Jay Hess was 14 years into his Air Force service.
The fighter pilot, in the cockpit of an F-105 Thunderchief, was dropping 600 pound bombs in the heavily defended area around Hanoi, in north Vietnam. Hess finished the steep dive, released his bombs and began to pull out when his aircraft was hit by enemy fire. With no way out, he pulled the ejection handle.
Five years ago I wrote “Jack, Will You Sing Again?” — a story about Col. Jack Tomes, a POW for six and a half years in the Hanoi Hilton, a notorious camp for POWs in Vietnam known for its brutal treatment of American prisoners. Spence Field brought Jack to Moultrie
Amy Shively Hawk knew she had to write about her stepfather’s experience as a prisoner of war in Vietnam when she heard the recordings he had made about that time. On the Department of Defense’s Prisoner of War/Missing in Action website, James Richard Shively’s name is one of 1,756 names
Somehow, five years and three months of captivity that included starvation and torture in North Vietnam did not change Ken Fleenor. He was the same man his wife, Anne, met long before, when she was a high school senior and he was a junior majoring in biology and agriculture at
Before his plane was shot down, before spending more than six years as a prisoner of war and before he was honored during his hometown’s Fourth of July parade, Col. Robert Waggoner called Steamboat Springs home. “He was the youngest boy of eight children, and he grew up and went
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