Shootdown
The August 8th mission involved evaluating low-level ordnance delivery against a cluster of warehouses in the Hoang Nhi barracks area. The target, about 55 miles northwest of Hanoi, was heavily defended with an array of anti-aircraft weapons. Kasler knew the dangers well: on four previous missions he had limped home with battle damage, including a shell-shattered canopy. His flight of four that day included Captains Wells and Ayers and Lieutenant Fred Flom.

The strike on the primary target with cluster bombs went well. His mission successfully completed, Kasler could have returned to the safety of his base. However, with bombs to spare, he directed his flight to a secondary target, another barracks and supply area down the river near Binh Bay. It was always his practice to expend all of his ordnance against the enemy, including the 1029 rounds of 20 millimeter in the Gatling Gun and its “linkless feed system.”

A cumulus cloud lay right over the secondary target, so Kasler began to turn out. As he banked to abort his bomb run, he saw a 37mm cannon projectile pierce the belly of Fred Flom’s aircraft. Because this was an intended low-level strike, Flom was only about 200 feet off the deck when he was hit. The belly of Flom’s F-105 immediately began to smoke, then yellow and red flames flared from it. Kasler told Flom to head for the Red River, then fell in behind his aircraft to assess the damage. From past experience, Kasler knew Flom’s aircraft was going to blow up and urgently called several times for him to eject. Fred was flying at about 550 knots approximately 1,000 feet above ground level when his canopy came off and the ejection seat cartridges fired. He had barely cleared the cockpit when his parachute popped open. Instantly, the aircraft exploded in a fireball, knocking Fred out. Kasler saw a chunk of metal fly through the canopy of the chute. Fred landed limp, unconscious, right on a roadway near a village.

Kasler called for a rescap (rescue combat patrol) and made passes over the shootdown area in an effort to allow Fred to escape. His flight had already jettisoned drop tanks and, low on fuel, headed for a refueling tanker south of the Red River. After refueling, they were directed to support Flom’s rescap. Immediately, they flew back to the shootdown site, only to find that Fred was gone, apparently already captured. With Flak exploding near them, Kasler led his flight northwest. He saw two gunners on the ground firing at him with 57mm and broke right. Later, he assessed, he should have gone left, for he took several hits in the belly of his aircraft. Still, he had been hit hard before and had been able to complete the mission. He had never lost an aircraft in his entire three-war career and did not intend to give up on this one, especially not deep in North Vietnam.

Captains Wells and Ayers escorted Kasler as he headed south across the Red River, but his cockpit began to fill with thick, black smoke. He knew he was in trouble and jettisoned the canopy to clear the smoke. His engine and hydraulic systems had been hit. He was losing thrust, and his flight controls were not responding well. Despite his best efforts, his F-105 began rolling uncontrollably toward the ground. Time to get out while I still have a little altitude left, he thought. As he reached for the ejection handles, his control stick migrated over onto his right thigh and locked there. He knew what that would mean when he fired the seat, but he had no choice.

When the ejection seat fired, the control stick deflected his right knee into the canopy rail, snapping off his femur just above the knee, shattering it near the hip. The splintered femur splayed like open fingers of a hand as it was driven some seven inches up through his groin area into his abdomen where it stuck like a splintered spear. Badly injured, he knew he was falling towards his enemy, but he could not have imagined the hell into which he was about to descend.

Capture
The pain was tremendous. As he dropped towards the earth in his chute, Kasler looked down and saw a bulge on his abdomen above his G-suit: the top of his thigh bone. His right leg hung limp with no bone to support it. He tried to use his emergency radio, but woozy with pain, simply put the radio back in his survival vest.

Had Kasler landed in the open, he might have had a chance of being rescued: the rescap for Fred Flom was already on the way, and Captains Wells and Ayers were flying cover over the scene. Unfortunately, he landed in a patch of woods and brush. Evasion was impossible, and he was quickly captured by local people who stripped off his clothing, right down to his under shorts. His right thigh, lacking a bone to support the muscles, was flat from his knee to his hip. A medic provided rudimentary treatment and a crude splint. Then Kasler was placed in what looked like a fishnet with a single bamboo pole through it and carried to a village.

