Re: My POW, Alive and Amazing

Date: April 26, 2004

"My POW, alive and amazing

Bracelet was our bond over three decades

PAM KELLEY Staff Writer

I've never met Col. Joseph W. Kittinger Jr., but for three decades, I've felt a connection with him.

As a junior high student in the early '70s, I mailed off $2.50 in hard-earned baby-sitting money for a POW bracelet -- a nickel band that bore the name of a U.S. soldier held as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. I got Kittinger, who'd been captured in May 1972.

During the Vietnam era, a nonprofit organization sold 5 million of those bracelets to draw attention to soldiers imprisoned or missing in action. You were to wear them until the soldier was brought home or accounted for. Mine stayed on my wrist a year or two, long after the black paint had worn off the engraved letters.

After the war ended, I stuck it away. I hoped Kittinger had come home safely. But I never knew.

Then, last month, my daughter was making a field trip to Washington, with a stop at the Vietnam Memorial. That got me thinking about Kittinger. As I dug through a dresser drawer to show her my POW band, it dawned on me that I could use the Internet to find out what became of him.

I went to the computer and Googled him. I found answers to everything I'd wondered about the man on my bracelet.

Yes, he was alive and well and living in Florida. But there was more. My POW was famous.

In 1960, years before his first Vietnam tour, the 32-year-old Air Force captain and test pilot rose in the gondola of a helium balloon to 102,800 feet, about 20 miles high. There, in the stratosphere, with just a parachute, a pressurized suit and a lot of optimism, he jumped.

As he descended, he reached a speed of 714 miles per hour, breaking the sound barrier. When he touched ground in New Mexico nearly 14 minutes later, his only injury was a painful and swollen right hand, caused by the failure of his pressurized glove.

In the past few weeks, I've loved describing that feat to friends and watching their jaws drop. It's so improbable -- and so frightening -- that it makes the thought of a rocket flight seem like a trip on the subway.

Kittinger's leap set records still unbroken: Highest open gondola balloon ascent, longest free fall, longest parachute descent, fastest speed by a human through the atmosphere. But its purpose wasn't to set records; it was to advance knowledge -- to learn how a human body reacts to that altitude and whether a person could survive an escape from a craft that high.

Kittinger later served in Vietnam. But after more than two years, just days before completing his third combat tour, his plane was shot down. He spent 11 months as a POW. After retiring from the Air Force, he took up balloon racing. In 1984, at age 56, he set another record, making the first solo balloon flight across the Atlantic, crash landing in Italy.

I'd never imagined the guy on my bracelet had such an extraordinary life.

Bracelet protocol says you're to return your band to your POW. I was more than 30 years late, but I e-mailed Kittinger for his address.

It turns out I'm not the only person belatedly searching for my POW. Chuck Schantag, director of the POW Network, a Missouri group that records Vietnam POW history, says he gets calls nearly every week from bracelet owners. One of his favorites came from a Florida woman. Her POW was a retired three-star admiral who, unbeknownst to her, lived just blocks from her house. Schantag alerted the admiral, and he paid her a surprise visit. When she opened her door, he announced: I understand you have my bracelet.

Schantag is amazed that so many bracelets remain in jewelry boxes and drawers all over America. When people call him and learn the guy on their bracelet is alive, some cry. Some of the POWs cry, too, he says, when they receive letters from bracelet owners who've remembered them for so many years. One former POW sends Christmas cards to people who've returned bracelets to him.

Col. Kittinger replied promptly to my e-mail. When I saw his name in my inbox, I felt a thrill, as if I'd just tracked down a long-lost relative.

His message was gracious: He thanked me for buying that bracelet in 1972. "Periodically over these past 31 years I have a POW bracelet returned to me and I once again cherish the freedom that I enjoy as an American," he wrote.

Later, we talked by phone. Now 75, Kittinger is married and lives near Orlando. In recent years, he's done skywriting, banner towing and balloon flying for an aerial advertising company. He still does a bit of skywriting and ballooning. "The sky is my office," he likes to say.

And he's got several Tar Heel connections: One son is a doctor in Wilmington, one grandson attends Davidson College, and a granddaughter graduated from Davidson last year.

I asked him about his incredible balloon jump. That was the hairiest thing he ever did, he said, but "I would never have gone if I didn't think it was going to work."

As a POW, Kittinger was tortured and spent weeks in solitary confinement. To keep boredom from consuming him, he'd plan long-distance balloon flights, mentally plotting routes and solving logistical problems.

Though he's had lots of memorable days in his 75 years, Kittinger told me he counts the day he was released from the Hanoi POW camp as the happiest of his life.

Over the years, Kittinger said, he's received more than 20 bracelets. He keeps the bands in a box in his bedroom. "It's such an emotional thing for all of us who get a response from people like you," he told me. "We never met you, but we know you're the force who got us back."

So now I'm packing up my POW band and sending it to its rightful owner. It feels odd to give it up after all these years. But I look at it this way: I haven't lost a bracelet. I've gained a friend.

Learn More About Vietnam POWs

Of the 763 soldiers who were Vietnam prisoners of war, 701 came home alive. Today, 1,862 soldiers remain missing in action, and the U.S. government continues investigations to account for them.

To learn about the soldier on your bracelet, go to www.pownetwork.org or www.dtic.mil/dpmo, a U.S. Department of Defense site that lists information about POWs and MIAs. To learn about the cases of still-missing soldiers, write Charles Henley, Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office, 1745 Jefferson Davis Highway, Suite 800, Arlington, VA 22202.

Government officials advise bracelet owners who want to return bracelets to families of still-missing soldiers to first write to the above address. Some families prefer not to be contacted.

©Charlotte Observer"