Welcome to Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition is retired US Air Force Colonel Ronald Webb. He is a Vietnam veteran and spent nearly six years in captivity as a prisoner of war after being shot down in June of nineteen sixty seven. He is also the recipient of two Silver Stars and Colonel Webb, thanks very much for being with us right pleasure. Where were you born and raised? Sir? I was born in Trenton, New
Jersey, August twenty ninth, nineteen thirty seven. And had there been a history of military service in your family before you served? My father was a CBE in World War Two US Navy. What made you want to join?
Was it knowing about your father's service or was there another reason? I was enrolled at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, and I entered one of two rotcs we had on campus, the Air Force, and I went all the way through the Air Force ROTC program and came out to commission second lieutenant.
Okay, and where did you go after that? I entered the Air Force as a navigator trainee, and of course everybody that comes into the Air Force, goes through San Antonio and from there I went to Waco to train as a navigator. I served five years as a navigator, but I had an opportunity to go to pilot training, so I went on to pilot training in nineteen sixty five and in Waco, in Mesa, Arizona, and Williams Air
Force Base. I graduated in nineteen sixty five sixty six and entered F four Phantom training at Davis Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona, and from there I went through survival training and then on to Vietnam. I have yet to meet a Vietnam pilot who did not love the F four. Can I say that you love the F four? Also? Absolutely wonderful machine. Well, I may be getting ahead of the story, but I was on my
forty fourth counter mission to North Vietnam in the Phantom. I was a backseat pilot copilot and I was involved in a mid air collision with another Phantom head on. Two of us were able to bail out, the other two were killed. Two Phantoms were destroyed. It's a very powerful airplane and I was able to survive a collision a head on collision. Our airplane was actually torn
apart. We went into a flat spin. We were on fire, and my front seater, who was a World War Two colonel I was a captain, then gave me the command to eject and I was able to get out. He was too, and a day later we were captured, but we were north and east of Hanoi, considerably far up into what's known as Package six, so chances of being rescued were very, very slim. Let me back up just a touch from your role as a back seater. Did you
often fly with the same front seat pilot? I did. My regular front seater was Colonel Frederick C. Boots Bless, who had been a double ace in Korea, and he and I trained together at Davis Mountain and it was quite an honor to fly with him, and that particular day he was the
winged DIO director of operations. In that particular day, June eleventh, he loaned me out to the new squadron commander, Hervey Stockman, full colonel, who was a World War Two veteran, and he had some kills in World War Two shooting down German airplanes, and so I was flying with him for the first time up to package six and unfortunately he was not leader of the flight, but the leader of the flight essentially had determined that we would fly
with the other leads squadron at the same altitude, same air speed, and at the same turn point. And as a experienced back Saar, I challenged that particular plan and I was overruled and I was told by the major that was leading the flight that we would fly it as he had briefed it. And unfortunately, about three hours later we had a mid air collision and it
killed the other two pilots from a sister squadron. Explain what was happening that day, what we were trying to achieve with that we were flying a mid cap mission. That's a combat air patrol that would protect one five aircraft that were attacking a Backchang rail yards. This was north and east of Hannoi. The rail line runs down from China from the north east down into Hannoi and
the F one fives were bombing it. We were essentially a protection or flight that a big cap that would fly in escorting the F one O fives and then escorting them off the target to keep the MiG fighter aircraft from attacking them. So that was essentially our plan mission. And you mentioned the collision. Could you see it coming? It was at a split second thing, very split second. The lead a flight we were number two, called out, very very briefly, look out, the other flight is coming through. And
then it felt like we flew into a mountain. We went into a flat spin and we were I tried to fly the airplane and it was like holding a wet noodle, you know, it was. We were out of control. There were flames. We were in a flat spin. My front seater had never called me this, but he said, Jesus Christ, bail out, and so I ejected. Tell me about that. The ejection and parachuting,
