A Man Apart: Chico native is only Butte County Vietnam war POW (Anthony Andrews)

Witness To Captivity: Staff Sergeant Jon Cavaiani’s POW Pajamas

Ironically, Cavaiani should never have been in Vietnam in the first place. Born in Britain in 1943, he immigrated to the United States in 1947. When American involvement in Vietnam was ramping up in the late 1960s, he discovered that he was considered medically unfit to serve because he was

The Way We Were: The POWs came home in 1973 (Tabb, Schrump, Crowson, Hardy)

Almost 50 years ago this month, they began to arrive. It was called Operation Homecoming, and it saw 591 American military prisoners of war finally free after years of often brutal captivity in Vietnam. Over several weeks in February and March of 1973, they were returned to military bases in

Elephant walking a B-52, ducking SAMs and surviving “the Hilton” (Arcuri, Geloneck)

Co-pilot William Arcuri’s last B-52 mission and his prisoner-of-war experience The electronic warfare officer yells into the microphone, “SAM uplink — 5 o’clock, SAM 6 o’clock, SAM 7 o’clock.” Four Soviet made SAM-2 surface-to-air missiles, each armed with a 288-pound fragmentation warhead, are racing up at more than 2,600 miles

Beloit’s native son, Vietnam POW shares heart and soul of defending freedom (Ron Mastin)

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

COLONEL NORMAN S. WELLS

In 1971, COL Wells returned to Vietnam for a second deployment. This time, he commanded the 4th MI Battalion, (Provisional), 525th MI Group, US Army Pacific.