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.”
The word “hero” is used far too often. So is the word “courage.” In the case of Capt. Eugene “Red” McDaniel, neither word accurately describes the horrors he endured as one of the most brutalized prisoners of war in Vietnam. When his A-6 Intruder aircraft was shot down over North
Fifty-six years after being designated a naval aviator, a former prisoner of war once again landed on the deck of an aircraft carrier — at one of Naval Air Station Lemoore’s F/A-18 Super Hornet flight simulators. “I got it, I got it,” exclaimed Capt. (Ret.) Theodore Kopfman as he sat
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
As explained by Peter E. Davies in his book B/EB-66 Destroyer Units in Combat, orbiting at the edge of heavily-defended territory, during the Vietnam War the vulnerable EB-66 Destroyer electronic warfare aircraft identified and jammed the enemy’s radar frequencies with electronic emissions and chaff to protect the American bombers. Their hazardous missions resulted in six
Another group of newly freed prisoners of war came home yesterday. “There’s no way we can express our feelings and emotions as we walk once more on pills wonderful land of ours,” said Capt. Charles Gillespie of San Diego, on his arrival at March Air Force Base in California. His