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.
POW Camp 101 is what it was called. The camp was a hell hole located 20 miles outside Hanoi, North Vietnam. It’s where 100 American MIAs languished during the Vietnam War and nobody in the United States knew they were there. A group of a dozen or so MIAs captured
U.S. Air Force Capt. William R. Austin II and his aircraft commander, Maj. Ivan D. Appleby, had out-maneuvered certain death hundreds of times before they got hit. A fighter pilot with the storied “Triple Nickle” 555th Tactical Fighter Squadron, Austin had flown 80 combat missions over North Vietnam in the
“On Earth as it is heaven.” It engulfed his mind as he stood there dirty, hungry and in pain. He struggled to hold his hands up against the wall. His knees shook as he spread his feet wide and tried with everything inside of him not to move a muscle,
On a granite wall in Washington, D.C., the story of Capt. Edward A. Brudno’s suffering remains untold. There is no recognition of the beatings he took or the interrogations he resisted – nothing that acknowledges 7 1/2 years of captivity in a windowless room. Three decades after being tortured in