Forever An Airman: At 77, the only Vietnam POW Four-Star Still Has the Spirit He Had in His Combat Missions

STORY BY // RANDY ROUGHTON PHOTOS BY // STAFF SGT. DAVID SALANITRI VIDEO BY // ANDREW ARTHUR BREESE

25 January 2016

An interview with General Charles G. Boyd. At 77, the only Vietnam POW four-star still has the spirit he had in his combat missions.
U.S. Air Force video // Andrew Arthur Breese

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Retired Gen. Charles G. Boyd reached into his left pocket and pulled out two silver dollars, which were tied to a superstition he habitually practiced as a fighter pilot in Vietnam.
“There they are,” he said. “I can’t tell you why I did that, but I never went anywhere, particularly on a mission, without those two silver dollars.”
Boyd lost them when he was shot down on his 105^th F-105 Thunderchief mission.  He was subsequently captured by the North Vietnamese and remained a prisoner of war for 2,488 days, but he replaced the silver dollars soon after he was finally released in 1973.
Although his days of flying combat missions are long gone, Boyd, the owner of three Bronze Stars and three Purple Hearts, still has the fighter pilot’s heart for adventure, just like the silver dollars in his pocket. At the age of 77, he loves to ride one of his BMW motorcycles or fly his T-34 Mentor — the same plane he flew in pilot training — from the small airport near his home in Virginia. The pride of being an Airman never left Boyd, the only POW in Vietnam who became a four-star general.
“It’s part of my soul. It’s who I am,” Boyd said. “I could always imagine the freedom, the release of gravity to fly like a bird, even though I hadn’t actually flown an airplane myself until I got into Air Force pilot training. But somehow that picture emerged and developed in my mind before I actually flew an airplane.
“When I did fly, it pretty much reinforced what I had imagined, except it had a greater reality to it. There was a sense of power, freedom, maneuvering and liberty. To this day, I have found nothing else in life that scratches that particular itch.”
Six months into his combat tour, Boyd was shot down on April 22, 1966, over Laos. He spent seven years as a POW at the Hoa Lo Prison, also known as the Hanoi Hilton. After his release during Operation Homecoming in 1973, Boyd declined to discuss his experiences for years because he was interested in looking forward, not back to the small cell in Hanoi.
“I made a significant effort in my life, and I think fairly successfully, to put that all behind me,” Boyd said. “I said, and I meant, when I was released and came home in 1973, that I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life as a returned POW and nothing more. I’d lost about a fifth of my life at that point, and I didn’t want to waste anymore feeling sorry for myself or fussing over what otherwise might have been.”
Instead, he focused his energy on a new direction for his life. During his captivity, he’d learned much of the Spanish language through the tap code that was the communication lifeline for POWs in Vietnam. So he decided to build on what he learned and earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Kansas, both in Latin American studies. He also progressed in his Air Force career, with assignments as 8^th Air Force commander at Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana; Air University commander at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama; and deputy commander in chief of the U.S. European Command in Stuttgart-Vaihingen, Germany. Boyd was promoted to four-star general on Dec. 1, 1992, and retired after 36 years in 1995.
Three years later, Boyd served as executive director of the U.S. Commission on National Security/21^st Century. Today, he’s chairman of the Center for the National Interest, a public policy think tank in Washington, D.C.
Boyd credits his competitive spirit for his survival of seven years in captivity. Just as he still carries those two silver dollars, that spirit has never left him.
“Fighter pilots are competitive guys, and they don’t like to be defeated, and that goes beyond just flying airplanes,” Boyd said when his alma mater, the University of Kansas College of Liberal Arts and Sciences gave him the 2013-14 Distinguished Alumni Award. “To let the enemy get the best of you was not in our psychological makeup, I think, and fighter pilots do business alone. So I think you can handle solitary confinement, for example, better than some.”

