‘Fidel’ tortured POWs in Vietnam (Bomar, Hubbard, Cobeil)

Jack Bomar still has nightmares about the beatings administered by ”Fidel,” a Cuban government agent in North Vietnam who tortured him and 17 other U.S. prisoners of war some three decades ago.

”I wake up at night and I am in a situation back there,” the retired Air Force colonel said. ”Sometimes I am trying to bail out of my airplane, or sometimes it might be Fidel there, waiting to hammer me.”

Recently declassified Defense Department documents say three Cubans were sent to North Vietnam by Fidel Castro’s government to deal with U.S. POWs in what became known as the Cuba Program.

Now, some of those former POWs are thinking of suing the Cuban government for reparations, according to a Miami Herald report Sunday.

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Homecoming or Rude Awakening? (Jose Luna)

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

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