The civilians treated him well, but his treatment deteriorated when he was handed over to the militia who transported him on the back of a flatbed truck toward their camp. A guard harassed him along the way. As they passed through villages, he was repeatedly beaten by civilians who also threw rocks and mud at him. Late that night the truck ran into a culvert with water in it and could not get across. So they took him to a shack and laid him on an old door. They set up a table with a Coleman lantern on it and began interrogating him, accusing him of war crimes. Whenever they did not like an answer, he was beaten. Finally, a man came from the camp and handed a note to the interrogator. That ended the questioning for they now knew who he was: Time magazine had just published an interview with him. When Kasler heard machetes being sharpened the next morning, he thought he was about to be beheaded, something which had happened to bomber crew members shot down over Japan during WWII.

After posed propaganda photos, the journey towards Hanoi continued as Kasler was hauled over rough terrain, tied in the back of a jeep-like truck. Such rough jostling would have killed him if the splintered end of his thigh bone had pierced an artery or his intestines. As before, he was beaten and harassed by both a military guard and by local people in villages they passed through.

Into the Fiery Furnace
Hoa Lo, the name of the prison in Hanoi known to Americans as “the Hanoi Hilton,” translates from Vietnamese to English as “the fiery Furnace.” Kasler was about to enter that fiery furnace. Like all pilots, he had been through survival training, but there was no way to prepare men to cope with this level of brutality and deprivation over a sustained period of time. Little did Kasler know that his imprisonment would stretch to over six-and-a-half years.

Taking up a trapezoidal city block in central Hanoi, Hoa Lo was a foreboding fortress-like prison surrounded by thick concrete walls some 15 to 20 feet high. A series of heavy iron gates locked shut behind him as he was taken into the bowels of that hell hole.

Kasler’s Communist captors had not had a hard time figuring out who he was for he had been prominently covered in the media for his spectacular attack on the Hanoi POL facility. He was also noted as a jet ace from Korea—fame that made him a potential valuable propaganda asset for the Communists, if he could be broken. No time was wasted in applying pressure, both physical and psychological. Told that he was going to have to confess his “crimes against the Vietnamese people,” Kasler replied, “Negative. I’m not doing that. I have committed no crimes, and I’m not doing anything.”

Most pilots suffered various degrees of injury during shootdown and capture. Vice Admiral Stockdale described Kasler’s bone injury as “hideous.” One universal pressure applied to injured men was the threat, a very real one, that their injuries would not be treated, that they would suffer permanent disability or death from lack of medical treatment. “We will throw you away,” was the common language used by interrogators. The crushed and badly dislocated shoulder of Senator John McCain is one example of such permanent injury resulting from a lack of medical care. Some POWs did die, either as a result of neglect or because of torture.

A wait, then an operation
Kasler had been told very bluntly that if he wanted to live, he had better cooperate, but he refused. Nonetheless, eventually he was taken to a hospital where he was x-rayed. Oddly, he was shown one of the x-rays; he could clearly see the splintered upper end of his femur, splayed out like fingers of a hand inside his abdomen. He knew he needed an operation, but he wondered if his captors could do so properly and figured he was likely to lose his leg.
After several days, he was taken to an operating room. He protested loudly, “calling them every name in the book” as they administered anesthesia, assuming they were going to amputate his leg. They applied traction and somehow managed to work his femur back into his thigh. That relieved a great deal of pressure and pain, but they still did not set his shattered bone.

Several weeks later, Kasler was posed for fake x-rays, then wheeled into a cast room where he was wrapped in a huge, full-body cast. It was all photo-op propaganda, but at least the published photographs told his family and his government that he was alive. His captors would have to account for him. After lying there for a couple of days, unable to move, Kasler protested, “If you’re through with your goddamn propaganda, how about cutting this thing off so I can eat.” A few hours later, they did cut the top part off his body cast.

After about three weeks in the hospital, the rest of the heavy cast was cut off, revealing dead skin and large boils. On the floor of a bathroom where dirty wash basins were cleaned, he was washed and crudely dry-shaved in preparation for an operation to set his shattered femur.

He was taken to another room for the operation. There, his thigh was sliced open, lengthwise, right down to the bone. A metal rod was inserted and his shattered femur strapped to that rod. Kasler awoke that afternoon lying in a couple of inches of bloody water which had pooled on his bed. Blood was spurting from his incision which had been left open. When he asked for help, the nurse watching him just shrugged. He felt horrible. For five days he remained in critical condition, running a high fever.

