It’s been nearly 50 years since Dennis Thompson was captured by North Vietnamese forces as a prisoner of war.
But he still sees the black enclosed room with no light where they kept him. For five years — he counted 1,864 days — the Vietnamese imprisoned him, 850 days of which were in continuous solitary confinement.
“I’ll always be there,” the 74-year-old veteran said.
The date was Oct. 26, 1967. I was on my 23rd mission, flying right over the heart of Hanoi in a dive at about 4,500 feet, when a Russian missile the size of a telephone pole came up—the sky was full of them—and blew the right wing off my Skyhawk
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,
On August 16, 1960, Joe Kittinger went for a balloon ride. Sitting inside an open gondola suspended from an enormous helium-filled envelope, the U.S. Air Force captain rose to a height more than 19 miles above the Earth’s surface. His mission that day—part of Project Excelsior—was to test a new
The food at the Hanoi Hilton was worse than just bad. As a prisoner of war, Ted Sienicki found the bread full of insects. Many of the POWs ate the rations anyway — with predictable results. One prisoner removed something from his body — just what isn’t clear — that
The morning he flew his 266th mission over Vietnam, Air Force Capt. Tony Marshall only knew the pilot in the seat in front of him, Capt. Steve Cuthbert, by reputation. Tall and thin with a shock of sandy blond hair, Cuthbert never suffered a lack of confidence flying the F-4 Phantom. “He told