next was whether or not―

Borling: Shelley, [Percy] B. Shelley, Ozymandias.89

DePue: …whether or not you guys ever thought about the possibility of being rescued.

Borling: Oh, yeah, and that happened with the Son Tay thing. We sure did.

DePue: Son Tay was November 21, 1970.

Borling: That was an attempt to rescue [us]. I think they probably could have (laughs) just as easily gone downtown than the shock factor and done that. I don’t think there were battalions of troops stationed downtown. I think they could have been in and out of…I think they could have almost landed at Gia Lam, airdropped a couple of battalions in and airdropped some others and stormed across. It would have been bloody. Helicopters would have been hard.

DePue: Well, from what little I’ve read about the Son Tay raid, it was a great success except…

Borling: Nobody was there.

DePue: The prisoners had been removed, because of the fear of flooding in that area, apparently. But I understand also, that things changed for you and everybody in the Hanoi Hilton.

Borling: Oh, it did, because they put us all together. Again, with the death of Ho Chi Minh in ’69 and the Son Tay raid, from ’69 to ’70, things were improving, although things were not good out there at that camp. Most of the guys out there had beriberi—lack of vegetables or greens apparently—and a lot of people had eye problems. But things were generally on the improve and that forced [them to] bring us together.

The night of that raid―

89“Ozymandias” is a sonnet written by English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelly, first published in 1818 in London. It is regarded as one of Shelley's more famous works. In antiquity, Ozymandias was a Greek name for the Egyptian pharaoh, Ramesses II. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias)

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DePue: So these prisoners came in to be living with you?

Borling: All of them. They collapsed all the prisoners into the Hanoi Hilton.

DePue: To include the Annex and the Zoo and―

Borling: Everybody, everybody.

DePue: So now you went from being alone or with three people together, or with nine people together―

Borling: In this case nine people to…All of a sudden we’re in a group of forty or fifty, in confines made for maybe twenty-five. But we were all together, sleeping shoulder to shoulder on a pallet, literally shoulder to shoulder. All this thing about, you can’t share a bed with another guy. Well, you can share it with fifty guys, with impunity, I’ll tell you. So, if one of these guys who I slept next to said, “Hey, let’s go get a double bed at the Red Roof Inn and save some money.” I’d say, “Are you out of your mind?” It wouldn’t matter that we’d “slept” next to each other for months, funny arrangement.

DePue: So, how else did your life change after that?

Borling: I think gradually treatment got a little better, sporadically. Remember, I told you about the bread and milk and the sickness and all that. And then they split us apart from there again. They sent us out to these different camps. This was in ’72, as I remember.

We went back to the Zoo, but it was a different Zoo. They had taken every building and created an outside courtyard. So, in a building where we were―I forget what side it was on―they had made an announcement that we’re going to give you guys better treatment. Again, I think this is some time in ’72, best of my recollection. You went back, and they had all the standard cells, but they had knocked the bricks out of the windows. Now you had long, barred windows, and you looked out on this courtyard, which had a couple of basketball hoops on either side, and it had…

They moved us back, and we saw how the Zoo had been reconfigured. They threw us into the rooms, and the next day they came by, and they opened up the doors of the rooms—I think we had three or four people in our room, three or four people in the next room—and they said, “Okay, you’re out.”

DePue: Did they explain why your conditions had changed?

Borling: No, they didn’t. The food was about the same. We still got that bread and milk in the morning. The food maybe marginally improved. But we were out. That’s where I ran into Pop Kern, that guy I told you about with the ring; Pop was there. I forgot, Read McCleary and Dave Carey and Tom, some of the

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guys we’d been with before. Then there were some new guys that we’d known from the big conglomeration, by name, but had not lived with them.

So there we were. We were maybe, I don’t know, twenty-five guys, twenty, and we had our SRO. The downside was, on this building, on the backside, were those two traitor guys. They never locked them up. These guys just wandered around the Zoo on their own. They had books, shelves of books and blankets―

DePue: But it otherwise, I would guess, lived a very lonely life.

Borling: They never came over on our side. They never came over on our side. But we had a back window, and sometimes these guys would come over. We’d try to…“You guys are…You need to get on the right side of the law here” and try to ship them over. These guys were giving us the anti-war message.

DePue: So, they truly believed it.

