He Became a POW in Vietnam Two Days Before His Baby Was Born

Hello, it is Ryan and I was on a flight the other day playing one of my favorite social spin slot games on ChumbaCasino.com. I looked over the person sitting next to me and you know what they were doing? They were also playing Chumba Casino. Coincidence?

I think not. Everybody's loving having fun with it. Chumba Casino is home to hundreds of casino style games that you can play for free anytime, anywhere, even at 30,000 feet. So sign up now at ChumbaCasino.com to claim your free welcome bonus. That's ChumbaCasino.com and live the Chumba life. No purchase necessary.

BTW, void prohibited by law. See terms and conditions 18 plus. This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And we love to hear from you, our listeners. Send your stories to OurAmericanStories.com. They're some of our favorites. And by the way, they don't have to be your stories. If you've seen or heard a story on your local news or just around town, send us the link.

We'll take it from there. Again, your stories are some of our favorites. Up next, you're going to hear from Ken Wells and his wife, Candy. Ken served our country in Vietnam and was captured and taken as a POW to the prisoner of war camp known as the Hanoi Hilton. Let's hear from Candy and Ken sharing their remarkable story.

We were married in November of 69 and then went to one year of pilot training in Big Spring, Texas. Ken achieved what he wanted. He wanted to get an F4 fighter plane, which I didn't want him to get because I knew where he would be going.

But he did, and that's what he wanted. I guess I'd wanted to fly ever since I was a little kid watching airplanes fly in and out of the Portland International Airport across the Columbia River from the dairy farm I grew up on. But I always wanted to fly a fighter aircraft. And so that was my goal in pilot training and was able to finish high enough in the class to get the F4.

Like in the movie Top Gun where the lady tells Maverick that you're not happy unless you're going mock-tooth, you're hair on fire. Well, that's kind of, of course, we're up fairly high, 25,000 feet doing that. So it's not like you're going supersonic at ground level, which is also fun, by the way.

I've been supersonic at about 200 feet and it's amazing. We went on then to Victorville, California, for F4 training for six months. At that time, then in March of 1971, March 4th, my mother and father got the visit that my brother had been declared missing in action. He was in the army.

He was 21 years old. It was a hard day for our family. But two months later, it even became more difficult because my mom and dad received the phone call that my brother had that my brother had been declared dead, but nobody recovered. But on that day when my mom and dad received that terrible call, I was reaching for the phone to call them to tell them they were expecting their first grandson.

So we went through our training and can finish the F4. And on October 31st of 1971, Ken went to Yudorn Air Force Base in Thailand, and I was seven months pregnant. Two months later, on December 18th, 1971, I was sitting in my parents' living room and my brother's sitting in a chair and he looks out the window and he says, oh, mom, here comes an army car. My mother, just because of what had happened, became hysterical. And I was sitting by her and I'm patting her leg and I say, mom, it's okay.

It's okay. And then the car got closer and he said, no, it's an Air Force car. I was very young.

I was 23 years old, very naive. And I said, oh, mom, they're probably just bringing me more papers to sign, I said. But the two officers came to the door. My father answered it and they said, Mrs. Kenneth R. Wells. And I was on the couch, but it took me a while to get up because I was pregnant. I got up, I went to the door, and then they read me the telegram. We regret to inform you that your husband, First Lieutenant Kenneth R. Wells, is missing in action.

My heart just dropped. I'd only flown eight missions. This was my ninth mission that I was on on the 18th of December of 71. In October of 68, President Johnson had declared a bombing halt over North Vietnam. So we weren't even allowed to fly over the country we're fighting, North Vietnam. So most of our missions were bombing missions in Laos that the North Vietnamese used as routes, road routes, to get supplies down to the south.

I was on the plane and I was in the south. I was the wingman in a two-ship formation. Out of there, it started out to be a bombing mission in the country of Laos. We took off that day. We had 12 500-pound bombs on board, each aircraft took off. And as soon as we got airborne, we got a radio call from Red Crown, which was the radar ship out in the Gulf of Tonkin, telling us that another F-4 had been shot down on the border of Laos and North Vietnam.