Operating conditions had been far less than sterile. Not surprisingly, he developed osteomyelitis, a severe bone infection that would last for many years. Boils started popping up all over his body as the infection spread. Great gobs of green matter came out of them—and out of his surgical incision which would erupt from time to time. He would endure repeated bouts of high fever and diarrhea.

After a week or so he was taken to the operating room and given another cast. A few days after that he was taken to a camp called “the Zoo” where he was held in solitary confinement, beaten, tormented, and deprived of sleep as his captors tried to force false confessions to war crimes out of him. Until nearly Christmas of 1966, he was held in that same room continuously, never once let out for air or light.

Finally, Kasler was given a roommate, John Brodak, a man who had served with him during his tour at Bitburg, Germany, and a fellow squadron mate who had been shot down just days after he was. James Kasler would later state, “I owe my life to John Brodak. I don’t think I would have survived without his help. He put his blanket on me when I was shivering from the cold and fever. We each had only one thin blanket. Of course, that meant he had none to keep himself warm in the night.” John could ill afford the sacrifice. He had collected only minor scrapes during his shoot down, but his body weight had dropped from his normal 150 pounds to under 100, and he had deep infections on his ankles and legs from leg irons. Starvation rations were calculated to physically weaken a man and break his will. John Brodak would later describe James Kasler as “by far the toughest man I have ever known.”
Both men developed dysentery with diarrhea so explosive and uncontrollable that neither man could make it to the bucket in time. Everything in the cell was covered with excrement. Still, the interrogations continued, as did the efforts to force Kasler to meet “peace delegations.” Kasler took more beatings for his refusal to meet anti-war protestors. He endured more surgery, another 13-inch incision right down to his thigh bone, but the swelling and infection would not go away.

Communication
Communication was the key to survival for the POWs. They used a “tap code” on the wall, a simple system of 25 letters, five across and five down. Letter “K” was dropped, “C” doing double duty in its place. For instance: tap once for row one. Tap once again for the first column. That meant letter “A.” The least-used letter, “Z,” took five taps down and five taps across. Shorthand was the norm. The “call-up” sign was the rhythm of “shave and a hair cut” (Tap, Tap-a-Tap, Tap). The reply from the person ready to receive a message was “two bits” (Tap, Tap). Sign-off at night was often “GBU”: “God bless you.” Communist jailers in Hanoi had no cultural context to understand such cryptic messages. Encoding was as simple was moving the columns around.

When POWs could see each other, flash code or hand signing was employed. Sometimes Morse Code was used. Tap code could be translated into coughs, throat clearing, and spits—or mimicked by a boom’s swishes on the ground. Of course, getting caught communicating meant “heavy punishment.” Men were often beaten on the mere suspicion of having communicated.

Stone Face
Really heavy torture came in the form of “ropes and irons.” Kasler had been spared that because if his poor condition, but they eventually came for him. He was put in hand irons with the backs of his wrists together. His shoulders were pulled together and the manacles ratcheted right down to the bone. Taken back to his cell, he was left like that for 12 hours and let out only long enough to eat. John Brodak had to feed him because his hands and arms were numb. The hell cuffs were put back on, this time with the insides of his wrists together. He was in irons for 32 days, let out only twice a day for 15 minutes to eat. Small wonder that he and his fellow POWs suffered permanent nerve damage to their hands.
“Ropes” were added to the irons. In this sadistic torture, Kasler’s swollen wrists were forced into iron manacles behind his back. A rope was wrapped tightly around his forearms until his elbows touched. Then his arms were pulled up behind him, over his head and down to his ankles, forcing his head down between his thighs. His tormentors would come to call him “Stone Face,” for despite the pain, Kasler refused even to give his tormentors the satisfaction of hearing him cry out in pain. That session lasted about 35 minutes. For the second session which immediately followed, the cuffs were crossed diagonally over the wrist bone, tearing flesh. About 15 minutes into this second session, he said, “I surrender.” But the torture continued. It did no good to surrender, since the torture session continued for the same amount of time. Released from the ropes but still locked in hand irons, he was interrogated. After that session, he was taken to solitary and put in leg irons, ironically called “traveling irons,” though they were too cumbersome for travel. Alone, locked in both hand and leg irons, he was helpless, lying in his own excrement.

