Published Thursday, November 10, 2011

Vietnam veteran, POW speaks to Newnan Kiwanis Club

From Staff Reports

news@newnan.com

Kiwanian Don Chapman tells a lot of jokes and is the butt of a lot of jokes, but it was all serious in May of 1967, when he was flying beside Bill Bailey in Vietnam and Bailey's plane was hit.

Bailey was immediately captured and taken to Hanoi where he was tortured for three days and spent the next six years as a prisoner of war.

Bailey was the speaker at a recent Newnan Kiwanis Club luncheon at the Newnan Country Club.

"I was a farm boy from Mississippi. I didn't think about the war. I just wanted to fly," Bailey said. "I was shot down on my 182nd or 183rd mission.

"I was a junior officer. The VC wanted to know targets. I didn't know targets, so I lied and told them targets we'd already bombed. They wanted to know who was in my squadron. I gave them names of people who had already rotated out of our squadron.

"They tortured us by tying our elbows behind our backs and made us bend like a pretzel until the pain became unbearable. We didn't give them [information] for free so we would be credible," Bailey said.

"A big part of the war was propaganda and they tortured some troops into saying they were against the war," he continued.

"I was moved into a cell block for about a week, and was in solitary confinement for about six weeks -- I lost track of time."

Then, for three years, "they put us in large cells with 50 or 75 people. That was happiness" because of the ability to communicate. "I was able to tell lies for weeks with an appreciative audience," he quipped.

"We didn't feel our lives were threatened. We had to fight depression and self-pity," he continued.

Through some type of manipulation, Bailey was released with a small group of other prisoners because his father was ill. His father died the second day after he got home.

"When I got out of Vietnam, I didn't understand why we had been there, so I went back to school and tried to figure it out," he said.

"All of our leaders saw Vietnam as a logical extension of the Cold War, as a fight against communism and the Soviet Union. Then somebody said, 'We're not going to roll back communism. If we just hold it, it'll fall.' And the sucker was right. There was enough disagreement between the Soviet Union and the Chinese so they worked against each other."

Bailey continued, addressing the present situation of the U.S. and war. "The U.S. shouldn't put itself in a position where we're going to do something for some country that its citizens won't do for themselves. For example, the one country that has been willing to sacrifice itself to the last man is Israel. We don't have to have troops in Israel. How many do we have in Afghanistan?

"And no matter how despicable Saddam was, I don't think he was a massive threat to the U.S. In the first year we took down the group that supported al Qaeda. We need to get out of there. Terror is not going to end. We'll have to fight it decade after decade. There are radical Islamic groups all over the globe," he concluded.

Bailey returned to the U.S. in 1973 and remained in the Navy, retiring as a commander. Then he became a vice principal at Westside High School in Anderson, S.C., until finally retiring again in 2010.

He is married to Suzy and they have three children.

Also attending the meeting was Ralph Gaither. He was Chapman's roommate when he started flight training in 1963. Gaither was shot down over North Vietnam near the Chinese border in 1966 and was a POW for seven years. After returning to the U.S. he became Commanding Officer of the Naval Survival Training program in southern California.

He retired from the Navy as a commander and taught industrial arts in Pensacola for years before retiring again. He and his wife Bobbi live in Pensacola and have two daughters.