Who was Colonel Makowski? He was an air force navigator who served our country during the Vietnam War. His plane was shot down, and he was taken as a Prisoner of War on October 6, 1966, spending 2,342 days in captivity then released on March 4, 1973. As an adolescent,
Walking next to his father near a lake he fished as a boy, Navy Lieut. Markham Gartley looked up at the clear, blue sky and filled his lungs with crisp autumn air. The 28‐year‐old pilot noted the colors of the northern Maine woods—the McIntosh reds of the sugar maples, the
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
It was December 26, 1972. The vibration from bombs exploding in the distance resonated through the walls of the North Vietnamese prison. In his cell, an American pilot peered through the barred windows where he saw the silhouette of a B-52 Stratofortress in flames. He could only watch as the
Lieutenant Colonel Galand Dwight Kramer was born 5 September 1941 in Wichita, Kansas. He grew up in Kansas and Oklahoma, graduating from Tulsa’s Edison High School in 1959. He is a 1964 graduate of the University of Oklahoma with a Petroleum Land Management degree. He was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant