Former P-O-W Survived on Faith
Jim Bailey News Channel 11
Sixty Three years ago next Tuesday Japanese Zero's thundered down on The U.S. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, drawing the United States into World War II.
Robinson Risner was in high school that day, but within two years was flying in the Army Air Corp at the beginning of a 33 year military career. Now every year the U.S. Air Force awards a pilot a trophy that bears Risner's name.
In the years in between he was a fighter ace, with 8 kills in Korea, and a long term prisoner of war.
At nearly 80 years old, retired Air Force Brigadier General Robbie Risner remembers the day he was shot down in Vietnam like it was yesterday.
"I was flying low, about 10 feet off the ground at 600 miles per hour, hoping to stay under their radar and get into the target and get out before they even saw me." Risner told the stories to me again during a recent visit to the Tri-Cities. The fire in his blue eyes still as bright as the tracer bullets that raced toward his F-105 Thunderchief on September 16th, 1965.
"I pulled up to go over about a 100 foot hill and when I did I was getting all kinds of fire." Fire than wounded his jet so badly he could not make it back to the airbase in Thailand from which he flew missions over North Vietnam. Today he would be captured.
Just the month before Lt. Colonel Risner had appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, and his Viet Cong captors had a copy. "Well they thought they had a prize," he recalled "and they just kind of concentrated on me for all this time, they wanted to break me and use me."
Breaking him meant torture. His shoulders pulled back until they dislocated, breaking his ribs at the sternum. Sitting sleepless for days on a hard wooden chair. Beatings, and loneliness. Of the seven and a half years he would spend as a POW, four would be in solitary confinement.
"For seven and a half years the Lord was getting my attention.", he shrugs off now as if it was an inconvenience, but a distant stare belies a different reality.
So much time alone left Risner searching for ways to occupy his mind. "All this time I could pray, and I did. I even prayed for a little girl who sat in front of me in the 2nd grade class."
Much of his solitary time was spent in a lightless cell, where a glimpse of the outside meant being able to focus on a single blade of grass visible through a crack in the wall. To maintain order in his life he solved math problems in his mind, and continued a regular Sunday morning worship service, all by himself. But apparently not alone.
One particular Sunday he heard a voice. "I was kneeling and He said, okay, you can do it now. I knew immediately what He was talking about, I could keep my promise."
Risner isn't sure whether he actually heard the audible voice of God but he recognized the promise he made while waiting to be found after putting down a jet he was test flying on a dry lake bed in Mexico.
He had promised to be a faithful Christian if God would just send someone to find him. It was a promise he says he failed to keep. That all changed that Sunday morning.
After the Vietnam War ended in 1973 Risner was released. Not broken as his captors had hoped, but better. "I came out a stronger man for it, simply because I had come to depend on God and country."
He wrote a book about his captivity, The Passing of the Night, detailing his reborn relationship with God, and regularly tells others about his ordeal, so they may find strength to face their own.
© 2004 Media General, Inc.