we we safely. The weather was great. We were flying essentially at between eighteen and twenty two thousand feet, so when I ejected, we had a long time to come down, and it was somewhat mountainous country. There were valleys where we could we could see. As I got closer to the ground, I could see people and I attempted to steer my shoote into the
side of the hills and I went through a large tree. As I went through the tree, I gathered my chute all my equipment and got out of the tree fairly readily, and then I proceeded to hide my parachute and get my equipment out of a seat pack. I got all of that equipment out and stuffed it in my g suit pockets. I had some slight burns. My back, of course hurt, possibly from the adjection action, possibly from coming through the trees. Found myself a hiding area. It was fairly thick
jungle, but I burrowed down behind essentially logs in a wooded area. I had a camouflaged helmet, one of only two on that flight that day. Everyone else had white helmets, and my camouflaged helmet enabled me to hide better. And as I mentioned, I got all of my items out of water bottles, and I did not have a radio. They were out of radios that day that I went up there. But I got everything that I could
carry into my g suit pockets, and I had this plan. I found a large stick that I was using get up and down because my back hurts are bad. But I had myself pretty well hidden by the time the people got up on me into the area, and they had primitive weapons, rifles and young young kids. They were looking up into the tree area that I
had come in. They knew exactly where I had penetrated the jungle, and they were assuming that I was still hung up up in the tree in my parachute, which would not have been uncommon, but anyway, I had managed to get out, and so they didn't see me, and it was getting darker. They searched the area, and they eventually moved on down into the valley, and then I spent the night without any sleep. Of course, my raft I had in the sea kit had inflated and had been punctured,
so I had no comfort from the raft in my hiding area. But I had my big stick, and I had a plan that as soon as I kept looking at my glove hand because it's so dark in the jungle, and as soon as I could see my hand, I figured I would pull up and head on to the east to the Gulf of Tonkin area. And I knew it was going to be a long trek, it would be months probably. We had gone through jungle survival and we had learned how to live off
the jungle. Certain roots you could cut to get water, and certain things you could eat, and I figured that I would make my way to the Gulf of Tonkin and hopefully get picked up by the baby get out in the water. But the people came back up on me, and I didn't hear them. They approached me very quietly, and so once I stood up out of my hiding place with my stick, they fell upon me like a pack
of dogs. And they tore my clothes off and allowed me to keep my underwear, took my boots, but they figured out later they gave me my boots back because they were going to have to hold me all the way down the jungle. They did that. They trusted me up ropes around my neck and my arms, and pretty much trust me up tightly, took me down
into a valley, and there were a number of civilians down there. There was one Vietnamese girl that had a first aid kit, and they noticed that my back was black and blue all the way down to my legs, and they marveled at that. They owed and the back of my back, and there wasn't anything she could do, but she was certainly attentive. They gave me something to eat and water. They gave me a leaf with a slab
of glutinous rice with a little piece of pig fat on it. And I found out many years later that that was a delicacy, you know, for them to give me something like that to eat. But they were they were treating me well. We understood ho chie men had ordered the countryside to capture pilots and that the community would get a reward of some sort. They were to bring us in with all of our gear and they would be summarily rewarded.
But we were I was taken into that valley and waited the capture of my colonel and what the leader of the search team had a pith helmet on,
but I think he was paramilitary. He wasn't a military man. But he had a notebook with a fountain pen, and he drew two parachutes and he wrote number one on mine, and he says number two where And I knew when we came down in our shoots where my colonel had landed, So of course I told him Hunter Nadia, and so they they had a German shepherd dog that was in the search with him, and so they used him and they scoured the area for most of the day and they finally found him,
but they had branched out all over. We were placed in jeeps that had been pulled up into the area. I was put in one jeep, my colonel was in another one. This was after we had been marched for several hours and down a path to the jeeps. When we got there, I was placed in one jeep with three or four men in there with me that were guards, and they threw the German shepherd in on top of me.
