‘The Last P.O.W.?’ Finally Gets on the Air : Television: The Bobby Garwood story is one of the oddest footnotes to the Vietnam War. Politics is blamed for ABC’s delay of its broadcast.

Three years ago this month, ABC went into production on a TV movie about the Vietnam War that dared to tell the story of the only convicted U.S. turncoat from his point of view.

Only Monday, however, will “The Last P.O.W.? The Bobby Garwood Story” make it to the air, 2 1/2 years after its originally designated broadcast date.

“I gave up on it a year ago,” admits Ralph Macchio, who stars as Garwood, a U.S. Marine who spent 13 years as a prisoner of war. “I stopped calling the network. But then ABC got a new boss and now I hope everybody sees it so we can try and figure out this unsolved mystery (about Garwood’s behavior in captivity).”

What delayed “Garwood” initially was that the question it poses about patriotism seemed too hot to ask the American people in early 1991, during the Persian Gulf War.

“We felt it was inappropriate to air it then,” an ABC spokeswoman said.

“ABC told me when they first postponed it, ‘We feel it’s in bad taste to air a controversial film about the armed forces and P.O.W.s at this time,’ ” says Macchio, star of the “Karate Kid” movies and the upcoming “Naked in New York.” “People were tying yellow ribbons around trees. The network played it safe because it isn’t a be-all-you-can-be type of picture. It raises questions.”

Later, legal difficulties involving claims to the rights to portray Garwood, eventually settled by ABC, further delayed the broadcast.

Garwood’s story, one of the oddest footnotes to the Vietnam War, was not one that many people wanted to hear when it exploded onto the front pages in 1979. A Red Cross official visiting Hanoi was astonished to be handed a note by an American no one knew was alive. Garwood, a Marine driver, had been captured in September, 1965; only now had he been able to escape.

But when he got home, Garwood became the only U.S. prisoner of war to be prosecuted for his post-capture conduct. A court-martial convicted him of “knowingly communicating and holding intercourse with the enemy” and of “simple assault” on another P.O.W. He was dishonorably discharged and stripped of his veteran’s benefits.

“Garwood gave the North Vietnamese more than his name, rank and serial number,” Macchio says, “and so did a lot of others. Based on reading the court transcripts and spending a lot of time with him, I’d like to believe he did what he needed to do to survive.”

Some other P.O.W.s who were held with Garwood for nine months during the war testified that he did more than that. They said he conversed with his captors in Vietnamese, cooperated with them and was treated better than other prisoners.

The TV movie was made with Garwood’s cooperation and clearly presents his side of the story, as a disclaimer announces at the outset. He is shown learning Vietnamese from another P.O.W., played by Martin Sheen, who tells him, “Give in long enough for them to stop what they’re doing. I am ordering you to survive.”

Garwood’s facility in Vietnamese helped save his life. But it also made him stand out from the other P.O.W.s. He maintained that the different treatment he got wasn’t a reward for cooperation but rather the Vietnamese’s attempt to induce the others to cooperate.

During the Vietnam War, American servicemen were guided by a Code of Conduct that forbade disclosing anything beyond their name, rank and serial number. Yet U.S. captives found they had to cooperate to some degree to survive.

Retired Adm. James Stockdale, who was Ross Perot’s running mate in last year’s election, was awarded the Medal of Honor for leading the P.O.W.s in Hoa Lo Prison in Hanoi. In his autobiography, “In Love and War,” he wrote of “a good, hard-won ‘submit.’ ” He stipulated that while submission was inevitable, a P.O.W. should retain his self-respect and the respect of his captors by not submitting until tortured.

The court-martial threw out most of the counts against Garwood, and the actions he was convicted of committing were arguably less heinous than other actions committed by P.O.W.s that were not prosecuted, such as agreeing to make anti-American broadcasts.

Macchio theorizes that Garwood was court-martialed because he said he’d seen “about 50 American P.O.W.s who were also still being held captive after the Vietnamese supposedly returned all the P.O.W.s in 1973. When the American government labeled him a traitor, this information conveniently got nullified in people’s minds. Who knows if it’s true?”

Producer Ed Gold says that a scene depicting what Garwood said he saw of Americans still in captivity was deleted from the script “because there was no way to corroborate it. The network demanded that every scene, every line, be backed up.”

But Garwood’s contention is still conveyed. Now an electrical contractor in the Northeast, Garwood--who continues to be a thorn in the government’s side, testifying before Congress and speaking to groups interested in the P.O.W.-M.I.A. issue--is seen on a platform orating, “I believe there are others and I hope that someday they will be brought home.”