A career Air Force officer who was a North Vietnamese prisoner says the United States butted its “nose into somebody else’s business” and that President Nixon could have settled the war for the same terms four years ago.
Maj. Hubert K. Flesher, 40 years old, a fighter pilot who spent more than six years in Communist prison camps, expressed a different view from that of many former P.O.W.’s, who have agreed with Mr. Nixon that the United States won a “peace with honor.”
When the Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center held the sixth Annual POW/MIA Run in September to honor all current and former prisoners of war and Americans still listed as missing in action, the big story that particular day was the run. However, the real story to remember from
Fifty years ago this week, returning Vietnam War released prisoner of war, Air Force Maj. Charles E. Greene Jr. of Schenectady, alighted a C-9 Nightingale at Westover Air Force Base in Chicopee, Mass. and embraced his wife, Sandra, and 10-year-old daughter Kim, who had been escorted to the plane’s ramp.
For weeks the returned P.O.W.s had been stepping from “freedom birds” onto the television screens—most of them saluting crisply, walking smartly, looking physically fit and acting mentally alert. As the nation’s early apprehensions faded, a new idea set in: perhaps the P.O.W.s had been humanely treated after all. That illusion
A Vietnam prisoner of war who spent years in captivity in the prison camp they dubbed the Hanoi Hilton and whose story was closely followed by the American public is set to be honored by Congress. For his grit under interrogation, and for his unbending commitment to survive the prison
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