‘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.

Other Publications You Might Be Interested In

P.O.W.’S HAD LIST OF PROHIBITIONS (David Rollins)

The North Vietnamese captors of American servicemen were adamant. No writing on the pri son walls. No noise. No dis courtesy to the guards. Regulations issued by the North Vietnamese in 1969 pro mised a reward for prisoners who informed about violations and punishment for those who tried to oppose

Read More »

Ex-POW recalls Hainan Island (Phillip Smith)

News of the emergency landing of a U.S. spy plane on China’s Hainan Island is giving flashbacks to a retired U.S. Air Force colonel who spent 7-1/2 years as a POW in China. It was on that island that Philip Smith spent his first hours after he was shot down

Read More »

Kenneth L. Coskey, former Navy pilot and POW

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

Read More »