For nearly 20 years, former Army Capt. Johnnie Ray remained grateful that Oklahoma had eased his return as a Vietnam prisoner of war by granting free college tuition to his children.
But when he tried to get free tuition at his own alma mater, Oklahoma State University, for his daughter, Pammy, he was turned down.
“They told us that was only for children of prisoners of war who died in Vietnam,” Dorothy Ray said Tuesday from the family’s Wynnewood home.
It’s an indelible image of the Vietnam era: George Alan Rose, then 30, stands on a rain-slicked tarmac. The Air Force fighter pilot has just been released from captivity in North Vietnam. His wife, Becky, wraps her arms around him. Their son, Glen, gazes up at his father and reaches for
The Palm Springs Air Museum’s collection of Vietnam-era POW/MIA bracelets has steadily grown since the first bracelet — bearing the name of U.S. Air Force Col. Norman Schmidt — was donated in late February.
“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,
This afternoon, I had the honor of visiting Colonel John Dramesi, Vietnam Prisoner Of War and author of the Code of Honor, with several friends.
Jack Bomar still has nightmares about the beatings administered by ”Fidel,” a Cuban government agent in North Vietnam who tortured him and 17 other U.S. prisoners of war some three decades ago. ”I wake up at night and I am in a situation back there,” the retired Air Force colonel