Trapped in the Hanoi Hilton: An Excerpt From Veterans Chronicles

The American Veterans Center (parent organization of the World War II Veterans Committee and now, the National Vietnam Veterans Committee) began with the production of the award-winning radio documentary series, World War II Chronicles, commemorating the 50th anniversary of World War II. This program, hosted by the late, great “Voice of World War II,” Edward J. Herlihy, aired on over 500 stations nationwide between 1991 and 1995 on the Radio America network. In the years since, the American Veterans Center has produced dozens of radio documentaries and series, in an effort to bring the history of America’s veterans to the public.

The tradition of quality radio programming continues with the new series, Veterans Chronicles, hosted by Gene Pell, former NBC Pentagon Correspondent and head of Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. With Veterans Chronicles, listeners are taken to the battlefields where America’s greatest heroes were made. The series is broadcast on the Radio America network. In this issue, we print the partial transcripts of a recent episode.

Our guest this week on Veterans Chronicles is the honorable Orson Swindle III, a retired Lt. Colonel Marine Corps pilot who was shot down over North Vietnam on November 11, 1966. He was flying his 205th mission in Vietnam. It was scheduled to be his final one, and in a tragic sense, it was. Then-Captain Swindle was captured by the North Vietnamese. For the next 2,305 days—more than six years—Swindle was in various prisoner of war camps; the victim of almost daily physical and mental abuse. He was finally freed in the general prisoner release in 1973. He would later hold senior positions in the Reagan administration, including a term as a member of the Federal Trade Commission.

Orson Swindle was not the first Marine is his family, his father serving in the Corps during World War II, one of thousands of Marines to hit the beaches at Iwo Jima. Swindle’s own combat experience would begin slightly more than 20 years later, when he would be deployed to Vietnam…

Gene Pell: When did you first go to Vietnam?

Orson Swindle: I only went one time. It was just a long time. I was in a fighter squad. We were assembled to go as a unit to Japan to fill an air defense-ship role run by the Marine Corps. We were assembled as a squadron in December of 1964, and we stayed together throughout 1965, doing a lot of training. Then Vietnam started heating up, and in late ’65 we were advised by headquarters that we should start adjusting our training to accommodate the combat in Vietnam, primarily in the close air support role. That meant hanging bomb racks on our planes and becoming proficient at dropping bombs. We rotated as a squadron to Vietnam. Over 300 of us were assembled and flown to Da Nang where we were to start operations on February 1st. Over the next seven or eight months I flew about 185 missions, before being taken out of the squadron and assigned to a job in air operations at the wing headquarters. The squadron I was now flying with was the only F-8 squadron in the country, and was scheduled to leave Vietnam on the 15th of November, if I remember correctly. I flew about 20 missions with them. The mission I was shot down on was on November 11th of 1966—the last mission I could have flown before going home.