Col. James Lamar, a 94-year-old veteran, reflected on his 7-year experience at a prison camp.
During an interview with Fox News, Lamar told the outlet how he was shot down in Vietnam.
Fox News noted Lamar joined the Air Force in 1948 after serving three years in the Naval Reserve.
He then completed his training as a pilot in 1949.
Lamar was later deployed to a fighter squadron in Japan prior to the Korean War.
At the start of the Vietnam War, Lamar was deployed to Thailand, as the outlet reported.
He explained, “When we got the news that we were going to go, I got an immediate premonition that something was going to happen to me — I would be shot down, killed, prisoner — I didn’t know what, but I knew something bad was going to happen.”
Lamar continued, “We got to our target area, I was the first one to go in.”
The veteran said he “pulled up to 12,000 feet, rolled over, and when I was headed down, I would like to have been some place else, because the flak (anti-aircraft fire) was just a solid layer below me. As I dive through it — boom — I got hit, my plane got hit in the fuselage forward of the cockpit, but there was an immediate fire in the cockpit.”
Fox News reported that Lamar “pulled out of his dive and started jinking side-to-side to avoid further anti-aircraft fire, then radioed his team to tell them that he was heading to a safe bailout area about 50 miles away.”
According to Lamar, immediately after he said that, “There came the very excited voice of my No. 4 man, who yelled at me, ‘Get out, lead, you’ve got a big fire going.'”
After waking up with a broken arm and discovering his parachute was in a tree, he was later turned into the North Vietnamese army, as Fox News noted.
The soldiers proceeded to take him to Hỏa Lò Prison, also known as “Hanoi Hilton.”
Lamar faced both mental and physical abuse.
He remembered telling other Americans “that I’m very depressed. What do you do to combat depression? Jerry Denton (another prisoner of war) said, ‘I’ll tell you what you do, Jim. You pray. You keep faith in God, your country and your family. And then you live each day, one day at a time. That’s the way you get through.”
Lamar added, “And he was right. My depression lifted, and I started living one day at a time. And that’s how I went through the total 2,400 and some odd days.”
In 1973, he was released.
Late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was also held as a prisoner of war at the camp.
After five and a half years, he was released.
“There is no reason for me to hold a grudge or anger,” McCain said.
He continued, “There’s certainly some individual guards who were very cruel and inflicted a lot of pain on me and others but there’s certainly no sense in me hating the Vietnamese … I hold no ill will toward them.”