Borling: They truly believed. I don’t know if they were just scared or whatever, but the immoral war, da-da-da, the Americans are bad guys. One was a Marine, and one was a Navy guy. Boy, it was…We didn’t have anything to do with them.

DePue: Did you know at the time…You know, ’69 is when the peace negotiations started.

Borling: We knew they’d started. You had the round table or the non-round table. This thing is going on, and we’re batting our brains out, thinking that now it’s ’72. So anyway, we’ve got recreation, and they gave us some books, so we had some books. That’s when those little gray things came out too, so we had something to write in and some pencils. Compared to what it had been, even back when they put us all together, it was all very…We were concerned, the twenty of us or so…We weren’t giving them anything, but we wanted to make sure that we weren’t getting special treatment.

We’d seen the rest of the build-out, if you will, at the Zoo. And this guy Wilburn Miller had the run of the place. For some reason, with this build- out, we didn’t have any communications with the rest of the camp. It was one of the few times that we didn’t have interconnectivity between the buildings.

DePue: So even at the Zoo, you didn’t have it.

Borling: Even at the Zoo. We couldn’t get any angles where we could get…Everything was either on the other sides or whatever, so we were effectively cut off. But the immediacy of having to have…We had our own SRO; we know what the policies were; we were all old timers; we knew what the hell was going on. We were concerned about that, but again, we knew the rules. We enjoyed this freedom. We were outside now for four or five hours a day. They’d come and

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lock us up, keep the windows open, so we’d talk back and forth through the windows, no need to tap on the walls anymore; it was wide open.

DePue: Did they give you a ball to play with?

Borling: We had a ball. We played basketball and stuff, and it was great. This was a failing, I think. In this period―It didn’t last too long; it maybe lasted four or five months. That sounds like a long time but relatively speaking, maybe four months―

DePue: Out of six and a half years, that’s just a small period.

Borling: …We argued amongst ourselves about, are we being set up? Is this something where they’re going to try to exploit us somehow? Are they going to bring delegations in? Are they going to show us how good we’ve got it? We said, “If delegations come, we just sit down where we are.” We had these contingency plans.

I suspect that I still harbor, as all the guys who were in that group do, that we softened a bit. The treatment was literally, for the first time, consistently humane, professional. We weren’t hugging guards, or they weren’t hugging us, but it was just business, and we were basically left to ourselves, as long as we…We didn’t have any quizzes; there wasn’t anybody trying to do anything to exploit us, but we were on guard. So time passes.

One day, in the middle of a basketball game that we were playing, the door opened up, and here are a couple of Vietnamese guys with cameras. They started taking films. We all froze. They had gotten a couple of minutes of video or film. We just kind of put the ball down and went over and sat down. They left, and then we looked at each other and we said, “Shit, we’ve been photographed having a ‘good time.’” We had a big discussion, to resolve with the SRO, saying, “Look, we know we are not singled out, and we know that others have this treatment too. We can’t speak for the whole deal, but we haven’t given them anything for this; we haven’t” da-da-da.

The determination was made that we would continue to take advantage—if that’s one word—or continue to live the way we’d been living. So we did. We saw, a couple days later, from a observation pole, that some cameras were set up and were shooting down into the compound. Once again, when we noticed it, and we figured it out—it wasn’t actually on a pole; it was off the roof—and we sat down again. Then that was the end of it; we never saw anything else. No foreign people showed up, nobody; that was it. But a number of us were troubled by this. Not so troubled that we…What do you say? “I would like to move to a different camp or I would like― (DePue laughs)

DePue: “I want to go back to being tortured?”

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Borling: Yeah, I don’t know what it was, what we thought, because it was so different from all the years we were uncomfortable. Then it changed. A few months later, we were bundled up and taken back to Hoa Lo, back into the big rooms. Then from there, it had to be not too long before we were shuttled off to the mountains. So it had to be ’72, and then the bombing, Linebacker I, Linebacker II started.90 We went, a large number of us, off into the mountains.

We talked about escaping. We could have escaped from Dog Patch, but by that time, we were convinced that the war was really going to end, because of the bombing, B-52s and others, that we just thought we’d tough it out. So we did; we toughed it out for whatever it was, the four months or so we lived up at Dog Patch. Then they brought us back in January of ’73, and then we knew it was over.

