Charles “Chuck” Jackson has little memory of the crushing sound of metal as his F-4 Phantom II broke apart.
What he does remember most is the split second before ejecting.
A heat-seeking missile, about 6 to 8 feet long, fired by a pursuing North Vietnamese MIG-21 went right up the two-seater’s jet exhaust while he and pilot Lt. James McCarty were on their return trip home from a bombing mission north of Hanoi.
When Jim Berger ’61 took off on his 30th mission as an Air Force pilot during the Vietnam War, he had no idea that this would be his longest flight, lasting more than six years. Jim was the backseater on an F-4C, also called the GIB, or guy in back.
Bill McMurry recently spoke to SaddleBrooke Sunrise Rotary about his experience as a POW in North Vietnam. He was captured on February 7, 1968 after helping defend the Lang Vei Special Forces surveillance camp in the northwestern corner of South Vietnam, about one and a half miles from the Laotian
On a granite wall in Washington, D.C., the story of Capt. Edward A. Brudno’s suffering remains untold. There is no recognition of the beatings he took or the interrogations he resisted – nothing that acknowledges 7 1/2 years of captivity in a windowless room. Three decades after being tortured in
The U.S. Air Force Starlifter touched down at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines on Feb. 12, 1973. The eyes of the nation looked on as 115 prisoners of war returned to the United States military facility. Near the front of the pack stood Raymond Vohden, a 42-year old