William P. Lawrence, a retired Navy vice admiral who was among the highest-ranking members of the armed forces held as a prisoner of war in Vietnam and who later served three years as superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, has died in Brownsville, Md. He had a stroke a decade ago. He was 75.
Mr. Lawrence, who died Friday, had been a test pilot and the first naval aviator to fly twice the conventionally measured speed of sound–1,300 m.p.h. In the late 1950s, he was a Navy nominee for Project Mercury, which would lift John Glenn and Alan Shepard to orbit and fame as the first Americans in space. Mr. Lawrence was disqualified when a minor heart murmur was discovered.
During the Vietnam War, he was commanding officer of Fighter Squadron 143 when he was shot down in North Vietnam in June 1967 and held as a prisoner of war until March 1973. Among others in the prison were John McCain, who went on to become a U.S. senator from Arizona, and future Vice Adm. James Stockdale.
Mr. Lawrence once described one of his torturers at Hoa Lo Prison, nicknamed the Hanoi Hilton: “A professional jailer before the war, old Strap and Bar, also known as Pig Eye, soon went to work on me. The flesh was literally stripped from my ankles from writhing in the irons.”
At other moments, Mr. Lawrence said he and other captives crafted playing cards from toilet tissue. They whispered to one another about their favorite hobbies, from European languages to Mr. Lawrence’s specialty, Civil War history. He kept his mind sharp by trying to recall names of grade-school friends, thinking up and solving math problems, and writing poetry in his head.
One piece of verse he created while in isolation became, after his release, the official poem of his home state, Tennessee.
Mr. Lawrence was among the 591 Americans released as part of “Operation Homecoming.” Shortly after arriving on U.S. soil, he learned that his wife had left him for an Episcopal priest who had comforted her during his absence. He soon remarried, to a physical therapist then helping McCain.
Mr. Lawrence received several top Pentagon appointments. He also served as Naval Academy superintendent from 1978 to 1981, a time when his daughter Wendy graduated from Annapolis. Wendy Lawrence became a NASA astronaut and mission specialist and was a key reason for her father’s eventual support for women in the military.
He later said that seeing his daughter go into space “compensates a lot for the difficult things I’ve faced in my life.”
Two weeks before his death, he completed a memoir, “Tennessee Patriot,” scheduled for publication next fall.
His decorations included four awards of the Distinguished Service Medal, three awards of the Silver Star, the Legion of Merit, the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Bronze Star with Combat V and two awards of the Purple Heart.
