Maine Military Museum honors Vietnam War POWs

SOUTH PORTLAND — The reading room at the Maine Military Museum and Learning Center is quiet, the kind of stillness that comes from walls lined with shadow boxes and folded flags. But on Wednesday, the space held a different weight. Two men stood near a recreation of a North Vietnamese prison cell — a concrete box barely wider than the area rug at their feet — and spoke about the 2,402 days they each spent inside the real thing.

Retired Col. Michael Brazelton and retired Maj. Gen. John Borling didn’t plan to meet in a museum in Maine. Brazelton lives in the state; Borling traveled from Illinois. But their paths converged in the same sky over North Vietnam more than half a century ago, when both Air Force fighter pilots were shot down within months of each other in 1966. They would spend the next six and a half years in the Hanoi prison system — Brazelton at the infamous "Hanoi Hilton," Borling moved through a circuit of camps the prisoners named Heartbreak Hotel, the Zoo, and Little Vegas.

On Wednesday, they stood shoulder to shoulder in South Portland, not as symbols, but as witnesses.

"This place," Brazelton said, gesturing toward the exhibits, "they seem to tell the POW story."

That story was the life’s work of Lee Humiston, the museum’s founder, who died in April at 86. Humiston spent decades collecting artifacts, letters, and oral histories from returning prisoners, determined that the specifics of their captivity — the tap code scratched through walls, the propaganda demands, the years of solitary confinement — would not flatten into a footnote. Volunteer Thomas Lundy recorded video as the two men moved through the Vietnam exhibit, capturing stories that have been told at reunions and in newsletters for decades, but rarely in a room built specifically to hold them.

Brazelton was 23 when his F-105 Thunderchief went down. He had wanted to fly since seventh grade, earned his license at 19, and had flown more than a hundred combat missions before the missile found him. He was the first in his squadron to be captured.

"One day, you're standing at a bar," he said. "The next, you're in a little cell by yourself."

He remembers crying in that cell. The dimensions were near-exact to the museum’s replica: seven feet by seven feet, a bucket in the corner, a light that never went out. Borling, who lost a third of his squadron in six months before his own shoot-down, described the tap code that became their lifeline — five-by-five grid, letters spelled out through concrete, knuckle against wall. It let them share news, prayers, jokes, and the names of new arrivals. The North Vietnamese guards considered it espionage. The punishment for tapping was severe; the punishment for stopping was worse.

Borling was ordered to write letters home confessing to war crimes. He refused. The result was months in irons, weeks in a cell so small he could not lie flat. "Our expressed desire was to survive and survive with honor," he said. "We wanted the people back home to be proud of us."

He thought of his wife, who never accepted the missing-in-action telegrams. His daughter, three months old when he deployed, grew up without him — and grew up to become a pilot herself.

Both men returned to the cockpit after their release in 1973, a rarity for former POWs. Both acknowledge the promotions and command slots they missed while the war moved on without them. "Life goes on," Borling said. "You still have to march."

Brazelton smiled. "I have all of my fingers. I married a beautiful woman. I have three daughters. Life turned out alright."

Before they left, museum staff unveiled a framed photograph of the two men, side by side, to be mounted permanently beside the cell replica. It will sit among the flight suits, the tap code charts, the letters smuggled out in hollowed-out toothpaste tubes — artifacts of a war that ended 50 years ago, tended by a museum that refuses to let the details fade.

Outside, the rain that had held off all morning began to fall on the museum’s roof. Inside, the reading room returned to its quiet. But the rug on the floor seemed smaller now.