Meanwhile, Kasler was still struggling with the infection in his leg. His 13-inch incision had closed most of the way, but there was still a gap which kept draining pus and blood. He was getting worse and was promised an operation, but that never happened until after the 1968 Tet Offensive. Then the enamel began falling off his teeth, and he began losing fillings. His body was decalcifying from the bone infection and poor diet, a diet which included no fat to help absorb what little calcium he received.

Kasler was moved to solitary. For a time, he had no one in the cells on either side of him to communicate with. Eventually, a man was moved into each of those cells. “I was caught communicating with them, beaten, and put on my knees on the concrete with my hands in the air for 12 hours. You’ve got to put yourself into a trance to be able to do that. Otherwise, you couldn’t take the pain.”

“Fidel”
In July of 1968, Kasler was again being tortured in an effort to get him to meet a peace delegation when “Fidel” intruded, supervising a torture session. Kasler was entering the so-called “Cuban Program.” Tall, handsome, muscular, relatively dark skinned, Fidel spoke idiomatic, obscenity-laden English with what the POWs assumed was a Cuban accent. He seemed upset by his inability to force Kasler to cry out in pain, but Kasler never gave him any satisfaction on that account. In his frustration, Fidel slammed a boot heel into Kasler’s chest. “The pain shot right out of my heart all the way down my right arm to my finger tips. Intense pain. I think he realized he hurt me pretty badly with that boot kick, because he never did that again.”

Many sessions of “ropes and irons” followed, progressively more brutal in nature. One day, Fidel turned to the fan belt, a heavy-duty truck fan belt with a single break which made it into an effective whip. Kasler counted 36 lashes on his buttocks, leaving him bleeding, his skin hanging in shreds. After more sessions of ropes and irons, they put him in leg irons, forced him to sit up on his bed, and took away his mosquito net. For five days he was given no food and only a half cup of water per day. At night mosquitoes swarmed into his cell, covering his body. The guard flicked on the light every fifteen minutes, making sure he was not sleeping. After two sleepless nights, the tactic switched. Every hour from dawn to dusk, Kasler was beaten with the fan belt, about seven lashes each time.

After five days of this torture, Kasler couldn’t control his mind anymore and began to hallucinate. Finally, he surrendered, but they just kept on beating him, hourly for six or seven more hours.

Once Kasler had a good night’s sleep, he was very distressed that he had surrendered. Each day the guards would come by and ask if he still surrendered. After several days, he said, “No.” The beating with the fan belt resumed—all over his body—and went on for three hours. In his own words:

I had big welts all over afterwards. My face was just like a hard chunk of leather,
my whole face hanging down below my chin from swelling. My eyes were
almost shut. They had ruptured my eardrum and blood was running down
the side of my head. Once, I fell against the bed and “Casper” kicked me in the
ribs. I felt a rib break, a really excruciating pain. I rolled on the floor, holding
my chest, and they were trying to kick me in the chest. There was blood all over
the floor. Then they started jumping on my injured leg. That broke the steel rod
loose [in his thigh] and jammed it up into my hip. They were like mad dogs, berserk.
I must have been in a semi-coma because I couldn’t feel the beating anymore.

Suddenly, he heard wrestling in the room, a fight, as other guards intervened, probably to prevent Kasler from being killed. After an hour lying on the floor, guards came back in and put him on his knees again, hands in the air. Finally, he collapsed. He couldn’t make his arms respond, and a full day passed before he was able to move.

The bone in Kasler’s right thigh was foreshortened by that abuse, and it healed that way, leaving his right leg permanently shorter than his left.

Fidel had taken his best shot at Kasler and had lost. At the end of July, he came to Kasler’s cell one last time, opened the peephole, stared at him for a long minute, then left. That was the last time Kasler ever saw him. Though various names have been suggested over the years, no positive identification for the Cuban the POWs nicknamed “Fidel” has ever been officially established.

Kasler spent the next six months in solitary. Near the end of January, he had his first hot shower in North Vietnam and finally received another operation. Doctors made another 13-inch incision, removed the steel rod, scraped dead spots out of his femur, and took cultures of the pus that kept oozing out of his thigh. This time, they put four stitches in that long incision, inserted two drain tubes, and gave him massive doses of antibiotics. The guard who bandaged his leg was “just filthy.” He received special food, but his guards stole most of it. By the end of the first week, his infection began to flare up again. Massive injections finally stopped that.

