Douglas Hegdahl was born on September 3, 1946 in Clark, South Dakota. Being from a small town, Douglas once joked with a reporter that he’d “never been east of [his] uncles’ Dairy Queen stand in Glenwood, Minnesota or west of [his] aunt’s house in Phoenix, Arizona.” So when a military
On Jan. 19, 1967, Air Force Captain Julius “Jay” Jayroe was flying an F-4C Phantom on a reconnaissance mission over Hanoi, Vietnam, when he was shot down. After landing by parachute in the rice paddies sprinkled across the countryside, Jayroe became a prisoner of war during the thick of the
Col. Ted W. Guy, 4-18-29 to 4-23-99SRO at the Plantation was Air Force Lt. Col. Ted Guy. The combative Guy had been downed in Laos on March 22, 1968. He was captured after shooting it out with some North Vietnamese soldiers, killing at least two of them. After capture he
In 1967, there was a “unit” of approximately 300 Americans fighting the Vietnam Warfrom within a Hanoi prison. The unit—later named the 4th Allied POW Wing—waslocated in the drab North Vietnamese capital. Within this unit, every man had thesame job: prisoner of war.All—except three enlisted airmen—were officers, including me. Our
When retired Lt. Col. James W. Williams returned to Southeast Asia this past fall, to the site of the worst 313 days of his life, the last thing he expected to find was himself. For a period spanning 1972-1973, Williams, a former U.S. Air Force pilot, was a prisoner at