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.
Charles Everett Southwick discusses his life with Ron Carrico. Southwick was a Navy pilot in Vietnam and was a POW for 6 years. From the archives of the San Diego Air and Space Museum
Retired Air Force Col. Laird Guttersen, 80, who spent five years in a North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp and later became an advocate for families of missing military personnel, died June 13 in Tucson of complications of a stroke, according to family members. His F-4 Phantom was shot down over North
Joe Milligan knew he had a problem when his North Vietnamese prison guards began wearing handkerchiefs over their faces when they entered his cell. The odor of rotting, infected flesh came from his arms, badly burned after Milligan ejected from his crippled F-4C Phantom and into a fireball. His burns
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
Navy pilot Byron Fuller spent almost six years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, where his battered body was tortured and starved, where he endured more than two years in solitary confinement in a 4-by-7-foot cell. Upon his release in 1973 from Hoa Lo, a prison camp known