Racist Turned Ministry

During the Vietnam War, two men were shot down over North Vietnam in separate incidents that occurred at about the same time.  One was Porter Halyburton, a Southern white boy who was something of a racist.  The other was Fred Cherry, the first black officer captured by the North Vietnamese.

The two men were thrown into the same cell amid the squalor of the infamous Hanoi Hilton, and it didn’t look like Fred Cherry would survive.  He had been seriously injured, and Porter soon discovered that he had to care for Fred in very personal ways, peeling off the clothes that were glued to his skin by pus, cleaning out his festering and decaying flesh, helping him get onto the waste bucket, washing and bathing him, and giving him his own food and clothes.  When Fred appeared to be near death, burning with fever, Porter hovered over him day and night, tending his loathsome wounds and exhorting him to hold on.

At one point, Fred hadn’t been able to wash his hair in months, and when he ran his hand through his thick Afro, he pulled out a glob of oil and smeared it on the ground.  Instantly an army of ants appeared from various cracks in the cell walls and began climbing up Fred’s body to get to his hair.  The two men tried to swat them off, but it was like a plague; there seemed to be million‘s of them.  Porter finally persuaded a guard to let him take Fred to the shower room.

Arriving there, they found the room repulsive.  It was cold, dark, and dirty.  The floor was covered with snails, and they stood in a quarter inch of slime.  Fred couldn’t move his arm because of his injury, so Porter helped him undress and positioned him under the cold water.  Then, rubbing soap in his hands, Porter began washing Fred’s hair.  At first nothing much happened, but finally the dirt, oil, and grease turned into a paste and began to ooze off his scalp and down his body.

“You won’t believe this,” Porter said.  “I’m going to have to wash your hair again.”  He washed the man’s hair again and again and again until finally he broke through the grease and grime.

After the men were finally liberated, Fred Cherry said that he would not have survived without Porter Halyburton.  But Porter said the reverse is also true.  Caring for Fred gave him a sense of mission and purpose, it enabled him to forget his own problems and serve someone else, and it taught him to love a brother in need.  And that, porter says, is why he survived the Hanoi Hilton.

David Jeremiah, Signs of Life, p. 227