50 years later, Vietnam POWs from South Carolina getting recognized for their sacrifice

MOUNT PLEASANT — Charles "Chuck" Jackson has little memory of the crushing sound of metal as his F-4 Phantom II broke apart.

What he does remember most is the split second before ejecting.

A heat-seeking missile, about 6 to 8 feet long, fired by a pursuing North Vietnamese MIG-21 went right up the two-seater's jet exhaust while he and pilot Lt. James McCarty were on their return trip home from a bombing mission north of Hanoi.

It was June 24, 1972. Air Force Capt. Jackson's 25th combat flight.

In an instant the plane's tail section dropped off and the nose pitched violently. Air speed went from 450 knots to even faster — actually gaining momentum, a result of the fuel tank exploding.

As the Phantom's separating parts drifted away "we immediately became a ball of fire."

Jackson pulled the eject handle and off he went — seat, parachute and him — shooting some 300 feet away from the disintegrating jet with enemy territory below.

The calendar marking his days of captivity was about to start.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the end of America's involvement in the Vietnam War. Coinciding with that, it signifies the anniversary of when some 591 U.S. POWs — mostly aviators like Jackson — were released following the long slow slog of conflict-ending peace talks.

On Sept. 15, the South Carolina organization of Veterans of Foreign Wars will honor some of those POWs who live in South Carolina in a dinner event at The Citadel, a school where James Stockdale, once the highest ranking Navy POW in Vietnam, briefly served as president.

About a dozen men were invited to be a part of what is the national POW/MIA Recognition Day, though not all will be able to attend.

Here are four of their stories.

Charles "Chuck" Jackson

Branch: Air Force captain

Length of captivity: June 24, 1972-Feb. 12, 1973 

Held: Hao Lo Prison (Hanoi Hilton), Cau Loc Prison (The Zoo)

Lives: Mount Pleasant

Jackson, a 1969 graduate of the Air Force Academy, landed in Southeast Asia on May 15, 1972, flying missions out of the friendly Ubon Royal Thai Air Base, Thailand.

His spot was in the backseat of the F-4 combat jet where he was a weapons officer, meaning he was in charge of its missiles and bombs and "being another pair of eyes" in a configuration.

He'd been at Ubon for 45 days when his 25th mission rolled around. "Every one of my missions was into the North," he said.

Once in the air, surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft fire were part of the known hazards, he said. "They knew when we were coming, knew where we were coming from most of the time and they knew where we were going." 

On the day he was shot down by that MiG-21, he parachute-landed near a village due west of Hanoi named Muoung Do.

"I had already reacted and was beginning to black out when I made the decision to eject," he said. "The next thing I knew I was on the ground."

Injured from his fall from the sky, Jackson hid in a rocky area for a few hours successfully from the villagers out to grab him — until his hand-held radio gave him away. Deaf from the sky-high wind blast that came with the Phantom's explosion, Jackson didn't know the device was squawking loud enough for his pursuers to hear. 

"Next thing I know somebody was pulling on my hair," he said.

Lt. James McCarty, the pilot, did not survive the shoot-down.

Held by locals, Jackson was searched but was careful not to move loudly around in his jumpsuit, fearing the villagers might become scared of hearing, for the first time, something Americans know by heart: the rip of Velcro-type material.

"I only had one good arm. My left arm was broken in a couple places," he recalled.

He was made to walk to a succession of villages — the first steps toward his holding in the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison.

Two incidents stand out from his early days as a prisoner. One is that he was able to escape from the second village he was kept at, but only for a few hours.

"I just simply walked off," he said, adding, "It was futile. I couldn’t climb very much or run."

In another instance, a village chief actually offered him a bride as an honor. It was, he learned, an attempt to strengthen the tribe's isolated bloodline. The union was rejected by the militia in charge. 

When he got to Hoa Lo Prison, dubbed the “Hanoi Hilton” by the Americans, "I knew I was in the hands of the professionals, whether that was good or bad," he said.

Tensions in the Hanoi Hilton could flip in a moment, he recalled, meaning you had to stay alert to situations amid unpredictable guards.

"You never knew when it was going to change or how it was going to change," he said. 

Later at Cau Loc Prison, a former movie studio that Americans called "The Zoo," he met with visiting American peace activist Tom Hayden, husband of actress Jane Fonda. Jackson bummed Marlboro cigarettes from Hayden, while passing along whispered stories of torture and brutality.

"The truth about the camps," he said.

The prison diet was heavy on locally grown vegetables, thin soup, pumpkins, squash, pig fat and skin.

