News-Info-Alerts

Re: Finally Free

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: February 12, 2003

"February 12, 2003

POWs will get another homecoming, 30 years later

By Brian Kelly
Herald Writer

OAK HARBOR -- Two words. A snippet of a sentence, a phrase that lifted them higher than the lumbering Air Force C-141 could ever soar.

"Feet wet!" came the call. And in plane after plane, shouts of joy erupted as each "Hanoi Taxi" crossed the coastline of Vietnam.

Thirty years ago today, the first wave of prisoners of war came home from Vietnam. Dubbed "Operation Homecoming," it saw the release of almost 600 of the 801 Americans captured during the war.

Today at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station, the freedom flights will be marked by a symposium and panel discussion hosted by a half-dozen or so Vietnam POWs. It's a hot ticket for people in uniform: Roughly 400 or more sailors and Marines are expected to attend.

Richard "Skip" Brunhaver, the pilot of a Navy A-4 Skyhawk, recalled being on the second flight out of Hanoi on Feb. 12, 1973. He spent 2,729 days, more than seven years, as a prisoner of war, most of them in Hoa Lo prison, better known as the "Hanoi Hilton."

He was 25 when he was captured -- his fighter-bomber went down because of mechanical trouble in August 1965 -- and 33 when he went home as part of Operation Homecoming.

No cheers came from on board when his plane took off from Vietnam, bound for Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines.

"We had developed so much cynicism over such a long period of time, you never knew," Brunhaver recalled. "You thought there might be some trick going on."

Brunhaver, now 62, said the mood changed once the plane crossed the coast.

"When we hit 'feet wet,' we knew it was for real. About that time, your brain clicked over and said it's time to start living again."

Roger Lerseth, considered a "new guy" during his stay at the Hanoi Hilton because he was captured after the death of Ho Chi Minh in September 1969, said the departure celebration started earlier for those POWs who hadn't been prisoners since the early years of the Vietnam war.

A bomber/navigator on an A-6 Intruder that was shot down by two surface-to-air missiles in 1969, Lerseth was on the first POW plane to fly out of Hanoi.

"The old guys were still looking around, figuring that the North Vietnamese were going to do something nasty," he recalled. But once the landing gear was pulled up, the new guys started to cheer. And once over water, everyone joined in.

Lerseth was on the first plane out because he'd been injured when his Navy jet was hit during an Alpha Strike attack of more than 30 aircraft on an enemy airfield. The first missile ripped a three-foot-wide hole in the plane's right wing.

Lerseth recalled the frantic message that came across the radio: "An ace is hit, get out! Get out, babe, get out!"

The pilot, Lt. Cmdr. Donald Lindland, dropped the plane's bombs and turned for the coast. Within five seconds that felt like hours, another missile hit the jet and it went into a steep dive.

"The next thing I heard was Ka-boom! And that was him leaving," Lerseth said.

Lerseth ejected as well, the force knocking him out cold. He came to after his parachute had opened.

Ears numb from the earlier explosions, Lerseth looked around in his suddenly silent world and found his survival vest -- fitted with two radios -- was gone. So was his flight helmet and his boots. His leg was flapping in the breeze because of a broken femur, and he couldn't control his parachute because of two shattered elbows.

He landed in a rice paddy. Lerseth reached over to pull a knob on the pan to his jet seat, a move he thought would activate an emergency beacon. Out popped a life raft that began to inflate.

"And the life raft went flub-bub-bup!" he recalled.

He was taken by an enemy militia group to a hospital, and later, Hoa Lo prison, where he spent 45 days in solitary confinement before joining other American prisoners. For the last two weeks of his 159 days as a POW, Lerseth shared quarters with Navy Capt. Rodney Knutson, who was captured in October 1965.

Lerseth had been wearing a POW bracelet with Knutson's name on it while Lerseth was aboard the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga, off the coast of Vietnam.

"When I met him, I said, "Heh, I was wearing your bracelet.' He said, 'What's a bracelet?'"

Lerseth, who retired as a commander in the Navy and now lives in Oak Harbor, remembered the subsequent flight home as part of Operation Homecoming, made possible by the peace treaty signed by North Vietnam and the U.S. in late January 1973. At Clark Air Force Base, they opened the base PX and gave the POWs the run of the store.

"I got a bottle of peanut butter and a loaf of bread. Took it back to the hospital and ate myself sick. God, it was good," he said.

Although much of today's events -- sponsored by the Red River Valley Fighter Pilots Association (River Rats), the 4th Allied POW Wing (NamPOWs), the Association of Naval Aviation and the Military Officers' Association of America -- will be devoted to sharing memories of what happened more than three decades ago, organizers also hope today's military will learn lessons that will help them in future conflicts.

"This isn't fun and games. There's a tendency these days to consider this (military duty) a business.

"But combat is still combat," Lerseth said. "Sometimes it's kind of hard to understand that."

Reporter Brian Kelly: 425-339-3422 or kelly@heraldnet.com.

Copyright © 2003 The Daily Herald Co., Everett, Wash."