I was on the floor. So we rode for quite a while with that poor German shepherd and he was having a hard time, you know, keeping his balance and he was on top of me. But anyway, that was our trip down to the next area. The next area was believe it or not, a rail line. I happened to know that about three weeks before my squadron and I was on the flight had flown over this rail line. But we were assigned a JCS target Joint Chess Staff target, and we
were our flight lead. A Lieutenant colonel said target of opportunity. Hit that railroad train was coming down there, and so we attacked the train and hit the rail line. And I know we were very successful because weeks later I was on ground zero looking at hundreds of people were working on that rail line locomotive was turned over on its side, and that train had been badly damaged and the tracks had been damaged, and so I knew that my squadron had
actually done a good job of bombing that rail line. At that station, though we were read out of these little Mau books or ho Chiumn books read books, we were read the riot Act in Vietnamese people through rocks at us, hit us with switches and essentially had their opportunity to abuse us up to a point. After that, we were back in the cars and taken to
another site for the night. That site was at a Catholic church complex and had a lot of trees around it, and there were guns all around that church, and the bottom of the church hadn't been dug out, and there were troops then in there. There were bivouact in there. The guns were thirty seven fifty seven eighty five millimeter guns that were stationed around that church. So if we had hit those guns, we would have been accused of destroying
a church. I was interrogated at that point in a building and there were two men that interrogated me. One of them was a dead ringer for ho Chie men. He looked just like ho Chie mentlenn old gentleman with a white beard and everything. I'm sure it wasn't ho But anyway, he had a younger man that spoke very broken English, and they read me the riot in Vietnamese and in English, and the only thing I can remember from the interrogation was that the young man said to me, now, you and your President
L. Johnson are prisoners of war. And I thought that was pretty cryptic, because throughout the time I was a POW, they never used prisoner of war. They always called us air pirates, black criminals, and never POWs, never prisoners of war. Until we were in weeks of release, I was beaten there by another man outside the building who asked me to go beyond the four Big four. We called it name ranks, service number, and
data birth and that's what we were trained to give under Geneva conventions. That's all we were required to give. And he wanted me to tell me about my family and the unit I was flying in. What kind of aeroplane? Asked me a number of questions. I refused to answer him. He took off his shoe and started beating me around the head, and of course I was still trussed up, so they knocked me around, knocked me off the
stool. Incidentally, they had given me a pair of khaki washpants that were way too small for me, but they made me put that on, and then they had a man with a camera take pictures. So I was photographed at that point, but I don't I don't think I ever saw that photograph. I don't think it ever appeared anywhere in their propaganda. But anyway, from that point on, we stopped at another location and slept on the ground
that night. I guess we were making our way to Hannoy. So the next day we made it to Hannoy and to the Hanoi Hilton, the main French prison downtown. When we come back, retired US Air Force Colonel Ronald Webb takes us inside the Hannoi Hilton and describes the torture and the interrogations, as well as the tap code that kept the POWs bonded together. I'm Greg Corumbas and this is Veterans Chronicles. This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbas.
Our guest in this edition is retired US Air Force Colonel Ronald Webb. He is a Vietnam veteran who spent nearly six years as a prisoner of war, and we pick up the conversation with Colonel Webb describing what the Hanoi Hilton prison was like. There is a main entrance into the prison. There's a portcullis gait that you go through. And when we first brought in, we're
still all trust sed up. And they laid Hervish stockman down on the pavement, and they laid me down next to him, and I was amazed that I saw his hand, and his hand was very, very swollen, and his fingers were very swollen, and both of our wrists had been tied very tightly. So I meant my imagination was that mine looked the same. But they separated us. They took him into one derrogation room and me into another. We called him the knobby rooms. In other words, they were rooms
that the walls were festooned with hand sized clumps of plaster. It's a suppress sound, the whole idea. And they had hooks in the ceiling that they they tied parachute cord to and they would trust you up. Whatever you're injured or ailment was, they would use that against you. If you had broken arms or bad legs or bad back, they'd trust you up in such a manner to inflict as much pain immediately as they could. So the hooks in the floor and in the ceiling were used to trust up the parachute cord.