"As long as everybody stood together and worked together to further each other's knowledge and understanding, the stronger we became," he said of his time there.

On a return trip to Hanoi in 2018, Jackson was introduced to the MiG pilot who shot him down.

William “Bill” Bailey

Branch: Navy lieutenant junior grade

Length of captivity: Five years, eight months

Held: Hanoi Hilton, The Plantation, The Zoo, The Zoo Annex

Lives: Anderson

Radar Intercept Officer Bill Bailey and his pilot, Cmdr. Bill Lawrence, were 10 to 15 seconds out from their target when they felt their F-4 Phantom II shutter. They’d been hit by North Vietnamese anti-aircraft guns.

But so close to their target, Lawrence pushed the jet into a dive. Baily counted out the altitude. They released their four 1,000-pound bombs on the Nam Dinh railyard about 5,000 feet below and began to pull up.

Maybe they weren’t hit so bad, Bailey thought.

Then the plane pitched up abruptly and began spinning uncontrollably.

“It was all over,” Bailey remembers. “I blacked out.”

When he came to, Bailey ejected. He doesn’t remember fear. There wasn’t time. “You’re trained to know what to do, and you do it,” he said.

Bailey fell to earth near a rice paddy on the outskirts of Nam Dinh. Fifteen civilians were waiting for him.

“Some of them had guns, some of them had sticks, all of them were mad,” Bailey remembered. “Can’t blame them.”

He and his pilot were captured immediately. It was June 28, 1967. The day his captivity began.

The first few days he spent in the Hanoi Hilton were the hardest. He was interrogated and tortured. On the third day, Bailey started lying. The North Vietnamese bought it.

Bailey spent the next six months in solitary confinement at the Hanoi Hilton. Just before Christmas in 1967, the North Vietnamese moved him to a prison built on the grounds of the French colonial mayor’s residence, which the prisoners named The Plantation.

He’d spend most of the war there and in The Zoo. 

At first, conditions in the camps were tough and monotonous. They received two meals a day — watery soup and rancid bread — and three cigarettes. The prisoners used a code of taps on the walls to communicate between cells.

For minor infractions, Bailey ended up in leg irons for hours or had to kneel on concrete with his arms in the air for long periods.

After North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh died in 1969, the food got better and the men were finally allowed to communicate, if sparingly, with their families.

“The first three years, they were years in which I went to sleep, I lived in fear that someone would rattle the door in the middle of the night and take me out,” Bailey said. “The last two-and-a-half years, I slept soundly.”

In early 1973, the Vietnamese announced the armistice and that the POWs would be released in three waves.

Bailey was to be in one of the latter two waves, but when National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger flew to Hanoi in early February, the North Vietnamese decided to release 20 prisoners between the first and second wave as a gesture of goodwill.

Bailey was told that he would be one of the 20. An official told him his father was gravely ill.

On Feb. 18, 1973, Bailey was released and flew directly back to the VA Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., to see his father. The day after Bailey returned his father died.

After mourning his father, Bailey took off to tour Europe for a few months, taking advantage of his long-awaited freedom. He met his future wife Suzy, a Pan Am stewardess, in London and proposed to her in Paris. The couple will celebrate their 50th anniversary in November.

Bailey said he doesn’t consider himself scarred by the five years and eight months in captivity. He hopes people don’t forget the Vietnam POWs.

“And it’s trite but it’s true that freedom is not free,” he said.

Vernon "Bud" Shepard

Branch: Army sergeant

Length of captivity: 38 days Nov.-Dec. 1969

Held: Jungle camp near Buon Me Thout, South Vietnam 

Lives: Myrtle Beach

Vernon Shepard's captivity began out of firefight in which three helicopters would be brought down — his, a sister chopper and a Cobra gunship.

On Nov. 2, 1969, Shepard was part of a two-man crew flying a Loach mission, or light observation helicopter (think of the chopper in the 1980s "Magnum P.I." TV show) searching for evidence of enemy activity: worn trails, bunkers, smoke or assembly areas — places where gunship fire could be called in.

"We were scalp hunters," he said.

Shepard and pilot teammate George Grega were in the air when they spotted about 12 enemies digging in. Immediately both sides commenced firing, ground to air and air to ground.

"We just opened up on each other," he said.

The chopper was blasted, fuel was leaking. It fell, hitting the ground on a dead-stick, no-power landing.

A second Loach flight immediately attempted a rescue. Shepard briefly got away by jumping on to that flight before it too was knocked out of action.

"I would say it was blown up pretty much," said Shepard said, who by then was severely wounded.