DePue: Well, I do want to talk a little bit more about Linebacker I and II and the end experiences, but I’ve got a few more questions I wanted to pursue before that time. One of them, you’d mentioned yourself the fear that there’d be delegations coming in. I understand there were people visiting; there were delegations that were―

Borling: There were, and they would torture people to go see them in the early years. Whoever broke first got to go see the delegation kind of thing. Then the Cubans would pull people out and take them to the thing. I never saw a delegation. I’d been tortured to see a delegation, but I never saw one. Not that I was particularly brave; I was just a little braver than the other guys. You’d listen to the screams and the things that they were doing. They were literally hurting people badly to get to agree to go and give the party line at the…What is it? Lenient and human treatment, that was the word, lenient and human treatment, and the war is wrong.

DePue: Who were the groups that were coming in? Were you getting some information about that?

Borling: Some were Americans, Noam Chomsky and some peacenik groups, Jane Fonda, obviously; other international peace groups, Swedes and French; Wilfred Burchett, some kind of Australian quasi-newsman, who was in the tank with the gooks. But again, I can’t speak to it, and the pressures that a lot of these people went under. There were people, that small number, who made tapes and who did things that were antiwar, but we’re talking four or five, six people. This was also the early release business.

90 Linebacker was the codename of a U.S. Seventh Air Force and U.S. Navy Task Force 77 air interdiction campaign conducted against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) from 9 May to 23 October 1972 to halt or slow the transportation of supplies and materials for the Nguyen Hue Offensive. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Linebacker)

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Early release, god, I’m glad they never offered it to me. It would have been such a test to turn it down. They never offered it, and frankly, I’m glad they didn’t; I didn’t want it. The policy was, you go out on the order we went in. Sick and wounded could go out, but you did not accept early release. Now the people that did accept―

DePue: Go out, meaning be released and turned back to American control?

Borling: Turned back to American. There were probably twelve or fifteen that were. All of them, save one, violated orders and are not accepted in the community of POWs to this day.

DePue: Violated orders, while they were within the camp?

Borling: Yeah, violated that you don’t accept early release. They would take people that they had never been tortured, people that were not there a long time, people who didn’t have an institutional understanding of what was going on, and they hadn’t been sequestered from the old time guys―we’re talking shoot-downs in the ’69, ’70, ’71 timeframe―except one guy, who was Doug Hegdahl, who was a seaman basic.

He fell off the fantail of a ship, into the Tonkin Gulf, and was swimming around. They picked him up and thought he was a CIA agent, swimming ashore to do dirty. They tortured the hell out of this kid.

DePue: You mentioned that all but one violated orders. Whose orders were these?

Borling: These were the SRO’s orders, Stockdale and Risner and…They offered McCain early release; he turned it down. John could have done it, because he was all beat up, but he knew they were releasing him because of his father, who was CINCPAC [Commander in Chief, Pacific Command], CINCPAC Fleet, I guess, CINCPAC.

The others who went…In fact, when Hegdahl left…They left from a place normally called the Plantation. I’d never been to the Plantation, but it was known as a Hollywood camp. It was like the camp I was describing, only earlier on, with some differences, I guess. I don’t know; I wasn’t there, so I can’t speak to it. But the Plantation was… Boy, you were moved to plantation, (whistles); they don’t torture; they don’t beat you up; they don’t…very relaxed. That’s where all the guys who were released were released from. Hegdahl was there. I guess he’d split from Stratton at that point.

So, these guys, they go out with the peace delegation. The two guys― there was a three person release―go off with the peace delegation. They were going to fly out through Moscow and through wherever, Paris. Hegdahl was lagging; he won’t walk with them. Here’s two officers, majors, and Hegdahl’s walking, and he said, “I won’t do it.”

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There was a military…When they got to the first stop, like Moscow or wherever, the U.S. Military was there. The other guys said, “No, we’re going to stay with the peace people.” Hegdahl threw himself into the arms of the military. They took him out of Moscow, and he went back. He’s the only guy that I know who went back through military routes. The rest of them got back, and (long pause) we don’t have anything to do with them.

DePue: That sounds like your folks had great respect for the way Hegdahl handled himself.

Borling: Oh, we did. We did, and we do, yeah. He came back, and he was the first guy to have a complete rendition of the names. It’s kind of like me with the poems, dumping them into a tape recorder. Hegdahl, said, “I’ve got to…” The minute he got there, he said, “You have to record this.” And he went through. It was the first time that they had a complete rendition of the names, every name that we were aware of in the system. These other guys didn’t know shit, didn’t try to do shit.

