2nd Lt. Stephen Leopold was Vietnam MIA for almost 5 years before his release

POW Camp 101 is what it was called. The camp was a hell hole located 20 miles outside Hanoi, North Vietnam. It’s where 100 American MIAs languished during the Vietnam War and nobody in the United States knew they were there.

A group of a dozen or so MIAs captured in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam by the North Vietnamese Army were marched from Cambodia to Laos and driven from there at night by truck to Camp 101 on Christmas Day 1968. 2nd Lt. Stephen Leopold, a Stanford Phi Beta Kappa, and a Special Forces Green Beret was one of the captives.

“I was put in solitary confinement in a black washed room for eight months and only let out to clean out my crap bucket and to splash a little water on my face at the cistern,” the retired Vietnam vet explained. “Then they’d march you back and you’d sit on your bunk in the dark.

Other Publications You Might Be Interested In

A Heroic Connection (Charlie James)

It took her 44 years, but Morreen O’Reilly-Mersberger finally tracked down the prisoner of war whose name was on a bracelet that she purchased in college and kept to this day. The 62-year-old Plymouth resident bought the item for $2 in the fall of 1970 from a student group on

Read More »

1,903 Days as a POW (Daniel Pitzer, Rowe, Versace)

In the early morning hours of 29 October 1963, at Tan Phu village in southernmost Vietnam, then-First Lieutenant (1LT) James N. ‘Nick’ Rowe, the Assistant Detachment Commander, Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) 23, prepared for a ‘routine’ combat patrol. Rowe, Senior Special Forces (SF) Medic Master Sergeant Daniel L. Pitzer,

Read More »