The four downed chopper men eluded capture while another Cobra gunship came in. It too was brought down.

In all, when the action was over, one of the helicopter men would be rescued, one would succumb to his injuries (Grega) and four would be captured over the following days, including Shepard.

The severity of his wounds actually may have saved Shepard from long-term capture. Too weak from their wounds to make it to Hanoi, he and Cobra pilot Michael Peterson were left behind in an enemy jungle camp near the village of Buon Me Thout but still inside South Vietnam.

Shepard reasoned he was made to stay behind to take care of the more injured Peterson who was shot in the legs and couldn't walk. Their home was a rectangular pit some 3 feet deep with a lean-to bamboo cage overhead.

"You couldn't stand up," he said, adding that their ankles were secured at night "so there was no chance of escaping."

The camp was controlled by a group he identified as National Liberation Forces, a local militia.

Their captivity lasted for 38 days, ending when a militia leader delivered specific instructions of how to get away toward the direction of a friendly base.

Shepard called it a surprise from nowhere.

"I really don't know what happened, it's a God thing," Shepard said, adding, "I believe we were holding them back."

After his recuperation, Shepard still had to honor his enlistment time. He returned to the U.S. and finished his service with the armored cavalry at Fort Knox in Kentucky. 

William R. Austen II

Branch: Air Force captain

Length of captivity: Five years, five months

Held: Hanoi Hilton, Zoo Annex, Dan Hoi Prison Camp (Faith), Bo Giuong Prison Camp (Dogpatch)

Lives: Simpsonville

Gen. John Flynn told his men to remain stoic as the North Vietnamese officer read the news of an armistice and their impending release to the rows of American prisoners in a field at the Zoo prison.

William Austen followed the order. But when he returned to his cell, he grabbed a blanket and headed for one of the foxholes that served as their bomb shelters.

“Ducked down there, put the blanket on my face and started yelling,” he remembered.

They were screams of joy. He was finally going home.

Austen’s ordeal had begun more than five years ago on Oct. 7, 1967.

He was in the backseat of an F-4 Phantom II with pilot Maj. Ivan Appleby escorting a pair of F-4s on an aerial reconnaissance mission over North Vietnam when they were hit by a missile. They were hit bad.

Appleby turned the plane around and made for the Laotian frontier. But it was too late. Austen ejected. Moments later the F-4’s tail broke off and the jet hurdled to earth in flames. Appleby would never be seen again. He was pronounced dead after the war.

Meanwhile, Austen was crashing through the trees to the jungle floor in a remote valley southwest of Hanoi. He had no intention of being captured. He discarded his parachute and turned to run up into the mountains toward Laos, pistol at the ready.

But instead of a sprint, Austen stumbled. His foot had lodged in a rocky crevice when he landed. He was stuck. Hearing villagers rustling through the brush at the forest’s edge, he pulled his pistol and fired into the air, still struggling to free his foot.

“All hell broke loose,” Austen remembered.

Bullets rained down on him from the brush as he hid behind a tree. He tried to surrender by throwing down his pistol, but the shooting only intensified. He dove down and felt a bullet hit his free leg.

“I said ‘God, I guess this is it. Please let the next bullet hit me in the head and kill me,’ ” he recalled.

He managed to find white fabric in his pack and throw it in the air. The Vietnamese finally understood he wanted to surrender.

The militia men stripped him to his underwear, freed his foot — which left him severely injured — and marched him through the jungle. After a harrowing dayslong trek to Hanoi, he was bound and contorted so badly during torture at the Hanoi Hilton that it took six months for him to recover the use of his hands and 18 months to learn to walk again.

“I was a vegetable,” he recalled. “I was finished physically.”

He lost 120 pounds in the first winter of captivity.

After Ho Chi Minh died, Austen’s treatment improved, and he was moved to the Dan Hoi Prison Camp outside Hanoi where he watched the fruitless American raid on the empty Son Tay Prison Camp just up the Red River one night. After the raid, the North Vietnamese packed Austen and about 200 others off to a rocky, cold prison camp near the Chinese border. It was only as the war drew to a close that Austen was taken back to Hanoi.

Austen was freed March 14, 1973. That night, after calling his wife Myrtle, who had been a leading advocate for the POWs, he walked the halls of a hospital in the Philippines. It was covered in artwork by school children celebrating the POWs.

Austen wishes every American Vietnam veteran could’ve had the same hero’s welcome on their return.

“We had a homecoming that most of the other veterans from Vietnam didn’t have,” he said. “We got the treatment the other vets deserved.”

Update: The identification for Vernon Shepard has been corrected.