So they wanted us to provide a search and rescue coverage for the other crew that had been shot down. So we kept the bombs on board, we orbited for about 45 minutes, got low on fuel, had to go to an airborne tanker, get topped off with fuel. And as we came off the tanker, we got a call that two MiG-21 fighters had launched out of Hanoi and were heading toward the shoot-down site of this other aircraft. So the lead pilot in the lead airplane got permission to drop our bombs on our target that he had hit the day before. And then we proceeded to chase these two MiG-21s back into North Vietnam.

All the way across North Vietnam, they actually went into Red China. And then we turned around at the border of Red China, very low on fuel, dangerously low on fuel, matter of fact. And we needed to get to a tanker or get back to our base as soon as possible. We got jumped by two more MiGs on the way out. I had about one minute of fuel left on the aircraft when I called the lead aircraft. And I said, well, we're going to be punching out in about one minute. And he said, well, we'll be about two minutes behind you.

So they ejected as well, but they were rescued. And you've been listening to Ken and Candy Wells. When we come back, more of what happened here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, the host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from our big cities and small towns.

But we truly can't do the show without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they're not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot.

Go to OurAmericanStories.com and give. And we continue with Our American Stories and with Ken and Candy Wells's story. When we last left off, Candy had just found out that her husband, Ken, was declared missing in action in the Vietnam War. Let's pick back up with their story. You know, you hear people say that their lives flash before their minds. I think that all began during the flight when I was getting ready to pull the ejection handle.

I was thinking about Candy, knowing that she's nine months pregnant and, you know, may not survive this thing at home. That particular day, they added on an extra couple missions. They ran out of experienced crew members, had one airplane left. Anyway, I got the toss of the coin, I guess, to be the aircraft commander of that. Lee, my back seater, was only on his 20th mission, so we had two inexperienced guys in our aircraft.

But Lee was a major, had 13 years in the Air Force by that time. I was probably pretty naive about what was going to happen. I figured, while I'm flying with this experienced guy, he knows what to do and didn't realize that things could go kind of sour. The fuel gauges read zero, that's when we punched out. And we were at about 5,000 feet altitude, doing around 300 knots. Once we got out into the parachute, it's pretty quiet up there when that happens.

We heard the engines quit on the aircraft, and it went in. We came down on opposite sides of the same hill. I came down in the trees and I, my parachute canopy, got caught up in the branches of the tree, so I stopped. My feet were swinging about 30 feet above the ground.

I lowered myself to the ground, got the radio out of my seat pack, and was able to make radio communication contact with Lee. So we kind of figured out we were on opposite sides of this same hill. We took off about two in the afternoon, we punched out about four in the afternoon. By the time we climbed to the top of the hill, it was probably about six in the evening.

It's December, so it's getting, it's pretty dark at that time. Then we're able to spend that night trying to make radio contact with friendly aircraft. We were close enough to hear friendly aircraft talking, but far enough away they couldn't hear our transmission. So that was pretty frustrating that all night, about every 15 minutes, we'd try to make radio contact with the aircraft we were hearing. In some cases, it was aircraft that were going into rescue the other crew that punched out. Daybreak the next morning, we started hearing noises around the bottom of the hill. We were on some dogs barking, so we knew that they were looking for us.

We were able to move a couple hills more inland away from the coast. Lee said about 10 30 that morning, he said, because it was really cold that night, he said, I'm going to go back and try and get my parachute so I can keep warm out here. I didn't think it was a good idea for him to go back, but he outranked me. So he went back.

All I heard was the shooting and I didn't know whether he was still alive or not. It was about an hour and a half later around noon. I was about a third of the way down from the top of the hill. And there were probably 20 North Vietnamese that were searching around that area. And they had come by me twice, once each direction, within 10, 15 feet away from me and hadn't found me.

