Virginia Historical Society Podcast

On April 5, 2019, Heath Hardage Lee delivered the Banner Lecture, "The League of Wives: The Untold Story of the Women Who Took on the U.S. Government to Bring Their Husbands Home from Vietnam." On February 12, 1973, one hundred and fifteen men who, just six years earlier, had been high flying Navy and Air Force pilots, shuffled, limped, or were carried off a huge military transport plane at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. These American servicemen had endured years of brutal torture, shackled and starved in solitary confinement, in rat-infested, mosquito-laden prisons, the worst of which was The Hanoi Hilton. Months later, this first group of Vietnam POWs to return home would learn that their rescuers were their wives, a group of women led by Sybil Stockdale and including Jane Denton, Louise Mulligan, Andrea Rander, Phyllis Galanti, and Helene Knapp. The POW-MIA advocacy group Sybil and her "League of Wives" created, The National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, went