During the Vietnam War more than 1,800 Americans were held prisoner or were missing in action in Southeast Asia. Among them was Army Major Theodore “Ted” Gostas of Sheridan. Gostas was born in Butte, Montana, on December 13, 1938. After enduring a difficult childhood and an abusive father, Gostas enrolled in the University of Wyoming. He majored in English literature, with a minor in history. It was at UW that he met his first wife, Johanna.
Ted joined the Army and he and Johanna moved frequently as his career in the military advanced. Eventually Ted was sent for military intelligence training and then on to Army language school, where he learned German. He and Johanna and their two children relocated to Germany and Ted was assigned to the U.S. Army intelligence service there.
Ted had advanced to the rank of Captain and, when presented the opportunity to go to Vietnam, felt called to serve. Johanna and their young family (they had a son, Demetrius, and a daughter, Laura, and Johanna was expecting a baby boy) returned to Sheridan to be near Johanna’s relatives. In Vietnam, Ted was initially posted to Saigon, but given the chance to “be his own boss”, he agreed to relocate farther north to the city of Hue.
His tour of duty was to have lasted a year, and things were going smoothly in Hue, where Ted was assigned to the 135th Military Intelligence Battalion Provisional. Then, unexpectedly, the city came under attack. It was the beginning of the Tet Offensive, and the battle for control of Hue. As the fighting in Hue grew more intense, Ted took his secret military intelligence files out of the safe and burned everything. He attempted to radio for help, but communication lines had been cut. Much to his dismay, on February 1, 1968, Ted and a small group of his men were captured by the Viet Cong. It was the beginning of a long living nightmare.
Immediately after his capture, Ted was marched for more than two weeks. He walked much of the way barefoot after he gave his shoes to a Marine. Leeches affixed themselves to Ted’s feet, which “swelled up like balloons”. Fire ants bit him as he slept in the rough. And a Viet Cong soldier kicked him in the face, breaking both his glasses and his nose. Eventually he and the others who had been captured were loaded onto a truck, and from there he was taken to a small cell. With dimensions of 6x3x6 feet, it felt like a coffin. He remained in solitary confinement, only to be interrogated daily. At one point, a Russian officer told Ted that a military tribunal had sentenced him to death. For months, each time a guard arrived at his cell, Ted was convinced that the trip from his cell would be his last.
Meanwhile, back in Sheridan, Johanna was raising Demetrius, Laura, and Jasen.
They all faced the terrible uncertainty of families of prisoners of war. Jasen had never met his father. Johanna held out hope that Ted was still alive, even though she never received a letter from him or any word that he was being held captive. She was concerned about her children, who “also daily carry this heavy sadness and fear in their hearts.” Demetrius, the eldest of the Gostas children, wrote:
Johanna channeled some of her own worry in action. She worked tirelessly on behalf of her husband and the other Wyoming POW/MIA families as the Wyoming coordinator of the National League of Prisoner of War and Missing in Action Families. She organized letter writing campaigns. Tens of thousands of letters went out to congress members, foreign embassies and even the President of North Vietnam.
Johanna spoke in Wyoming to community organizations like the Jaycees and the VFW. Working to raise attention to the plight of the Wyoming prisoners of war and missing in action, she helped to prepare flyers and publicity featuring photos of the POWs/MIAs. She circulated petitions, wrote letters, rallied support, and attended endless meetings.
Through her activism, Johanna became aware of the horrific conditions the prisoners of war were enduring. Men had been chained in dark jungle prisons, in bamboo cages or forced to live in deep tunnel complexes, sometimes chained in six foot, grave-like pits in the ground. Johanna wrote “we, the families, know that with every day that goes by, there will be fewer of our loved one coming home, and those that do return will have less of a chance of returning home well, both physically and mentally, under the conditions under which they are being held captive.”
Ted was amongst those men. Kept largely in solitary confinement, he had been interrogated, bashed in the head with the butt of an automatic rifle, strung up from the rafters by his armpits, starved, deprived of water, subject to inhumane conditions and more. Ted was losing hope. He felt discouraged and abandoned. He had never been allowed to write Johanna and received no Red Cross packages or letters from home. This, despite the fact that Johanna had been sending him messages using official North Vietnamese forms.
As the war in Vietnam dragged on, the work of the National League of Prisoner of War and Missing in Action Families became more urgent. It was clear that North Vietnam and allies were not respecting the tenets of the 1954 Geneva Convention. Names of prisoners were not being released, prisoners were not being given sufficient food or adequate medical care and neutral parties like the Red Cross were blocked from having access to prisoner of war camps.
Johanna’s involvement with the National League of Prisoner of War and Missing in Action Families took her to Washington D.C. where she lobbied politicians and ambassadors of foreign governments to put pressure on North Vietnam, the Viet Cong and the Pathet Lao to abide by the Geneva Convention. She even traveled as far as Paris to meet with the members of a North Vietnamese delegation and to Geneva to raise awareness with the International Red Cross and other countries that had been signatories to the Geneva Convention.
As for Ted, he had spent nearly four and a half years in various jungle prison camps. After that he was moved to the Hoa Lo prison, colloquially called the “Hanoi Hilton” by captured prisoners. It was there that he learned from a North Vietnamese officer that his release was imminent. But first he had to learn to say “thank you for your humane and lenient treatment” in Vietnamese. Ted had been a prisoner of war for 5 years, 1 month and 15 days in anything but humane and lenient conditions.
By the time he was released, on March 16, 1973, Ted was gravely ill. His intestines were riddled with hookworms. He had eighteen abscessed teeth. He had been tortured, both mentally and physically. Captivity made him bitter. In reflecting on his experiences, Ted said “war brings out the worst in men and the best in men—but mostly the worst.”
After his return to the U.S., Ted was assigned to the 6th Army Headquarters in San Francisco. According to Ted, Johanna refused to move with the children to California, and she and Ted divorced. Ted went on to marry twice more. He wrote and illustrated a book of poetry titled Prisoner about his experiences in Vietnam. And he received a medical discharge from the Army in 1977. For his service, Gostas received a Bronze Star Medal and other awards. Today Ted devotes himself to painting and drawing and has raised funds for college scholarships for the children of indigent veterans.
Learn more in the Theodore “Ted” Gostas oral history and the Johanna Gostas POW/MIA papers at the American Heritage Center.
Post submitted by AHC Writer Kathryn Billington.
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