They had a little stool that they sat on, a interrogation table, three chairs, and the interrogation started. The interrogators I found out over the years there were two essentially perfect English. They didn't even have the British accent that Radio Hanoi and Hank they had kind of a British accent to their English. But these two interrogators, I guess they had interrogated so many Americans over the course of years that their English was excellent. You could close your eyes and
you could tell it was you couldn't tell it was an American. Everett Alvarez was the first man captured in August of nineteen sixty four. I went down in June of nineteen sixty seven, almost three years after him, and I didn't think I'd be a pow very long, But you know, six years later I got out. But so Everett was there nine years, eight and a half to nine years But anyway, getting back to the interrogator, they they went after tactical intelligence. What was your what's the next target? What
are your targets? What are your modus operendi, so to speak, how do you operate? How many airplanes come in? Many of the things they already knew, but they wanted to know whether you would would part the information. And of course you deny it as long as you can. We were trained in our survival training programs to deny it up to the point of losing
your physical senses and then lie. That was the program that we had in the Survival series training survival, evasion, resistance, in escape training in the Air Force. The Navy had a little different program. Years later, we streamlined it so that all of the services abided by the Code of Conduct in appropriate fashion. Some of the lies that were told up and Hannoi did get guys into trouble because they, particularly the Navy guys, they would name Hollywood
characters and funny book characters out of the members of their ship. But in my case, I simply told him I was a navigator, I wasn't really a pilot, and I didn't know anything about what the pilots were doing, and that my whole job was just to get us up to the Hanois and get us back home, you know, And that was it. They had my flight suits, said they knew what squadron I was from and what bass I took from Darnang, South Vietnam. So essentially I couldn't lie very much
about anything. Oh, the main question was how did you get shot down? Now that was a good one because at first Blush I felt a little embarrassed that I was in a mid air collision. So I simply said that I was shot down by ground fire. Some big guns shot us down. Well, they would write this down into their book, and I'm sure in subsequent interrogations they found out that that area that I was in that I was captured, there were no big guns around. So then they said, are
you sure you were shot down by big guns? No, I think maybe it was a meg. I think a meg got us. So then they went back to their air force and checked see if any MiGs are up that day, and of course they got me on that lie. And now you said you were shot down by megs? I said, well, you know, it's very possible that we ran out of gas, you know, and so I had a different story each time, and I may have eventually told him I was in a mid air collision. Now, were the interrogations mostly
after you first got there or did they continue for a while. The interrogations initially were for military tactical information of the air operations of the war. Later on it was all thought reform propaganda interrogation training us to turn against our country. The whole idea was to proselytize us brainwash thought reformer that wanted the same, and they wanted us to turn against our country, appear in films and
whatnot as andi war activists. We unfortunately had three officers it did that they were never released early even though they had played with the commune this line. At the end of our time up there, there were eight enlisted men also that had been brought up from the South that had also violated the Code of conducts. So essentially we had two officers and enlisted types that we brought charges against when we returned home. But out of five hundred and ninety one that
were returned, that's a very small percentage. What were the conditions like the rest of the time, It went through about three eras. The first years there were very brutal. Up to November of nineteen sixty eight, President Johnson had ceased attacking the North and we settled in with a three hundred and twenty
five of us that were the old era of POWs. And then of course, in late seventy one seventy two, Linebacker two came through and we picked up another two hundred or so POWs to flesh out to five ninety one. So in the eras were we were brutally treated separated. I had over eighteen months of solitary confinement, and that was not uncommon. We had some men up there that were two and three years or more of our senior people.
And they kept us separated because they never wanted us to organize, because if we could get our military organization going, we would be able to counter their propaganda program a lot stronger. And so they denied us that we had to communicate through the walls with our tap code system. Let's talk about that, because he received another silver Star for what is considered unusual and ingenious methods of communication. So explain that the tap code is a five by five matrix of
the English alphabet. Since our twenty six letters. One letter had to be dropped, so the letter C the letter K was supplemented as a C. So in the five columns you have aflqv and our memory device was air Force loves Quick Victories American Football League quits victorious. The British used it world War
two and they remembered it as Alfred Fondley Love Queen Victoria. It's a five by five, So in the first column or row, however you want to set it up, A f l q v R the five lead lines A B, C, d E, f G h I j K, l M n O, P q R S, t U, v w x y Z. So if I were to tap my name web, I would go, first of all, there's a sign up call telephone shaven haircut B and the answer is two bits. So once I start tapping, I would go A f l q v v WS. I'd go VW A A B
C d E A A B A A B I got Webb. The beauty of the tap code as of five by five is that whenever we were outside, we'd always be sending with our fingers in the hopes that somebody was seeing what we were sending In latter months there we were allowed outside to get some fresh air. We would use it as a as a baseball code top of the head a f l q V, and so it was not uncommon for
us to be scratching, rubbing. But we're sending the tap code. In just a moment, Colonel Webb shares another innovative variation of the tap code. He also tells us about his release and what it was like to taste freedom again after nearly six years of confinement. I'm Greg Corumbas, and this is Veterans Chronicles. This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbas. We now conclude our conversation with retired Air Force Colonel Ronald Webb, a Vietnam veteran and prisoner
of war. In a moment, you'll hear about how he was freed, but we pick up the story with Webb's explanation of another variation of the tap code. About two years before the end, I got moved once again solo into a different camp, right into the main prison, and I got moved into a cell block. And as soon as my door was closed, I heard a profusion of coughing and spitting and hacking, and the awful of sounds.
