Retired Air Force Col. Robert Certain was a navigator on the first B-52 shot down during Operation Linebacker II.
News stories about the Vietnam conflict were a daily staple in the spring of 1968 when I joined The Patriot Ledger as a copy reader on the news desk. I soon learned that the year before a Quincy native, Lt. Cmdr. Richard Stratton, had been captured after he was forced
I stood up and made a gesture of surrender, and they were all over me. Funny thing, the first thing to come off was my Seiko watch . . . then they got around to my gun and knife.” When Bill Wilson was captured by the North Vietnamese, one of
I arrived at Udorn RTAFB in early May, 1967, to fly A-1E and A1-H Skyraider with the 602nd Fighter Squadron (Commando). I was to fly 247 combat missions during three consecutive tours and participated in the rescue of 18 aircrew members. On May 31, 1968, going for number 19, I
Although he graduated ahead of me – he was in the Class of 1959 and I was in the Class of 1967 – Jon Reynolds and I both received Air Force commissions through Trinity’s Air Force ROTC unit. He was shot down over North Vietnam when I was still at
Among the 200 American Vietnam prisoners of war and their families who recently gathered in the reproduced East Wing at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda were Whitethorn residents Everett and Evelyn King. Everett King was a corporal in an Army intelligence unit stationed at Hue,