The strength, the endurance, the determination you need is already there. Dig deep, and you will find it.”
Tom Kirk, retired Air Force Colonel and Phoenix resident
By Tom Kirk
My plane was shot down on Oct. 28, 1967. I had been chosen to lead the largest bombing raid of the Vietnam War, and as I led my squadron of fighters into a strategic dive, the anti-air fire around Hanoi lit the sky with fire and shrapnel.
The 30 miles around Hanoi was the heaviest air-defended space in military history at that point, and as the lead pilot, my engine was one of the first to be shot through at near 10,000 feet.
Despite my training, despite my years of experience, panic and fear flooded my body as I angled my fighter, desperate to glide it the 50 miles needed to be rescued from hostile territory. I only made it 27 when my hydraulic system burned through and sent my fighter into a nosedive.
Nothing left to do, I ejected, and the windspeed at hundreds of miles an hour knocked me instantly unconscious.
I woke lying in a plowed field to Vietnamese men, women, and children from the nearby village beating me with sticks and rocks. I couldn’t walk. My automatic parachute landed me in one piece but had jammed my legs on impact.
Before I knew what was happening the Vietminh had me bound, gagged, and thrown in the back of a truck to be taken to the Hanoi Hilton prison camp. I was left strapped to a stretcher in a dark room for days before I was visited by a doctor whose only comfort was that I would likely die soon.
I didn’t, but at the time I wished I had. The next three days and nights were spent in beatings, torture, and interrogations. Mere days before I had been a soldier at the top of my game, and in a blink I’m trapped in shock and agony.
Finally, before the dawn of the fourth day with my body and mind no more than mush, I broke. I gave them information (to this day I do not know what it was, but it must have been something, for the beatings finally stopped).
The torture ceased, but then the true misery began.
I had failed. Failed in my mission, failed to resist the enemy’s interrogation. The shame was unbearable, I thought. What did I do to deserve this, I asked? Why me? I wanted to die. I could bear the pain no longer.
But after days in the depths of darkness and despair, the choice became clear: die, or survive. It is the same choice offered by every challenge, no matter how large or small. Be defeated or be made stronger.
I thought that I could bear no more, but I realized something: nothing is truly unbearable. In those moments of suffering, you are already bearing the pain.
This war will end one day, I told myself.
The strength, the endurance, the determination you need is already there. Dig deep, and you will find it.
And so for five-and-a-half years, myself and my fellow 660 prisoners endured. Those early days were hard, but after that difficult decision to endure, what followed was easy. Hell, I could have stayed another five years.
When the war ended at last and I returned home, hundreds of people stood waiting in the yard. My wife, my mother, and my father pulled me inside. My father told me to get on my knees. We prayed.
“You’re the luckiest man alive,” he said. “You’ve flown airplanes for 28 years.
You’ve had two combat tours in two different wars. You spent over five years as a prisoner of war and look at you: you’ve come home and in relatively good health. You’re blessed. Don’t ever forget that.”
I haven’t. Every day above ground is a beautiful day.
Now, why have I told you all this?
I’ve been an investor all my life. In those days without end in solitary confinement, I often passed the time developing business plans in my head, calculating compound interest.
I have made many investments since Vietnam, but by far the most valuable is the one I make by sharing my story. I’ve told it hundreds of times to thousands of people in the hope they can learn what I did in that prison camp, but save them all the pain: wherever you are, whatever struggles you face, use them to make you stronger. Build yourself, become better, move forward.
So no matter life’s circumstances, you may count yourself fortunate that you have the opportunity to move forward, to become better. You’re alive, so count your lucky stars, because you only live once.
This investment in others I make by sharing this is perhaps my proudest achievement, so to be selected to receive the Veteran Heritage Project’s Storyteller Award from among so many deserving veterans is an honor to which I can only respond with gratitude.
Saluting Stories of Service, VHP’s annual fundraising gala, will be held on March 7. This program is a direct reflection of the investment I make when sharing my story, and by helping support them, you expose a new generation to the lessons me and my fellow soldiers learned.
Editor’s Note: Tom Kirk is a retired Air Force Colonel and Phoenix resident.