Escape Attempt
On May 10, 1969 John Dramesi and Ed Atterberry escaped—and were caught the next morning. What followed was a disaster for all the POWs. Atterberry was beaten to death; Dramesi, nearly so. Many POWs were brutalized, broken, and the Vietnamese learned pretty much everything they wanted to know. The vital POW communication system was so compromised that they had to switch to sign language. “The terrorism went on for a couple of months after the escape attempt,” notes Kasler. Consequences were so severe that when Kasler and Dramesi were involved in an escape plan in late 1971, senior ranking POWs ordered them not to execute the plan.

The Death of Ho Chi Minh
Ho Chi Minh died on September 3, 1969. That marked a turning point in the treatment of the POWs. Until that time, the prison system in North Vietnam was run by the Propaganda Ministry. After the death of Ho, the Army took over and conditions improved. POW families, once told by our government to keep quiet, were finally allowed to speak out. Ross Perot organized and funded a letter writing campaign intended to improve the treatment of our POWs. The American public was made aware, and many responded in support of our men.
In the prison, POWs were told to pull bricks out of windows that had been closed up. Walls between buildings were torn down. Men received room mates. Rations improved. The worst torture and brutality stopped. However, there were limits. For instance, during the so-called “church riot” (February 7, 1971), when POWs refused to stop an organized religious service, the leaders were handcuffed and taken to solitary confinement.

“Linebacker II: the Eleven-Day War”
By December 1972, President Nixon simply wanted our POWs back so we could withdraw from the war. Still, the North Vietnamese negotiators continued playing the POWs as pawns. Nixon’s patience ran out. Under the leadership of Robert McNamara and Lyndon Johnson, our best strategic bomber, the B-52 was confined to tactical targets in South Vietnam, while tactical fighter planes, such as the F-105 and F-4, were used against strategic targets in the North. On December 18, President Nixon sent waves of the big B-52 bombers to North Vietnam, every hour, on the hour, twenty-four hours a day for eleven days—with a pause for Christmas. This was not WWII-style carpet-bombing of cities. Rather, all targets were military or strategic: power plants, MiG bases, SAM sites, etc. Nearly 1300 SAMs were fired, resulting in the loss of fifteen B-52s, and a pair each of F-4 Phantoms and F-111 Ardvaarks. When the North Vietnamese began stalling again in early January, American pilots flew another 1,200 sorties against the North, including over 500 sorties by B-52s. The result was devastating to the North Vietnamese. Their military power was crushed, leaving them with little ability to fight back. Our POWs had a ring-side seat for this awe-inspiring display of air power. Finally, the POWs knew they would be going home soon.

Today, many analysts believe that the war would have ended successfully for us and with far less loss of life on both sides had we sent the B-52s to North Vietnam early in the conflict. Consider just one comparison. The B-17 carried eight 500 pound bombs to Germany during WWII. One B-52 in the “big belly” configuration could carry 108 such 500 pound bombs.

Homecoming
At his release (March 4, 1973) in Hanoi, James Kasler learned that he had been promoted twice during his captivity and had been a “colonel” since 1969 When he arrived at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, he was the spokesman for his release group. All of the POWs were debriefed at Clark before being returned to the States.
On March 8, 1973 at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, as his wife Martha and his three children waited at a distance, Colonel Kasler delivered the following speech:

We are not bitter men. We are proud men, but no prouder
than any loyal American has the right to be.
During our darkest hours in Hanoi, we maintained our faith
in God and our country. This was our strength and we were not denied.
I want to take this opportunity to thank those millions of Americans
who participated in the 1969 letter writing campaign and those who in other
ways brought our deplorable treatment to the attention of the world and
forced the North Vietnamese to improve our conditions. Had it not been
for your efforts, many more of us would not have returned today. We are
overwhelmed by the concern and the love which has been showered upon
us on our return trip.
We are so proud to be Americans.

At that point, Martha and his three now-grown children broke away and ran towards him, as he did towards them. That long-awaited, joyous reunion was caught by press cameras and received national exposure. Air Force artist Maxine McCaffrey incorporated that scene into a portrait of Colonel Kasler which hangs in the Air Force wing of the Pentagon. A duplicate copy is displayed in the Kasler home in Momence, Illinois.