DePue: You mentioned Jane Fonda.

Borling: But they have to live with it.

DePue: I’m sure you were aware that there’s been this persistent thing that’s gone around on the Internet about her meeting people and―

Borling: There was a lot of false stuff with Jane Fonda, but in the end, she didn’t do us any favors and caused us a lot of problems. There’s so much folklore about she gave secret messages back to the gooks, and she did this, and she did that. Some of it’s wrong, but the fact is that she was a net minus for us and used as a hammer to try to exact statements and thoughts about the war and all that business.

DePue: Can you explain how she would have been used to try to coerce you guys to make statements?

Borling: Oh, I could imagine a couple of ways. (both laugh)

DePue: That she would agree to do?

Borling: I fantasized, after seeing her in that Oscar dress this last year, that we ought to have invited her to that fortieth reunion of the POWs out at the Nixon Library, that we had, to replicate the ’73 party that President Nixon had for us at the White House. We could put her up at the head table, behind a banner, “Jane Fonda screws POWs for the last time.” (DePue laughs)

There was also a thing when she had a bunch of Vietnam vets, like thirty or forty of them. This is when she was making her apology, her public apology. She would take each one of them off into a room and offer what she

179 John Borling Interview # VRV-A-L-2013-037.01

described as a private apology. Well, the word going around is, it’s kind of a Mamie Stover blowjob session, you know.91 You know who Mamie Stover is?

DePue: I don’t think I do.

Borling: Read William Bradford Huie, The Revolt of Mamie Stover.

DePue: Stoffer?

Borling: Stover, S-t-o-v-e-r. Mamie Stover. It’s a great book out of World War II. But anyway, so that was…I don’t think a lot about Jane Fonda. Some of the people, I guess, who had contact with her nurse an abiding hate.

DePue: Let’s talk about hate as a factor in helping―

Borling: As a motivator?

DePue: As a motivator.

Borling: I suspect all of us had elements of hate that we used. But if you let hate get in the way of…In my view, if you let hate become the prime motivator, then often your actions were irrational. The real chore was to somehow keep it firm and professional and let them know that you were unbending in your beliefs, and they couldn’t get you on the cheap, or they couldn’t get you at all. The guys who were haters, for the most part, ended up giving more because— again, this is my impression, my judgment—because they would take that hate and then translate it into actions that were unacceptable, that would have been unacceptable to us. It would have been like the guys at Guantanamo taking a swing at you every time you opened the door or offering physical altercation or verbal for that matter.92 The guys who operated on hate, I think, on the whole, had a rougher time, although we all hated to an extent.

I think we all may have gotten…You were so starved for normal human interaction that any lessening of tension or any sign of humanness or a smile on the part of a guard, that’s a good sign. We would talk good signs, bad signs. Hey, it’s a good sign, the Kid…One of the guards was named the Kid; he was an easy one. He was always…friendly is the right word, although when other people would come around, boy, then they’d get stern. So there were some “friendly” guards, and we responded to that. We acknowledged that. I think that was psychologically affirming. It wasn’t like we were going

91 The novel, The Revolt of Maime Stover, set in the early 1940s, is about a San Francisco prostitute who is run out of town just as the second World War has begun to intensify. She hopes to start a new life in Hawaii. (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049672/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl) 92 The Guantanamo Bay detention camp is a United States military prison, located within Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba was established in 2002, during the War on Terror. The inmates have been detained indefinitely, without trial, and several detainees have alleged torture. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp)

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to go out square dancing together or anything, but it was…So there was that mini-Stockholm syndrome.

On the other side, you had the Cubans who would come in and play good guys, as reported, and then just turn into raving maniacs. It was like you were dealing with some kind of psychotic series of creatures, where one day it’s hug you and love you and give you sweets from Cuba. The next day they come in and rip off their belts and start beating you around the heads and shoulders. It’s almost like they were trying to create a dog syndrome, where if you’re nice to the dog, the dog will come and love you. Then you beat the shit out of the dog, but the dog comes back, hoping you’re going to love again. All this stuff was in play one way or another. Me, I just tried to keep it.