I thought, well, maybe that's the last pass, but then they made a third pass back. And this time the guy was right at my elevation and he stopped maybe 10, 15 feet away from me and just staring at me. And when I saw how many guys there were around, I had put my little 38 revolver back in the holster.

I knew it wasn't going to be much good. And we just stared at each other for several seconds. And then he raised his rifle and then just started shooting in the air, yelling and screaming.

And within a few seconds, there were about 20 guys around me jumping down for joy. They just captured an American fighter pilot. They stripped me down to my Fruit of the Looms, tied my wrists and elbows together behind my back, tied two ropes around my neck, one out front and one out back, and off went through the jungle. I didn't know for at least two or three hours whether they intended to keep me alive or not.

I didn't know whether Lee was alive or not at that point. But we came to a little fire camp on the side of the hill. And that was where I saw, I think, the first real military man that was there. These others were militia type. You know, one guy might have a helmet, someone else have the military shirt, someone else the pants.

But they all had the weapons. But the first real military guy was at this fire camp. And after I'd been there a while, he indicated to somebody to give me something to eat. And the guy handed me a little ball of rice about the size of a golf ball. And that was my first indication, well, if you're going to kill me, you know, I've got to give me something to eat. So after giving me the ball of rice, they gave me a flight suit to put on.

And it was a major flight suit, so I assumed it was Lee's. And then they gave me my boots back, but they wouldn't let me lace them up, tie them up. And so walking several hours through the jungle, I got huge blisters on my feet, which eventually became infected and actually got blood poisoning.

Then blood poisoning. Then walked for several hours, came to a little village where they just put me there for a couple hours. And occasionally some little kids would come in and peek at me inside in the room where they'd bring me out and let the kids in the neighborhood see me. It was probably about 10 o'clock that night, then they flew us from Haiphong to Hanoi. And so it was when I was put on the helicopter at night, they were actually wiring me. Instead of using ropes, they used wire to tie me to the seat supports on each side of the helicopter. And that's when I noticed that there was a warm body next to me, and it was Lee. And that was it. And they actually, they actually wired us together somehow.

So if I moved to get comfortable, it tightened the wires on him and he would groan and say, don't do that. If we tried to talk to each other, we got whacked with the butt of a rifle. We weren't allowed to communicate with each other, but just knowing that we were each alive, I think encouraged the two of us. I don't know, it was a 45-minute helicopter ride from Haiphong to Hanoi, and then drove us to the camp that we called, nicknamed the Hanoi Hilton POW camp. It was on all the major news channels because these were the first four Americans that had been captured in three years.

And so the Vietnamese government was very thrilled to say they'd captured these Americans, you know, so they plastered their pictures. And I'm grateful that they did, because I was able to see that Ken was okay. There had been a news conference in Hanoi, and I got to see Ken walk out behind a curtain in his prison pajamas.

I could see that when he ejected, he had his arms and his legs, and that gave me hope that he was going to be okay. But that was December 21st when I found out he was a POW. December 23rd, I had our son. And you're listening to Ken and Candy Wells share their story. And folks, if you've ever had somebody serving overseas in combat, you know that the husband and the wife are both serving, and you're hearing it here on this story. That worry that she had when her husband was declared missing in action went away when the North Vietnamese paraded around these four airmen, proud that they'd captured them. And this gave the bride a sense of hope. And the very next day, the birth of her child, and at least with some glimmer, that something good could happen in the end. When we come back, more of Ken and Candy Wells' story, what happens next here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories and Ken and Candy Wells' story.

Let's pick up where we last left off. The days were very dark. I went through a short time where I was going through a pity party. Poor Candy, she lost her brother. Her husband's a POW.

