I was watching the NBC local news in San Antonio when our own Tony Marshall appeared on the screen. Seems Randolph was honoring two Vietnam POWs, Jack Trimble (70) and Tony. See the attached article from the paper. I have to say Tony looks really good, very distinguished, very articulate, and appears much younger than the rest of us. He even looked really good in a flight suit and G-suit. How many of us could do that. Ron Jackson

Vietnam aviators receive a salute

Ex-weapons officers are first to get ‘fini flight’ honor
By Sig Christenson STAFF WRITER

America’s Vietnam prisoners of war
Of the 58,220 troops who died in the war, 3,000 were aviators. The United States brought home 684 prisoners of war, all but about 54 of them military. Forty-six died in captivity.

Jack Trimble (left), who was shot down during the Vietnam War and became a prisoner of war, is sprayed with champagne by Maj. Ryan Troxel after Trimble completed his “fini flight” with the 560th Flight Training Squadron.

Like his friend Trimble, Tony Marshall was a weapons officers when his aircraft went down during the Vietnam War. Later, after being freed as POWs, Marshall and Trimble both earned their pilots’ wings.

PRISONERS RELEASED
Air Force — 332 Army — 121 Navy — 149 Marine Corps — 28 Civilians — 54*

PRISONERS DYING IN CAPTIVITY
Air Force — 16 Army — 10 Navy — 11 Marines — 6 Civilians — 3* * The Defense Department has said 54 U.S. civilians were captured in the war, but the number could be off by two. Source: U.S. Air Force

The morning he flew his 266th mission over Vietnam, Air Force Capt. Tony Marshall only knew the pilot in the seat in front of him, Capt. Steve Cuthbert, by reputation. Tall and thin with a shock of sandy blond hair, Cuthbert never suffered a lack of confidence flying the F-4 Phantom.

“He told me he would never be captured when shot down,” Capt. Ross Detwiler, another pilot, later wrote, recalling a conversation the night before a malfunction sent Cuthbert’s plane to the ground in 1972.

Cuthbert was believed killed after capture, and Marshall, his weapon systems officer who handled the fighter-bomber’s air-to-air missiles and other ordnance, became a prisoner of war.

Decades later, Marshall and an old friend, retired Lt. Col. Jack Trimble, a fellow POW shot down in a separate incident, were at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph on Thursday for the 44th annual Freedom Flyer Reunion, which solemnly salutes the return of 684 American prisoners from Vietnam in 1973, almost half of them airmen.

Their memories rushed back this week as they took in a preflight briefing in standard-issue flight suits, carrying helmets and making a bit of Air Force history as the 197th and 198th “Freedom Flights” given by the 560th Flying Training Squadron.
On Thursday, they became the first weapons officers captured in Vietnam to get a “fini flight” — a final, celebratory mission
capping their aviation careers.

Before them, only pilots had been given that honor. The two would earn their wings after being freed, but when they were based at Udorn Royal Thai Air Base in Thailand in the 13th Tactical Fighter Squadron, they flew in the back seats of the F-4.
As Cuthbert and Marshall flew fast and low over North Vietnam on July 3, 1972, a fuel tank’s nose cowling came off, and Cuthbert had to jettison the cockpit canopy with a sudden blast. Without the cone, the drag of the empty fuel tank under the plane made the F-4 pitch uncontrollably. At a higher altitude, Cuthbert might have recovered, but at just 3,500 feet, there was no chance.
Marshall and Cuthbert were blown out of the jet, stunned but conscious after hitting the wind at 633 mph. Marshall landed on a hillside and stood up, part of his parachute over one shoulder and Phantoms racing past him, sometimes lower than 1,000 feet.
The noise was deafening.

“And then the next thing I remember is this out-of-body experience where I’m watching an idiot stand there with a radio in his hand,” Marshall 70, of Apple Valley California, recalled, chuckling. “Obviously, it’s me.”

A half-dozen armed Vietnamese surrounded him and gestured excitedly. Marshall, in shock, didn’t know what they wanted. They took his survival vest, handgun and flight suit, some of them playing with its zippers before binding him and moving him to an underground bunker.

A man later came down with a flashlight, prompting Marshall to think, “They’re going to shoot me now,” he said.
Trimble was making his 186th combat mission and his 99th over Hanoi, escorting Air Force A-7s when the Phantom crews engaged a MiG-21 on Dec. 27, 1972. As he and Maj. Carl Jefcoat headed back to Thailand, they didn’t see the one that came at them from behind.

“It was a loud bang and whoosh! I had to get ahold of my ejection handle and out I went,” said Trimble, 69, of Memphis, Tennessee. “The chute opened up and I looked down and saw below me quite a ways, and I saw my airplane hit and explode, and then I looked around to see if I could see the other pilot, and I couldn’t.”

Just as worrisome was where he was headed — straight into the trees. He slipped through the foliage and found himself just a foot above the ground, immediately grasping his good fortune. He wasn’t wounded. Jefcoat, too, survived the crash and captivity. He died in 1987.

Trimble hid, but had no hope of escaping and was in enemy hands two hours later. A militiaman tried to incite a crowd of civilians that had gathered around him.

“He pointed at me and yelled at them and pointed at me, and turned around and hit me in the face. And I could see it coming. My hands were tied behind, and I just rolled my head and I felt the blow, but it didn’t hurt,” Trimble said.

“So he hit me and the response from the crowd was electric. And this guy said a few things and started hitting me again and an old man came out of the crowd and grabbed his arm and just chewed him out. He lost great face in front of them.”
Trimble and Marshall had brief stints in the infamous Hanoi Hilton, but quickly were moved to Cu Loc prison, an old French film processing plant called “the zoo.” They never saw each other there but both recalled living on a daily cup of gruel-like cabbage soup, a single, late-afternoon meal occasionally topped with stale, moldy French bread.

“It was entertainment,” Marshall said of the bread, which had bugs cooked in it. “Sesame seeds, with legs on them.”
The events at Randolph will culminate with a wreath-laying ceremony at 10:15 a.m. today at its Missing Man monument, followed by a flyover — an F-16 Fighting Falcon, T-38C Talon, T-1A Jayhawk, T-6A Texan II, T-34 Mentor and a U-28A, a surveillance aircraft used to support Special Operations troops.

A symposium featuring five former POWs is set for at 1 p.m. in Fleenor Auditorium.
Marshall and Trimble were released on March 29, 1973 and flown to Clark Air Base in the Philippines, then home. Both earned their pilots’ wings together at Williams AFB in Phoenix and spent another two decades in the Air Force, retiring as lieutenant colonels before landing commercial airline jobs.

Trimble and his wife, Rachel, marked the 40th anniversary of his capture by meeting the North Vietnamese pilot who shot him down. Tran Viet, a retired brigadier general in Vietnam’s air force, was perhaps 27 on that day of battle. Trimble was 25.
“I certainly had been in engagements and killed his friends, and vice versa,” Trimble said, calling the visit a great experience. “War is war. You respect the soldiers.”

Marshall began his stint as a POW by telling his captors a string of contradictory stories in hopes of confusing them. One of the tales was claiming to be a married man.

“Here I am, it’s graduate school for survival,” he said. “What can I get away with? So I just started seeing what lies I could tell. … Over the next two weeks I invented a half-dozen new girlfriends because they were fascinated by girlfriends. I got bored with that and created a wife and a kid. When they released me, they walked in and handed me my wedding ring.”
It turned out to be Cuthbert’s.

sigc@express-news.net - News Researcher Mike Knoop contributed to this report.