‘Yankee air pirate!’ — Air Force pilot shot down over Vietnam lived to tell the tale (George Rose)

It’s an indelible image of the Vietnam era: George Alan Rose, then 30, stands on a rain-slicked tarmac. The Air Force fighter pilot has just been released from captivity in North Vietnam. His wife, Becky, wraps her arms around him. Their son, Glen, gazes up at his father and reaches for him.

Rose is 80 now, but that reunion at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland on March 31, 1973, captured by an Associated Press photographer, is still fresh in his mind half a century later.

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