An Unwavering Fight for Honor
BOOK REVIEW: Unwavering: The Wives Who Fought to Ensure No Man is Left Behind
By Taylor Baldwin Kiland and Judy Silverstein Gray/ Post Hill Press
Reviewed by Monica Kuhlmann Ferrara
The Reviewer: Monica Kuhlmann Ferrara was 12 when her father, US Air Force Major Charles F. Kuhlmann was shot down on September 22, 1968. 27 years later, his remains were found, recovered, and buried at Arlington National Cemetery, attended by his wife, Charlotte and four children. Like her father, Monica was commissioned into the Air Force where she met her husband, a career officer with combat experience as a flyer. All three of their children have served in the US government. She is a former member of the Board of Governors at the National Military Family Association.
REVIEW – As I read Unwavering: The Wives Who Fought to Ensure No Man is Left Behind, the memories flooded back. This is the story of military wives who have gathered together to fight for their husbands who were prisoners of war or missing in action in Southeast Asia. Geographically scattered across the country and warned not to take any public action, this group of women pushed both North Vietnam and their own government for the accounting and return of their men. My father, an A-1 pilot, was one of them.
Authors Taylor Baldwin Kiland and Judy Silverstein Gray both served in the military and are familiar with military hierarchy and protocols. They clearly capture the changing social era of the Sixties and Seventies with anti-war protests and rising feminism. They describe in detail how POW/MIA wives transitioned from traditional housewives to activists as they formed the National League of Families of POWs and MIAs in Southeast Asia. Kiland and Gray also establish how the prisoners became a political issue for the government. Americans’ public focus changed from anti-war protesting to bringing our prisoners of war home. As an organized group, the National League could not be brushed off as easily as a junior officer’s young wife.
Unwavering reads like a novel but the research is accurate. Kiland and Gray cover the historical and political aspects of the era. They also capture the feelings and efforts of family members through exhaustive interviews, giving the reader insight on personal accounts and details. They give us real people instead of characters in a story. The resilience and determination of these women and the many other POW/MIA wives was amazing especially through those difficult times.
As with the families written about in the book, the military told my own family not to reveal my father’s status which was listed as MIA/PKIA/PFOD, (missing in action/presumed killed in action/presumed finding of death). As military wives who had moved every couple of years, (most were single-income families) monthly bills continued to come in and life insurance was not paid until a death certificate was issued. In our case, that was 27 years after my father was shot down in Laos. And even then, survivor benefits were not as adequate as they are today. Asking for a change in status from ‘Missing’ to ‘Killed-in-Action’ meant the military would make no further effort to recover remains. This was understandable for many young and newly married wives who wanted to move on but unthinkable for longer established families. Family financial decisions were complicated by uncertainty. When the final batch of POWs was returned in 1973, many considered it the end of the story.
Unwavering documents the continuing accounting of the MIAs through the under-funded and under-staffed years. The Joint Task Force-Full Accounting, now relabeled as the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) in Hawaii, has many outstanding dedicated people who strive in every way to research and dig up crash sites. I can testify that their efforts to find, recover and identify my father’s remains were heroic. Twenty-five-year-old unexploded ordinance was only the beginning.
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Through the Johnson and Nixon administrations, the League made the POW/MIA issue active and troublesome. Then they struggled through the long silence of the Ford and Carter years. As Kiland and Gray relate, there were many questions asked about the unaccounted and there were many theories. The recovery rate was slow. But when Vietnam wanted more recognition as a nation in the 1990s, they were more willing to provide access and information leading to the recovery of remains. By then, time and the growing age of any remaining MIAs had shifted the nature of the problem.
This methodical telling of deceit and disregard for the lives of American service men by their own government is a shameful history. Unwavering raises questions about the responsibility of government that is owed to the service members they send into combat and to the families who are left to cope at home. Since Vietnam, the United States has not been confronted with large numbers of POWs and MIAs and their families. How is our government to be held accountable for our service members today?
For this extremely well researched and accurate account, I give this book four Trench Coats.
This book earns a prestigious four out of four trench coats.
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