50 Years Ago
■Mrs. Mary Cutter, 211 Elm St., grandmother of Capt. James Cutter, prisoner of war in North Vietnam, reported this morning that she has learned her grandson will be among the last prisoners to be returned to the U.S. “He hasn’t been there (as a POW) as long as some,” Mrs. Cutter conceded. “He’s only been there about a year.”
Soon after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973, the United States prepared for Operation Homecoming. Five hundred and ninety-one American prisoners of war returned home from Vietnam during the two-month process. Previously, during the war, 129 pows “escaped from,evaded, or were released by their captors,” including
It was suppertime when they came to break the news. There were seven in the delegation, including her husband’s commanding officer, a Catholic priest and a flight surgeon supplied with tranquilizers. She met them at the door of the two-story house on the Wright Patterson Air Force base in Ohio,
This weekend marked the 50th anniversary of the fateful day the first U.S. troops went ashore in South Vietnam. But by then U.S. aircraft had already been bombing North Vietnam for seven months and downed American pilots had fallen into a hell that would last for the rest of the
The 15th Wing opened Readiness Day, where senior leaders discussed maintaining optimal mission readiness, Aug. 24 here, at Hollister Auditorium, with a speech on individual readiness and resiliency from a former prisoner of war. Retired Air Force Col. Thomas Norris, then a captain, was shot down Aug. 12, 1967, after dropping bombs
Who was Colonel Makowski? He was an air force navigator who served our country during the Vietnam War. His plane was shot down, and he was taken as a Prisoner of War on October 6, 1966, spending 2,342 days in captivity then released on March 4, 1973. As an adolescent,