She had to give birth alone. And it was like, I was really feeling sorry for myself. But then I went to my first Washington State POW-MIA meeting. At that meeting, I walk into this room full of people. And the lady I went with, her husband was missing in action. And she leaned over and she told me, she said, Candy, there are only three of you in this room that know that your loved one is alive. And that was quite an awakening for me to just get off the pity party and be grateful for what I know.

And I quit feeling sorry for myself. When we got to the prison camp, they put us in solitary confinement. And that lasted nine days. And during that time was the different interrogation sessions. They were basically trying to find out lots of information about the base where we were stationed. And I had the advantage of being a brand new first lieutenant that knew nothing.

Lee, on the other hand, I think they pressured him more for information. But after nine days, they came and got me out of my cell and took me to another cell partway across camp. And there was already a young man in there.

It's a young man who's my age. Dick Vaughn was his name. They put Lee and I with Dick in one cell. Three days later, then they moved us from that camp over to a camp called the zoo.

It was nicknamed the zoo. We were put in a cell, then it was probably 15 by 15 square feet. And three of us in one cell. And we didn't know anything about the camp at that point. But a few weeks later, the guard took us out of that cell and just kept us out of the cell for about two hours. And when we finally came back into the cell, he locks us up and Dick found a piece of candy on the floor with a piece of paper wrapped around it. Of course, after the guard left, he opened it up and there was a note inside.

It said, welcome to the zoo. So there are 79 prisoners in this camp other than yourselves. You three are the only three that have been in this camp less than five or five years. Through that note, we're able to establish a line of communication with these other 79 guys.

And through communication with them, realize that the first prisoner ever captured, Everett Alvarez, was captured August 5 of 1964. He had been there over seven years when we showed up. So here we are. We'd been there at this point, been there close to a month, you know, probably feeling sorry for ourselves that, you know, we're prisoners and who knows when we're going to get out of here. And then to realize right across in the next buildings and across this brick wall, eight foot high brick wall, separating our courtyard, we're going to have to get out of here. And we're going to have to get brick wall, eight foot high brick wall separating our courtyard for prisoners have been there, you know, in some cases a third or quarter of their lives.

So kind of like Candy going to this meeting and realizing she's lucky to know that I'm alive, you know, we kind of quit feeling sorry for ourselves and started thinking, okay, what can we do to help these guys? We had two methods of communication with them that developed. One was just passing notes across this eight foot high brick wall.

The guards would throw their cigarette wrappers out in the courtyards. And so we would, when we got out, maybe 10, 15 minutes a day to take a bath or to clean our plates and bowls, which grounds up these pieces of paper. Dick, during one of his interrogation sessions, had stolen a piece of pencil lead out of a mechanical pencil.

He got it down below the table from the interrogator and pulled the lead out and broke off the blunt end and put it back in. And so we had something to write with. We had the paper. Lee, I always called our walking encyclopedia.

He had an amazing memory. He could remember a newspaper article he'd read two years ago, names, dates, numbers, so through that, we used the junction of this eight foot high brick wall and the edge of the wall of the office building as a mailbox. And then we placed a little chip of a brick on top of it. So if you're looking at it 50, 60 feet away and you saw this little chip up there, you'd realize there's a note up there that needs to be picked up. So one day we would pass a note to them the next day they would pass a note back to us. I was the scribe. I learned how to write very small and use abbreviations to get a lot of information on one of these pieces of paper. You take a cigarette wrapper and open it up, you've got a rectangle to write on on the inside. Then through that, we set up another way to communicate is they had drilled a hole with a piece of paper the size of a nickel through about 15 inches of brick and mortar through the end of their building aimed right at our door. Our door had a peephole on it with a flap on the outside and the guards would push that to one side and check on us from time to time throughout the day, but I could push that flap to one side from the inside. I could see the hole in the building that they had drilled through and they had to drill it fairly high up to hide it from the guards and so one man had to stand on the shoulders of another man just to get up to the hole, but then he'd stuck a wire through the hole and he'd flick it up and down once for a dot, twice for a dash, use the Morse code to transmit to me.

