One of the most remarkable stories to come out the Vietnam War involved American pilots who picked up their lives after brutal imprisonment in North Vietnam. NBC special correspondent Tom Brokaw joins them for a reunion in San Diego.
Captured and at the mercy of an increasingly cruel enemy, German-born US Navy pilot Dieter Dengler was left with no choice but to attempt a daring escape from the Pathet Lao prison camp in which he was being held during the Vietnam War. The fateful decision was made only after he and six other POWs had overheard plans to get rid of them as soon as the guards ran out of food. Dieter would choose
Vietnam is often called “the war that won’t go away”, largely because of the continuing controversy of the POW/MIA (Prisoners Of War / Missing In Action) issue. Families of those who were POW/MIA in Vietnam organized an activist movement which went on to pursue a question which still haunts America nearly decades later: were soldiers left behind in captivity after the Vietnam War? Once the exclusive domain of a select fraternity of soldiers’ wives, the
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords, which officially ended U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. One local man spent six and a half years in captivity, as a prisoner of war. Naval aviator George Coker returned to America as part of “Operation Homecoming” a half-century ago. He spoke about it today with Mike Gooding.
On November 17, 2013 Robert Wideman sat down and told of his experiences in the Vietnam War. Robert, born in Montreal, Canada and raised in upstate New York and Cleveland, OH, served in the Navy. A pilot, he flew 120+ missions into Vietnam off the carriers Enterprise and Hancock. On May 6, 1967, his plane was shot down over North Vietnam and Robert became a POW for the next six years. In this clip, he
