Rather than dwell on the hellish experience, he plunged enthusiastically into a new life—as a family man, a teen counselor and eventually a congressman. Now Peterson, 61, takes on his biggest challenge. The Senate is soon expected to confirm him as the nation's first ambassador to postwar Vietnam. Despite all he endured at the hands of the North Vietnamese, Peterson relishes the post's possibilities. "We all have to work with them and see them not as a war but as a country," he says. "I think maybe I can be the bridge."
Such an attitude would have been unthinkable three decades ago, as Captain Peterson sat wasting in prison. He and fellow airman Bernard Taliey had set out from Thailand in their F-4 Phantom on the night of Sept. 10, 1966, with orders to bomb railroad yards near Hanoi. Just after Peterson dropped a flare to light his target, a missile struck and he and Taliey ejected. Peterson landed in a tree, unconscious, with a broken right arm, shoulder and leg. His captors paraded him through villages of screaming, rock-throwing crowds. "It was pretty close to a lynching," he says.
One of 3,000 captives in the notorious Hanoi Hilton, Peterson endured seemingly endless rounds of interrogation and torture. "I was out of my mind for a while," he says. Yet Peterson stubbornly resisted providing any information his captors could use. "You'd give them crazy things, and they'd give you a reprieve to regain your strength," he says. "Then they'd come back and do it again." Surviving on insects and contaminated water, he meditated and spent months on imaginary projects like building a house. "We did a lot of praying," says Peterson, a Catholic, "and got very serious about it."
Born the ninth of 10 children of a U.S. Postal Service mechanic and his homemaker wife, Peterson grew up in Omaha and later in small towns in Missouri and Iowa before dropping out of college to join the Air Force in 1954. He met Carlotta Neal, a flight dispatcher in Marianna, Fla., when he did his pilot training, and they married in 1956. When Peterson left for South-east Asia 10 years later, Carlotta was eight months pregnant with son Douglas and caring for Mike, then 8, and Paula, 7. After Peterson's capture, she had no word of him for more than three years until she spotted him in propaganda footage on a December 1969 newscast. She traveled to Vietnam and Laos to speak out for POWs but didn't see him again until the war ended and he was finally released.
"Getting back was a twilight zone," Peterson says. "We didn't want to sleep. We wanted to make up time. That's still a problem. I feel I'm making up time." Retiring from the Air Force in 1981, he moved his family to Tampa, where he started a small construction business. But tragedy struck in 1983, when Douglas, 17, was killed in an auto accident. "It was a devastating blow," Peterson says, "worse than prison."
Traumatized, the family moved back to Marianna, Carlotta's hometown, where Peterson and a partner launched a computer business, and in 1985 he became director of a treatment program for hard-core teen offenders. "I had been in prison," he says. "I knew what being locked up meant." Partially because of his experience, his effect on the boys was "enormous," says Wally Kennedy, a psychologist with the program: "When they could get the respect of somebody like him, it made them feel better about themselves."
In 1990, despite his lack of political experience, Peterson ran for Congress as a moderate Democrat. "I wanted to test if someone could come off the street and win," he says. The answer was yes, and he easily won three straight terms. But in 1995, Carlotta died of breast cancer and Peterson, weary of the increasingly partisan atmosphere in Washington, chose not to run again. Now, after two trips back to Vietnam, he is ready to tackle the controversial issues surrounding his new post, including the possibility that any fellow POWs or MIAs remain alive. "The chances," he concedes, "are very low." As for himself, he has made peace with the past. "Being a POW is not my thing," Peterson says. "I finished with that when I came home. I want to be judged on the future."
THOMAS FIELDS-MEYER
SANDRA McELWAINE in Washington and DON SIDER in Florida
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