News-Info-Alerts

Re: Johnson Blasts Baghdad

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: March 29, 2003

"Ex-prisoner blasts Baghdad
 
By Gary Martin
Express-News Washington Bureau
   
WASHINGTON — Rep. Sam Johnson, shot down as a fighter pilot over North Vietnam and imprisoned in the "Hanoi Hilton" for nearly seven years, said Thursday that U.S. troops held captive in Iraq are being mistreated and that those responsible should be tried as war criminals.


Johnson, 62, said the most terrifying time after being captured by enemy troops is the first hours of captivity, because you don't know if interrogators are going to "shoot you or mistreat you or torture you or treat you humanely."

"My heart goes out to them," said Johnson, a former Air Force colonel and prisoner of war who's to return to San Antonio today for the 30th annual POW Freedom Flyer Reunion at Randolph AFB.

Johnson will receive a "freedom flight" in a T-38 Talon, symbolizing what should have been his last flight in Southeast Asia.

Since 1973, 191 former POW Air Force officers have received a flight from the Freedom Flyer Reunion.

Johnson said reports that U.S. prisoners have been shot underscores that the Iraqis have violated international law and the bounds of human decency.

"They certainly need to be brought to task as war criminals for violating the Geneva Conventions," said Johnson, R-Dallas.

Johnson, shot down in a Phantom F-4 in April 1966, was placed in solitary confinement for 42 days, leg stocks for 72 days and leg shackles for 2 1/2 years.

Ten days into his confinement, Johnson was blindfolded and taken into the woods for a trial where he was found guilty of trying to overthrow the North Vietnamese government and placed before a firing squad of five men with AK-47 rifles.

"Even though I had been to Sunday school every Sunday because my mother made me go, I wasn't really that close to the Lord," Johnson said. "But at that point I was praying harder than I ever prayed."

When the officer told them to fire, "the guns went click, click, click, click, click," Johnson recalled. "I prayed to the Lord and laughed at them, which I shouldn't have, because they kept me in a slit trench.

"But from that day forward I never had any fear of them," he said of his captors.

While in captivity, Johnson dropped from 200 pounds to 120 at one point, surviving on a diet that included weeds, pig fat, white rice and pumpkin soup.

Johnson was born in San Antonio in 1930, but grew up in North Texas. Following his return from North Vietnam, he was a homebuilder and served in the Texas Legislature.

He was elected to Congress in 1990.

Portions © 2003 KENS 5 and the San Antonio Express-News."