Before his plane was shot down, before spending more than six years as a prisoner of war and before he was honored during his hometown’s Fourth of July parade, Col. Robert Waggoner called Steamboat Springs home.
“He was the youngest boy of eight children, and he grew up and went to school in Steamboat Springs,” said Sylvia Spangler, Waggoner’s niece.
Waggoner died June 21 in California. The U.S. Air Force colonel was 86 years old.
Jon A. Reynolds, a retired U.S. air force brigadier-general who spent more than seven years as a prisoner of war after his plane was shot down over North Vietnam in 1965, died April 16 at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 84. The cause was lung cancer. Reynolds was
Retired Navy Capt. Collins Henry Haines refers to the years 1967 to 1973 as the time he spent in jail. Between June 8, 1967, and March 3, 1973, Haines, an F-8 Crusader pilot, was moved between a series of North Vietnamese prisoner camps, where he endured torture, disease and isolation. “We
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
The bright blue Corvette in David Harker’s garage holds a special place in his heart. It was a gift on the day in March 1973, when he returned to Lynchburg after five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. His classmates sold bumper stickers to raise money for the
PREFACE When people ask about being a POW, they want to know what the Hanoi Hilton was like. What happened in the Hilton was the same for all of us. But what happened before we got to the Hilton or some other site was quite different. Some pilots were shot