Seven years in Hanoi’s prisons did not dim Robbie Risner’s fighting spirit (Larson, Risner)

T he picture on the Time magazine cover for April 23, 1965, was Air Force Lt. Col. Robinson Risner. The cover story, “The Fighting American,” featured 10 US military members in Vietnam, with fighter pilot Risner—a rising star in the Air Force—foremost among them.
“At the time it was a great honor,”

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State Tells Vietnam Ex-POW Only Dead POWs’ Kin Get Aid (Johnnie Ray)

For nearly 20 years, former Army Capt. Johnnie Ray remained grateful that Oklahoma had eased his return as a Vietnam prisoner of war by granting free college tuition to his children. But when he tried to get free tuition at his own alma mater, Oklahoma State University, for his daughter,

M.I.A: Accounting for the Missing in Southeast Asia.

Washington, D. C.: National Defense University Press, 1995.

Ex-Vietnam POW brings fallen comrades home (Edward Mechenbier)

Piloting the same plane that rescued him 31 years ago, a former American prisoner of war returned to Vietnam on Friday on his last military mission to bring home remains thought to be fallen comrades. Air Force Reserve Maj. Gen. Edward Mechenbier stood in his flight uniform saluting two aluminum

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,”

And with honor I return (Ronald Webb)

The bombing started on Dec. 18, 1972 and lasted 11 days. Waves of B-52s dropped 20,000 tons of ordnance on and near the North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi and the port city of Haiphong. For the nearly 600 American POWs held by the North Vietnamese, the destruction wreaked by Operation