You can imagine. I was all the kinds of sounds like that, and I thought I was in the tb ward that these guys were dying. Well, what it was was Admiral Jeremiah Denton went an admiral then. But Jerry Dent had come up with the voice tap code were and he would make these sounds and that's how they set the tap code. It worked fine, except that the guards oftentimes did a lot of coughing and spitting two and so that would interrupt messages and you'd have to go back and start all over again.
But I give Jeremiah Denton credit for a voice tap code. Getting back to the origin of the tap code. It had been used in World War Two. It had been used in Russia under the cyrillic alphabet in Stalags. The Americans and the Brits used that in the World War two Stalags in Germany. A man who had been a pow in World War Two, Claude Watkins,
trained in our survival training program at Stead Air Force Base. Claude had been a pow in the Stalags and on a lark over coffee one day he had three or four guys that were drinking coffee, and he told him about the tap code. It wasn't part of the curriculum at that time. One of the guys that was having coffee was Smitty Harris F one oh five pilot. Smitty has subsequently written a book about it. But he was one of the first five or six guys captured in January February of nineteen sixty five.
And while they were all together, these first four or five guys, he told them about the tap code. He says, if we ever get separated, he said, you might want to remember we got to communicate with a tap code through the walls. It's a tapping. You can't send morse code because you can tap a dot, but you can't tap a dash. So anyway, they remembered it, and in every cell in Hanoi it was itched on the walls or under bedboards. The Vietnamese knew we used that. They
couldn't. They tried to duplicate it, you know, guards tried to enticeis and communicating you get punished if you got caught. They just never could get the rhythm of shaven a haircut. You mentioned that this was developed to help build up your resolve and resistance to their propaganda efforts to indoctrinate you. So explain how much that helped being able to communicate with each other to resist what the Vietnamese are trying to do to you. It was the tap code was
our source of communication and bolstering each other through the walls. If a guy got tortured and he was being punished, you know, tortured and then was required to write letters or something against his country, they would come back to the cell and guys would tap to him and say, hang in there. You know, we've all been through it. We did everything we could to
keep up our morale. Of course, as an American, we come from a society that is so free and so abundant and information that it's it's very difficult for an American to swallow the communist line. I really aized today in our current situation, we're seeing maybe an aberration to that. But we were educated, for the most part. We were college educated officers. The poor guys that had been captured in Korea, it was their first exposure to communist
indoctrination. We had the benefit of what they went through. President Eisenhower promulgated the Code of Conduct after Korea. We were all trained in that, and so we had that advantage not only being officers and educated. You know, some of the people up there head masters and PhDs. I lived with Jim Stockdale and he had a PhD. And so you know, we're pretty well educated groups. So we found their propaganda line very repugnant, and so I
don't I don't believe anybody really believe in any of that. When did you first start to get an inkling that you were going to be freed? During Linebacker two, the Vietnamese packed up about three hundred men and moved him up to col Bang on the Chinese line away from Hanoi. Once again, I was fortunate to remain downtown, in downtown in the main prison when those raids came in Christmas of nineteen seventy two. The stone slabs we slept on actually
bounced from the bombing. In downtown Hanoi. We had bamboo shades across the windows in the cells, but you could look up at an angle and you could see aircraft dropping things, dropping bombs, and of course any aircraft going back up, and the American attack knew where the camps were. We didn't
feel threatened in being bombed. We knew our guys were pinpoint bombing, and I found that out when we had our first trips out of Hanoi without blindfolds and could see the job that Sacked did on bombing the rail line in Hanoi. On one side of the street were four story buildings the windows weren't shattered, and on the left side were industrial complexes that had been blown to bits. So the Sack bombers did a terrific job, and they took some losses.
