![]() 27, 1973-the day the cease-fire was signed in Paris. He was freed in June 1962: His captors simply came out of the jungle at a main road and put him on a bus back to Saigon. 26, 1961, while riding a bicycle on the way to a swimming pool on the outskirts of Saigon. ![]() The first American taken prisoner by the Viet Cong was Army Spec. The Korean War had the highest casualty rate among US prisoners–with 38 percent of the 7,140 prisoners perishing.įor Americans searching for meaning in a controversial conflict and yearning for heroes, the POWs became a touchstone for the traditional values of loyalty and inspiration often overlooked during the conflict itself. Of the 142,255 Americans captured and interned during major wars in the 20th century, a total of 17,033 died in captivity. The number of prisoners taken during the Vietnam War was relatively small. Of those, 113 died in captivity and 658, or 85 percent, were returned to US authorities during or at the end of a grueling conflict that claimed the lives of more than 58,000 American troops in Southeast Asia. Dragged before propaganda cameras after 72 hours of nonstop indoctrination, the sleep-deprived pilot had numbly blinked his eyelids to relay the message “t-o-r-t-u-r-e” in Morse code as a Japanese television news crew filmed the interview.Ī total of 771 Americans were captured and interned during the Vietnam War. ![]() It was a triumph for Denton, who had alerted the world to the communists’ torture of prisoners in May 1966. With that, the Navy pilot who went down in an A-6 carrier attack aircraft during a bombing run over North Vietnam’s Thanh Hoa bridge complex on July 19, 1965, marked the end of the longest wartime captivity of any group of US prisoners in history.
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