It was Nov. 7, 1967 and U.S. Air Force 1st Lt. Leon Ellis was co-piloting an F-4C Phantom over North Vietnam when his aircraft was suddenly hit by enemy fire. It exploded into pieces and was quickly tumbling to the ground.
He managed to eject safely, but found himself parachuting into the same enemy territory he was attacking – not a good situation. He was almost immediately surrounded by North Vietnamese soldiers and captured.
Tass, the Soviet press agency, reported from Hanoi today that American air strikes over the North Vietnamese capital had inflicted casualties on Ameri can pilots held prisoner there. A Tass correspondent, Alex ander Mineyev, said that raids “during three straight nights” had dropped bombs in the area of a prison
REPORT OF NAVAL PILOT ON HIS CAPTURE AND TREATMENT BY THE NORTH VIETNAMESE
In 1967, there was a “unit” of approximately 300 Americans fighting the Vietnam Warfrom within a Hanoi prison. The unit—later named the 4th Allied POW Wing—waslocated in the drab North Vietnamese capital. Within this unit, every man had thesame job: prisoner of war.All—except three enlisted airmen—were officers, including me. Our
Jack Van Loan, an Oregon native and fighter pilot who spent six years in the infamous Hanoi Hilton as a prisoner of war in Vietnam and then served for 20 years as executive director of the Five Points Association in Columbia, has died. He was 87. “He was a mentor,
Mishawaka native Richard “Dog” Brenneman jokes about the deprived quarters where he spent 1,953 days as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. “You had a bucket to go potty, and if you were lucky, you had a lid,” recalls the 75-year-old retired Air Force officer, chuckling. “You usually had a