From Beaver Creek to Hanoi: A Mother’s quest To Rescue Her Son

In recent times, online sites like Mighty Girls, that relate tales of brave, yet unappreciated women, have become popular. This issue of Maine Women with the theme of honoring the women who came before us is brilliant. There are many women in Maine history who have made a difference without receiving the recognition they deserved. It is time to have their stories told. Also, taking a look at an important historical event with some maturity can be an interesting experience. One can do just this with the following recently released book.

From Beaver Creek To Hanoi: A Mother’s Quest to Rescue Her Son is the story of a Maine woman’s plucky journey into political activism that culminated in an amazing act of courage in the fall of 1972. Written by Cheryl Grant Gillespie in collaboration with Mark and Marcia Gartley, this nonfiction work is about Mark’s mother Minnie Lee. Cheryl taught for several years with Mark’s wife Marcia at Westbrook, and was fascinated by her mother-in-law’s story. Minnie Lee helped her husband Gerry run Beaver Creek Camps outside of Greenville in the summer and taught high school history in Dunedin, Florida during the school year. Mark was a pilot shot down in August of 1968 over North Vietnam while flying an F-4 bomber. He spent the next four years in prisoner of war camps. His mother didn’t just sit and wait for his return home.  ​

​Minnie Lee joined the League of Families of POWs and MIAs. She was involved in meetings and mailing campaigns to promote awareness of the plight of these captured military men. She testified to congressional committees. She also contacted some peace groups and became friends with members of them who were working against the war and also striving for better means of communications between the POWs and their families. She proceeded to be involved in meetings with North Vietnamese women’s groups. Working with both ends of the political spectrum, Minnie Lee walked an interesting tightrope but managed to retain the respect of both conservative members of the League and liberal members of peace groups like Women Strike for Peace.

​In the fall of 1972, against the caution of the Nixon administration, Minnie Lee joined a peace committee that went behind enemy lines in North Vietnam. The book details what happened there. Minnie Lee is no longer with us, but she diligently kept scrapbooks, tapes, pictures, and other things that helped tell her story. The author is delighted to share this excerpt with you. One can find the book in paperback or ebook form on Amazon or on http://androscogginpress.com.

​​​Chapter One The Letter

​Minnie Lee Gartley stood stock-still at the kitchen sink of the cabin at Beaver Creek Camps in Maine. It was a hot August day, 1969. Her hands, held to her face, smelled of Ajax from cleaning. That scent mixed with the room’s other odors—a potpourri of burnt firewood, drying waders, fishing baskets, and pine―was the familiar smell of summer work at the camps her husband Gerry and she ran on Moosehead Lake. Minnie Lee, or Min Lee as family and close friends often called her, was finding it hard to get work done that day. She had spent the last year trying to get herself to accept the fact that Gerry’s and her much wanted, first-born son Markham was missing-in-action in Vietnam and possibly dead. He'd been shot down just like her first husband whom Min Lee had lost during World War II; a husband she had kept a secret from everyone except Gerry and her childhood family in Kentucky. No one here in Maine knew this could be a double loss for Min Lee, including her two sons.

​Markham, or Mark as most people called him, was a handsome child born in May of 1944 and named after Min Lee’s father Markham Ligon. Blonde, hazel-eyed, and always with a smile on his face, he charmed people at the campground as a boy running around doing errands for his parents. An athlete in school, Mark graduated as the valedictorian of his high school class. After graduating from Georgia Tech where he had received a full ROTC Navy scholarship and was battalion commander his senior year, Mark informed his parents he was going into Naval Aviation to be a pilot, a top gun. Min Lee told him she wished he wouldn’t do that, but Mark thought she was probably just being protective and proceeded with his plans. He wrote to his parents about the thrill of flying an F-4 phantom jet off the USS Constellation. After he finished his training, he hadn't been flying bombing raids in Operation Rolling Thunder for long when Min Lee and Gerry stopped hearing from him. After no word from him since August of 1968, they received a letter from the military in January of 1969 explaining that someone observed Mark and his navigator Bill Mayhew eject successfully from their plane after it was hit. The letter also said nothing more was known about what happened to them. The endless period of not knowing any specific details that followed had been excruciating. Min Lee had tried to ignore the calendar in the camp kitchen that reminded her it was August again, but this morning she paused and took a good look at it. Mark had been gone for a full year now. The tough shell Min Lee had tried to keep around her heart cracked slightly. And it ached.

​“Min!”

​“For God’s sake, Gerry! You scared me half to death!” answered Min Lee, without turning around to look at her husband. “What are you doing here so early? Thought you’d be out longer with that fishing group.” Min Lee fussed with a dish towel at the edge of the sink while trying to wipe her eyes. When she finally pivoted and saw Gerry’s face, she noticed her usually stoic husband looked rattled somehow.

