SAN ANTONIO (AP) - Retired Navy Cmdr. Everett Alvarez Jr. flew one of the first combat missions of the Vietnam War in August 1964, soon after President Lyndon B. Johnson told the nation the United States would strike targets in the north following the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
But Alvarez’s A-4 Skyhawk was crippled by ground fire and went down. Moments later, one of the Navy’s few Hispanic pilots had become the war’s first American POW.
Six weeks of intensive interrogation followed.
“It was pretty easy to convince them that I was a very junior j.g.,” Alvarez, a Silver Star recipient, told the San Antonio Express-News (https://bit.ly/18VPe6o), referring to his rank as a lieutenant. “I didn’t know anything, I just arrived at the ship and my primary duty was I was in charge of the popcorn machine.”
Alvarez’s strategy illustrates how hundreds of American prisoners of war endured brutal living conditions and sadistic interrogation techniques during a long and increasingly unpopular war. Their captors’ goal was to break the prisoners in a quest for tactical information, but the POWs - often in solitary confinement but united in the face of increasing torture - found ways to resist.
Many former prisoners came to Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph after the war to requalify as Air Force pilots. Last week, they returned for the 42nd annual Freedom Flyers Reunion at Randolph, where young Air Force pilots, family and friends saluted old heroes and remembered the 1,636 Americans who still are missing in action.
The ranks of Vietnam’s POWs are thinning, prompting retired Marine Lt. Col. Orson Swindle III to think back on comrades who’ve died in the past year or two, among them Air Force Col. Bud Day, a Medal of Honor recipient, and Brig. Gen. James Robinson “Robbie” Risner, who was senior ranking officer and later vice commander of the 4th Allied Prisoner-of-War Wing.
A Korean War ace who lived for years in San Antonio, Risner died in 2013. Like other prisoners at Hoa Lo Prison, dubbed the “Hanoi Hilton,” he was in solitary confinement. He also was placed in a darkened cell for 10 months and stayed sane exercising. Risner’s mantra, banged out in a “tap code” created by the POWs, was to give the enemy as little as possible.
“I didn’t have the honor of living with Robbie Risner, but I heard Robbie Risner, having been tortured and tortured and tortured, his voice cracking,” said Swindle, a two-time Silver Star recipient. “He was setting the example. Basically no matter what they want you to do, you fight it, and these guys just didn’t mouth words, they lived it.”
The reunion was part of a Randolph program established in the wake of “Operation Homecoming,” the return of POWs to the United States in 1973, and included the 18th annual Prisoners of War and Mission in Action Symposium. Around 150 Air Force pilots back from captivity returned to active-duty flight status with the help of instructors from the base’s 560th Flying Training Squadron.
The first flight, given to Lt. Col. “Bud” Flesher on May 21, 1973, was designed to be what the last mission in Southeast Asia should have been - a traditional greeting by fellow pilots armed with a bottle of champagne, which they drank in honor of those who didn’t make it back.
The 560th’s “Charging Cheetahs” developed the requalification course, which included academics and about 45 hours of flying. The squadron’s pilots have taken 195 former POWs who couldn’t return to the cockpit or didn’t want to on one last “fini flight,” a tradition last observed five years ago.
“I think for the most part, the ones that have wanted to have done it. There may be a couple out there that haven’t, and I’m kind of selfishly hoping for another one,” said the squadron’s commander, Lt. Col. Joel DeBoer.
Facing the crowd that surrounded Randolph’s Missing Man Monument as a light but steady drizzle fell, Swindle said his fellow former prisoners of war were worth remembering.
“They are just extraordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances in turbulent times, and asked to do so much more than was probably expected by any one of them or any of us,” he said.
Sitting in a cell that was the size of a small pantry, Alvarez ate a meal one day and saw that a fellow prisoner had written something on the bottom of the plate.
“Is there a wok in Hanoi?” it said.
Alvarez, a Salinas, California, native who was a prisoner from August 1964 to February 1973, scratched his initials into the plate and soon got another message.
“’Hi, E.A., the score is Navy 7, Air Force 7,’” Alvarez recalled. “Why in the world would they want to give me the score of Navy-Air Force?”
It was a scorecard of another kind - the number of American POWs.
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