Nearly 25 years ago, when the war was raging in Vietnam, a 20-year-old private from Alabama said a prayer and buried his Marine buddy in a Viet Cong prisoner of war camp where both were held.
Thomas Davis survived five years in POW camps and has returned to Vietnam for the first time since his release in 1973 to help find the remains of his fallen comrade.
“I came here to get a friend,” he said. “I’m here through the grace of God.”
In 1967, there was a “unit” of approximately 300 Americans fighting the Vietnam Warfrom within a Hanoi prison. The unit—later named the 4th Allied POW Wing—waslocated in the drab North Vietnamese capital. Within this unit, every man had thesame job: prisoner of war.All—except three enlisted airmen—were officers, including me. Our
Retired fighter pilot Robert Sponeybarger doesn’t suffer flashbacks and isn’t jarred awake in a cold sweat from nightmares of being held captive by the North Vietnamese. Never was a problem for him, he says. And he says he rarely thinks of ejecting from his crippled plane, threats of execution or
Walking next to his father near a lake he fished as a boy, Navy Lieut. Markham Gartley looked up at the clear, blue sky and filled his lungs with crisp autumn air. The 28‐year‐old pilot noted the colors of the northern Maine woods—the McIntosh reds of the sugar maples, the
During his time as a prisoner of war, Lt. Col. William “Bill” Gauntt remembers a Vietnamese soldier pressing a .45 pistol against his forehead and pulling the trigger. “I remember hearing the spring as it was being stretched and then pop,” he said. “On an empty chamber fortunately.” Gauntt told
For weeks the returned P.O.W.s had been stepping from “freedom birds” onto the television screens—most of them saluting crisply, walking smartly, looking physically fit and acting mentally alert. As the nation’s early apprehensions faded, a new idea set in: perhaps the P.O.W.s had been humanely treated after all. That illusion