A large crowd of past and present service members, students and guests gathered at Grand Avenue Theater to hear Colonel Thomas J. Curtis, retiree from the United States Air Force, speak about his time as a Prisoner of War (POW) in Vietnam on Friday. Organized by Master Networks Belton Chapter and named “Living History,” Colonel Curtis revealed the brutal reality behind being imprisoned in the Hanoi Hilton and how he has lived to tell his story as one of 687 POWs who returned alive.
Where is the most austere or arduous place you spent the holidays while deployed? (Hughes, Alcorn)
On 22 December 1965, on a combat mission over North Vietnam, I was shot down and captured. I spent Christmas on a concrete floor in a North Vietnamese prison, arms tightly bound behind my back. For eight holiday seasons I enjoyed “the humane and lenient treatment of the North Vietnamese people,”