He could see my hand through the peephole and I could transmit back to him using visual alphabet similar to American Sign Language. So we used that method for anything covert and a covert communication and then the notes going back and forth was just informational messages. One of the questions they asked us was, did we really land on the moon? They asked us about 40 questions and we were there about three months later and we were able to get through all those 40 questions through these notes and within a day or two after finishing those questions we were moved back to the Hanoi Hilton Camp. So I kind of looked at that as maybe that was our purpose for being there, was to help these guys, because in that first note they said send us all the information you can think about in the outside world and you can think about in the outside world in the last five years. They were starved for information. Anyway, I just think that really helped them to get that information. Like I say, Lee was a wealth of information about things. They want to know about the stock market, how that was going, what did the new cars look like?

And one of the funny questions we got is, have they developed a birth control pill for males yet? So anyway, you never knew what was going to come up out of their mouths or out of their notes. And we're listening to Ken and Candy Wells talk about their experience.

And my goodness, Candy's was something. She walks into a room with a bunch of other families that had suffered from this term called missing in action. And that's not knowing anything about your loved one and what's going on in their lives overseas. And she quickly got an attitude adjustment because she was one of the few who actually knew her husband was alive. Her pity party, well, it ended. The same thing happened to Ken.

He found out that when he was at the Hanoi Hilton, when he was captured, that there had people who'd been there seven years and quickly his attention turned not on himself and his own feelings, but on serving the men who'd been there for so long and were so starved, so in need of any kind of human touch and connection to the outside world. The story of Ken Wells and his bride Candy continues here on Our American Stories. And we're back with Our American Stories and with former POW at the Hanoi Hilton, Ken Wells and his wife, Candy.

Let's return to this couple with the final part of their stories. I was very much in the media all along the year, every holiday, they made sure to keep up with me. And so I felt like I could help in our community by making people aware that there were POWs out there.

We need to keep this on the front burner, get these men home. Well, I guess I always had faith in God. I guess I had faith in our country to the point where we can just stay alive, somehow they'll come and get us out of here. And faith in our camaraderie just within our group. I mean, it's like any one of us would have died, laid our lives down for anyone else in the camp.

Still at the Hanoi Hilton in an area called New Guy Village. And I remember guards came and they said, everybody put on good clothes. Well, everybody had two t-shirts and then two long sleeve shirts that is tied with strings in the front. So we had our normal prison clothes and then what the guards would call put on your good clothes. That was the long sleeve.

They had everybody dressed up, it was just pajamas. And so brought everybody out into the small courtyard and then the camp commander, Vietnamese camp commander came in with an interpreter and a couple of guards. And it was January 29, 1973 when he came in. And he read a prepared statement that the peace agreements had been signed in Paris two days before on the 27th.

There would be a 60-day withdrawal period of all of our troops and a 60-day period of release of the prisoners, 25 percent every 15 days. Of course, the sick and injured will come home first and then in order of your capture. And so we knew in our group we were going to be part of that last 15-day period.

28 March of 73. They loaded 40 of us on two camouflage buses and drove us through the city of Hanoi to the Guillaume airport. Coming around this small terminal building seeing this beautiful C-141 aircraft parked on the ramp, red cross on the tail and the American flag on the tail. They called out our names one at a time in the order that we were captured.

I was number two in line of that group. Escorted us to the back of the aircraft and up the ramp. When the last man's foot hit the ramp and ramp came up, the engines were started, we taxied out, pulled on the runway and I don't think two words were spoken the whole time. They had lied to us so many times during our captivity that we didn't know if this didn't even seem real that this was happening. Until we got airborne and the gear came up and then the whole place broke loose and we knew we were free. It was about a two hour and 45 minute flight to the Philippines where we spent about three days in the hospital there at the Clark Air Base in the Philippines.

