After 14 years of gathering war stories, Tim Breitbach created a documentary depicting his cousin’s life, Daniel Hefel, a Vietnam War veteran.
The film was shown for free March 30 during a public gathering at Southwestern Illinois College in Belleville, which was attended by a diverse audience of college students, veterans, and community members.
Before his plane was shot down, before spending more than six years as a prisoner of war and before he was honored during his hometown’s Fourth of July parade, Col. Robert Waggoner called Steamboat Springs home. “He was the youngest boy of eight children, and he grew up and went
50 years ago, direct U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War officially ended as the last remaining combat troops and prisoners of war returned to American soil. It was a complex moment for the country, as the war was deeply unpopular and ended in defeat. More than 58,000 Americans died in the war,
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
Kenneth L. Coskey, a retired Navy captain and aircraft pilot who served five years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, died June 29 at the Avalon assisted living facility in McLean, where he had resided for the last four months. He was 83. He had Alzheimer’s disease, his
It took her 44 years, but Morreen O’Reilly-Mersberger finally tracked down the prisoner of war whose name was on a bracelet that she purchased in college and kept to this day. The 62-year-old Plymouth resident bought the item for $2 in the fall of 1970 from a student group on