Ed Mechenbier served in our United States Air Force for forty years, retiring at the rank of Major General. Nearly six of those forty years were spent as a POW in North Vietnam.
His father told Ed he had better get a good scholarship or he wasn’t going to college. But he also bet him five dollars that if he applied to a service academy, he could probably get in. Ed had to borrow five dollars from his mother to pay his father when he was admitted to the Air Force Academy.
The policy at the time was that once a crew completed 100 missions into North Vietnam, they could go home. Although he wasn’t on the flight roster, Mechenbier volunteered and was shot down on his 80th mission thirty miles NE of Hanoi. He jokes that he landed right in the middle of a group of enemy soldiers, so he never got the chance to make use of his “wonderful Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape training.”
Mechenbier would be held as a POW for 5 years, 8 months and 4 days. He shares some stories about his time in the camps, including the famous “tap code”. He also discusses how he handled the situation mentally; “You may not be in complete control, but you are not completely lost.”
On Feb. 18, 1973 591 POW’s were released as part of “Operation Homecoming”. However, Mechenbier was part of a second group that came to be know at “the Kissinger Twenty”. He said they delayed for several days because they thought the special release was just another one of the mental games their captors enjoyed playing.
Mechenbier’s last official flight mission was quite the special one. Thirty one years after he was released, he piloted the very same aircraft that brought he and his fellow POW’s home back to Vietnam on a mission to recover the remains of fallen comrades.