The War: Blowing the Whistle (Rumble, Frishman, Heghdhal)

A heroic connection (Charlie James)

It took her 44 years, but Morreen O’Reilly-Mersberger finally tracked down the prisoner of war whose name was on a bracelet that she purchased in college and kept to this day. The 62-year-old Plymouth resident bought the item for $2 in the fall of 1970 from a student group on

Phillip Butler fought his way through a…

There is little about Phillip Butler’s appearance to suggest a man who has lived by what he calls the “warrior spirit.” Dressed in a sweatshirt, jeans and sneakers, Butler wears his snowy white hair closely cut and sometimes walks with a cane. He speaks softly and enjoys a mostly quiet

Vietnam POW retells his tale (Donald Heiliger)

A prisoner of war for seven years, a University of Wisconsin alum spoke to a group of UW Air Force Reserve Officers’ Training Corps cadets Tuesday, telling a jarring tale of courage, honor and service. Originally trained as a navigator, Col. Don Heiliger became an official pilot when the Air

Vietnam vet shares POW experiences, stories (John Murphy)

John Murphy was about 15,000 feet in the air when his vision came back to him. He was also in free fall and still strapped to the ejector seat of the F4 E Phantom fighter-bomber that moments earlier he had been piloting on a mission over North Vietnam before the

True Soldier Stories: My Name is “Lucky” Larry Chesley

I grew up in Burley, Idaho. We lived on a farm and I learned to work hard at an early age. I enlisted in the Air Force in 1956 when I was seventeen years old and spent two years in Japan and nearly two years in Germany. In 1960 I