Staff Sgt. Ken Wallingford had only days left to serve in the US Army when he found himself trapped – and seconds away from being burned alive. He’d spent the previous night hiding in a bunker with another soldier at a base that had been overrun by the North Vietnamese
Retired Air Force Col. Laird Guttersen, 80, who spent five years in a North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp and later became an advocate for families of missing military personnel, died June 13 in Tucson of complications of a stroke, according to family members. His F-4 Phantom was shot down over North
The engineered violence U.S. Air Force pilots Ron Mastin and Tom Storey felt ejecting from an F-4 Phantom at 500 miles per hour was more shocking than impact of North Vietnamese ordinance that sent their jet crashing to the ground on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. On Mastin’s 34th aerial reconnaissance
Navy Lt. Brad Smith was on a bombing run to destroy a bridge in North Vietnam when he was shot down in 1966. He didn’t see what ripped into his A-4 Skyhawk, but he saw the ground approaching at 600 mph as his crippled jet nose-dived toward the ground. Smith
Fifty years ago this week, returning Vietnam War released prisoner of war, Air Force Maj. Charles E. Greene Jr. of Schenectady, alighted a C-9 Nightingale at Westover Air Force Base in Chicopee, Mass. and embraced his wife, Sandra, and 10-year-old daughter Kim, who had been escorted to the plane’s ramp.