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Love gives ex-POW 30 years of near-misses

ILWACO, Wash. — It was a 30-year courtship. Ed Leonard, the Vietnam flyboy, had fallen in love with a cute elementary school teacher named Suzanne. And Suzanne, well, she couldn’t get enough of Ed.

It should have been easy enough from there. But it wasn’t.

Ed’s plane was shot down over Vietnam in 1968. He spent five years enduring torture and eating bread smattered with rat feces in North Vietnam. Suzanne, sure he was dead, mourned and reluctantly moved on.

And yet, somehow, there they were Friday in their Ilwaco home: Ed, a 69-year-old retired lawyer making googly eyes at Suzanne. And Suzanne, 70, was making eyes right back at him.

Ed met Suzanne at a dance in the late 1950s. He was just 19, an Air Force pilot in training.

They went their separate ways, but never forgot each other.

By 1967, he was flying the Skyraider, a prop-driven powerhouse of a plane, during search-and-rescue missions over Southeast Asia.

“Our job was, when pilots went down in North Vietnam or Laos, we would go in and find them,” Ed said. “It always got complicated.”

During his 257 missions during the war, Ed rescued eight pilots. He blasted away at anti-aircraft positions. He rolled in to protect a pilot “who was getting hosed pretty badly” and ended up ditching his Skyraider in a rice paddy. He also unloaded his rockets and bullets during a near miss with two far-more-powerful enemy MiG jets.

But after losing a friend during one of his early missions, Ed said he got drunk, thought of Suzanne and decided to send her a letter.

“He remembered me in an alcoholic haze,” Suzanne said Friday.

Ed received Suzanne’s response in December of 1967, while he was recovering from hepatitis in the Philippines. She, too, was in the Philippines, teaching kindergarten, her letter said. If you’re ever here, stop by.

They were engaged, Ed said, within 12 hours of their reunion.

“Beautiful young school teacher. Heroic young fighter pilot,” he said.

Ed was supposed to head back to the Philippines to spend time with Suzanne the evening of May 31, 1968, when an F-4 went down in Laos. Ed went after the pilot but didn’t come back.

He said he still has trouble talking about his capture.

“I was not taught to lose,” he said Friday.

But this much is clear: His Skyraider went down. He survived on his own for three days. And then, he was snatched up by the enemy after he was discovered hiding in a tree.

“I was out of ammunition,” Ed said. “We’d had a gunfight and I’d shot up everybody. So I had no options. And I was captured.”

Suzanne hoped for a time that Ed could be alive. She’d heard reports that he’d been spotted running up a road after his plane went down. But then, the North Vietnamese released a list of U.S. prisoners. Ed wasn’t on it. Ed, she thought, was surely gone forever.

For five years, Ed was kept in North Vietnamese camps. The guards tied his arms behind his back, twisted his elbows and legs, hung him from the ceiling. They bashed his face with rifle butts. There was a six-month period when he couldn’t stand without help.

He was kept largely alone. He would prick his wrist with small pieces of bamboo and scrawl messages to his fellow POWs on rough toilet paper with his own blood: “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” “Hang tough.”

On Friday, he pointed to the white specks beneath his wrist watch. “That was my inkwell,” he said.

He thought of Suzanne. “All the time,” he said.

Ed was one of the last of the North Vietnamese prisoners to be released. When he returned, in 1973, he was treated to a dinner at the White House with President Nixon. It was one of several occasions when he would meet future Sen. John McCain, also a former prisoner of war.

Ed’s hometown of Winlock treated him to Christmas in the middle of May. People decorated the streets. Santa showed up on a fire engine. The event was featured on the cover of the Los Angeles Times.

“It was a wonderful idea,” Ed said.

But his return started a saga that would take Ed and Suzanne in and out of each other’s lives over the nearly three decades that followed.

As it turned out, Ed came home from Vietnam just six days after Suzanne had married another man.

“Boy, were we all surprised,” Suzanne said. “It wasn’t pleasant. I was married for 10 years. I knew right after the marriage occurred that it was a big mistake. I committed, so I stayed in it.”

Ed went to law school and worked as an insurance fraud prosecutor in Austin, Texas.

Suzanne and her first husband had two children. But the marriage ended in the early 1980s. Suzanne sent a letter to Ed’s sister, saying she’d made a terrible mistake, that she still wanted Ed in her life. It’s now known as the “letter from hell.”

Ed was to be married six days later. When he learned that Suzanne had reached out, he stopped the wedding plans and rushed to see her. But he couldn’t believe this was happening and dismissed it all as a fairy tale.

“So I walked away from it,” Ed said.

He married the other woman. They had two children. And then, seven years later, Ed’s marriage also ended.

“I, too, made my wrong decision,” he said.

In 1992, Ed heard from an old friend.

Suzanne, the friend said, was in California. She had breast cancer.

Ed found Suzanne. He was on his way to Astoria to practice law.

The chemotherapy had made Suzanne bald. She recalls joking that she smelled of Ajax.

Ed said he knew they should be together. But there was another problem: “I’m engaged,” Suzanne told him.

His response: “So what.”

They were married six months later at the Astoria Column.

Suzanne has been cancer-free for 16 years. And now, when people ask them how long they’ve been together, they say, “Not long enough.”

“Every day’s a gift for both of us,” Suzanne said.

Ed smiled and said one word: “Gratitude.”