Our guys…When I was in charge of rooms, we don’t give them anything. That’s why that session, going back, it bridles me even today, that camera thing. I think we got had there. In fact, that film made it out into some Western thing. Myrna saw it; it got over to her. There I am, shooting a basket or something, and she knew that was a change, an aberration. But like I say, I’ve often thought that [we] got had. I wasn’t proud that we…If there was one thing I could take back out of that whole prison experience, I would take that moment in time back.

DePue: But I would think that Myrna saw that and was uplifted by the thought that you were okay.

Borling: Yeah, she was; she was, yeah, but that’s not reason enough.

DePue: (laughs) I understand. I want you to talk a little bit about―

Borling: In fact, I have felt so badly about that, that this is the first time I’ve ever talked about that. It’s no expiation of the soul thing; it’s just being honest. If queried, I would be honest about that, that that period, that two minute period that I consider to be exploitation, weighs heavily on me, even though I wasn’t in charge, even though we made the…I’ve got all the qualifiers you want but wish we hadn’t gotten suckered, and we got suckered. This sounds awfully defensive, and I keep wrestling with this in my mind. This is something I’ve carried with me for a long time. It was more a sin of omission than commission. Okay, new subject.

DePue: Well, the new subject is contact with home, contact with Myrna and finding out news about what was going on in the outside world.

Borling: Four or five years out, five years out, five or six years out, I got a photograph of my dog on a sofa. I knew it was my dog, a poodle. I didn’t recognize the sofa, so I figured Myrna was squandering my money, buying furniture. Then I got a picture of her and the family and a letter, six lines. I think I got four or five letters in the course of the six and a half years, and I got―

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DePue: How did you get this photo? Did they just―

Borling: Myrna was getting mail and sending mail all the time. They were just shit- canning it. As a psychological thing they’d say, “Ah, we have communication from home,” and they gave me a picture of my dog. It said, “Topsy” on the back, Topsy, which is the name of our dog. So I thought, Yeah, that’s our dog. That was my first contact, a picture of the fucking dog on the sofa.

I will tell you something else. In ’70—we’re talking about how treatment improved—but in June of ’70, July of ’70, I’m getting hammered for some reason, I mean just ripped apart. I don’t remember what it was. They’ve got me all tied up. I still have my lock pick. I’m in the hell cuffs, but I’ve loosened them up. And they’ve got me in leg irons; I can’t get the leg irons done, but I can scoot. They had me in ropes, but the ropes were loose. They left me alone. I was in this room with a desk. I got over [to] the desk, scooted over. I open it up; it’s full of letters.

So I ripped all the letters. I’m looking at all the letters, trying to figure out if there’s one for me in there. Oh, there’s one for a guy two cells down, so I open that real quick. It’s a letter from his wife, divorcing him. I put that back, never told him. She did. I’m looking at letters, and there wasn’t anything there for anybody else that I knew or that I had contact with or for me.

About this time, they hit me. Well, I wasn’t going to let any of this stuff go; I’m still doing this. I did manage to scrunch the things down again. They come in, and oh, god, they’re insane. They jump me, and they were ripping this stuff out of my hands. The last thing they rip out of my hands is a letter, an envelope, and there’s a stamp on the envelope. Do you know what the stamp is?

DePue: No.

Borling: Man on the moon. I look at that, and the next thing I know, I’m being beat down, rifle butts and stuff. Oh, they went crazy. A couple weeks later…I don’t even remember what the thing was. I didn’t give them what they wanted. Maybe it was a delegation visit; I don’t know, but I didn’t give it to them. But they kept me there, and they hurt me a lot. They switched stuff out and ropes and things. They finally just threw me back into the cell. I was alone in this cell and really kind of hurting, but I had news.

I tapped on the wall (taps on the table). I remember exactly what I tapped. It took me a while to get myself back together, because my hands weren’t working right, and I said [tapped], “We own the moon.” We didn’t know; this is 1970, a year later. Even now, I get an operatic chill that god, we own the moon! That message—this is still in the Zoo—and the message went out. So this is ’70, pre-Son Tay, and they had a big move out of the camp. But

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that message spread like wildfire. We’d had no contact, this group of us, with anybody who was shot down in ’69 or ’70. I said, “I saw a stamp with a man on the moon.” That carried us for a long time.