Of course, we lost thirteen B fifty twos I believe. But anyway, to answer your question, when that attack was going on, if we'd had luggage, we'd have packed them because we knew we were going home. President Nixon had finally come back to get us. Lyndon Johnson left us. Sarah, what was that moment like when you were finally back with Americans when that exchange happened. Probably the greatest, greatest day of our lives was when
we lifted out at Hanoi on that See forty one. We lifted up the airplane, erupted it into chairs and tears, and it was a magnificent flight to Clark. At Clark, we were and given the opportunity to call home, and we got mail, and we got all of our records brought up to date. The first thing, first thing we all wanted to do. When we got to the hospital at Clark, I had a briefing officer and a nurse and her and they, you know, we're going over our problems,
and I said, I've got to get to the shower. I've got to get to the shower, because we were all we wanted to wash han Unfortunately, when I got to the bathroom, at the shower room, it was you couldn't see a steam in there. Everybody was in there Washington. But anyway, it was a great time. Then they flight back to America. I landed in Washington, d c. And my daughter came running out and I picked her up. And there's a fairly famous picture that was in
a number of the papers of her. She was almost nine years old and two when I left. Anyway, we had the families there to meet us, and that was that was the greatest day in the world. Did they ever let you bathe when you were in prison? We had cold cisterns with scuppers that a couple of days a week we would go out and throw the water over us, and if we had any clothing, we'd stomp on it,
you know, try and wash that. Occasionally they'd give us haircuts, and that was always a chance for the guards to pull hair out of you, you know, so that was brutal. They had razor blades on occasion that they would leave in the shower stall, and by the time you got there, somebody had already taken the blades out and put an old one in, you know, so they were useless. You touched on this a moment ago when you talked about the flight leaving Hanai going to the Philippines and Clark
Air Force Base. You are one of a few Americans who knows what it's like to have freedom, to lose it, and to get it back. How do you put into words what that's like. Until you've lost it, you never know what you lost. But getting back to America and resu a healthy life in the greatest country on earth is a blessing every day that I've been back, and it's been fifty years, and it's been fifty wonderful years.
You know. We've had our ups and downs in this country. I think we're at our lowest point right now, which is very disconcerting to those of us who have lost our freedoms and Americans just don't know how great we have it. I find that I'm blessed. I've come back in pretty good shape. I have pretty good health, and I treasure every cherish, every day that I have as an American. Now, when you came back, you worked in Air Force intelligence, correct, I did. I flew a
little bit because I had been a navigator. I had lost all those navigator hours, so my pilot hours were limited. So I went into C to T thirty seven's. I went through training in three different airplanes and ended up flying the Saberliner T thirty seven back and forth from Langley Air Force Base to the West West Coast and back to build hours. I came back a major. I got promoted to lieutenant colonel and went to some senior schools. I
went to the Industrial College. I'd been to these Air Force Staff college and I was at a point where I couldn't go back in and fly anymore because I didn't really have the flying credentials to lead a flight group. So I wanted to the intel business. I had a secondary AFSC and intelligence I was assigned to Federal Aviation for four years and as an intelligence pilot operator, and I worked with the State Department, and I managed all the communist block flights
that come into America, VIP flights that come into America. I'm working with the State Department from FAA, and during those four years, I kept book on the Soviet airflot scheduled operations, Cubana charter operations to the Cubans, and they were guilty of transgressions the whole time, but I kept book on that. It was picked up by the Air Force Journal Armed Forces Journal magazine and they interviewed me and they took my records and they presented them to Barry Goldwater,
Senator Goldwater, who entered them in the congressional records. And President Reagan was the president, and he went ahead and canceled Arara flot scheduled operations and Kbanner and so I got a Defense Superior Service Medal for that. I didn't know I was in that kind of arena, But I just did my job at Federal Aviation, and I'm very proud of that particular award more than anything else. After an extraordinarily impressive military career. What are you most proud of?
Well, I'm proud that I was an Air Force officer and that I could go a full career. And I'm proud to have served in a war that a lot of people question whether we should have ever been there, but I felt that I was doing the national defense mission. I'm proud of being an Air Force officer. And lastly, what does it mean to you to have the American Veteran Center collecting your story and the other oral history's event.
Well, as far as I know, you're a very fine organization that does build history over the lives of those of us that have served in that history is something in America that I think all folks are to be up to date on and learn about. Just About every family in America has some association with military uncle's cousins, father's, grandfather's sons, daughters, and I think they find it interesting you're reading American military history. Sarah. It's an honor to
meet you. I thank you for your time today, and I thank you most of all for your incredible service and sacrifice for our country. Thank you. We've been speaking with retired US Air Force Colonel Ronald Webb is a Vietnam veteran recipient of two Silver Stars, spent nearly six years in captivity in Vietnam after a midair collision in June of nineteen sixty seven. I'm Greg Corumbus. This is Veterans Chronicles. Hi, this is Greg Corumbus, and thanks for
listening to Veterans Chronicles, a presentation of the American Veterans Center. For more information, please visit American Veterans Center dot org. You can also follow the American Veterans Center on Facebook and on Twitter. We're at AVC update. Subscribe to the American Veteran and Center YouTube channel for full oral histories and special features, and of course, please subscribe to the Veterans Chronicles podcast wherever you get
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