The Good Life While Halyburton and Cherry led separate lives in Vietnam, their experiences overlapped in one critical respect. Both discovered that their lengthy incarceration had a transforming, even uplifting, effect. As the years passed, they were forced to shun conventional ideas of happiness and success, to reappraise the meaning of their own lives, and to create a world very different from the one they had known. Trapped, brutalized beyond despair, each man eventually survived by finding a higher plane of existence. In the early years, Halyburton tried to escape the present by living in the past. He recalled every memory, cherished every achievement, confronted every mistake, and underwent what he called "the catharsis of regret." His "atonement" for his imperfect past was to think of everything he wanted to do in the future. In that process, he began identifying "categories of interest"—the aspirations of a young man who felt he had squandered opportunities in his carefree youth, a wish list of personal goals that would validate his imprisonment, a way to ensure that no minute of his freedom would be wasted.
