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 they seemed a different culture from the troops he was sent to train.
Unsure whether they would be greeted as traitors or heroes, POWs returning from Vietnam responded by holding tight to their chosen motto, “Return with Honor.” “We’re giving the American people what they want and badly need–heroes,” said a Vietnam jungle POW. “I feel it’s our responsibility, our duty to help
When Lt. Colonel Ballard, a USAF jet pilot on a military mission over North Vietnam, was shot down in September 1966, his first thought was for his wife: Ruth, I’m sorry. It’s going to be a long time… Shortly afterward he was captured by North Vietnamese soldiers and interred as
I’m No Hero is the autobiography of Captain J. Charles Plumb. It is also the detailed story of American POW’s in Viet Nam who faced an isolated world of degradation, loneliness, tedium, hunger and pain. More significantly, it is a story of hope for it deals directly with the techniques
From the Naval Academy to the POW camps of Vietnam to Capitol Hill and possibly to the White House — one of America’s most remarkable menIn 1998, at the dedication of the National Prisoner of War Museum in Andersonville, Georgia, former Attorney General Griffin Bell, a Democrat, introduced Senator John
