Like a lot of men who turned 18 during World War II, Richard Paul Keirn signed up to do his duty with the U.S. military. His choice was the U.S. Army Reserve in his native Ohio. He joined in November 1942, but within three months, he was accepted to the
Donna Bowers was a teenager in the early 1970s, when she received her POW bracelet. The name on the bracelet was Col. Leland Hildebrand. There was a date with the name: 12/18/71. Those bracelets were worn in honor of American soldiers missing or taken prisoner in the Vietnam War. That’s something we
A story of survival, endurance, and overcoming obstacles for your Memorial Day. Lt. Col. Paul Kari spent nearly eight years as a POW after being shot down over North Vietnam. What happened afterward also tested his limits. Kari and I walked the land on his pristine spread in West Liberty.
He remembers being shot down like it was yesterday. On July 18, 1965, U.S. Navy Lt. Commander William M. Tschudy and his co-pilot Commander Jeremiah Denton were on a mission over Vietnam’s Song Ma river, with instructions to bomb North Vietnamese ships that were unloading supplies. At first, they thought
Tass, the Soviet press agency, reported from Hanoi today that American air strikes over the North Vietnamese capital had inflicted casualties on Ameri can pilots held prisoner there. A Tass correspondent, Alex ander Mineyev, said that raids “during three straight nights” had dropped bombs in the area of a prison