Retired Air Force Col. Robert Certain was a navigator on the first B-52 shot down during Operation Linebacker II.
There are people in this world who, no matter what you’re going through, have had it worse. Allen Brady is one of them. The retired Navy Captain was flying his A-6 Intruder on a mission to take out a North Vietnamese bridge on January 19th, 1967. And then, suddenly everything went
U.S. Air Force Capt. William R. Austin II and his aircraft commander, Maj. Ivan D. Appleby, had out-maneuvered certain death hundreds of times before they got hit. A fighter pilot with the storied “Triple Nickle” 555th Tactical Fighter Squadron, Austin had flown 80 combat missions over North Vietnam in the
1,882 days; five and a half years. That’s how long Vietnam veteran Wayne Smith was a prisoner of war. “We were in pretty bad shape, we certainly were,” said Smith. He shared his story with us and dozens of people at Punta Gorda’s Military Heritage Museum. The Air Force captain’s
First came a knock on the door, then the bad news, then a request for silence. Don’t tell anyone that your husband/father/son/brother has become a prisoner of war. That was the way it went early in the Vietnam War. U.S. government officials didn’t want to antagonize the North Vietnamese captors,
It was suppertime when they came to break the news. There were seven in the delegation, including her husband’s commanding officer, a Catholic priest and a flight surgeon supplied with tranquilizers. She met them at the door of the two-story house on the Wright Patterson Air Force base in Ohio,