Two Souls Indivisible: The Friendship That Saved Two POWs in Vietnam Hardcover – January 1, 2004 by James S. Hirsch
 
The author of Hurricane moves from the life of a boxer imprisoned for murder to the real-life incarceration of two American pilots in a Vietnamese prison camp during the war, where survival depends on mutual support.
 
From Publishers Weekly
Dozens of men held prisoner by the North Vietnamese were brutally tortured physically and emotionally for years on end. Among them were Fred Cherry, an air force F-104 fighter-bomber pilot and the highest-ranking black POW, and Porter Halyburton, a white navy F-4 Phantom jet navigator from North Carolina. Cherry, who was severely wounded when he was shot down near Hanoi in October 1965, was tortured as his captors tried, without success, to coerce him into signing antiwar statements urging black servicemen to give up the fight. Cherry would not have survived his ordeal without the care he received from Halyburton, whom the North Vietnamese placed in Cherry's cell in an effort to foster enmity between the two. Halyburton cleaned Cherry's wounds, bathed him when Cherry was too weak to move and did other yeoman, life-saving work for nearly eight months. This amazing story of courage, friendship and dedication to ideals was told briefly in Wallace Terry's excellent oral history, Bloods (1984). It is related here in depth and exceptionally well by Hirsch (Hurricane), a former Wall Street Journal and New York Times reporter. Hirsch has crafted a well-researched, cleanly and clearly written account that chronicles Cherry and Halyburton's lives before and after the war, but concentrates on their day-to-day struggles in Hoa Lo Prison, also known as the Hanoi Hilton, from 1965 to 1973. This is a compelling story told compellingly well.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
 
7.11