I don't know how old you are out there, but maybe you will remember that most of the residents in 'Hanoi Hilton'  were pilots who had been shot down, been captured, and survived.  However, there were many of our friends who were shot down that didn't survive. It was an unpopular war, but my husband would remind me that he "served at the pleasure of the President of the United States of America".  He said that over and over again--president after president.  He meant it.  He might not have liked what he was called upon to do, (although I never heard him say that) but he would say, "Saddle up."  The Marines were moving.  And as a result, so were their families.

So, we bought a house at "Home" in Oklahoma.  We settled in, enrolled the kids in school and said good-by to him.  Like I said, we had no illusions.

Cell phones didn't exist.  And we had no money for expensive international phone calls of any sort.  We wrote.  With a 10 to 14 day delay for a response.  You lived for the letters.  I saved all of mine.  He didn't.  He said they were covered with mold, probably because he was living in a tent and it rained every day for the first 75 days after he got there.  He wrote things like, "My finger nail clippers have rusted in my pocket."  Or,  "I keep volunteering for extra missions so I can see the sun."  Or, "I couldn't send (someone) on the mission yesterday, he would have got himself killed."  (What he was saying was that he assigned himself the mission on the pretext of seeing the sun).  I think the man truly believed that he was invincible.

But then he got hit.  A 50 millimeter shell through the cockpit.  "I was 'on the deck' (really, really low) trying to hit a loud speaker that was harassing the ground troops."  A loud speaker!!!   "I leaned up in the seat and pulled back on the stick to pull out of the dive when the shell took out the canopy of the airplane, passing between the back of my head and the front of the ejection seat.  His take on that story, (which I didn't hear until his tour was over) was "If I hadn't been leaning forward to pull out of the dive, the shell  would have cleaned the wax out of my ears."  He wasn't unique.  All of the pilots were like that.  Something horrible would happen and they would turn it into a "Funny Story".

Continued……………...