​“Min, the worker from the camp store brought this up just now. Caught me outside running up to grab some more lures for the guys to use at the dock. He was curious about the Chicago return address on the envelope. It’s addressed simply to “Gartley, Greenville, Maine.” Gerry paused and placed something down on the long, pine camp table and looked up. “Min, it’s him!”

​“What are you talking about, Gerry?”

​“Look!” Gerry pointed to what looked like a page torn out from a magazine on the table. “It’s Mark, Min!”

​Min Lee walked over to the table and peeked at the page. It was a picture of men somewhere tropical. She looked closer. One did look like Mark. The caption under the picture had three words in English―Mark Ham Gartley. Min Lee looked closer at the picture. There was also a letter that had fallen out onto the table. Min Lee didn’t need to read that right now. It was him. Her handsome son. He was alive? In a prisoner of war camp, but alive?

​Min Lee spent a few seconds rubbing the tip of her right index finger on Mark’s face in the photo. Then she hugged herself. She couldn't process this. The magazine photo cracked the shell around her heart wide open.

​“Oh, Gerry,” whispered Min Lee. “Why haven’t we heard anything from someone official?” Her pragmatic husband kept telling her to expect the worst about Mark after all this time. Now this?

​“Min, I don’t know any better than you.”

​“I need a minute,” said Min Lee as Gerry tried to approach her with one arm extended in her direction. She ran out of the camp and down to the shore of Moosehead Lake. With shaky hands, she whacked a cigarette out of the pack she kept in her apron pocket and lit it after four attempts and some curse words. Raised on a peach and tobacco farm in Kentucky, Min Lee took solace in smoking a cigarette, but today it wasn’t working as well as it usually did. The massive stretch of open water before her did not have the calming effect it always gave her either. After a few puffs, she threw her half-finished cigarette to the ground and stomped it out. She shook herself and realized she might want to read the letter with the magazine. She hustled back up to the camp and found Gerry still standing at the table and simply looking at the picture. Min Lee grabbed the letter, unfolded it, and read aloud:

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Gartley,

    We get a magazine from Poland which is where my husband and I are from. We were interested in this picture of the American POWs. The only name they seemed to have gotten in English was Mark Ham Gartley. In the article it said this Mark’s parents were from Greenville, Maine, so we tried sending it this way. If this is not a relative of yours, please forgive us.

Sincerely,

Mr. and Mrs. Kowalczyk

​“Good heavens,” said Min Lee under her breath. Then she said a bit louder, “How did this couple get this information when you and I have heard nothing from the military, Gerry? How?”

​Gerry shrugged his shoulders. “I have no idea, Min. No damned idea at all. But he’s alive. Min, he’s alive. At least he was when this picture was taken.” They stood quietly for a few minutes until they heard a call from outside.

​“Gartley, where are those lures?”

​“Min?”

​“I know, Gerry. Bring them the lures. We’ll talk later. I need to let Jim know. Get going now.”

​Before Gerry came in with the news of Mark, Min Lee was planning to start getting ready to go back to Dunedin, Florida, to their mobile home where she lived while teaching high school history and civics. Gerry would eventually shut the Maine camp down for the winter and join her in the warmer state. She and Gerry had done this double residency ever since Mark had gone off to college. Their second son Jim, diagnosed a few years earlier with bipolar disorder, went back and forth with his mother as he needed her support. Min Lee helped Jim get into therapy groups, find odd jobs, and take some college classes in Florida. There were so many services down there to help Jim with his problems. Gerry would return to Beaver Creek for the start of fishing season in the spring as soon as the ice was out of Moosehead Lake. Min Lee and Jim would go up to Maine when school closed down in Dunedin. It was an arrangement that worked for them. Min Lee considered those Maine winters brutal when she had taught at Greenville High School, and Gerry struggled with his younger son’s illness.

​Min Lee soothed herself by thinking about the fact that she would have more time and better resources to study the POW situation once she was settled in Florida. This war, or military action since war was not officially declared, puzzled her. A patriotic soul, she had been a WAC during World War II stationed at Fort Knox with her second husband Gerry and would have stayed longer than a year and a half if her mother hadn’t taken ill. She was honorably discharged to go care for her. There was a purpose to the war in the 1940s. Everyone seemed to support it. The United States’ intervention in Vietnam was chaotic. The media was filled with contradictions about why the U.S. was there and what they were doing for that country. Even the well-respected news anchor Walter Cronkite had openly criticized the U.S. involvement there over a year ago. Min Lee was startled when he spoke like that during his news broadcast, and she still thought about it now. The news was paying more attention to student protests and huge music festivals like Woodstock this summer than they were paying to the ongoing battle in Southeast Asia. Min Lee knew she had to get involved with the political debate. She had started questioning the purpose of the war before Mark went to Vietnam. She wasn’t going to just sit back and wait to see what would happen with Mark now. That’s for sure.

Available in ebook form on Amazon or at androscogginpress.com.