August 25, 1972 dawned hot and muggy in Vietnam. Pilots of Fighter Squadron 161, stationed aboard USS Midway (CV 41), readied their aircraft and went over the day’s flight plan. Their mission was an early evening MiG combat air patrol over North Vietnam. Lt. John “Jack” Ensch would serve as a radar intercept officer in an F-4B Phantom.
“The key word for all of us at first was fragility. Each of us, before we were ever in shouting distance of another American, was made to “take the ropes.” That was a real shock to our systems — and as with all shocks, its impact on our inner selves
It was the worst prison camp of the Vietnam War. Lodged deep in the jungle west of Da Nang, South Vietnam’s second largest city, the prison camp—or camps, for it was a moveable horror—was not easily imagined by a generation that had grown up watching World War II movies. There
This speech by Jim Collins for The Drucker Institute talks about The Stockdale Paradox, which is rooted in the story of Admiral James Stockdale, who was the highest-ranking United States military officer in the “Hanoi Hilton” prisoner-of-war camp during the height of the Vietnam War. Tortured over twenty times during
When Lt. Col. Harlan Chapman arrived in Hawaii after his release from seven years in North Vietnamese prisoner of war camps, Marine Lt. Gen. Louis Wilson was there to meet him. “Welcome back to the Marine Corps,” Wilson told Chapman. “Thank you, general,” Chapman replied, “But I never left.” Chapman