Got to take a nice hot shower the first time in 16 months. They fitted us for a uniform. Got to go down to the cafeteria and eat whatever we want. When the first prisoners came out they were real leery about what to feed us because they didn't know how our bodies would react. But I think after the first group came out they realized, hey we just need to let them eat what they want.

So they had quite a spread there for us. And I go through with a tray and anything that looked like it had protein in it I wanted it. Sat down and a couple glasses of milk.

Grew up on a dairy farm so I missed milk. And I think I ate about 10 bites and I couldn't eat anymore. The stomach I think had shrunk. Then they had arranged times during the evening when we could call home for the first time and mine was fairly late at night.

When I called Candy it was 4 a.m. on the 29th of March in the states where she was which was her birthday. Well first of all it was 4 a.m. so it was very startling. And it wasn't Ken on the phone it was another officer who said, Mrs. Kenneth R. Wells?

Then it's kind of scary. Yes. You know then he said I have your husband here would you like to speak to him? Yes. You know. And he said I have your husband here would you like to speak to him?

Yes. You know. So then Ken got on and I knew it was Ken.

It was real. And it was like our first date. How are you?

Fine. You know we we had been separated about as long as we had been married. When it first got back to the states after three days and they flew us to hospitals across the country mine happened to be Travis Air Force Base in California near Sacramento. When we were at Travis Air Force Base they gave each of the families that their husbands or loved one would be coming home. They had each of us in a separate car so there's a line a string of cars.

The plane pulls up the red carpet is rolled out and the band plays and I'm sitting there just waiting as the door opens up the plane. Of course I've been watching from the first group second third hallway so when the door opened and the man stepped out then my car pulled forward and the officer then let me out and I walked the red carpet and then Ken came down the stairs and there's some really sweet pictures of Ken of I hugging and kissing for the first time. Spent two weeks there going through interrogation sessions again but also we all had parasites in our bodies several different parasites had to be treated so that's the reason I was there for two weeks it was during that two-week period still in California where go ahead.

I had become so independent of just doing things myself you know and taking care of this little person that I was just going to go out and get us some groceries you know so Kevin and I I gather him up I have my hand on the doorknob to turn it and Ken says where are you going I'm like oh yeah I forgot you know it was just another thing that we had to get adjustment that oh yeah I'm sorry. And we heard later that something like 80 or 90 percent of the prisoners got divorced after came home so there's just a lot of pressure like she was saying she had to become independent not only for herself but to take care of well Kevin and of course I hadn't changed at all in 16 months right. When I left I was just a husband now I'm coming home to an almost 16 month old boy kind of scary he didn't have a lot to do with me at first we're still at Travis in the quarters the two weeks in the hospital there was as an outpatient so they put us up in the base quarters but I'd bribe him with food and treats and stuff like that and at the end of the two weeks when we flew then from Travis up to Portland International Airport there's a picture of me holding Kevin there us and I'm us and I'm holding Kevin and I've I felt like we were dad and son I think that two weeks there was good for us to become a little family unit before they launch us onto the world.

It was a great time for us to get to know one another better again. When we know some of the stories of those who didn't get to come home like our brother Rodney or even some of the prisoners that came back and their family situation just dissolved we just feel feel blessed we feel God is with us through the whole experience and we feel blessed to be able to come home and start over and live out a normal life. The POWs were inventive very creative I just found it very interesting how that they never gave up that spirit that they persevered through this difficult time when some people would just collapse these men persevered held on when you know that how little they had but they did everything to encourage one another to take care of one another and just keep on keeping on. And a terrific job on the production editing and storytelling by our own Madison Derricotte and a special thanks to Ken and Candy Wells for sharing their story. What kept them going in that Hanoi Hilton? Well Ken said it faith in God faith in country faith within his group and my goodness what Candy says at the end there about the fact that those men never gave up they persevered they held on comforting each other. The story of Ken and Candy Wells the story of so many POWs and as they said the story of those who never came back and not just in Vietnam but all of America's wars their stories all of them here on Our American Stories.