When Green Beret Lieutenant James N. Rowe was captured in 1963 in Vietnam, his life became more than a matter of staying alive. In a Vietcong POW camp, Rowe endured beri-beri, dysentery, and tropical fungus diseases. He suffered grueling psychological and physical torment. He experienced the loneliness and frustration of
On April 6, 1967, twenty-year-old U.S. Navy Seaman Apprentice Doug Hegdahl fell off his ship, a guided-missile cruiser, in the Gulf of Tonkin. Close to exhaustion after nearly four hours in the water, he was picked up by a small fishing boat and soon found himself in Hỏa Lò Prison,
When Lieutenant Robert Wideman’s plane crashed on a bombing run in the Vietnam War, he feared falling into enemy hands. Although he endured the kind of pain that makes people question humanity, physical torture was not his biggest problem. During six years as a prisoner of war, he saw the
George Smith spent two years as a POW moving from camp to camp in the middle of the jungle. Impressed from the beginning by Vietcong military proficiency, he slowly overcame his Green Beret “arrogance” and learned to see the VC as people-warm, just, humane, sincere and so highly motivated that
Jack Van Loan was a United States Air Force fighter pilot. In 1967, he was flying as wingman for Colonel Robin Olds when his F-4 Phantom jet was shot down. He spent six years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. Alongside such legends as Robbie Risner, James Stockdale,
