‘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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In the early morning hours of 29 October 1963, at Tan Phu village in southernmost Vietnam, then-First Lieutenant (1LT) James N. ‘Nick’ Rowe, the Assistant Detachment Commander, Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) 23, prepared for a ‘routine’ combat patrol. Rowe, Senior Special Forces (SF) Medic Master Sergeant Daniel L. Pitzer,

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