There’s a postscript to that story; it goes forward several years, many years. I’m in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, just off the Oval Office. I’m in a meeting, White House meeting. I’m on White House staff as a White House Fellow. Jack Schmidt is sitting across from me. I think [Vice President] Dick Cheney was chairing the meeting, actually.93 I said, “Jack,” I said, “I need to tell you this story.” I made the introductions, and Cheney’s down there.

The meeting hasn’t started. But people listened to the story, and I’m telling it around the table. It’s not a big conference table; it goes from here to maybe the chair in there. Everyone was listening, and I said, “You have no idea how important that was to us.” And I said, “I’ve never had a chance to tell an astronaut who has been on the moon that story.” Well, he [Schmitt] starts crying. We’re at the end of the table; he comes up, and so I stood up, and we give each other…Now we’re both crying, and everybody in the room is just, “Oh my god.” I think it was Dick who said, “Can we start the meeting?” (both laugh)

Anyway, so we sat down, and that afternoon—and I’ll show it to you in my office, you saw it—there’s a picture, it was an astronaut picture of a guy on the moon with an American flag and an earth-rise coming up over his shoulder and the inscription, “Glad we could help, Jack Schmidt.” Boy, will I ever give that one away? That one’s going to get buried with me or put in the museum here at Memorial Hall, with the story, just like the ring story. The ring will end up there too. You asked a question; I gave you another story of that timeframe. Isn’t that amazing?

DePue: That is incredible. I would imagine, if the North Vietnamese guards were getting letters from wives who were threatening to divorce these guys―

Borling: Oh, that guy got that letter, by the way.

DePue: That was my point.

Borling: He got that letter.

DePue: Because that would be part of the psychological warfare.

93 Harrison "Jack" Schmitt, a geologist, was the first professional scientist to walk on the moon. In December 1972, he and Gene Cernan spent three days on the moon's surface, logging a record 301 hours on the surface and collecting a record 249 pounds of lunar material. (http://biography.yourdictionary.com/jack-schmitt)

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Borling: Any time you got bad news, dad died―for the guys who were letter writers, boy that message got through―or I’m broke or I’m divorcing you, or god, I’ve got syphilis, whatever it was.

DePue: How about letters going the other direction?

Borling: For the letter writers, as I said, there was some modest ability to communicate for a few guys, over the years. But the letter writing thing, where we all got six-line letters, started somewhere in ’71, I would guess, yeah, ’71.

DePue: Six-line letters.

Borling: Along, at the same time with the packages, six-line letters, yeah, ’70, ’71; I don’t remember, but late. I remember it was five years, five-plus years, before I got a letter and before I received a letter. It was six lines.

DePue: Why did they restrict you to just six lines? You’re shaking your head; you have no idea. Were you hearing things like stories about the antiwar protests back in the United States?

Borling: Oh, yeah, all the time, yeah. The Kent State killings and the marches on Washington, and this and that.94

DePue: The ’68 Democratic Convention?

Borling: Yeah, on the Logan statue in Chicago, by the way. The Logan statue was a gift of Saint-Gaudens. I showed you my Menna sculpture upstairs. The last great memorial sculpture of the last 400, 500 years was Augustus Saint- Gaudens. That’s that statue of General Logan, Major General—I’m partial to major generals—John A. Logan, on his horse, Blackjack, with the furled banner, about three blocks south of the Hilton on Michigan Avenue. That’s where we do the Memorial Day ceremony. I did the rededication in 1997, which was 100 years from the dedication of that statue, 1897, a quarter million people surrounding it for the dedication.

Logan was a very popular Union general, one of Lincoln’s generals, a Douglas supporter originally, kept southern Illinois in the union. There was a successionary movement in those days for Illinois—at least that part of it—to join the Confederacy. He was a southern rear general, later became the commanding general of the Grand Army of the Republic, which is like the American Legion or Foreign Legion. This was the guy who, through his

94 The Kent State shootings (also known as the May 4 massacre or the Kent State massacre) were the shootings on May 4, 1970, of unarmed college students by members of the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, during a mass protest against the bombing of Cambodia by United States military forces during the Vietnam War. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings)

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general order—number nine I believe—established Decoration Day; that then morphed into Memorial Day over the years.

DePue: He’s still considered the best of what they called the “political generals” of the era. He was a brilliant general.

Borling: He was and a congressman, et cetera.

DePue: A senator.

