B.G. students’ documentary places first nationally

On the Web

View Jethro Abatayo’s and Logan Gibert’s winning documentary on YouTube at http://youtu.be/MyhiivPB1iA

To learn more about National History Day visit www.nhd.org

View a C-SPAN program featuring “Two Souls Indivisible” author James Hirsch and former Vietnam POWs Fred Cherry and Porter Halyburton at www.c-span.org/video/?184360-1/book-discussion-two-souls-indivisible

Stories told by former captives during the Vietnam War are still valuable today, four decades after the war ended.

Jethro Abatayo and Logan Gibert, 14-year-old students at Pleasant Valley Middle School, found the stories so compelling they spent more than 600 hours researching, interviewing prisoners of war, writing and producing a documentary that placed first in the National History Day competition this month.

Abatayo and Gibert took first place in their division at the national competition with their 10-minute documentary, “Vietnam War Prisoners of War: Taking Responsibility When Deprived of All Rights.” The students also received the Captain Ken Coskey Naval History Prize.

More than a half-million students across the country participate in National History Day at the regional level. About 3,000 students, including three teams from Pleasant Valley Middle School, advanced to the national competition June 15-19 at the University of Maryland in College Park.

Pleasant Valley Middle School teacher Irene Soohoo has supported her students’ participation in the event for 25 years. Many have placed first at the state competition and several have placed at nationals, but Abatayo and Gibert’s win at the national competition is a first for Soohoo and for Battle Ground Public Schools.

Soohoo said the students worked after school every day and worked at home on weekends.

“These are top kids,” Soohoo said. “They’re workhorses.”

In 2013, Abatayo advanced to the National History Day competition with a project about the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War. Last summer he was still hungry for Vietnam research when he became engrossed in the biography “Two Souls Indivisible” that tells about the bond formed between two American pilots — one black and one a white Southerner — when they shared a cell in a Vietnam prisoner-of-war camp. He knew he’d found a key story he wanted to tell in his 2014 National History Day project.

When Air Force pilot Fred Cherry’s F-104 was shot down over Hanoi in 1965, the severely injured Cherry was the first black officer captured by the North Vietnamese. Believing putting a black and white man together would be a source of torment, the North Vietnamese put Cherry in the same cell with Porter Halyburton, a white U.S. Navy navigator from North Carolina. Instead, Cherry and Halyburton ultimately saved each other’s lives, according to the book’s author James Hirsch.

While producing their documentary, Abatayo and Gibert interviewed many Vietnam POWs. Although they reached out to Cherry and Halyburton several times, neither man had responded to their interview requests. Finally, the boys turned to Charles Chadbourn, a History Day judge at the regional, state and national competition. Chadbourn, a professor of strategy at Naval War College, offered to connect the boys to the former POWs.

“People want to tell their stories,” Soohoo said. “You just have to find the right people.”

With Chadbourn’s assistance, the boys were invited to personal interviews with Cherry and Halyburton. Abatayo flew to the East Coast with his father, Arine Abatayo, to interview the former POWs.

Jethro Abatayo said a highlight came when Halyburton pointed to his headstone in his backyard. When Halyburton went missing in Vietnam and the military thought he was dead, they sent his wife a headstone. Halyburton said when he is having a bad day, he stands in his yard, stares at his own headstone and realizes it could be worse.

Although Abatayo and Gibert already had conducted phone and Skype interviews with several POWs, the interviews with Halyburton and Cherry added considerable substance to the documentary.

Later Chadbourn asked Cherry and Halyburton to autograph a copy of Hirsch’s book, and he sent it to Soohoo.

Both students will be freshmen at Prairie High School in the fall.