It took 25 years, but Barb Newell has finally met the Prisoner of War whose bracelet she wore in 1972.
Newell had thought she and Glendon Perkins would meet in November, during Veterans Day activities. Earlier she had traced him to Florida, made contact and invited him to be guest speaker at one of Emporia’s Veterans Tribute Week events. Perkins accepted, and both he and Newell were eager to be acquainted beyond e-mail exchanges.
Perkins encountered a health problem shortly before his scheduled trip, though, and had to cancel plans to come to Emporia with his wife Kay.
“I was so sad and disappointed when I heard ... they would not be able to travel to Emporia,” Newell said in an interview in late October. “I told Glendon that I had cried twice when reading e-mails from him — once when he told me they could come to Kansas in November, and then last week when he told me they couldn’t.”
Newell was discouraged but not deterred. Late last month she and a friend, Tammy Just, traveled to Orlando to visit the Perkins at their home.
“I was so nervous and so happy,” she said last week after returning home. “It was wonderful. I felt like we’d known them for a long time. We were welcomed literally with open arms.”
On return to the Perkins’ home after lunch, they sat down for a visit.
“Of course I wasn’t going to ask anything,” Newell said. “Anything he wanted to tell us about his seven years of captivity, we wanted to know everything, but at the same time, we were going to ask nothing.”
Within an hour or so, the stories began pouring out and continued until midnight. They listened while Glendon Perkins talked about being a prisoner of war. He talked about the torture he and the others had undergone and the coping mechanisms they’d resorted to in order to survive emotionally.
Perkins told of another prisoner who’d fashioned a needle from a nail, torn up a pair of underwear to obtain thread, and sewn a “little pocket watch” to give to Perkins in honor of a milestone anniversary in the Air Force.
“He’d said, ‘Congratulations. This is your gold watch,’ ” Newell said. “That was exactly the kind of thing that kept him sane. They tapped on walls, figured out ways to do hand signals from windows. And it was always at the risk of being caught and tortured more, and they just risked it.”
They learned that Kay had been exceptionally active on the home front. They already knew that she and Glendon had married at the ages of 16 and 19, respectively. They knew that Kay took over family responsibilities for herself and their four children; she became a working mother, joined a POW wives’ group and began giving speeches to gain release of prisoners in Southeast Asia.
“She had fabulous stories of her own,” Newell said. “She was so active at home while he was in captivity. ... She went to the Paris Peace Talks.”
Glendon Perkins told the women they would have to tell him when “enough is enough.”
“And I said, ‘When you need to get a drink of water, go get it,’ because I was absolutely fascinated,” Newell said.
They watched a documentary about prisoners of war in Vietnam, and Perkins pointed out a man named Mark with whom he’d shared a cell for a couple of months.
“And she’d say, ‘I met his wife,’ ” Newell said. “(The documentary) was being narrated by these people who were sitting right there. It was incredible.”
He recognized a North Vietnamese man the prisoners had called “Rabbit” as the man read names of prisoners who were being released to board an airplane to return to the United States.
Glendon Perkins then put in a DVD that had been transferred from a reel-to-reel film. It was a special Bill Moyers had done on families of POWs, and Kay and the children were a featured story.
“We looked around at times during both of these, and all four of us were crying,” Newell said.
Perkins showed them the souvenirs of his seven-year imprisonment — soap, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and his tin cup, as well as the hand-made “gold watch.”
The Emporians heard about Glendon Perkins’ victory over the unpredictability of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and the kindnesses extended by Orlando residents when they recognized him on the street or in restaurants.
Perkins was one of two POWs released a little earlier than the rest because of serious family illnesses at home. His picture stepping off the plane had been distributed by news wire services and his face was familiar to many people.
He and the family learned to live together again, unlike some POWs and their families. The Perkinses still live in the same attractive ranch-style home they did in 1973; he gardens and grows roses, and made a Secret Garden setting in the back yard for his grandchildren.
The morning after the stories and the films, Perkins told Newell that he’d forgotten how healthy it could be to talk about his experiences.
“And he said, ‘I don’t mean just to a group of people at a meeting, but I mean to friends. People who want to listen.’ And I about lost it, it was so heartfelt and so nice.”
Newell said that Perkins’ trust in talking freely about his ordeal had meant a great deal to her. And the visit at the Perkins home was not all serious. The Emporians enjoyed the lighthearted moments when Perkins teased and told jokes. The trip, Newell said, was an experience beyond what she could have imagined.
“If you’d had me write down before I left what the best possible scenario could have been,” she said, “it was better.