Borling: No, I don’t think he was a senator. But we can check each other on that.95 But we do this ceremony, ever since 1997, at the Logan statue on Memorial Day, which, of course, has morphed from…It’s now into the three-day weekend, and people don’t do Memorial Day like they used to. We’ll get a couple hundred people out, 250 maybe, have a laying of wreaths and firing squads and bugles. I MC [master of ceremonies]. Now we have leavening the loaf, but it’s a meaningful circumstance.

DePue: When did you find out that Richard Nixon was president?

Borling: When he was elected.

DePue: They did tell you that?

Borling: Yeah, sure, yeah. There was no secret about that.

DePue: Even though I’m sure the Communists viewed that not in a good light, because they would have preferred Hubert Humphrey.

Borling: Yeah, they would have beat up on any president. They were always looking for somebody to say something anti-war. The McGovern thing was big news.96 But they would always give you the slant.

I remember one thing that backfired on them. They talked about how a ship was commandeered by the Cambodians, that was seized in the port or seas, violating Cambodian waters, and taken into the Cambodian port there at Phnom Penh or wherever it was. Then we didn’t hear anything else, except that they came out with a diatribe some time later about the coup being staged by counter-revolutionary forces that came off a boat. (both laugh) So it was a CIA ploy, to get…It was the Trojan horse thing, and then they took over the thing.

95 John A. Logan was elected county clerk in 1849, served in the Illinois House of Representatives from 1853 to 1854 and in 1857; and for a time, during the interval, was prosecuting attorney of the Third Judicial District of Illinois. In 1858 and 1860, he was elected as a Democrat to the U.S. House of Representatives. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_A._Logan) 96 Senator George McGovern gave an antiwar address in Chicago, during his presidential campaign in 1968, becoming an icon of the antiwar movement. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_McGovern)

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DePue: I think we’re bumping up into a timeframe when you said you’re going to have to stop today.

Borling: Noon is going to be about it, I’m afraid.

DePue: Let me just ask you, I think, a very quick question here.

Borling: You haven’t talked anything about after the war.

DePue: Well, I haven’t gotten there yet, no. We’re going to have to save that for next time.

Borling: Oh, Jesus, what am I? You and I are lifelong hobbies, one to another here?

DePue: Well―

Borling: All right, ask your questions quickly, yes, no, maybe.

DePue: I wanted to get your impressions of James Stockdale and John McCain and a couple of the more famous prisoners.

Borling: I don’t have anything but good things to say about all of them. I knew Jim early on, wasn’t with him for many years, until the end. I lived with John later on, briefly, and had a good opinion of him, a patriot, hell-raiser, tough guy, quick temper, but you knew where he was coming from. Robbie Risner, who I’d lived next to in the early years, hero. I flew my first F-100 with Robbie Risner as a cadet at the academy. Here he’s a hero, living next to him. (vacuuming in the background) I suspect you’ll pick up the sound of the vacuum, but that’s the way it goes.

DePue: Yeah. One other quick question. You went in as a lieutenant when you were captured.

Borling: Came out as a captain.

DePue: How did you get promoted?

Borling: They promoted us on time. Myrna tried to get them to promote me early. She said, “He’s so good, he ought to be promoted early.”

DePue: Did you know you’d been promoted?

Borling: No. We all kept the date of rank…That was always something about…Here you’re a lieutenant, and then a guy comes in as a captain, but he was junior to you. We made some kind of adjustment, but the rank thing was really… Unless you were a super-senior guy, a colonel or a general, that didn’t make any difference.

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DePue: Thank you. Well, this is probably a decent place for us to stop. Any final comments for today?

Borling: No, Mark, I think you’re exhausting. (DePue laughs) You’ve got me now, where selfishly I think that there might be some kind of editable work that comes off of this that we might use for some larger story at a point, rather than some archive document gathering dust in the bowels of the Lincoln Library in Springfield.

As you know, I am a Lincoln Academy guy and proud to be nominated to be a regent now.97 That’s going to happen, I’m told. I had lunch with Tom Johnson, the chancellor, yesterday, and that’s going to happen here in May as we celebrate our fiftieth anniversary of the Lincoln Academy.

DePue: Thank you very much, General.

Borling: Well, thank you.

(end of transcript #04)

(end of volume #01)

97 The Lincoln Academy of Illinois, named for Abraham Lincoln, is a not-for-profit and non-partisan organization dedicated to recognizing contributions made by living Illinoisans. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lincoln_Academy_of_Illinois)

187