COL ROBERT CERTAIN | U.S. Air Force, B-52 Navigator, 307th Strategic Air Wing – Air Force
“I thought perhaps I was going to die,” McCain told ABC’s Sam Donaldson in a 1999 interview when describing being captured and tortured by the Vietcong.
Vietnam is often called “the war that won’t go away”, largely because of the continuing controversy of the POW/MIA (Prisoners Of War / Missing In Action) issue. Families of those who were POW/MIA in Vietnam organized an activist movement which went on to pursue a question which still haunts America nearly decades later: were soldiers left behind in captivity after the Vietnam War? Once the exclusive domain of a select fraternity of soldiers’ wives, the
The veteran graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point in 1969. He spent 25 months as a prisoner of war (POW) at the Zoo, Plantation Gardens, and Hilton prisoner camps in Hanoi, Vietnam.
During the Vietnam War many United States soldiers were captured and held as prisoners of war (POW). Many soldiers reported being regularly tortured, and some were used for military propaganda. This segment from Iowa Public Television’s Iowans Remember Vietnam includes archival footage and interviews with Iowa veteran Harold Johnson. Johnson describes his role as a military jet pilot, his experience being captured, his days in captivity and his eventual release.
In August 1964, an American pilot was shot down and captured by the North Vietnamese. In the following years of the Vietnam Conflict, hundreds of American prisoners of war were interrogated, starved and tortured in Communist prisons. Prisoners of Hope presents the experiences of ten of these individuals who were denied that most valuable and precious possession — freedom. Their stories are filled with suffering and survival, death and deliverance. But above all, they are
