Thomas Collins III would like to clarify one point about his bombing missions in Vietnam, and the more than seven years he spent as a prisoner of war:
It was not a mistake, not a waste, not a failure.
“We needed to stop communism,” says Collins, 74, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel. “It was a good mission. We needed to nip that in the bud, and we did. Actually, Vietnam was successful. We stopped communism.”
Brought down by a faulty fuze on his wingman’s bomb, Tom Moe survived more than five years as a POW in North Vietnam.
One of the senior American officers in the North Vietnamese prison camps said today that the prisoners “forced” their captors “to be brutal to us” by resisting their demands to the last possible point of human endurance. Navy Capt. Jeremiah A. Denton, who has been nominated for promotion to admiral,
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
In August of 1967 I was shot down on my 101st mission near Dong Hoi, just north of the Demilitarized Zone. I was the co-pilot on an F4C. Both the pilot and I survived the crash and spent the next five and one-half years in a Communist prison in Hanoi
Graduates from one of Lackland’s last Officer Candidate School classes, including an honorary class member and former Vietnam prisoner of war, reunited here to commemorate their 50th-year anniversary. Members of OCS Class 62-A, which graduated Sept. 22, 1961, were honored as special guests during the Sept. 23 Air Force Basic