It was a few days before Christmas, 1972, when Jill Drummond got the worst present imaginable. It was a letter from the United States Air Force telling her that her husband David Drummond was officially missing in action in Vietnam.
Shock, fear and worry all followed. What she didn’t know immediately was that her husband’s B-52 bomber had been shot down and he had been captured by North Vietnamese soldiers.
On August 16, 1960, Joe Kittinger went for a balloon ride. Sitting inside an open gondola suspended from an enormous helium-filled envelope, the U.S. Air Force captain rose to a height more than 19 miles above the Earth’s surface. His mission that day—part of Project Excelsior—was to test a new
A young Long Island marine who spent 18 months as a prisoner of war was acquitted today of charges that he had run from his unit and, when captured, had made propaganda statements broadcast over the Hanoi radio. The decision freed Sgt. Jon M. Sweeney, 21 years old, of West
1,882 days; five and a half years. That’s how long Vietnam veteran Wayne Smith was a prisoner of war. “We were in pretty bad shape, we certainly were,” said Smith. He shared his story with us and dozens of people at Punta Gorda’s Military Heritage Museum. The Air Force captain’s
This database is designed to assist researchers in accessing U.S. government documents related to American military personnel who are unaccounted for from the Vietnam War. The formal title of this collection is “Correlated and Uncorrelated Information Relating to Missing Americans in Southeast Asia.” The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA; formerly
In honor of Memorial Day 2024, the Watkinson Library is pleased to announce an expanded and fully processed version of the personal papers of a Trinity College alumnus and decorated U.S. Air Force Brigadier General, Jon A. Reynolds. The Jon A. Reynolds papers consist primarily of correspondence and office files;