There were times I thought the end was coming.
That’s how Arthur Neil Black described his captivity after the helicopter he was aboard was shot down over North Vietnam on Sept. 20, 1965, while on a rescue mission for the U.S. Air Force.
“It was a very scary situation,” he recalled. “You don’t know if you are going to live or die. You start to pray. You don’t have anywhere else to turn. That becomes a saving grace.”
Their code was to return with honor. The inhumane treatment can hardly be understood by most of us. As prisoners of war in Vietnam, it was desperate at times after the torture, but Capt. Robert Biss says he always knew he was coming home.
Porter Halyburton was born in 1941 and grew up in Davidson, North Carolina, with his grandparents because his parents divorced when he was young. His grandfather taught at Davidson, and Porter later attended that university. He enjoyed sports and being outdoors, often roaming the area around Davidson with a .22
On October 1, Thomas Pyle ’53 shared his story about coming to CFS as a 12-year-old from Wilmington, DE, and how the discipline, work and faith he learned at the school helped him through 6 1/2 years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
On Nov. 29, 1970, 43 U.S. servicemen gathered in the Hoa Lo prison compound, often called the “Hanoi Hilton,” and performed an act of retaliation— a church service. Nine days earlier, after a failed attempt by U.S. Special Forces to liberate the prisoners, the North Vietnamese captors had removed them