| Date: 18 October 1965 |
| Aircraft type: F-4C Phantom |
| Serial Number: 64-0730 |
| Military Unit: 68 TFS, 8 TFW attached to 6234 TFW |
| Service: USAF |
| Home Base: Korat |
| Name(s): |
| Capt Thomas Edward Collins (POW) |
| 1Lt Edward Alan Brudno (POW) |
| A USAF raid on a railway bridge near Ha Tinh, 35 miles south of Vinh, resulted in the loss of one of the raiders. Capt Collins had just put his Phantom (call sign Argon) into a dive at 7,000 feet when it was hit by AAA. The aircraft immediately became uncontrollable and Collins and Brudno ejected. Capt Collins suffered compression fractures to several vertebrae (a common result of ejection even with today’s more sophisticated ejection seats). The crew were captured by local militia and taken to Hanoi to begin more than seven years of brutal treatment in the North Vietnamese prison system. Collins was incarcerated in no less than 12 camps during his time as a POW and contracted beri-beri amongst other diseases and ailments in the unsanitary conditions found in these camps. Both men were released from their imprisonment on 12 February 1973. Brudno had been able to send coded messages in his letters from prison in Hanoi which greatly assisted the Department of Defense’s knowledge of the POW camps. However, Brudno suffered greatly both physically and psychologically while imprisoned and on 3 June 1973, just four months after his release, he committed suicide, unable to cope with the return to ‘normalcy’. In April 2004 the Department of Defense announced that Edward Brudno’s name would be added to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC in recognition that his death was due to wounds sustained in the combat zone, a direct result of his treatment while in captivity. |
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