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.
Weeks after arriving in Vietnam in 1968, Korean War veteran Sergeant First Class Floyd Wilmoth- who enlisted in the US Army in 1953- stepped aboard the river vessel LCU1577 ‘Sunset Strip’. Days later, Wilmouth and his crew were unwittingly embroiled in an international incident between Cambodia and the United States.
Ronald Ridgeway was “killed” in Vietnam on Feb. 25, 1968. The 18-year-old Marine Corps private first class fell with a bullet to the shoulder during a savage firefight with the enemy outside Khe Sanh. Dozens of Marines, from what came to be called “the ghost patrol,” perished there. At first,
Ben Pollard got a lot of mail his last week in prison, as many letters as he’d received in the preceding six years combined: four. – No matter that they dated to 1968, .and this was 1973. ; That sort of conduct “made (the iNorth Vietnamese) wonderful enemies,” said Pollard,
Former POW and U.S. Air Force LCOL Armand Jesse Myers looks through a book on Vietnam prisoners of war in the hospital lounge. LCOL Myers was captured on 1 Jun 66 and released by the North Vietnamese in Hanoi 12 Feb 1973
Amy Shively Hawk knew she had to write about her stepfather’s experience as a prisoner of war in Vietnam when she heard the recordings he had made about that time. On the Department of Defense’s Prisoner of War/Missing in Action website, James Richard Shively’s name is one of 1,756 names