- See more at: http://airman.dodlive.mil/2016/01/forever-an-airman/#sthash.eNXNpR3c.dpuf

'The Code:' Topic of F-105 Pilot's Talk With Survival School Instructor Became Lifeline for POWs in Vietnam

STORY BY // RANDY ROUGHTON | PHOTOS BY // STAFF SGT. ANDREW LEE VIDEO BY // JIMMY D. SHEA

27 January 2016

Profile of retired Col. Carlyle Harris, a former POW in Vietnam who is credited with introducing the tap code, which the prisoners used to communicate. (U.S. Air Force Video // Jimmy D. Shea)

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Questions consumed Capt. Carlyle S. “Smitty” Harris’ mind in the early days of his eight years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.
Harris’ thoughts focused mostly on his pregnant wife and two children back home near Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa, Japan. Harris also wondered how the POWs could maintain any semblance of leadership and morale without a way to communicate with each other.
For eight long years of captivity, the questions lingered and gnawed at his mind.
Within five months after he’d joined the 67^th Tactical Fighter Squadron in Thailand, Harris launched his second F-105 Thunderchief mission on Thanh Hoa Bridge April 4, 1965. After Harris hit his target, his F-105 was hit by anti-aircraft fire, and he was forced to eject. About 20 people from a nearby village immediately captured the pilot, and he was quickly surrounded by almost 50 villagers armed with hoes, shovels and rifles. Just as he was about to be shot, an elderly man stepped in because of the government’s orders to capture American pilots alive. Harris remained in captivity for 2,871 days, much of it at the Hoa Lo Prison, which POWs nicknamed the Hanoi Hilton.
After Louise Harris learned her husband was missing, she remained at their home in Okinawa with their two young daughters, Robin and Carolyn, until after their son Lyle was born. Six weeks after Lyle’s birth, she took her family to Tupelo, Mississippi, where her sister lived. Even before she received her first letter from her husband from Vietnam, Louise believed he was alive and made certain the children kept the faith, too. As Lyle grew older, he’d tell his mother, “There goes Daddy,” when an airplane flew overhead.
Shortly after his capture, Harris was placed in a cell in the Hoa Lo Prison, also known as the “Hanoi Hilton,”with four other POWs, and, at that time, he remembered a conversation with an instructor at his survival school training. The instructor had told him about a tap code Royal Air Force POWs used during World War II, and Harris taught the other four POWs the code. Their captors put them back in solitary confinement a few days later, but that only helped them spread the code throughout the seven-cell area, and ultimately, to POWs throughout North Vietnam.
“As we were moved to other camps away from Hanoi, someone always took the tap code with them and was able to pass it on,” said Harris, who retired from the Air Force as a colonel in 1979 and spent the next 18 years working in business, law and marketing in Mississippi. “So no matter where you went in the POW system in North Vietnam, if you heard a tap, the guy on the other side of the wall would respond with two knocks in return, and you’ve started the communication process.”
At the Hanoi Hilton and other POW camps in Vietnam, the tap code was not only a means to communicate with each other, but it also became a lifeline. In the code, the alphabet was arranged on a grid of five rows and five columns without the letter K, which was substituted with C. The first set of taps indicated which row the letter was on, and the second represented the column. So one tap followed by another tap meant the letter A, and a tap followed by two taps indicated B.
As soon as a POW returned from interrogation, he would begin tapping the wall to communicate what happened. When a prisoner returned from a particularly brutal interrogation, as soon as the guard turned the key and left the block, he’d hear a series of taps that communicated three letters: G, B and U for “God bless you.”
When Harris was being interrogated, for strength to resist demands for information, he thought back to his squadron commander in the 67^th TS, Lt. Col. James R. Risner.
“While I was being interrogated the first couple of weeks, when it was pretty darned intense, I thought so much about Robbie Risner,” Harris said. “Mentally, I put Robbie Risner on a stool right beside me. It was my greatest effort to not do or say anything that he would not approve of. That really helped me.”
Risner was later captured, and confirmed the birth of Harris’ son after another POW first relayed the news through the tap code.
As the U.S. began its withdrawal from Vietnam, almost 600 POWs returned home in 1973, and Harris was finally released on Feb. 12. As he looked forward to his reunion with his family at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, one question remained in his mind: the reception with his children after eight years of captivity, especially the 8-year-old son he’d never met.
When Harris stepped into the quarters where his family was waiting, Robin and Carolyn squealed and ran to his arms. “Oh, thank you, Lord,” he said, “they haven’t forgotten.” But when he saw Lyle for the first time, his son didn’t hug him back. However, about a half-hour later, as his father opened his arms, Lyle ran across the room and fell into his embrace.
After eight years, Harris had the answers to all of his questions.

- See more at: http://airman.dodlive.mil/2016/01/the-code/#sthash.ddVWwosg.dpuf