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.”
Ronald Ridgeway was “killed” in Vietnam on Feb. 25, 1968. The 18-year-old Marine Corps private first class fell with a bullet to the shoulder during a savage firefight with the enemy outside Khe Sanh. Dozens of Marines, from what came to be called “the ghost patrol,” perished there. At first,
Michael Thomas Burns was fulfilling a lifelong dream of flying jets in the Air Force when he was shot down over Vietnam during a combat mission July 5, 1968. Burns was captured and later transferred to the infamous Hanoi Hilton prisoner of war camp. After spending 1,714 days in captivity,
For US Air Force Col. Raymond J. Merritt, his accommodations in North Vietnam between 1965 and 1973 left a lot to be desired. Merritt, a former fighter pilot, was shot down by anti-aircraft fire in September 1965 and held captive at a number of camps, including the infamous “Hanoi Hilton.”
It was the worst prison camp of the Vietnam War. Lodged deep in the jungle west of Da Nang, South Vietnam’s second largest city, the prison camp—or camps, for it was a moveable horror—was not easily imagined by a generation that had grown up watching World War II movies. There
Nearly 25 years ago, when the war was raging in Vietnam, a 20-year-old private from Alabama said a prayer and buried his Marine buddy in a Viet Cong prisoner of war camp where both were held. Thomas Davis survived five years in POW camps and has returned to Vietnam for