The Kaslers were invited to a White House welcome-home dinner. All told, some 1300 people attended. Besides the POWs and our nation’s leaders, the list included the rich and famous from the entertainment world. Martha Kasler was named “Mother of the Year” in Indiana for 1973. Colonel Kasler was honored as the Grand Marshall for the Indianapolis 500. Senator Richard Lugar, then mayor of Indianapolis, gave him the key to the city. Colonel Kasler was offered the chance to run against Birch Bayh in the 1974 Senate race, but Martha put her foot down on that suggestion. He had been away from home too long already, and she did not want to lose him to the campaign trail.

Three Air Force Crosses
For his selfless, heroic attempt to cover his downed wingman in North Vietnam, an action which led to his own shoot down, Colonel James Kasler was awarded a second Air Force Cross. For his incredible resistance under torture in Hanoi he received an unprecedented third award of the Air Force Cross. No other person, living or dead, has three awards of this decoration for combat valor which ranks second only to the Medal of Honor.

Flying again
After a year at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base getting back up to speed, Colonel Kasler was assigned as vice commander of the 336th Tactical Fighter Wing at Mountain Home, Idaho, flying the F-111. The transition from the single-engine F-105 to a twin-engine, swing-wing, highly automated bomber might have been daunting, especially since Kasler had not flown for nearly eight years. “The only thing that worried me was my right leg. It was now shorter than my left from my shootdown injuries and the poor treatment in Vietnam. I wasn’t sure I could get full deflection on the right rudder pedal.” But that did not prove to be a problem, and Colonel Kasler made the transition with ease.

Colonel Kasler had two unfulfilled goals left in his Air Force career: to command a wing, and to make brigadier general. Both were within his grasp. None other than fellow NAM-POW and fellow Korean War jet ace Brigadier General Robinson Risner was boss of the Air Division with included Kasler’s wing. General Risner had already chosen James Kasler as the next wing commander at Mountain Home. Further, he stated, “I firmly believe that Jim Kasler would have been a three or four star general if he had stayed in [the Air Force]. He had all the makings.”

South Shore Golf Course
However, fate intervened in the form of a golf course which James Kasler owned in partnership. With no warning, he received a letter from the bank which held the mortgage on the property stating that they were about to foreclose because of bad debts. He had invested a great deal of money in the course over the years. During his time in Hanoi, he occupied his mind by visualizing improvements to the golf course, especially during long periods in solitary confinement. He thought the course would be in great shape when he came home, but it wasn’t. In fact, it had deteriorated into little more than a barren pasture. When he asked what had happened to the sand traps, his business partner replied, “Oh, we filled those in to speed up play.” To which James Kasler replied, “You don’t have to worry about speeding up play here: you don’t have any.” Potential customers were, indeed, staying away in droves.

Kasler knew he was near the end of his Air Force career. He knew they would not let him fly or command forever, so he visited the local bank, took out a loan, and retired early from the Air Force. He readily admits that he has always second-guessed that decision. It took years of sweat equity and invested money to turn the course into a garden spot and a very successful business.

Borrowing from the bank led James Kasler into the banking business. He accepted the offered of a directorship and helped the bank grow. Sitting on the Ganeer Township Board as a trustee, he became involved in local government. He also sits on various boards related to Riverside Hospital, including the Finance Committee and Riverside Trust which raises funds for the hospital. The Pro Am Golf Committee also involves him in fund raising for the hospital.

Through all this, Kasler still had drainage from his old war wound. Sometimes he had to change huge bandages seven or eight times a day. He needed a knee operation, but doctors could not operate so long as he had an active infection. No cure existed for osteomyelitis until the early 1980s when Dr. Slama, an infectious disease control doctor in Indianapolis, came up with Cipro Floxicin, a powerful antibiotic. Finally, the infection was stopped and he had that knee operation.

Honor and Dignity
in his own words

People have asked me how I endured imprisonment, especially the torture. Robert Louis Stevenson said, “Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day.” That was the pattern of our lives in Hanoi during those early years of terror. We lived to endure each day, hoping that nightfall would bring a few hours of relief. We easily could have compromised our beliefs and made our lives much easier by cooperating with the Vietnamese. But our goal was to return home with our honor intact. Some brave men did not survive the early years, but those who did came home with honor and dignity.

A Man for All Seasons
Now approaching age 83, jet ace, three-war combat vet partially crippled by old war wounds, husband, father, businessman, banker, the prisoner of war known as “stone face,” the only three-time recipient of the Air Force Cross, Colonel James Helms Kasler remains singular, indomitable, truly a man for all seasons.