George Coker: A story of perseverance

This airman was one of only two POWs to survive captivity in World War II and Vietnam (Richard Keirn)

Like a lot of men who turned 18 during World War II, Richard Paul Keirn signed up to do his duty with the U.S. military. His choice was the U.S. Army Reserve in his native Ohio. He joined in November 1942, but within three months, he was accepted to the

The War: Blowing the Whistle (Rumble, Frishman, Heghdhal)

Only a month earlier, they were prisoners of war. Since their release, Navy Lieut. Robert Frishman and Seaman Douglas Hegdahl have been recuperating at the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. The third released P.W., Air Force Captain Wesley Rumble, 26, whose fighter-bomber went down over Quang Binh province in

Tortured in notorious ‘Hanoi Hilton,’ 11 GIs were unbreakable

On September 9, 1965, Navy Cmdr. James Bond Stockdale was flying his A-4 Skyhawk on a mission over North Vietnam, just days after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, when his plane took fire and hurtled down. Forced to eject with seconds to spare, he landed with severe injuries: his left

Bracelets to remember our soldiers (Timothy Ayres)

The bracelets are cuff-style. They come in a number of colors and can be made of a number of materials: silver, stainless steel, aluminum, copper. They are engraved and go by many names, depending on their exact reason for being: memorial bracelets, KIA bracelets, POW/MIA bracelets, hero bracelets. They have

Vietnam vet shares POW experiences, stories (John Murphy)

John Murphy was about 15,000 feet in the air when his vision came back to him. He was also in free fall and still strapped to the ejector seat of the F4 E Phantom fighter-bomber that moments earlier he had been piloting on a mission over North Vietnam before the